Well, I don't mean 'Superman' per se, in that even Lance had never had the Doctor bounce bullets off his chest (shoot them out of the air, yes, but never bounce them off his chest).
I mean rather the view that sees the Doctor is an immeasurably superior lifeform, able to pull respiratory bypass systems and perfect vocal impressions out of his hat to deal with any situation, to take any amount of pain and to do any calculation or bring any bit of knowledge that might help the plot out of his head. And occasionally demonstrate superhuman strength too.
Of course, some of this is just bog-standard lazy plotting. You want to put your character in an impossible situation but then find you've you've painted yourself into a corner you aren't clever enough to logically somersault out of, so it turns out that he wasn't suffocated after all, or his sonic gun can magically make everything okay (or blast the enemy's sonic gun out of her hand).
But I think it goes deeper than just that: there is a strain of 'the Doctor can do anything we can do, better, he can do anything better than us'. I was watching 'An Unearthly Tribe of 100,000 BC' recently on a friend's DVD and was interested to see just how un-super the Doctor is. He knows much less that he pretends to; he's just as much at sea in the distant past as the schoolteachers are, and almost as much at sea as them in the TARDIS. His ideas are frequently wrong. He's much more of a character, much less of an icon (though of course it's because of him that the programme survived long enough to become iconic).
Davies's version of Doctor Who, it has been noted before, is stuck firmly in the seventies: the Pertwee era, with Earth being under threat every week, the Doctor getting into fist- and swordfights, and the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce; and the T.Baker era, which is where the Doctor's superpower inflation really set in, both in terms of his tools (first time the sonic screwdriver was introduced it was used to unscrew a screw, then to vibrate a mechanical lock open -- both by Troughton -- Pertwee was using it to activate mines, but I think it's T.Baker where it first leaves all narrative justification for what sound waves might be able to do behind and starts becoming a cutting torch, a welding torch, an electronic lockpick, and whatever else that meant they had to eventually destroy it). He's just taken that seventies Doctor to the next step, the one that -- to give JNT his due -- he avoided by deciding that after Baker they should go in the opposite direction and have a more vulnerable Doctor.
What makes the new, super-charged Doctor even more unappealing, of course, is not only that he's written as a god but that he's arrogant with it. The seventh Doctor, both on TV and in the New Adventures, liked rather to hide his abilities; but the tenth makes sure that every supporting character he comes across gets a good speech about how powerful he is, preferably (if the budget will stand it) with a fireball in the background.
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dancing_serpent
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-06 10:59 pm (UTC)I mean rather the view that sees the Doctor is an immeasurably superior lifeform, able to pull respiratory bypass systems and perfect vocal impressions out of his hat to deal with any situation, to take any amount of pain and to do any calculation or bring any bit of knowledge that might help the plot out of his head. And occasionally demonstrate superhuman strength too.
Of course, some of this is just bog-standard lazy plotting. You want to put your character in an impossible situation but then find you've you've painted yourself into a corner you aren't clever enough to logically somersault out of, so it turns out that he wasn't suffocated after all, or his sonic gun can magically make everything okay (or blast the enemy's sonic gun out of her hand).
But I think it goes deeper than just that: there is a strain of 'the Doctor can do anything we can do, better, he can do anything better than us'. I was watching 'An Unearthly Tribe of 100,000 BC' recently on a friend's DVD and was interested to see just how un-super the Doctor is. He knows much less that he pretends to; he's just as much at sea in the distant past as the schoolteachers are, and almost as much at sea as them in the TARDIS. His ideas are frequently wrong. He's much more of a character, much less of an icon (though of course it's because of him that the programme survived long enough to become iconic).
Davies's version of Doctor Who, it has been noted before, is stuck firmly in the seventies: the Pertwee era, with Earth being under threat every week, the Doctor getting into fist- and swordfights, and the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce; and the T.Baker era, which is where the Doctor's superpower inflation really set in, both in terms of his tools (first time the sonic screwdriver was introduced it was used to unscrew a screw, then to vibrate a mechanical lock open -- both by Troughton -- Pertwee was using it to activate mines, but I think it's T.Baker where it first leaves all narrative justification for what sound waves might be able to do behind and starts becoming a cutting torch, a welding torch, an electronic lockpick, and whatever else that meant they had to eventually destroy it). He's just taken that seventies Doctor to the next step, the one that -- to give JNT his due -- he avoided by deciding that after Baker they should go in the opposite direction and have a more vulnerable Doctor.
What makes the new, super-charged Doctor even more unappealing, of course, is not only that he's written as a god but that he's arrogant with it. The seventh Doctor, both on TV and in the New Adventures, liked rather to hide his abilities; but the tenth makes sure that every supporting character he comes across gets a good speech about how powerful he is, preferably (if the budget will stand it) with a fireball in the background.
S.