Doctor Who: Darkness and light – Balancing two different sides of the Doctor

The Doctor’s darker side – how far should Doctor Who go with exploring that? And how important is it to the depiction of the character?

Generally speaking, one thing we all love about Doctor Who is the eccentricity and silliness of the lead character. Doctors like Patrick Troughton, Tom Baker, David Tennant and Matt Smith had a huge amount of appeal because of how funny they could be. They were all excellent at handling both witty dialogue and physical comedy.

However, that’s only one side that’s appealing about the Doctor. Because our favorite hero has another side to them. A darker side that sometimes shows up.

The way this darkness manifests can be in different ways. For the Tenth Doctor, for example, his darker side was extremely emotional. Most of the time, he was openly nice, but there were times when his anger and his rage would come out into the open, especially if his opponents went too far, or worse, his friends had betrayed his trust. In just his first episode, he showed the same level of anger towards Harriet Jones as he did to the Sycorax.

Other Doctors show their darker sides in different ways, however. In Matt Smith’s case, while he had the occasional moment of open rage, he was a Doctor that was more secretive and alien, and would make decisions that his companions might not agree with. For example, he casually shut the door on older Amy in The Girl Who Waited and abandoned her. While the younger Amy was already with them in the TARDIS, it was still a harsh decision, especially with the older Amy begging him to open the doors.

Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor still comes across as alien, but have we seen enough darkness from her yet?

(Image credit: Doctor Who/BBC.

Image obtained from: BBC Press.)

A delicate balance

More from Winter is Coming

• For All Mankind finally gives us information in Episode 405, “Goldilocks”
• Watch a stunning VFX breakdown of The Wheel of Time season 2
• Of course Steve Toussaint (Corlys Velaryon) thinks Eve Best (Rhaenys Targaryen) should rule Westeros
• Confirmed: The Last of Us season 2 will air in 2025
• Final season of Star Trek: Discovery will have “a lot of action, a lot of adventure, a lot of fun”

When it comes to showing the darkness of the Doctor, it can be a difficult balance to get right. Too much, and it runs the risk of moving too far away from the character’s core appeal. Humor has been a key component in many great Doctor Who stories, and it’s important to still have a light element to the main character.

However, not enough darkness runs the risk of making the Doctor too simple. This is one key problem I personally have with Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor. While many stories in Series 11 were enjoyable and Whittaker handles the eccentricity well, we haven’t seen a great deal of darkness to her character just yet. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want them to suddenly overcompensate in the next series and make her too angsty for no reason. But it would be nice if her Doctor was given just a little more complexity.

That’s what makes the Doctor so interesting. On the surface, a happy-go-lucky alien who enjoys life and wants to see the best that the universe has to offer. But sometimes, just sometimes, you want to see the anger, the guilt or even the more alien parts of them that they try to hide. Because that reminds you of just how long they’ve lived, and how much of the universe they’ve really seen.

What do you think? Do you prefer the Doctor to have just a little bit of a darker side to them? Would you prefer to see it more often? Or do you prefer that the show focused on the lighter sides of the character? Let us know in the comments below.