What gives life significance? In the latest season of Doctor Who, we do. As individuals, we endow our existence with purpose. Without that endowment, life is aimless and meaningless.
On the surface, that seems empowering. We possess the ability to make meaning. Unfortunately, that sentiment doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, like many of the season finales under Doctor Who showrunner Russell T Davies—including “Empire of Death.”
For the record, I often appreciate the climaxes to Davies’ story arcs that lean heavily on character and attempt to pull together a season-long thread. The conclusion to the Bad Wolf storyline from the first season made me a Doctor Who fan for life. But while the big finales resolve numerous questions, they often leave just as many unanswered.
Examining “Empire of Death” and the Fifteenth Doctor this season, we see the Doctor following along the path of so many real-world institutions and fictional heroes. The Doctor has been deconstructed.
Spoilers below for the latest season of Doctor Who and the finale
In “Empire of Death,” Sutekh, a returning villain from classic Doctor Who, achieves his goal of destroying all life in the universe, seemingly except for the Doctor, his new companion Ruby, and a previous companion Mel.
Eventually, however, all that remains is the Doctor and Ruby trying to uncover the mystery of her mother’s identity, which may be the key to defeating the god of death. Sutekh does not kill them because he needs them to solve the mystery. Riding on the TARDIS, the ancient evil “saw the one thing beyond his comprehension,” Ruby’s mother.
When they finally find her name, it doesn’t make sense to Ruby, but they use the mystery to capture Sutekh and pull him back into the Time Vortex, where the Fourth Doctor had previously sent him to his supposed death.
In the end, the Doctor reveals Ruby’s mom is just an ordinary human woman. Ruby doesn’t understand how a normal person could defeat a god. “She was important,” the Doctor says, “because we think she is important. That’s how everything happens—every war, every religion, every love story. We invest things with significance.” The world is meaningless, but we can give it meaning amid its meaninglessness.
Metamodern Doctor
In this way, Doctor Who embraces the deconstructed perspective of metamodernism, which continues many of the nihilistic elements of postmodernism but asserts meaning can still be found when we create it ourselves. It’s an embrace of incoherence.
“Metamodernism opposes the ‘either/or’ bifurcation of modernism and postmodernism,” writes Brett McCraken at TGC. “It refuses to choose between sincerity/certainty/hope (modernism) and irony/deconstruction/nihilism (postmodernism). It values both, even if—or perhaps precisely because—such a synthesis is, in the end, illogical and incoherent.”
Davies may argue Doctor Who has not undergone a significant philosophical change into a metamodernist perspective. Instead, he may say this is simply in line with his stated desire to move the show more into the realm of fantasy. Before this season, he compared the show to Narnia in that you step through a wooden door into a magical world.
It's always had little nods towards making a science fictional sense of fantasy elements, and I just decided to start dropping the nods and not even pretending that there's any rational exposure to this.
But fantasy means more than no longer needing a scientific or rational explanation for what happens. Fantasy like Narnia and The Lord of the Rings still operate in a grounded, even if magical, world. Actions have meaning and consequences within a moral framework. And people have value, not simply because someone else extends it to them.
Compare Samwise Gamgee’s and Mel’s perspective on fighting even when things seem hopeless. In Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: Two Tower, Frodo asks Sam what they’re holding on to. The brave gardener replies, “There’s good in this world and it’s worth fighting for.” What Mel says when confronted with Sutekh’s dust wave of death seems similar but is vastly different — “There’s nothing we can do … except fight.”
Mel makes no assertion about goodness in the world. There’s no reason to fight except that she believes she should. Paradoxically, her choice itself gives her decision significance, not the worthiness of anything or anyone else.
But we don’t have to compare Doctor Who to other stories. We can see the deconstruction of the Doctor within Doctor Who itself. While Ruby’s mother was important because others saw her as important, that’s not how the Doctor viewed the ordinary person during Davies’ first season.
Value of the ordinary
In Father’s Day, Rose travels back in time to the moment her dad Peter was killed in a car accident. The Doctor warns her not to interfere, but she saves her dad and justifies it by saying he’s no one special. “Rose, there’s a man alive in the world who wasn’t alive before,” the Ninth Doctor says, “An ordinary man. That’s the most important thing in creation. The whole world’s different because he’s alive.”
Peter doesn’t have meaning and significance simply because Rose believes he does. That Doctor recognizes that an ordinary man has immeasurable, inherent value. But not the Fifteenth Doctor, not the deconstructed Doctor.
In the first episode, “Space Babies,” he told Ruby he didn’t have “a purpose, or a cause, or a mission, but I have freedom.” It’s meant to be a bold statement of self-determination, but it comes across as a sad existence and a rejection of his name.
Time Lords, the Doctor’s race, choose their titles to signify who they are. He became the “Doctor” because he wanted to help people. Now, he says it just became his name because it was used for a thousand years.
Instead of being a self-sacrificing hero to emulate, the Doctor spent much of this season weeping over his inability to save someone or needing others to save him. In the end, the Doctor brings death to death to give life, but not through his own sacrifice. Sutekh is dragged through the Time Vortex, reversing all the death he unleashed on the universe.1
With Davies giving the Doctor a same-sex love interest and on-screen kiss in “Rogue,” Doctor Who had already become a show I would no longer share with my kids. As this season ends, the Doctor now joins a long line of heroes who have been dissected and subverted to the point that subversion becomes the trope. It’s a sad day when the Doctor has deconstructed.
For more Doctor Who coverage:
Reviews of the recent run
Doctor Who rewatch
“Father’s Day” (S1:E8)
“The Satan Pit” (S2:E9)
“Blink” (S3:E10)
“Midnight” (S4:E10)
“The Eleventh Hour” (S5:E1)
“The Girl Who Waited” (S6:E10)
“The Day of the Doctor” (S7:E1)
“Heaven Sent” (S9:E11)
This is particularly frustrating for those looking for coherence in the story. Previously, the Fourth Doctor sent Sutekh into the Time Vortex, where the god of death latched on to the Doctor’s TARDIS and rode around until it was time to unleash his plan. Now, the Fifteenth Doctor used the same method to defeat the god of death and spoke as if he had crossed some line of bringing death to Sutekh. Why would this be a pivotal, groundbreaking moment for the Doctor when he already tried to destroy Sutekh in the exact same way?