Posted in: BBC, Doctor Who, Opinion, TV, TV | Tagged: bbc, disney, doctor who, jon pertwee, Ncuti Gatwa, patrick troughton, peter capaldi, william hartnell

Doctor Who: Do We Really Need The Doctor to Be An Action Hero?

Doctor Who has always been a pacifist, though the BBC really wants us to think they're an action hero. But is that really necessary?

Do you ever think of "action hero" as the first thing that comes to mind when Doctor Who comes up? Does the BBC really need to sell Doctor Who as an action hero? Does every hero need to be an action hero now in the age of blockbusters? If you watch action scenes in the classic era of Doctor Who, you might notice that, well, the action kind of sucked. The BBC operates under very limited budgets, and action choreography was not high on the menu. Sure, okay, running is action. And the Doctor and friends spend a lot of time running. So much of the sixty years of Doctor Who is spent running, both down corridors (usually cheap sets built on the BBC lot), down quarries in Wales doubling as alien planets, and then corridors in expensive locations now that the show has a bigger budget, they'd probably run down the corridors of the BBC if they run out of locations to run in.

Actually… they have run down parts of the BBC doubling as alien sets and headquarters. Running is probably the easiest big action. Doctor Who has been propaganda for cardio for decades! God knows everyone, especially kids, needs to get up and moving as much as possible. Preferably between watching episodes of Doctor Who.

The Doctor has always been pitched as a pacifist who uses Science and reasoning to outsmart the bad guys. He started out as an elderly Edwardian gentleman figure in 1963, after all, played by William Hartnell, not a beefy two-fisted man in his thirties. He was a stern but secretly mischievous and cunning grandfather. When Patrick Troughton took over as the Second Doctor, he was younger and did a lot of running from monsters, but nobody thought of him as an action hero as Troughton based his performance partly on Charlie Chaplin.

It was when Jon Pertwee took over the show that they leaned into the two-fisted action-hero tropes in the Doctor. The series wanted to follow the James Bond and Avengers action trend of the Sixties, so the Third Doctor fought duels, did "Venutian Jujitsu" and karate chopped people into unconsciousness as spy heroes tended to do in mid-Sixties TV series. He was always the "Action Doctor" more than any other before or since. When the series came back in 2005, the budget was larger, the production values slicker and the directors were a bit better at action, so the subsequent Doctors have all done their share of action, but it's still mostly running, jumping off high places, hanging from high places and pointing the sonic screwdriver at things to make them go BOOM! Only the Twelfth Doctor (Peter Capaldi) threw a punch in the show's entire history for forty years, and he knocked out a racist – which is never a bad thing.

Well, Doctor Who is entering a new Disney+ era, and Ncuti Gatwa is as dashing and fit as they come, so why not have the most action-hero Doctor of them all?

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