Character Highlight: The Sixth Doctor (Doctor Who)

I’ll say this for Six:  he improves over time, and he’s more palatable on rewatch.  Still, not exactly high praise for an incarnation of a character who’s otherwise been nearly a dozen of my favorite TV characters.  How do you solve a problem like Six?  (Spoilers for “The Twin Dilemma.”)

Right from the start, this incarnation of the Doctor feels designed to turn people off.  He’s dismissive of and insulting toward his companion (I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – poor Peri,) his self-assurance comes off way more smug than confident, he gets accusatory and high-handed at the drop of a hat, and he has a habit pretending none of his mistakes actually happen and/or fobbing them off on Peri instead.  Even his outfit; while plenty of other Doctors have carried off odd looks with eccentric charm, Six’s Technicolor dreamcoat and cat broach feels intentionally garish.  And of course, the major blow comes when, in the midst of a regeneration-crisis psychotic break, he tries to choke Peri to death in “The Twin Dilemma.”  I get that he’s not in full command of his faculties at the time, but that is not the kind of first impression you generally want your Doctor to make with the audience, and it’s a very hard image to shake.  (Note:  during rewatch, if I watch series 23-24 and then circle back to “The Twin Dilemma,” he feels better in 23 and 24.)

As I said, it’s not all bad.  He grows less harsh with Peri as time goes by, and by the time Mel comes along, he’s almost civil.  I like his enthusiasm for machines, a la his excitement about meeting George Stephenson in “The Mark of the Rani” and the time ruse device he makes in “Timelash.”  Over time, he’s ever so slightly less full of himself and eventually is able to take the occasional joke.

But overall, Six is still a miss of a Doctor for me, and that makes me sad.  As I said repeatedly during some of the unpleasantness of new Who’s eighth season, all I really want to do is love Who to pieces, and I hate it when the show gives me something that resists my very eage desire to love it.  “It’s not all bad” should never be the best thing I have to say about a Doctor.

In writing this, I’ve been thinking a lot about Six, One, and Twelve, and why the latter two work for me while the former doesn’t.  All three are less overtly-cuddly Doctors and have been variously described as rude/cranky/mean.  Now, while I don’t like some of One’s early actions (in fact, I wonder if, in conceiving the choking scene in “The Twin Dilemma,” the show asked, “What can we have the Doctor do that would be worse than kidnapping two teachers?”), the first few serials of the show show him changing quite a bit for the better as he’s influenced more and more by Susan, Ian, and Barbara.  He can still be imperious, ‘cause that’s just One, but we always see “the twinkle,” as An Adventure in Space and Time puts it.  By the time Six bursts onto the scene, though, he’s already been doing good in the universe for five regenerations.  He feels like regression, not growth.  Meanwhile, I think the big difference for me with Twelve is that I feel like he rarely intends to wound others.  He says rude or insulting things distractedly, unfiltered, or in irritation, but I don’t think he’s specificially setting out to make anyone feel bad, and I think Six does.  Even when he criticizes her, I get how much Twelve cares about Clara (this is the same guy who assures Clara that he doesn’t want her to change moments after he implies that she’s an “egomaniac needy game-player,”) whereas I don’t get the sense that Six gives much of a damn about Peri until he actually starts acting like it.