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

[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.