Doctor Who, shibboleths, & the name of The Doctor

I’M NOT PARTICULARLY enjoying Series 8 of Doctor Who. “Listen” aside, episodes have been mediocre to terrible; the programme’s overall tone is muddled; it’s on too late; & fans now have to put up with the ridiculous notion that Earth’s moon is, & has always been, a bloody egg; &, furthermore, all of the big questions raised by 2013’s run of episodes appear to have been ignored. Where’s Gallifrey? Was The Curator really The Fourth Doctor? & what is The Doctor’s name?

The last one, at least, doesn’t actually need answering. Doctor Who head writer Steven Moffat would, I rather suspect, tell you that The Doctor must continue to be The Nameless; that there is an immense power in names, & that it is therefore imperative, for dramatic reasons, that that name not be revealed to the audience – whereupon it would lose that mystical power.

The entire conceit is rather an entertaining one, making a sly wink at a long-running aspect of Doctor Who fandom – Doctor Who is the name of the show, fans’ll say; if you refer to a character named Doctor Who – or worse, Dr. Who – then you must be talking about the villain from one of Toho’s more obscure monster films, & any official or semi-official source that gets this wrong must be a bit shit. In that way, it functions as something of a shibboleth – one can distinguish fans from non-fans based on whether they refer to the Time Lord as “The Doctor” or “Doctor Who”. Similar shibboleths exist in all sorts of fan circles – for instance, some hip-hop purists avoid the term “rap”, referring to the genre as “hip-hop”, the performers as “MCs”, & the vocal style as “MCing”. The avoidance of a phrase introduced by the Sugarhill Gang’s brilliant, but inauthentic, “Rapper’s Delight”, is used to indicate a familiarity with, & understanding of, hip-hop’s origins in New York block parties; & thus, to establish one’s credentials as a “true” fan.

The only problem when it comes to Doctor Who fandom is that the strict insistence that only the programme, & not the character, is named Doctor Who actually demonstrates ignorance rather than specialist knowledge. What is the name of The Doctor? Doctor Who. There’s a wealth of evidence, going all the way back to the earliest episodes: The Doctor has taken “Doktor von Wer” & “Quiquaequod” as aliases (German for “Doctor from Who” & Latin for “Whowhowho”, respectively); he has signed his name as “Dr. W” or, alternatively, as a question mark; his Fourth, Fifth, & Sixth incarnations all sported question marks on their lapels, while the Seventh had a whole sweater just riddled with them; The Seventh Doctor also carried an umbrella with a question-mark handle; The Third Doctor occasionally drove an absurd hovercraft called the Whomobile; when WOTAN in The War Machines requests to have “Doctor Who” brought to it, the order is understood; K-9 has responded to the question “Doctor Who?” with the answer “Affirmative!”, & given the robot dog’s inability to understand humour, K-9 must at least believe Doctor Who to be an accurate way of referring to The Doctor. & even if all of these characters – including The Doctor himself – are mistaken in believing “Doctor Who” to be the character’s name, then surely the programme itself is an objective source-? The character is referred to as “Doctor Who” in the title of the serial Doctor Who and the Silurians* & the episode “The Death of Doctor Who”; the on-screen credit for the character was either “Doctor Who” or “Dr. Who”, all the way up to Tom Baker’s final serial. With the programme’s return to television in 2005, the credit reverted to “Doctor Who”, which lasted until David Tennant’s first full episode. The result is that the First, Second, Third, Fourth, Eighth & Ninth Doctors were never credited as playing “The Doctor” in their original runs. That’s without getting into merchandise, DVD packaging, &c.. So why, faced with this mountain of evidence, do fans continue to insist the character is not, & has never, been called “Doctor Who”? Pedantry, probably. People, nerds especially, like to be privy to secret knowledge. The irony is that in their assertion of superior fandom, they’re missing out on some very special secret knowledge indeed: the true name of The Doctor.

UPDATE: I originally wrote this essay before the broadcast of “In the Forest of the Night”, in which The Twelfth Doctor exclaims, “I am Doctor Idiot!”. If his name isn’t “Doctor Who” – or at least, if nothing comes after the “Doctor” part – then his exclamation wouldn’t make any sense; rather than “I am Doctor Idiot!”, parallelling “I am Doctor Who”, he’d have said “I am The Idiot!”, parallelling “I am The Doctor”, wouldn’t he?

*Somewhat surprisingly, the only TV serial to use the “Doctor Who and the…” title format; however, it has been used for scores of novels, audio adventures, comics, &c..