So I was at a networking event this morning, and I met a friend who has been asked to write for a Doctor Who magazine (or this may be the Doctor Who Magazine). Anyway, we got onto a discussion about the relative merits of Fantasy verses Science Fiction (from my point of view, they are both the same, it just depends on which side you like your bread buttered), but I got onto pointing out the overt Fantasy vein running through Matt Smith's tenure.
A potted history of Doctor Who for those of you who do not know it.
The first time we meet Matt Smith's Doctor he is wearing the tattered remains of the clothes of his previous incarnation. He is a strange, potentially frightening man who rejects wholesome food like apples in favour of fish fingers and custard. True to form, however, young Amelia is not frightened of him and, like Lucy Pevensey when presented with the otherwise terrifying Mr Tumnus in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, quickly makes a friend of him.
As a result of his time machine malfunctioning, what was intended to be a quick jump into the immediate future went from being a few minutes to more than a decade. Now, little trusting, open-minded Amelia has grown into a jaded adult Amy who doesn't trust her own sanity. Along the way, she has acquired a stand-in Raggedy Doctor in the form of kind-hearted but not-too-cool Rory, who Amy used to dress up as the Raggedy Doctor. Following another jump of a couple of years we find Amy in her bedroom, just as she had been twelve years before when the Doctor returns.
In an attempt to restore her sense of wonder, the Doctor offers to take her on a trip through time and space to show her the wonders of the universe. Only after she leaves do we learn it is the eve of her wedding to Rory.
This image of an youthful-and-ancient figure spiriting a nightie-clad girl away into the night for a series of adventures on the eve of her becoming a woman instantly struck me as the symbolism of Peter Pan. And from there the Fantasy symbolism started flowing strongly. The Raggedy Doctor is assumed to be Amelia's imaginary friend. He convinces her he is real with an apple (Snow White, anyone?), issues of transformation and perception in the Weeping Angels. The Weeping Angels even appear from a shard in the corner of Amy's eye, very much like how the broken mirror became lodged in the eye of the hero in The Snow Queen. Having returned to the dream world to heal cracks in reality, the Doctor is brought back to life by thought and recitation of an incantation ("Something old, Something new, Something borrowed, Something blue"). How many Fairystories have a character exisiting in the liminal world between sleep and wake where the Doctor implants this thought in Amelia's memory?
Things get even better. We are introduced to the Doctor's dark opposite and shown him as the destroyer.
Moreover the whole colour-pallet and photography of Series 5 was soft lighting and pastel shades versus the hard light and strong primary colours of previous series.
Probably the first clue was the revamped (or regenerated) title sequence, which went from being colourful wormhole wibbly wobbly-timey wimey to something much more Fairytale - clouds, lightning and flames.
Tenth Doctor title sequence:
Eleventh Doctor title sequence:
If we apply my Trickster Acid Test, we see that the Doctor fulfils all four of the criteria for a Trickster Ally:
Boundary Transgressor
The Doctor has no home, yet is at home anywhere. He moves around in time and space with utter impunity.
Shape Shifter
When mortally wounded the Doctor literally changes from one body to another. Moreover, in his eleventh incarnation, The Doctor adopts a variety of disguises, and even his name is an alias.
Gender Swapping
Not so much, but more than one person has questioned if Matt Smith or his Doctor is gay.
Ambiguous Assistance
Having kidnapped Amy to re-establish her sense of wonder, a fine and noble act, he quickly endangers her life and that of her fiancée when he joins them.
The wonderful thing about having Amy and Rory on the TARDIS, is that the series again works as it did with the Doctor's first incarnation. He is once again a mysterious character, and we have point-of-view characters to show us this.
However, what the Matt Smith/Steven Moffat Doctor shows us, arguably for the first time in the series' history, is the Doctor as a true trickster.
The purest form of the Trickster has no physical power. Anyone could kill him at any time. What the Trickster must rely on for survival is cunning, and Matt Smith's may be the most cunning Doctor.
The awesome power of the Trickster is not that he will destroy you - he will get you to do it for him!
If we consider the episode "A Good Man Goes To War", we see the Doctor turn his enemy in on themselves without having to fire a shot himself. As one character says, "His greatest triumph."
But, as with J M Barrie's Peter Pan, who I think is so strongly echoed in Series 5, the Doctor is not a nice person. He can be gay and light-hearted, but it is always a narcissistic façade covering a much darker character - the Trickster in undiluted form. The eleventh Doctor, shows the ability to be cruel, malevolent, persecutory and self-centred, not to mention vain ("To hell with the Raggedy! Time to put on a show!") and arrogant ("I am the Doctor, and you are the Daleks!").
From my point of view, "A Good Man Goes To War" represented the zenith of the Eleventh Doctor-as-Trickster. By the conclusion of that series the Doctor had decided that his public profile was too great (curiously also the conclusion of the also-Moffat-penned Sherlock series!), and he returns to the dream-world of anonymity. As River Song puts it, "He'll rise higher than ever before, then fall so much further."
I can't deny that in the last couple of series I have really re-engaged with Doctor Who though, as with a lot of people, found the second half of the most recent series a bit frustrating, not helped by a lacklustre Christmas Special in 2011 in which he seems to actually go to Narnia. But it will be interesting to see where this character goes from here...
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