It’s important for Doctor Who to show that The Doctor doesn’t always save the day and that, sometimes, it needs to be someone else.
Doctor Who is the hero of the show. The title says it all, but that doesn’t mean the Doctor always saves the day. Yup, the hero doesn’t always have to be the one who saves everyone. In the modern era of the series, there have been plenty of episodes where someone else saves the day and even saves the Doctor. What does it all mean? Is that a good thing? Why not?
Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat have introduced a recurring theme to Doctor Who, which is that the Doctor makes people better. They empower and inspire people to take control of their destinies. Their very presence changes people’s lives, especially their companions’. They take them away from mundane lives and introduce them to a wider universe and its possibilities. That is a theme that’s more explicit in the modern era of the series than the classic version. That’s part of what defines a hero: to not just save the day but to make heroes of others as well.
The Doctor Makes People Better
A hero who doesn’t do the save is a tricky thing for genre storytellers since Storytelling 101 indicates that the protagonist should always be proactive in solving the main conflict of the plot. In Doctor Who, the best instances where someone else saves the day are due to the Doctor’s effect on them, including when they end up sacrificing themselves to save everyone, including a loved one, like when Pete Tyler gives up his life for his daughter Rose (Billie Piper) and restore a timeline his survivor fractured, only for another version of him from another universe to save her in a later story. In “Boom”, the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) influences the AI replica of a dead father to override the AI of a whole corporation to prevent it from killing everyone including his daughter and the Doctor.
In the end, even when the Doctor doesn’t do the saving, it’s all still about them and their presence in the story. When you think about it, the Fifteenth Doctor didn’t actually save anyone in any of the eight episodes of their first seasons – of course, defeating Sutekh and bringing back the entire universe across time back from death kind of made up for it in the season finale. There have been spinoff series without the Doctor, and there will be more, of course, but that’s a topic for another time.
