The Doctor: What's in a Name?

[fajrdrako]

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?
Doctor: Nine centuries in, I'm coping.

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.

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?

Comments

[walkingowl.livejournal.com]

Vonda McIntyre is still alive, but I have seen nothing from her is so long. It is sad.

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."

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I liked the Stewart, too. He's dropped it?

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.

[walkingowl.livejournal.com]

Since I'm online and have just a minute (it's hot and I have hanging baskets in the car, but they should be fine for a little while), I should go look for Vonda McIntyre.

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.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I don't need/want to see The Waltons now, but I might some day.

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.