One Year On: Digging Deeper into Deep Breath
Guest contributor Richard Forbes takes a thematic look back over Capaldi’s debut.
In about a hundred milliseconds, researchers suggest the human brain makes snap judgements, impressions of people based on their appearance. Blink and you might miss it, but Deep Breath explores this slippery practice of prejudice and I think it’s important to unpack its themes to come to terms with what Deep Breath means for the process of regeneration and also, what we can learn from and take away from this bold retelling of the classic post-regeneration story.
The Grumpy Doctor
Steven Moffat has been fairly adamant that the Doctor is written virtually the same way, no matter if the dialogue was intended for Christopher Eccleston or Matt Smith; it’s ‘the same man’ he repeats. I’m inclined to agree. I think as you strip away the catchphrases and the funny hair and the costumes, what you have is a character that is fundamentally the same person with a fuzzy but still distinct continuity of personality.
But do others agree?
The other day I was in my doctor’s office when the secretary smiled and asked ‘How do you like the new doctor?’ I did a double-take. New doctor? That’s not right, I thought. My doctor isn’t ‘new’. When she pointed to the ‘Doctor Who’ logo emblazoned across my t-shirt, I felt very silly indeed. Oh that Doctor! When we got chatting about the latest Doctor (played, of course, by Peter Capaldi), I was taken aback by the adjectives she used to describe him: ‘grumpy’, ‘mean’, ‘cold’ – certainly things I had heard from others online for months, but was the Twelfth Doctor really these things, I wondered? The Doctor, in my mind, is the same Doctor. He has his grumpy days (we all do, especially on Mondays), but as far as I’m concerned he is still the silly, courageous, overconfident idiot who tries to do the right when he can, regardless of whether he has a grumpy old face or a younger one. The performance that Peter Capaldi presented us in Series 8 does not fundamentally rewrite the character – he’s still enthusiastic as ever about the universe (e.g., ‘can I talk about the planets now?’), hopelessly unwise and imminently brilliant.
Despite my optimism on the matter, I think quite a lot of people still feel the same way as my doctor’s secretary, erm, not that doctor, the other one… oh bugger… point being, I think it might be worth returning to Peter Capaldi’s introduction, Deep Breath and what it has to say about the ‘new’ Doctor.
Rethinking ‘Deep Breath’
Deep Breath serves as a kind of commentary on prejudice and asks us to reconsider what regeneration is really like from the Doctor’s perspective.
The story beautifully deconstructs and explains regeneration in terms that are relatable to any person and in that sense is a new way of thinking about regeneration. I always thought that regeneration was ‘scary’ for the Doctor because your face changed – but it was always rather unclear what was so scary about this whole process for the Doctor. We can easily understand why regeneration is scary for viewers – saying goodbye to an old favourite and hello to the new man is rarely easy – but getting into the Doctor’s mind just before or after a regeneration is less accessible for viewers because none of us have regenerated, right? Well… perhaps not.
At least once, the Doctor admitted he considered it ‘like dying’ (controversial remarks, indeed) – in fact the entire café scene from The End of Time flies in the face of what we thought about regeneration previously, when the Doctor says that a ‘new man saunters off’ while he fades away. I’d argue that the events that take place in Deep Breath were what the Doctor was afraid of, what he has always been afraid of. The parallels between The Christmas Invasion and Deep Breath are so blatant, the cold opener even alludes to it with Clara’s ‘That’s the Doctor’ line – but you have to ask yourself what if the Doctor hadn’t regenerated into someone that Rose had been attracted to (physically)? Clara is a different person than Rose and likely handled the situation different than Rose would, but the point remains: Deep Breath pressures Clara to respond to the fact that she cannot see the person she loved when she looks at the Doctor anymore.
Regeneration, Deep Breath demonstrates, is scary for the Doctor because of prejudice. The entire story of Deep Breath is about prejudice – the dinosaur trapped in London, alone and frightened and treated as a monster … Vastra who hides her face… Jenny who hides her relationship with Vastra. When the Doctor says ‘you can’t see me, can you? You look at me and you can’t see me,’ he calls upon you to remember every rejection you’ve had, or bad interview – moments when you are judged by your appearance and not by your character.
I questioned earlier whether any of us had regenerated before; obviously none of us are Time Lords (I think…), but Deep Breath suggests that we all know what it feels like to regenerate – there are moments in our lives where we are forced to face prejudice in an instant; our first day of school can be a terrifying ordeal where leering eyes instantly cast judgement upon you, our first date, our first day of work at a new workplace or the day we retire – when for some of us we, in those fleeting few moments, regenerate from a respected colleague into a dawdling old retiree all over the span of one cake, an hour and a parting gift (if your workplace likes you). These are moments in our lives that come to define our self-image, yet we often try to put them off, like the Doctor does, until they catch up on us in the most brutal of ways; then, like the Doctor in Deep Breath, we are forced to persevere through an uncomfortable and ultimately unavoidable identity crisis and the subsequent renegotiation.
Deep Breath reveals the immense scariness of regenerating for the Doctor; as the Doctor waddles around with hysteria, reduced to a nightgown, the people he loved and trusted look at him as though he is a stranger; in the same sense that the first post-regeneration story, The Power of the Daleks seemed to encourage viewers to distrust the ‘new’ Doctor, Deep Breath throws the Doctor and its viewers out of their comfort zone and forces both the Doctor and viewers to question who the man we thought we knew really is behind this new face of his.
Final Remarks
Food for thought, but perhaps regenerations don’t actually change a Time Lord’s personality?
What if the strong differences that we attribute to each new regeneration is how the world reacts to their new face and their new appearance and the opinion and identity that we download upon them? When we see the Doctor as William Hartnell as old, we might see him as authoritative but grandfatherly, or Patrick Troughton’s short doctor, who we regard him as impish and innocent, or Jon Pertwee, whose tall and handsome appearance, gave us the immediate sense of a ‘man of action’ – and so forth… In this new way of thinking about regeneration, the Doctor would hardly be in control of his own identity, which instead would be imposed and assumed by society based on superficial features of his overall appearance. A cynic might even wonder if the Doctor ‘plays up’ the characteristics people assume of him, solely to fill the expectations that people have – like when the Second Doctor would let others underestimate him. Perhaps the Doctor hates meeting himself in stories like The Three Doctors because he can’t help but see himself as a fraud; just someone pretending that week to be a ‘dandy’ or a ‘clown’ to himself and others, rather than a honest presentation of one’s self. After all, Rule #1…
When I think back to the Tenth Doctor sitting in that café, contemplating regeneration, I do wonder if this is what he meant by ‘a new man’. The new man might not be ‘new’ at all, just new as far as everyone else was concerned. Think about it: nobody would ever treat the Doctor like they treated him when he was the Tenth Doctor ever again – that’d be scary, no? He’d never be able to visit Rose Tyler or Wilf and have them look at him and see him as he once was. His old self would, in a way, be dead to them, as if he never survived the regeneration. No wonder the Doctor rarely revisits those who he leaves behind; those trusted few that have been with him through different regenerations, like the Brigadier and Sarah Jane, to name a few, may be the only people to every truly know, understand and love the Doctor behind ‘the face’.
