Character Highlight: The Seventh Doctor (Doctor Who)

Like the Sixth Doctor before him, the Seventh Doctor reflects a clear intention on the show’s part to do something different with the character.  Personally, I think this experiment is a lot more successful with Seven than with Six, but there are times when it doesn’t really work for me.

I’ve said before that there are really two separate characterizations for the Seventh Doctor, one for series 24 and one for series 25 and 26.  His initial portrayal is pretty “typical Doctor” – kooky and fairly light, hitting the trickster notes hard.  The are notes of Four’s eccentricities here, along with One at his most mischievous.

In series 25, though, we start changing things up again, and we see a Doctor who’s much more manipulative and enigmatic.  While I certainly wouldn’t call Seven a villain and there’s frequently a well-intentioned reason behind his machinations, he’s a character who often leaves the viewer (and Ace) a little unsure of his motivations.  This can make it hard to trust him – it’s like, in the back of your head, you get that he’s still a good guy, but when you watch him in action, it’s hard to remember that sometimes.

For me, the manipulations can get trying.  Pull that on the baddies, sure, but I’m never a fan of the Doctor puppet-mastering his companions, and Ace has to deal with a lot of that.  Even if he often does it to “help” her or for the greater good, it strikes me as kind of arrogant, assuming he’s so right/justified that he doesn’t even need to tell Ace what he’s up to.  It’s more understandable in instances where he needs to do something in order to trick the villains, like how he stops Fenric, but when he still plays those games when he doesn’t need to, it makes it harder for Ace to take it on the occasions when he does have a good reason for his machinations.

This show also hints at some greater mystery and darkness for Seven, neither of which I’m really a fan of.  I always get a little wary when the show elevates the Doctor’s importance, because I like it when the Doctor isn’t part of some grand plan that’s centuries in the making or mythologized in the legends of other planets (hello, Timeless Child!)  I love it when the Doctor saves the day unassumingly, here to help and then gone again.  That isn’t the chord the show typically strikes with Seven, which can be disappointing for me.  I don’t dislike it the way I do the manipulative stuff, but it’s definitely less interesting to me.

I do like, though, that even as Seven gets “darker” and more enigmatic, he never fully loses his Doctory whimsy.  These are often the moments in which I like him best, like when he blithely banks on Ace bringing the Nitro 9 he told her not to take or when, in the middle of a speech about Davros’s lust for world domination, he adds in a throwaway line about “unlimited rice pudding.”  Darkly mysterious or not, he’s still the Doctor, and I never want that to change.