An Awfully Big Adventure - Part II
Oct. 28th, 2008 07:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sensiblecatHaving trained as Peter’s part-time domestic, Wendy eventually embraces the adult world, growing up, we are told by Barrie, “of her own free will, a day quicker than the other girls.” Peter becomes, “no more than dust in her box of toys.”
Yet Barrie hardly seems to have a good word to say about her married state. We’re given the colour of the trimming on her wedding gown, but her partner isn’t even named. Wendy’s life seems to consist of domestic drudgery with an unpleasant hint of her dumbing down. We’re told “she felt she was untrue to {Peter} when she got a prize for general knowledge.” Barrie appears to equate ignorance with innocence, and to see both as desirable. As the Lost Boys progress at school, they exchange the ability to fly for City jobs and rides on London omnibuses. Clearly Barrie regards this as a matter for regret (he tells us wistfully, “In time they could not even fly after their hats. Want of practice, they called it; but what it really meant was that they no longer believed.”)
In time, Wendy has a daughter, Jane. In the manner of her social class, she employs a Nanny to care for Jane, but on her night off mum and daughter share quality time. Naturally, this consists of hiding under Jane’s blankets and telling stories of Neverland, just as many a sentimental fanfic depicts Rose describing her journeys with the Doctor long ago to the child he’s unaware of having fathered. Eventually, having broken Wendy’s heart repeatedly by forgetting their yearly trysts, Peter shows up, assuming blithely that Wendy will be free to fly off with him. The Tenth Doctor’s emotional crassness has a very clear antecedent in their ensuing conversation. The mismatch between Peter’s perspective and Wendy’s is precisely the kind of thing Stephen Moffatt likes to explore in his DW scripts.
And then one night came the tragedy. It was the spring of the year, and the story had been told for the night, and Jane was now asleep in her bed. Wendy was sitting on the floor, very close to the fire, so as to see to darn, for there was no other light in the nursery; and while she sat darning she heard a crow. Then the window blew open as of old, and Peter dropped in on the floor.
He was exactly the same as ever, and Wendy saw at once that he still had all his first teeth.
He was a little boy, and she was grown up. She huddled by the fire not daring to move, helpless and guilty, a big woman.
"Hullo, Wendy," he said, not noticing any difference, for he was thinking chiefly of himself; and in the dim light her white dress might have been the nightgown in which he had seen her first.
"Hullo, Peter," she replied faintly, squeezing herself as small as possible. Something inside her was crying "Woman, Woman, let go of me."
"Hullo, where is John {Wendy’s younger brother}?" he asked, suddenly missing the third bed.
"John is not here now," she gasped.
"Is Michael asleep?" he asked, with a careless glance at Jane.
"Yes," she answered; and now she felt that she was untrue to Jane as well as to Peter.
"That is not Michael," she said quickly, lest a judgment should fall on her.
Peter looked. "Hullo, is it a new one?"
"Yes."
"Boy or girl?"
"Girl."
Now surely he would understand; but not a bit of it.
"Peter," she said, faltering, "are you expecting me to fly away with you?"
"Of course; that is why I have come." He added a little sternly, "Have you forgotten that this is spring cleaning time?"
How interesting that, when clearly the problem lies in Peter’s attitude, Wendy takes upon herself the burden of guilt, attempting to “make herself very small”, on the verge of lying about her own family to save his feelings, inwardly wanting to return to a child-like state to win him back while he remains defiantly unchanged. It appears to be a classic co-dependent relationship with a male abuser, with the woman prepared to make any excuse for his behaviour.
But, somewhat inexplicably (RTD wasn’t the first writer to struggle with the conflicting demands of character integrity and the need for an emotional climax in his penultimate scene), Wendy finds the strength from somewhere to explain to Peter that she is now an adult and can no longer fly: “O Peter, don’t waste the fairy dust on me.” And, like most bullies, for that is what he is (Barrie expresses surprise that he resists the temptation to sabotage Wendy’s wedding!), Peter now becomes fearful for the first time. I, for one, saw David Tennant and Billie Piper’s body language clearly here:
She had risen; and now at last a fear assailed him. "What is it?" he cried, shrinking.
"I will turn up the light," she said, "and then you can see for yourself."
For almost the only time in his life that I know of, Peter was afraid. "Don't turn up the light," he cried.
She let her hands play in the hair of the tragic boy. She was not a little girl heart-broken about him; she was a grown woman smiling at it all, but they were wet eyed smiles.
Then she turned up the light, and Peter saw. He gave a cry of pain; and when the tall beautiful creature stooped to lift him in her arms he drew back sharply.
"What is it?" he cried again.
She had to tell him.
"I am old, Peter. I am ever so much more than twenty. I grew up long ago."
"You promised not to!"
"I couldn't help it. I am a married woman, Peter."
"No, you're not."
"Yes, and the little girl in the bed is my baby."
"No, she's not."
It is, of course, a classic study in denial. The dim light of the nursery, like the amber glow of the TARDIS control room, is a place where illusions flourish.
Reality terrifies Peter and provokes him to violence. He raises a dagger against Wendy’s sleeping child, the unavoidable proof of her womanhood, but lacks the will to kill her. Instead he wakes young Jane and takes her away with him, robbing Wendy, his mother figure, of all that is most precious to her yet again. Rose becomes Jackie. The same dismal sense of a cycle being repeated is captured by someone’s icon of the Journey’s End beach scene, with the slogan “Not this shit again!” At that point, we begin to lose all faith in the original Ten’s ability to give and receive love.
Although there is a conspiratorial air to Wendy’s shared storytelling evenings with her daughter, and she suspects that Nanny would disapprove, one can’t help reflecting that Nanny is probably right. To discard your old love and steal her daughter to mother you, leaving her life empty a second time, is the ultimate in cruelty. Peter clearly enjoys this power, and we’re left with a disturbing image of him sitting and crowing loudly on the bedpost, while Jane promises she’ll come back home when she’s finished mothering him and Wendy resignedly lets her go. So the conflict is presented as a foregone conclusion with Peter as eternal predator.
There seems to be something rotten at the heart of a national consciousness shaped by this type of fantasy. Yet it remains pervasive, to this day, despite the worthy and influential efforts of writers like Philip Pullman to imbue the genre with a sense of personal responsibility. In my view, its insidious effect can be clearly seen in New Who, or at least the pressures that are felt by some of the producers and writers to make it that kind of show.
There’s a certain kind of fan of DW who holds these truths to be self-evident: that the Doctor will never mature emotionally, that he’ll never settle down and that the programme would die a thousand deaths if he did. The argument goes that you simply can’t make the Doctor interesting and preserve the format if he doesn’t stay as Peter Pan.
But there’s a problem with this. Peter, we are told, is “gay, innocent and heartless”, qualities (in Barrie’s opinion) common to all children. Is this, in fact, correct? Modern psychological theory and practice would take issue with these assertions, seeing children as more frequently the abused than the abuser. Leaving aside the changed resonances of the word “gay”, can we recognise the Doctor as eternal child in this prototype?
Possibly, in the early days of Classic Who, the answer would be yes – certainly he lacked the emotional complexity of his later incarnations. Like Peter Pan, he tended to racket around showing remarkably little evidence that his adventures left emotional scars (there are occasional exceptions to this stereotype, rather more frequent as the show matured, but generally I think the argument stands). The idea of him ever living an ordinary, day-to-day existence was inconceivable. Having to stay on one planet for a few years was bad enough.
RTD’s Doctor is a very different creature. To begin with, the Doctor has become a rootless, traumatised war veteran with a past too tragic to ignore – and just in case we ever come close to forgetting it, the scripts regularly remind us that he’s the last of his kind, tortured by a guilt that Peter Pan would fail to comprehend or recognise. The casting of first Christopher Eccleston and then David Tennant, two masters of brooding intensity, makes it clear that today’s Doctor emotes with the best of them, and his relationships are shown as being deeper and more complex than in previous series, with lasting consequences for all concerned. The Doctor’s companions – Rose, Jack, Martha, Donna and their families, are all scarred as well as enriched by their dealings with him. A metaphor of lost innocence recurs – once you “know what’s out there” you have a sense of responsibility, a drive to serve and protect ignorant humanity. Its ultimate expression, as defined by Davros, is that you become one of the Doctor’s weapons. The Doctor becomes a facilitator, helping humanity to grow up and take its place in a multi-species cosmos.
The remarkably complete and rapid feminization of DW fandom shows that this aspect of the Doctor’s character appeals, particularly strongly, to modern young women. And the archetype of the Doctor as outsider, struggling to find a social space where he can express an emotional life without rejecting his cultural values, resonates with gay people of both genders. It’s no coincidence that, of the three people responsible for the success of New Who, two are gay men and the other is a woman.
But all this sits uneasily with a Peter Pan conception of the Doctor. The language used by fans who feel more comfortable with the Classic Doctor is filled with defensive sarcasm and, possibly intentional, emotional cruelty. The worst of their ire falls on Rose Tyler for, like Wendy’s baby, her importance in the Doctor’s inner life undermines all their cherished prejudices about him. Not only does she represent his heterosexual nature, but she also challenges the perception of the Doctor as an upper-class gentleman amateur. She is a blonde chav, and therefore doubly reprehensible. Some fans would happily stick a dagger into Rose’s heart as she shared the Doctor’s bed.
The tension between the two competing audiences cannot be ignored. The Peter Pan Doctor is sometimes presented as being the one suitable for the kiddies, but RTD knows perfectly well that the emotional maturity of modern children is frequently underestimated. They may see Donna as the fairy princess who makes him cheer up after he’s cried for Rose, but they’ve also seen their own parents split up and cry like that, and they know how it feels to juggle your loyalty to Mum against the new girl in Dad’s life. The real problem is not the children watching, but the adults who are irrationally invested in the Doctor they think they remember, who see the change in him as a threat to their own desire to relive their childhood.
It seems that the Doctor is simultaneously fleeing from responsibility and exhorting others to embrace it. Yet as soon as they do so, rather than travelling with them and accepting them as equals, the Doctor seems to flinch from what he’s done, like Peter confronted with the adult Wendy, unable to accept that he’s changed people in this manner, that he can’t retain his ideal of human innocence. When Donna becomes a Time Lady, he quickly returns her to her original state and undoes all the character development she’s experienced as his travelling companion. Rose is repeatedly banished to the bosom of her family and given a job to do. Jack is abandoned as soon as he becomes an emotional liability, but he replicates the Doctor’s paternalism by taking a job with an organisation that exists to keep humanity in ignorance of the truth and wipe their memories should they discover it regardless. In “The Sound of Drums” he explicitly states that he joined Torchwood in honour of the Doctor, but the irony that Torchwood is opposed to the Time Lord’s very existence is never fully addressed.
The Doctor is presented as champion of truth and moral courage, but it only goes so far. At the end of each series, with the exception of S1 where it was somewhat obscured by the Doctor’s regeneration, a reset button is pressed that restores the status quo – the Doctor as paternal colonial administrator, choosing to remain alone and indulge his illusion that if he never goes back he never needs to contemplate the fact that his companions change and grow old. Every time a series ends on this note, the genie of the Doctor’s apparent emotional development is shoved back in the bottle and fans wait hopefully for the cork to blow off in a subsequent encounter, telling themselves that the crunch will come when he meets Rose again, or the Master, or Davros. They are invariably disappointed. Because drama thrives on conflict, the Doctor’s character development takes place on camera with us cheering him along, but between series it is undone; the cork is firmly replaced in the bottle ready for the cycle to begin again with a fresh companion. Arguably, this has now escalated to the point where only a year’s absence from our TV screens and a change of showrunner can hope to contain it and protect the tried and trusted brand.
In “School Reunion”, the Doctor is faced with an older, and possibly more cynical, Sarah Jane. His distress as he struggles to articulate his feelings to Rose recalls Peter’s panic attack when he can no longer maintain the fantasy that Wendy is his changeless girl-mother:
THE DOCTOR
I don't age. I regenerate. But humans decay. You wither and you die. Imagine watching that happen to someone who you--
He stops when he realizes what he was about to say.
ROSE
What, Doctor?
The Doctor stares at her intensely, as if willing her to understand.
THE DOCTOR
You can spend the rest of your life with me.
Rose looks up at him, eyes shining with unshed tears.
THE DOCTOR (CONT'D)
But I can't spend the rest of mine with you. I have to live on. Alone. That's the curse of the Time Lords.
(School Reunion, script by Toby Whitehouse).
The Doctor loves Rose, but he’d rather cause her pain than confront this problem. If you buy into the argument that even the Mighty Moffatt has to submit to emotional continuity, he even extends this to punishing Rose in the next episode through his dalliance with Reinette and his callous, if temporary, abandonment of her. It’s his version of forgetting it’s spring-cleaning time.
Russell T Davies argues that this mismatch between their life-spans is the biggest problem Rose and the Doctor face as a couple, the ultimate barrier to their happiness. Yet in a show like Doctor Who, jam-packed with instant fixes and plot devices, there’s always a reason why such limitations are presented as absolute.
I would argue that in fact it dramatises the cultural conflict between the romantic conception of childhood as a time of lost innocence, a nostalgia embraced by adults, not least by those of us who speak fondly of Saturday teatimes behind the sofa, and the more modern sensibility that acknowledges children as more sensitive and vulnerable versions of their adult selves – a trend which is illustrated by the current vogue for “misery memoirs” in which lurid accounts of nightmare childhoods are related by “survivors.” Today we are more likely to see childhood as a time of vulnerability that relatively few people negotiate (or “survive”) without experiencing some kind of abuse, than as an idyllic interlude lost for ever.
A century ago the power lay with the adults. They were able to exploit children with impunity whilst sentimentalising them to salve their consciences. It’s an uneasy compromise and there are times when a vicious distrust of childish cruelty pierces the rosy-hued idyll of Kensington Gardens. Raising a dagger to an innocent sleeping child, crowing loudly at the emotional havoc he has caused – when Peter does these things it goes beyond thoughtlessness into a chilling portrait of youthful cruelty that reaches its fullest expression in “Lord of the Flies”, William Golding’s classic subversion of Barrie’s childhood favourite, “The Coral Island”.
Child abuse, like the poor, will probably always be with us, but these days we are far more alert to the possibility of it happening, prepared to set boundaries to appropriate adult involvement with children, to regard unconventional family relationships with suspicion and to believe children when they make accusations against apparently benevolent carers. The public schools regarded as character-forming by the upper classes in Barrie’s day are now viewed as hotbeds of corruption, and an army of social workers would be alerted to protect the orphaned Llewellyn-Davies brothers from Barrie’s questionable interest. The popular press, that notorious barometer and occasional former of British public opinion, likes to express the uneasy feeling that “all this has gone a bit far.” We hanker for a mythical golden age when a decent chap could volunteer to help out as a Boy Scout Leader without submitting to a police check. Our fear of potential abusers drives children’s lives inward towards the families, statistically the most likely place for such crimes to occur.
Co-existing with this uncomfortable awareness is the tendency to view earlier generations of childhood as a golden age when Enid Blyton could be read without glimpses of politically incorrect subtext and there weren’t all these ridiculous rules about multiculturalism. Attempts to breathe an adult complexity into the inner life of a narrative directed at children, particularly one fondly recalled by an earlier generation, tend to run up against the hurdle of resentment at the undermining of illusion.
It seems that RTD went right up to the brink of giving the Doctor a complex and realistic inner life, only to retreat at the last moment and capitulate to those who prefer to regard the hero’s journey as “an awfully big adventure” without emotional cost. Fearlessly, he admitted in public that he admired soap operas and proceeded to give depth to the story of a supposedly harmless chap who happens to entice attractive young women to go away with him for unspecified amounts of time. It was always going to be a hard sell, involving a tightrope-walking act between those who embraced realism and those who clung to their cherished memories of the show as an uncomplicated romp. The pressure on RTD increased until, by the end of S4, it threatened his physical and mental health. Finally came the supposedly definitive finale, where in a fudge every bit as unsettling as Barrie’s “Peter and Wendy”, the Doctor is given a duplicate who can grow up a universe away from the prying eyes of more sensitive viewers. By sensitive, I don’t mean the young viewers who would apparently baulk at the Doctor swearing or Jackie Tyler having a fag, but the adults who would cry, along with WB Yeats, “Tread softly, for you tread on my dreams.”
Our contemporary fantasy figure of choice is incarnated not by David Tennant, but by Johnny Depp. He is our swashbuckling Captain Hook these days, and he becomes the Barrie we want to believe in in “Finding Neverland” – a biopic that claims to be based on reality but is as far-fetched as “Pirates of the Caribbean” when compared to the murky truth. Ironically, my first thought on finishing viewing “Finding Neverland”, as that soft Scottish accent rang in my ears, was that if you really wanted to know what Barrie was like, your ideal leading man would be David Tennant, with his unnerving ability to turn on a sixpence from favourite uncle to menacing villain. To see him sell Barrie’s spurious innocence to a little boy would send shivers down my spine, as does a grown-up reading of “Peter and Wendy”.
And so the emotionally healthy Doctor fades into the West, and we are left with Peter Pan, condemned to be alone forever. It’s not easy to feel sorry for him, but perhaps that’s what we want our heroes to be like. I take heart, as a fanfic reader and writer, from the final line of another Hollywood biopic, crass though it is when analysed:
“George Gershwin is dead. But I don’t have to believe it if I don’t want to.”
Part One
When Wendy Grew Up
(Note - the text of "Peter and Wendy" remains under eternal copyright in the United Kingdom. Extracts are italicised and used without permission)
Yet Barrie hardly seems to have a good word to say about her married state. We’re given the colour of the trimming on her wedding gown, but her partner isn’t even named. Wendy’s life seems to consist of domestic drudgery with an unpleasant hint of her dumbing down. We’re told “she felt she was untrue to {Peter} when she got a prize for general knowledge.” Barrie appears to equate ignorance with innocence, and to see both as desirable. As the Lost Boys progress at school, they exchange the ability to fly for City jobs and rides on London omnibuses. Clearly Barrie regards this as a matter for regret (he tells us wistfully, “In time they could not even fly after their hats. Want of practice, they called it; but what it really meant was that they no longer believed.”)
In time, Wendy has a daughter, Jane. In the manner of her social class, she employs a Nanny to care for Jane, but on her night off mum and daughter share quality time. Naturally, this consists of hiding under Jane’s blankets and telling stories of Neverland, just as many a sentimental fanfic depicts Rose describing her journeys with the Doctor long ago to the child he’s unaware of having fathered. Eventually, having broken Wendy’s heart repeatedly by forgetting their yearly trysts, Peter shows up, assuming blithely that Wendy will be free to fly off with him. The Tenth Doctor’s emotional crassness has a very clear antecedent in their ensuing conversation. The mismatch between Peter’s perspective and Wendy’s is precisely the kind of thing Stephen Moffatt likes to explore in his DW scripts.
And then one night came the tragedy. It was the spring of the year, and the story had been told for the night, and Jane was now asleep in her bed. Wendy was sitting on the floor, very close to the fire, so as to see to darn, for there was no other light in the nursery; and while she sat darning she heard a crow. Then the window blew open as of old, and Peter dropped in on the floor.
He was exactly the same as ever, and Wendy saw at once that he still had all his first teeth.
He was a little boy, and she was grown up. She huddled by the fire not daring to move, helpless and guilty, a big woman.
"Hullo, Wendy," he said, not noticing any difference, for he was thinking chiefly of himself; and in the dim light her white dress might have been the nightgown in which he had seen her first.
"Hullo, Peter," she replied faintly, squeezing herself as small as possible. Something inside her was crying "Woman, Woman, let go of me."
"Hullo, where is John {Wendy’s younger brother}?" he asked, suddenly missing the third bed.
"John is not here now," she gasped.
"Is Michael asleep?" he asked, with a careless glance at Jane.
"Yes," she answered; and now she felt that she was untrue to Jane as well as to Peter.
"That is not Michael," she said quickly, lest a judgment should fall on her.
Peter looked. "Hullo, is it a new one?"
"Yes."
"Boy or girl?"
"Girl."
Now surely he would understand; but not a bit of it.
"Peter," she said, faltering, "are you expecting me to fly away with you?"
"Of course; that is why I have come." He added a little sternly, "Have you forgotten that this is spring cleaning time?"
How interesting that, when clearly the problem lies in Peter’s attitude, Wendy takes upon herself the burden of guilt, attempting to “make herself very small”, on the verge of lying about her own family to save his feelings, inwardly wanting to return to a child-like state to win him back while he remains defiantly unchanged. It appears to be a classic co-dependent relationship with a male abuser, with the woman prepared to make any excuse for his behaviour.
But, somewhat inexplicably (RTD wasn’t the first writer to struggle with the conflicting demands of character integrity and the need for an emotional climax in his penultimate scene), Wendy finds the strength from somewhere to explain to Peter that she is now an adult and can no longer fly: “O Peter, don’t waste the fairy dust on me.” And, like most bullies, for that is what he is (Barrie expresses surprise that he resists the temptation to sabotage Wendy’s wedding!), Peter now becomes fearful for the first time. I, for one, saw David Tennant and Billie Piper’s body language clearly here:
She had risen; and now at last a fear assailed him. "What is it?" he cried, shrinking.
"I will turn up the light," she said, "and then you can see for yourself."
For almost the only time in his life that I know of, Peter was afraid. "Don't turn up the light," he cried.
She let her hands play in the hair of the tragic boy. She was not a little girl heart-broken about him; she was a grown woman smiling at it all, but they were wet eyed smiles.
Then she turned up the light, and Peter saw. He gave a cry of pain; and when the tall beautiful creature stooped to lift him in her arms he drew back sharply.
"What is it?" he cried again.
She had to tell him.
"I am old, Peter. I am ever so much more than twenty. I grew up long ago."
"You promised not to!"
"I couldn't help it. I am a married woman, Peter."
"No, you're not."
"Yes, and the little girl in the bed is my baby."
"No, she's not."
It is, of course, a classic study in denial. The dim light of the nursery, like the amber glow of the TARDIS control room, is a place where illusions flourish.
Reality terrifies Peter and provokes him to violence. He raises a dagger against Wendy’s sleeping child, the unavoidable proof of her womanhood, but lacks the will to kill her. Instead he wakes young Jane and takes her away with him, robbing Wendy, his mother figure, of all that is most precious to her yet again. Rose becomes Jackie. The same dismal sense of a cycle being repeated is captured by someone’s icon of the Journey’s End beach scene, with the slogan “Not this shit again!” At that point, we begin to lose all faith in the original Ten’s ability to give and receive love.
Although there is a conspiratorial air to Wendy’s shared storytelling evenings with her daughter, and she suspects that Nanny would disapprove, one can’t help reflecting that Nanny is probably right. To discard your old love and steal her daughter to mother you, leaving her life empty a second time, is the ultimate in cruelty. Peter clearly enjoys this power, and we’re left with a disturbing image of him sitting and crowing loudly on the bedpost, while Jane promises she’ll come back home when she’s finished mothering him and Wendy resignedly lets her go. So the conflict is presented as a foregone conclusion with Peter as eternal predator.
There seems to be something rotten at the heart of a national consciousness shaped by this type of fantasy. Yet it remains pervasive, to this day, despite the worthy and influential efforts of writers like Philip Pullman to imbue the genre with a sense of personal responsibility. In my view, its insidious effect can be clearly seen in New Who, or at least the pressures that are felt by some of the producers and writers to make it that kind of show.
There’s a certain kind of fan of DW who holds these truths to be self-evident: that the Doctor will never mature emotionally, that he’ll never settle down and that the programme would die a thousand deaths if he did. The argument goes that you simply can’t make the Doctor interesting and preserve the format if he doesn’t stay as Peter Pan.
But there’s a problem with this. Peter, we are told, is “gay, innocent and heartless”, qualities (in Barrie’s opinion) common to all children. Is this, in fact, correct? Modern psychological theory and practice would take issue with these assertions, seeing children as more frequently the abused than the abuser. Leaving aside the changed resonances of the word “gay”, can we recognise the Doctor as eternal child in this prototype?
Possibly, in the early days of Classic Who, the answer would be yes – certainly he lacked the emotional complexity of his later incarnations. Like Peter Pan, he tended to racket around showing remarkably little evidence that his adventures left emotional scars (there are occasional exceptions to this stereotype, rather more frequent as the show matured, but generally I think the argument stands). The idea of him ever living an ordinary, day-to-day existence was inconceivable. Having to stay on one planet for a few years was bad enough.
RTD’s Doctor is a very different creature. To begin with, the Doctor has become a rootless, traumatised war veteran with a past too tragic to ignore – and just in case we ever come close to forgetting it, the scripts regularly remind us that he’s the last of his kind, tortured by a guilt that Peter Pan would fail to comprehend or recognise. The casting of first Christopher Eccleston and then David Tennant, two masters of brooding intensity, makes it clear that today’s Doctor emotes with the best of them, and his relationships are shown as being deeper and more complex than in previous series, with lasting consequences for all concerned. The Doctor’s companions – Rose, Jack, Martha, Donna and their families, are all scarred as well as enriched by their dealings with him. A metaphor of lost innocence recurs – once you “know what’s out there” you have a sense of responsibility, a drive to serve and protect ignorant humanity. Its ultimate expression, as defined by Davros, is that you become one of the Doctor’s weapons. The Doctor becomes a facilitator, helping humanity to grow up and take its place in a multi-species cosmos.
The remarkably complete and rapid feminization of DW fandom shows that this aspect of the Doctor’s character appeals, particularly strongly, to modern young women. And the archetype of the Doctor as outsider, struggling to find a social space where he can express an emotional life without rejecting his cultural values, resonates with gay people of both genders. It’s no coincidence that, of the three people responsible for the success of New Who, two are gay men and the other is a woman.
But all this sits uneasily with a Peter Pan conception of the Doctor. The language used by fans who feel more comfortable with the Classic Doctor is filled with defensive sarcasm and, possibly intentional, emotional cruelty. The worst of their ire falls on Rose Tyler for, like Wendy’s baby, her importance in the Doctor’s inner life undermines all their cherished prejudices about him. Not only does she represent his heterosexual nature, but she also challenges the perception of the Doctor as an upper-class gentleman amateur. She is a blonde chav, and therefore doubly reprehensible. Some fans would happily stick a dagger into Rose’s heart as she shared the Doctor’s bed.
The tension between the two competing audiences cannot be ignored. The Peter Pan Doctor is sometimes presented as being the one suitable for the kiddies, but RTD knows perfectly well that the emotional maturity of modern children is frequently underestimated. They may see Donna as the fairy princess who makes him cheer up after he’s cried for Rose, but they’ve also seen their own parents split up and cry like that, and they know how it feels to juggle your loyalty to Mum against the new girl in Dad’s life. The real problem is not the children watching, but the adults who are irrationally invested in the Doctor they think they remember, who see the change in him as a threat to their own desire to relive their childhood.
It seems that the Doctor is simultaneously fleeing from responsibility and exhorting others to embrace it. Yet as soon as they do so, rather than travelling with them and accepting them as equals, the Doctor seems to flinch from what he’s done, like Peter confronted with the adult Wendy, unable to accept that he’s changed people in this manner, that he can’t retain his ideal of human innocence. When Donna becomes a Time Lady, he quickly returns her to her original state and undoes all the character development she’s experienced as his travelling companion. Rose is repeatedly banished to the bosom of her family and given a job to do. Jack is abandoned as soon as he becomes an emotional liability, but he replicates the Doctor’s paternalism by taking a job with an organisation that exists to keep humanity in ignorance of the truth and wipe their memories should they discover it regardless. In “The Sound of Drums” he explicitly states that he joined Torchwood in honour of the Doctor, but the irony that Torchwood is opposed to the Time Lord’s very existence is never fully addressed.
The Doctor is presented as champion of truth and moral courage, but it only goes so far. At the end of each series, with the exception of S1 where it was somewhat obscured by the Doctor’s regeneration, a reset button is pressed that restores the status quo – the Doctor as paternal colonial administrator, choosing to remain alone and indulge his illusion that if he never goes back he never needs to contemplate the fact that his companions change and grow old. Every time a series ends on this note, the genie of the Doctor’s apparent emotional development is shoved back in the bottle and fans wait hopefully for the cork to blow off in a subsequent encounter, telling themselves that the crunch will come when he meets Rose again, or the Master, or Davros. They are invariably disappointed. Because drama thrives on conflict, the Doctor’s character development takes place on camera with us cheering him along, but between series it is undone; the cork is firmly replaced in the bottle ready for the cycle to begin again with a fresh companion. Arguably, this has now escalated to the point where only a year’s absence from our TV screens and a change of showrunner can hope to contain it and protect the tried and trusted brand.
In “School Reunion”, the Doctor is faced with an older, and possibly more cynical, Sarah Jane. His distress as he struggles to articulate his feelings to Rose recalls Peter’s panic attack when he can no longer maintain the fantasy that Wendy is his changeless girl-mother:
THE DOCTOR
I don't age. I regenerate. But humans decay. You wither and you die. Imagine watching that happen to someone who you--
He stops when he realizes what he was about to say.
ROSE
What, Doctor?
The Doctor stares at her intensely, as if willing her to understand.
THE DOCTOR
You can spend the rest of your life with me.
Rose looks up at him, eyes shining with unshed tears.
THE DOCTOR (CONT'D)
But I can't spend the rest of mine with you. I have to live on. Alone. That's the curse of the Time Lords.
(School Reunion, script by Toby Whitehouse).
The Doctor loves Rose, but he’d rather cause her pain than confront this problem. If you buy into the argument that even the Mighty Moffatt has to submit to emotional continuity, he even extends this to punishing Rose in the next episode through his dalliance with Reinette and his callous, if temporary, abandonment of her. It’s his version of forgetting it’s spring-cleaning time.
Russell T Davies argues that this mismatch between their life-spans is the biggest problem Rose and the Doctor face as a couple, the ultimate barrier to their happiness. Yet in a show like Doctor Who, jam-packed with instant fixes and plot devices, there’s always a reason why such limitations are presented as absolute.
I would argue that in fact it dramatises the cultural conflict between the romantic conception of childhood as a time of lost innocence, a nostalgia embraced by adults, not least by those of us who speak fondly of Saturday teatimes behind the sofa, and the more modern sensibility that acknowledges children as more sensitive and vulnerable versions of their adult selves – a trend which is illustrated by the current vogue for “misery memoirs” in which lurid accounts of nightmare childhoods are related by “survivors.” Today we are more likely to see childhood as a time of vulnerability that relatively few people negotiate (or “survive”) without experiencing some kind of abuse, than as an idyllic interlude lost for ever.
A century ago the power lay with the adults. They were able to exploit children with impunity whilst sentimentalising them to salve their consciences. It’s an uneasy compromise and there are times when a vicious distrust of childish cruelty pierces the rosy-hued idyll of Kensington Gardens. Raising a dagger to an innocent sleeping child, crowing loudly at the emotional havoc he has caused – when Peter does these things it goes beyond thoughtlessness into a chilling portrait of youthful cruelty that reaches its fullest expression in “Lord of the Flies”, William Golding’s classic subversion of Barrie’s childhood favourite, “The Coral Island”.
Child abuse, like the poor, will probably always be with us, but these days we are far more alert to the possibility of it happening, prepared to set boundaries to appropriate adult involvement with children, to regard unconventional family relationships with suspicion and to believe children when they make accusations against apparently benevolent carers. The public schools regarded as character-forming by the upper classes in Barrie’s day are now viewed as hotbeds of corruption, and an army of social workers would be alerted to protect the orphaned Llewellyn-Davies brothers from Barrie’s questionable interest. The popular press, that notorious barometer and occasional former of British public opinion, likes to express the uneasy feeling that “all this has gone a bit far.” We hanker for a mythical golden age when a decent chap could volunteer to help out as a Boy Scout Leader without submitting to a police check. Our fear of potential abusers drives children’s lives inward towards the families, statistically the most likely place for such crimes to occur.
Co-existing with this uncomfortable awareness is the tendency to view earlier generations of childhood as a golden age when Enid Blyton could be read without glimpses of politically incorrect subtext and there weren’t all these ridiculous rules about multiculturalism. Attempts to breathe an adult complexity into the inner life of a narrative directed at children, particularly one fondly recalled by an earlier generation, tend to run up against the hurdle of resentment at the undermining of illusion.
It seems that RTD went right up to the brink of giving the Doctor a complex and realistic inner life, only to retreat at the last moment and capitulate to those who prefer to regard the hero’s journey as “an awfully big adventure” without emotional cost. Fearlessly, he admitted in public that he admired soap operas and proceeded to give depth to the story of a supposedly harmless chap who happens to entice attractive young women to go away with him for unspecified amounts of time. It was always going to be a hard sell, involving a tightrope-walking act between those who embraced realism and those who clung to their cherished memories of the show as an uncomplicated romp. The pressure on RTD increased until, by the end of S4, it threatened his physical and mental health. Finally came the supposedly definitive finale, where in a fudge every bit as unsettling as Barrie’s “Peter and Wendy”, the Doctor is given a duplicate who can grow up a universe away from the prying eyes of more sensitive viewers. By sensitive, I don’t mean the young viewers who would apparently baulk at the Doctor swearing or Jackie Tyler having a fag, but the adults who would cry, along with WB Yeats, “Tread softly, for you tread on my dreams.”
Our contemporary fantasy figure of choice is incarnated not by David Tennant, but by Johnny Depp. He is our swashbuckling Captain Hook these days, and he becomes the Barrie we want to believe in in “Finding Neverland” – a biopic that claims to be based on reality but is as far-fetched as “Pirates of the Caribbean” when compared to the murky truth. Ironically, my first thought on finishing viewing “Finding Neverland”, as that soft Scottish accent rang in my ears, was that if you really wanted to know what Barrie was like, your ideal leading man would be David Tennant, with his unnerving ability to turn on a sixpence from favourite uncle to menacing villain. To see him sell Barrie’s spurious innocence to a little boy would send shivers down my spine, as does a grown-up reading of “Peter and Wendy”.
And so the emotionally healthy Doctor fades into the West, and we are left with Peter Pan, condemned to be alone forever. It’s not easy to feel sorry for him, but perhaps that’s what we want our heroes to be like. I take heart, as a fanfic reader and writer, from the final line of another Hollywood biopic, crass though it is when analysed:
“George Gershwin is dead. But I don’t have to believe it if I don’t want to.”
Part One
When Wendy Grew Up
(Note - the text of "Peter and Wendy" remains under eternal copyright in the United Kingdom. Extracts are italicised and used without permission)
