[ SECRET POST #4228 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4228 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 14 secrets from Secret Submission Post #605.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 1 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[scarfman]

I've always felt the same way and, while as other commenters have noted everyone seems to have forgotten about it, there have never been any explicit contradictions either (some implicit ones in some people's eyes, but only implicit).

Mostly I subscribe to the half-human school of thought for out-text reasons. People who think it was done on account of a Spock precedent strike me as ignorant. Heroes have always been part-human. Hercules was half-human. Gilgamesh was one-third human (there’s a neat trick). Merlin was half-human. Merlin! Segal and Jacobs and their predecessors in movie development as chronicled in The Nth Doctor didn’t make the Doctor half-human, Aaronovitch did.

Also, denying the Doctor is half human creates problems rather than solving them (though, as noted elsewhere, most people just ignore the problems). Then why did he say it? And why did the Master also say it? How else does he come to have human retinas, and why else would those be what prompts the Master to say it? Accepting the Doctor is half human, on the other hand, instead of shutting down anything new opens up questions that are story potentials, such as: How the hell did a Time Lord and a Tellurian contrive to have a child together? How much of a pariah in Time Lord society will this have made the Doctor's father? What are normal Time Lord/Gallifreyan childrearing practices? We've learned since that the Doctor was raised in some kind of boys' home; was that because he - you know what I think I've made my point.

[(Anonymous)]

It's not so much that people have forgotten about it - I think it's more that people have intentionally chosen to disregard and ignore it, because they don't think it's interesting. Which, I think, is an entirely valid decision to make, and a regular and unexceptional thing to do.

Heroes have always been part-human. Hercules was half-human. Gilgamesh was one-third human (there’s a neat trick). Merlin was half-human. Merlin!

OK, sure. I don't think there's anything fundamentally impossible about the Doctor being half-human. But where does it get us? What particular resonances or themes does it allow us to access? There's often been a Merlinesque element to the Doctor, granted, but does a half-human background extend that? And is there any meaningful comparison between the Doctor and Hercules or Gilgamesh? What is the similarity there?

Also, denying the Doctor is half human creates problems rather than solving them

Only to the extent that you're trying to shape all of Who into one seamless, coherent, sensible whole. If you're trying to do that, then yes, it's a problem to try to reconcile this claim with the rest of the series. But I would argue that it's both impossible to actually do that, and largely unnecessary. It doesn't really add anything to our understanding of Doctor Who. And there's so many canonical problems that would need to be resolved to do it that it's actually much simpler and more sensible to just choose to ignore the problems.

Accepting the Doctor is half human, on the other hand, instead of shutting down anything new opens up questions that are story potentials, such as: How the hell did a Time Lord and a Tellurian contrive to have a child together? How much of a pariah in Time Lord society will this have made the Doctor's father? What are normal Time Lord/Gallifreyan childrearing practices? We've learned since that the Doctor was raised in some kind of boys' home; was that because he -

Welllll. But how much story potential do those ideas actually have? I mean, most of those aren't even about the Doctor himself, and they don't much deepen our understanding of his character, except by providing a (not particularly interesting) explanation for his involvement with Earth and humans. Rather, most of them are about Gallifreyan society, or about the Doctor's father, or all of these other aspects of the universe, and providing more depth to those bits. Not the Doctor himself - not really the part of the universe that Doctor Who, as a franchise, is most closely concerned with - but with background details of canon.

I mean, "childrearing practices" is kind of a perfect example, because it's something that already has been the subject of a ton of fan speculation and had a lot of ink devoted to it. And all that's resulted is a lot of complicated mess about "looms" that very few people care about and that hasn't really made any real difference to Doctor Who. Because it's just not the kind of thing that Doctor Who is really about. It's the same reason that the "Master Plan" was easily the least interesting part of Cartmel-era Who.

So, tl;dr: I just don't see why the suggestion that the Doctor is half-human is *interesting*. And it's generally much simpler to just ignore it entirely.

[scarfman]

Well, on the one hand, if it weren't interesting as a Doctor Who story in the present day of the Doctor Who character to Doctor Who storytellers, there wouldn't be a paperback book filled with movie development treatments from the decade before the movie was made.

On the other hand, if it were really all that interesting, maybe more of a decade's developed ideas would have made their way into the movie which did get made than half a dozen lines of dialog. So, yes, point.

Certainly looms are nonsense.