Today,
I’m staying home for Sylvester McCoy.
In the
roster of Doctors past and present, Five can get a bit lost in the
shuffle. He doesn’t have the
delightfully-eccentric flair of his predecessor Four, and although I prefer him
to his successor Six, Six is certainly memorable, something that isn’t always
true for Five. Whenever I haven’t been
watching any of his serials lately, I tend to think of him as a nice but
slightly bland Doctor. Closer proximity
to his stories reminds me that he’s more fun than that, but I’m not sure why I
have a hard time holding onto that impression.
Before
Matt Smith came along, Peter Davison was the youngest actor to play the Doctor,
and so when Four regenerates into Five, it’s a fresh-faced Doctor who emerges,
one who cuts a less-bemusing figure. But
even from the start, the Fifth Doctor defies the more conventional expectations
that viewers may have of him. Sure, his
Edwardian cricket uniform isn’t as out there as Four’s scarf or Six’s
technicolor dreamcoat (maybe that’s the issue – Five is just sandwiched between
two really big personalities,) but he wears a stalk of celery in his lapel, for
goodness sake! That old Doctor
twinkle-in-the-eye is still there, and Five gets up to his share of whimsical
trouble.
He’s a
very pleasant Doctor, and he ingratiates himself with strangers more easily
than some other incarnations. He has a
disarming presence that baddies can sometimes underestimate, but he’s just as
sharp as ever and can use that pleasantness to lull villains into revealing
just a bit too much. That’s how his
trickster tends to come through, getting people comfortable and then pulling
the rug out from under them.
Five has
a great deal of kindness in him. It’s
demonstrated most dramatically in “The Caves of Androzani,” his final serial,
which is probably why that trait is so ingrained in my impression of him – the
last acts we see of his are the incredible lengths he goes to help Peri. It’s one of my favorite stories of his, in
large part because he doesn’t know
Peri well at that point, but he still gives so much of himself for her
sake. I love that.
All that
said, Five isn’t some selfless milquetoast.
I had to watch his seasons a couple times before I could really
recognize and appreciate how downright ornery he can get with his companions at
times, especially the original trio of Adric, Nyssa, and Tegan (if I had to
travel with Adric, I’d be tetchy too, Doctor!)
Even though, when he regenerates, the Doctor and the three companions
are mostly still getting to know each other, they’re quickly thrown into some
real wild situations together. This
forces them to grow speedily into a weird little family, and it’s a family that
gets on each other’s nerves. I like
Five’s arguments with Tegan over his ability (or lack thereof) to get her back
to Heathrow, and I like how huffy he gets with Adric on the regular. It adds a bit of sharpness to the milder
Doctor, and what’s more, it tells us a bit more about who he is. He gets ornery and loses patience with his
companions most often when 1) they’ve accidentally put themselves or one of
their friends in danger or 2) they’re talking about going back home. Though he doesn’t usually say it in so many
words, Five cares about his friends deeply, and rather than admit he wants them
to say, he quarrels with him, making a show of not caring to cover up the fact
that he doesn’t want to be without them.
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