The Doctor: What's in a Name?
Jun. 9th, 2008 10:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Doctor Who in some ways this season reminds me of the Guy Gavriel Kay novel Tigana.
Now, if you haven't read it, I would highly recommend it. This is a fantasy novel about a group of freedom-fighters, but even more, it's about the power of a name. It's the Rumpelstiltskin theme: the power that comes from saying a name, or taking away the power to say a name, or the power of invoking a name.
The Doctor, of course, doesn't use a name. He's just... the Doctor. As in the wonderful exchange with Rose in "The Empty Child":
Rose: What was I supposed to say, you don't have a name! Don't you ever get tired of 'Doctor'? Doctor who?So they tease us with his name, or the absence of his name, and we get nicknames like Theta (or so I'm told) but no clues as to his original name. I was rather hoping he didn't have a real name; that Gallifreyans didn't have to have names, that they could just be The Master or The Doctor or Whatever. No, Romana wouldn't fit that pattern. Or perhaps the fun of it is that the pattern is that there is no pattern. A free for all for names.
Doctor: Nine centuries in, I'm coping.
Rose called the Doctor 'Spock' in the scene I quoted. I was disappointed, back when I was an ardent Star Trek fan, to learn that Spock had an unpronounceable last name. Why did he need a last name at all? For aliens to have the Indo-European pattern of first name and last name seems absurd to me. I don't even know why we need that pattern, but don't get me started on that....
So now it seems the Doctor has a name, and would use it in one one situation.
There's an interesting parallel here to Captain Jack Harkness, another man with no known name, using a stolen one as an accidental tribute to the man he stole it from.
So they've raised the mystery: what was Jack's name, before he was Captain Jack Harkness? Does Captain John known? Grey would know, but Grey is in a frozen coma. Toshiko asked Jack directly in "Captain Jack Harkness", and he didn't answer. What was the Doctor's name, and why is it such a secret?
Having raised the question as a tease and a mystery, will they feel compelled to answer it? Part of the game in the new series of Doctor Who was that the Doctor never said the name of Gallifrey - not until "The Runaway Bride". But that's different. We already knew the name of Gallifrey.
The bottom line: I don't want to know the name Captain Jack's parents called him by. He is Captain Jack Harkness and that's enough for me.
I don't want to know the Doctor's name. I don't ever want to know. I love the scenes in which the question is raised, but dread any hints or clues. What name could be good enough for either of them, except the names we know?
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Date: 2008-06-10 03:58 am (UTC)Even among Indo-Europeans, the "first-name+last-name" pattern is not universal. The Romans, for example, had "first-name" [praenomen] + "last/clan-name" [nomen] + "clan-sept-name" [cognomen]. Examples of that include "Gaius Julius Caesar" and "Publius Cornelius Scipio". The Roman Senate also had the authority to tack on extra names to a person as a reward; Scipio became known as "Scipio Africanus" after defeating the Carthaginians in the second Punic War [IIRC].
I believe that the Spanish and all Latin Americans [including Mexicans] *still* use the three-name Roman pattern, which often gives Anglo-oriented customer-related programs the fits. :-)
Then there's the habit of putting the last [family or clan] name first, which died out in most of Europe a long time ago. The only Europeans still doing this (and they don't speak an Indo-European language) are the Hungarians or "Magyar." In much of Asia, especially the Far East, putting the last name first is still common, however. For example, in "Jiang Jieshi" [Pinyin], better known as Chiang Kai-shek, the "Jiang" is the family name.
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Date: 2008-06-10 11:51 am (UTC)No. I was trying to find a cultural group that tends to use it, but even that is partial. Go back even a few hundred years, and you'll see Atilla the Hun and William the Bastard didn't use that pattern. They were a little more... descriptive.
So why assume aliens would use that pattern, or take their father's name? It seems to me like a failure of imagination.
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Date: 2008-06-10 03:44 pm (UTC)Wherein my ancestor Mikkel Jensen (son of Jens), had a daughter Kirsten Mikkelsdatter (daughter of Mikkel).
And Ianto Jones, had he been born a couple hundred years earlier, would have been "John, the son of John".
They still use this in Iceland. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_name)
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Date: 2008-06-10 11:51 am (UTC)I like his name!
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Date: 2008-06-10 04:18 am (UTC)I'm not nearly so interested in awhat the name is, as in what circumstances he would speak it in -- look at how River apologized before telling him he'd spoken it.
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Date: 2008-06-10 11:55 am (UTC)Yes. I liked that, but didn't understand it in the least. And why would he only tell his name in one particular rare or unique circumstance? We have no reason to think names on Gallifrey are generally particularly secret or sacred, though it's possible. Nor can I think of any reason this would be the case with the Doctor, but no one else. Maybe he and the Master made a pact - no names!
My guess would be that the circumstances of telling his name involve either marriage or death, but I can't think of anything that would explain this. And I can't think why she would apologize about the marriage, unless she was just worrying about a spoiler for his future. But perhaps the revelation meant one of them was going to die?
No, it doesn't really make sense... but it's all I can think of.
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Date: 2008-06-10 02:10 pm (UTC)Well, in canon, he's never spoken it, not even (Deadly Assassin) on Gallifrey. Something is going on there. (My speculation was that he no longer *had* a name, that it had been stripped from him. Ah, well.)
The only Gallifreyans we've seen who use titles (The Master, The Rani, The Meddling Monk) are all exiles. So it makes sense that there is some sort of prohibition going on, or some sort of custom that he still honored.
> marriage or death,
Marriage, maybe. We've seen him die, repeatedly, so no cigar there. I'm hoping it's something far more interesting than that. It's sci-fi, after all. He can only speak it when the universe is ending. He can only speak it when he's doing something uniquely Gallifreyan. He can only speak it when confronting Rassilon. (He's done that before, though.)
But it's something so dreadful that River apologizes, repeatedly, before telling him his name. She's not just apologizing because she knows it, she's apologizing because she's telling him something in his future that he doesn't want to know. I very much doubt that's marriage, and he's certainly faced death with reasonable equanimity before.
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Date: 2008-06-11 01:12 pm (UTC)So his wive and kids didn't know his name?
Something is going on there.
Definitely, even if just in the recesses of Steven Moffat's devious mind.
My speculation was that he no longer *had* a name, that it had been stripped from him. Ah, well.
I thought that too.
some sort of custom that he still honored.
Especially since he is the last one.
We've seen him die, repeatedly, so no cigar there.
I meant the death of the person he's telling, not his own death. But I hope it's more interesting than that, too.
it's something so dreadful that River apologizes, repeatedly, before telling him his name.
Yes. There must have been a reason. And his reaction was... well, whatever it was, it wasn't a simple, "How did you know that?" It was something more.
And no, marriage wouldn't warrant the apology and the tension. So - ?
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Date: 2008-06-11 01:22 pm (UTC)Agh! No, I wasn't clear. He's never spoken it in a TV episode. We don't know what he's done in the rest of his life. (It wasn't even canon that he *had* a wife until the RTD era. There was this elaborate theory by a previous show-runner that all Time Lords were grown in vats. Google Doctor Who Looms.)
I really am trying to imagine but I haven't a clue. What could be more dreadful than what he's already done?
These next few are all wild dreaming, no basis in show history.
Hmm. He could say it when naming a baby. He could say it when confronting some dreadful entity from Gallifrey's mythological history. I dunno...
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Date: 2008-06-11 02:36 pm (UTC)So what happened in "Deadly Assassin"? Did someone try to force him to say it?
It wasn't even canon that he *had* a wife until the RTD era.
I thought he had a granddaughter from the beginning. Doesn't that imply a family, including a wife?
There was this elaborate theory by a previous show-runner that all Time Lords were grown in vats.
I've heard of that. I thought it was a sort of joke.
He could say it when naming a baby. He could say it when confronting some dreadful entity from Gallifrey's mythological history. I dunno...
Hee. Lots of possibilities.
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Date: 2008-06-10 07:44 am (UTC)It sort of refers to those societies where people have a 'true name' one reveals only to the most intimate and true friends and lovers, a name that gives power over you, a magical name.
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Date: 2008-06-10 11:58 am (UTC)So it seems. Have he had reason to believe before that the Gallifreyans do this? or it just the Doctor? (And, I would guess, the Master.) Perhaps it's the case with a certain type of Gallifreyan?
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Date: 2008-06-10 02:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-10 08:29 pm (UTC)Food for thought, anyway.
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Date: 2008-06-10 11:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-10 12:00 pm (UTC)What do you think that is?
There have been plenty of hints that it´s more than just a secret. Madame de Pompadour even said so and who wrote that episode, hehe ...
Steven Moffat has been setting this up since series 1. (The fiend!) It could be just a game he likes to play, but more likely he's got a plot brewing. I wonder what it will be?
I agree that we won't learn his name, but we'll learn about the circumstances in which he'd tell it.
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Date: 2008-06-10 12:40 pm (UTC)It won´t have anything to do with anyone getting married though. Of that I´m absolutely certain.
No way is the Doctor going to marry his mum, because that´s who River Song is. Steven Moffat said so. Really, he did, I´m not making that up. Marrying your mum - that would be sick! :)
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Date: 2008-06-10 05:49 pm (UTC)How and when and if it´s going to play out, I have no idea.
Neither have I, but I predict we will have our answers by the end of this series. Not about the Doctor's name, probably, because that's a Stephen Moffat thing more than a Russell T. Davies thing, but about the Medusa Cascade.
One way or another.
No way is the Doctor going to marry his mum, because that´s who River Song is.
That would explain a lot, though I'm not sure about the "pretty boy". Unless he's also her parakeet. And the non-recognition factor just doesn't fit.
Steven Moffat said so.
When? Where? I missed that.
Marrying your mum - that would be sick! :)
There's precedent, but I don't see the Doctor as Oedipus.
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Date: 2008-06-10 06:36 pm (UTC)The Medusa Cascade might indeed pop up in the finale, definitely a possibility. There´ve been so many hints dropped, I´d be amazed if they didn´t do something with it. I can´t wait what happens and at the same time I´m dreading the final episode because it´s a long time from there until Christmas.
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Date: 2008-06-10 08:40 pm (UTC)Ah. He's a goof.
Don´t know if you listen to the podcasts
I haven't. I don't even know where to find them.
There´ve been so many hints dropped, I´d be amazed if they didn´t do something with it.
I don't think it's been mentioned in every episode of series 4 but it must be close to it.
I can´t wait what happens and at the same time I´m dreading the final episde because it´s a long time from there until Christmas.
Agreed. I also dread it because I don't trust them to do things right (I didn't like "Last of the Time Lords") but at the same time I can hardly wait. I loved "The Parting of the Ways" and "Doomsday". So I take my chances.
And then - a long dry spell.
Maybe that will get me writing fanfic again?
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Date: 2008-06-10 09:12 pm (UTC)http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/podcasts/doctorwho/
They stay up for one week so grab it before the next episode airs. Unlike the video clips on the website these can be downloaded from outside the UK. For older podcasts - well, there are these "selfhelp groups", cough cough. Although, if you end up listening to only one podcast ever, you could do a lot worse than this one. It´s absolutely hilarious.
Last of the Timelords was a bit of a mixed bag but there still was some brilliant stuff in it. And it was preceded by two fantastic episodes. The last 15 minutes of Utopia were simply one of the most exciting things I´ve ever seen on TV and don´t just say that because I am a fob watch wearer. :)
I´ll probably do a rewatch of all four seasons during the long wait. I did Farscape two years ago, this year it´s going to be Doctor Who. No idea how I´m gonna make it through next year though.
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Date: 2008-06-11 12:06 pm (UTC)I was particularly interested in the part where they concluded that the Doctor was a charlatan.
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Date: 2008-06-11 08:06 pm (UTC)If you can track them down, I can recommend the podcasts for The Doctor´s Daughter (RTD, David Tennnant, Alice Troughton and Baby Gallifrey) and Partners in Crime (Phil Collinson, David Tennant, Catherine Tate) which are also very funny. Another hilarious one is Voyage of the Danmned (RTD, Phil Collinson, Julie Gardner). Everyone is in a VERY cheerfull mood in that one. It must have been some damn good coffee they were drinking.
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Date: 2008-06-11 08:13 pm (UTC)I'll try to get them.
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Date: 2008-06-11 09:21 pm (UTC)http://www.bbcamerica.com/content/123/commentary.jsp
It´s the region 2 DVD commentary for Last of the Timelords featuring David Tennant, Freema Agyeman and John Barrowman which had to be omitted from the region 1 DVDs because they kept breaking into song. Have fun! :)
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Date: 2008-06-11 10:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-10 01:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-10 05:52 pm (UTC)The connection is in names - unspoken names. In Tigana no one can say the name of the country until the spell is broken, and knowledge of the name is lost.
In Doctor Who, no one knows the name of the protagonist and he won't say what it is. (He wants everyone to call him "the Doctor".) Except in the latest episode, he meets someone who does know his name, which is spooky and powerful and mysterious of her.
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Date: 2008-06-10 05:05 pm (UTC)I feel pretty strongly about this too. For Jack and the Doctor. Unless the narrative arc has been leading up to it from the beginning - and it hasn't, it's just one of the mysteries of the character - then I feel revealing it would cheapen an important quality of the character.
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Date: 2008-06-10 08:38 pm (UTC)I love it that Captain John Hart took a name of the same form as Captain Jack Harkness. More self-reinvention.
And Grey - perhaps people of the Boeshang Peninsula have one-word names?
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Date: 2008-06-11 01:35 am (UTC)But, like you, I don't see why people need to have a family name and a personal name.
Vonda McIntyre's Starfarers! novels (there are four of them) had a character named Stephen Thomas Gregory. He makes a point of not letting anyone shorten his name -- he goes by Stephen Thomas. Someone observes that he has two first names, and he offhandly says that actually he has three. We later find out that his dad is Gregory. This is only one of many wonderfully nonlinear things that Vonda McIntyre has done... for instance, in "Dreamsnake," her first big success (first an award-winning short story, then a novel -- which I wish someone would make into a movie! and before Janine Turner is too old to play Snake!!), she deals closely with a species which needs three sexes in order to copulate.
Names are too common -- I mean, names are meaningful and intrinsic to me, yet people tend to toss them around without thinking about them.
Here's an odd quirk of NT popular culture for you: notice news accounts of, usually, serial killers. Sometimes, other heinous stuff too, such as individuals who assassinate one person (or try to). They are called by all three names. This is annoying on several points, for me. For one, assume that people all have middle names? uh, why assume that? For another, who in the world called Lee Oswald "Lee Harvey" during his lifetime, for cryin' out loud? And who called John Gacy "John Wayne," huh? Yet the media has these people ingrained in history by all three names. Even poor Dahmer... no middle name to be had, apparently, but now we all know him as "Jeffrey," not as Jeff. And he did go by Jeff.
And, like you, I won't even get into the habit of giving someone a nickname they don't want, and refusing to stop using it. That's one reason I introduced myself to you as Gayle, all those years ago: my first name had been taken from me and turned into things that I did not want but could not stop, so I cut myself off from it... till enough time had passed, and I could begin to reclaim it. In the version I preferred!
All this to say... both Captain Jack Harkness (ours) and the Doctor intrigue me, with their non-name names. I like it when fiction plays with conventionality. With things that go without saying, things that so many people find so easy to take for granted.
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Date: 2008-06-11 01:58 am (UTC)Re Lee Harvey Oswald: I thought that was what every called him - before the assassination, I mean. Am I wrong? Lots of people have/use three names, like Sarah Jane Smith or Anthony Stewart Head. I thought he was one of those. Though I see Anthony Head has dropped the Stewart. Pity.
I always liked double names like John Mark Keyes (who's at the OLT) or Alexander Graham Bell or John Boy Walton. (Did I remember that last one right?)
both Captain Jack Harkness (ours) and the Doctor intrigue me, with their non-name names
Yup. It isn't as if they wouldn't be wonderful anyway. It's just that this is one of the many details that make them so delightful.
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Date: 2008-06-11 04:10 am (UTC)Lee Oswald. Just Lee. He used several variants of his name, in his different activities, but in "straight" society, he was just Lee Oswald.
I liked the Stewart, too. He's dropped it? Pity. One of the actors in Across the Universe is Martin Luther McCoy, and in the commentaries, the actress who worked mnost closely with him calls him Martin Luther. But the music editor, who knew hin before he was cast, calls him Martin. I use all three of my names, but only when I want to seem erudite. Hee.
You were close. It's John-Boy. Good for you! (He was one of my role models... till the end of her life, my mother got me notebooks for Christmas. Because in The Homecoming, the first Waltons show, John-Boy gets blank writing tablets for Christmas because, as his daddy says, "I wonder how Santa Claus got word all the way to the North Pole that you wanta be a writer?" (even though John-Boy had been so careful to keep this to himself), to which John-Boy replies tactfully, "Well, I reckon that's 'cause he's a right smart man." That series was so fully real to me. I think my parents watched it to feel close to the world they'd known while growing up.
Names... somethign that can be used so wonderfully, in fiction, yet which so many authors neglect to pay attention to! I once created an alternate-future world in which I had a brother and sister named ... oh, crap, now I can't remember! Anyway, this was before Cats hit it big. I cannot recall their formal-names, but their use-names were "Rum" and "Jellicle."
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Date: 2008-06-11 11:44 am (UTC)So it seems. I saw him on the Jonathan Ross show, just as "Anthony Head", and that is what he seems to be using in his new show.
I loved the book The Waltons was based on. I only saw the show once or twice (if that) but thought it was very good.
Great names in Cats! Trust Eliot to think of good names - he's the guy who came up with J. Alfred Prufrock.
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Date: 2008-06-11 10:27 pm (UTC)Eliot... how can I say how important he was to my nascence as a writer? I was reading all the books I could off the "these are too old for you" list I managed to get a look at, at school, age 12 or 13 or so, and one of them was On the Beach, about the people in Australia being the last survivors on Earth as a radioactive cloud from all-out war slowly spread. Its title came from "The Hollow Men." I immediately went looking for "The Hollow Men."
I later wrote a senior-year paper on that poem, and basically got no grade on it... my teacher, who was only about 26, realized I was talking about stuff she didn't know herself, and so gave it to one of her professors at the Univ of Pittsburgh... sadly, I never got the paper back. Nor any chats with that professor. Even when anyone recognized my gifts, back then, nothing ever came of it. So frustrating. And still perplexing.
Would you like to see The Waltons at all? I can oblige.
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Date: 2008-06-11 10:31 pm (UTC)Eliot was important to me too, not for being a writer, but just because I love and loved his poetry so much. And his thinking.
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Date: 2008-06-13 01:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-13 09:28 pm (UTC)I had a friend who was annoyed when fantasies or SF gave women names ending in A, because that is such a Latinate, or Indo-European thing to do - she thought it showed cultural bias. And it does. But I couldn't bring myself to think of it as a problem: a lack of imagination, maybe, but also a bit of linguistic shorthand.
The Doctor In US Political Cartoon
Date: 2008-06-11 03:13 am (UTC)http://www.salon.com/comics/tomo/2008/06/10/tomo/
Re: The Doctor In US Political Cartoon
Date: 2008-06-11 03:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-11 06:41 am (UTC)"What?"
"My name. It's Bob."
"No, I mean what is it really?"
"I just told you. Bob."
"Your name is not Bob."
"Is so."
"Is not."
"Is."
"Is not."
"Is."
"I don't believe you."
"What's wrong with Bob? Perfectly good name, Bob."
"Of course it is. I still don't believe you."
"Fine. See if I care."
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Date: 2008-06-11 12:04 pm (UTC)"Bob" is the only name I can write in Egyptian hieroglyphics without looking it up.