CYPHER SYSTEM CONVERSIONS: The Doctor (Doctor Who)

The Doctor is a Rebel Time Lord Who Outwits Adversaries

REBEL

You have issues with authority. Willful and independent, you refuse to take orders from anyone but yourself. This quality doesn’t necessarily make you a criminal; you will follow rules and conventions if they make sense to you, but if they don't you have no trouble ignoring them. You may or may not be a freedom fighter, taking on what you perceive as tyranny. Regardless, you likely dress and act with unique style and air, not caring what others think. You gain the following characteristics:

Willful: +4 to your Intellect Pool.

Skill: You’re trained in resisting attempts to manipulate or intimidate you.

Skill: You’re trained in tasks requiring you to talk yourself out of trouble. Inability: Your ego sometimes gets in your way. When dealing with authority figures--leaders, bosses, commanders, etc--the difficulty of all social tasks is raised one step.

Initial Link to the Starting Adventure: From the following list of options, choose how you became involved in the first adventure.

- You threw in with the other PCs because you saw that they were resisting some form of authority.

- One of the other PCs convinced you that joining the group would be in your best interests.

- You’re afraid of what might happen if the other PCs fail.

- Helping the others inconveniences someone you are opposed to.

Time Lord (Prydonian Chapter)

Are the "Time Lords" a race, or a profession? The television program has never made it clear. Certainly, not all Gallifreyans are Time Lords. In both the classic series and recent episodes, some live comparatively primitive lives in the wilderness outside of the Citadel. This version, then, assumes that Time Lords are not born, they are made by attending graduating the Academy. Obviously, other assumptions are possible.

Based on the Doctor, we might call this the "Prydonian" build (his Chapter at the Academy). Noted for their manipulativeness and political skill, we are suggesting a Speaker with the Technology Flavor.

Regeneration: Time Lords can bear two cyphers. However, we are counting "Regeneration" as one of them. Time Lords are imbued (or promised they will be) with Regeneration energy at several points in the series, and it is clearly something that is expended once used. This ability then is treated as a subtle cypher with twelve "doses." When the Time Lord reaches death, or near death, it can be voluntarily triggered. Doing so simultaneously triggers all remaining recovery rolls in a burst of energy. The character assumes a new appearance (possibly even gender), with a new set of personality quirks. He or she cannot regenerate again until resting and restoring all recovery rolls (thus the Time Lord can still die unless retreating from danger). The power can be used twelve times, after which further regenerations can only be obtained from the Time Lord High Council.

Outwits Adversaries

This is simply "Calculates the Incalculable" with a new name.

Might: 15 (Edge: 0)

Speed: 20 (Edge: 2)

Intellect: 33 (Edge: 5)

Effort: 6

Skills: Resist Manipulation/Intimidation T, Talk Your Way Out Of Trouble T, Seeing Through Deception T, Persuading T, Time Capsule Piloting S, Time Capsule Repair T, Practiced with Light and Medium Weapons

Abilities: Encouragement (1 Int), Fast Talk (1 Int), Spin Identity (2 Int), Understanding (2 Int), Hacker (2 Int), Scramble Machine (2 Int), Tinker (1 Int), Tool Mastery, Babel, Impart Ideal (3 Int), Grand Deception (3 Int), Mind Reading (4 Int), Confounding Banter (4 Int), Flee (6 Int), Jury Rig (5 Int), Predictive Equation (2 Int), Predictive Model (2+ Int), Subconscious Defense, Cognizant Offense, One Step Ahead Of Everyone (6 Int)

Sonic Screwdriver (Artifact): Pick Locks T, Gather Information T, Turn On/Off Machines T

TARDIS (Artifact). A time capsule that can travel anywhere in time and space, is infinitely large on the inside, and can blend into its surroundings to escape notice.

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DOCTOR WHO AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS

If you haven't watched Series 8 of Doctor Who to its conclusion, be warned.  Spoilers ahead.

At a time when kids are very likely to know a teacher--or relative--who has been to war, Doctor Who spends a series dealing with it.

Doctor Who has a lot in common with Harry Potter.  First and foremost, they are stories aimed at kids.  The Doctor was created back in 1963 to be "H.G. Wells meets Father Christmas," and has stayed fairly true to that formula ever since. Because of this, expecting Doctor Who to be Battlestar Galactica is a bit like expecting Harry Potter to be Game of Thrones.  It is meant to be whimsical, to have its absurd moments of wild imagination, and to the adults in the room, to frequently be unbelievable.  When I hear someone complain about Who's sillier moments, I wonder if they are the kind of people who also complain about the violations of basic physics in the old Warner Brothers Roadrunner and Coyote cartoons.

But something else Who and Harry have in common (other than David Tennant) is a keen awareness that kids live in the real world too.  Young people might have slightly larger senses of wonder, but they also suffer, feel fear, and grapple with life's darker realities.  Harry Potter was from the start a tale of loss, opening with an orphan boy just after the murder of his parents.  And Doctor Who, a program with the concept of "time" at its very heart, has never shied away from death.  Because of this, even the lightest chapters of Harry and the Doctor's lives (say, Philosopher's Stone or Matt Smith's first series) have shadowed moments...and sometimes, as with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows or Peter Capaldi's freshman series 8, the darkness gets deep indeed.

There is a lot of chatter about how "dark" Capaldi's Doctor is.  He really isn't.  The Twelfth Doctor is no darker than the Seventh who manipulated Ace in both Ghostlight or The Curse of Fenric, or the Sixth whose first act was to nearly strangle his companion.  He is no darker than the First, who might have actually killed Ian and Barbara if his granddaughter didn't stop him in Unearthly Child.  Capaldi only appears dark if you joined the saga with Tennant or Smith, the two most cuddly Doctors to ever pilot the TARDIS.  If anything, Capaldi is simply a return to form.

The real darkness is actually the series itself.

Since its return in 2005, Who has relied on gimmicks to hold each series together (something the original program never bothered with, except for rarities like "Trial of a Time Lord" or the "Key to Time").  We had Bad Wolf in the first series and Torchwood in the next, Harold Saxon followed by Returning Rose.  Then came cracks in space and time, the Silents, and the Impossible Girl.  The dramatic journey in each series was that of the Companion, and how traveling with the Doctor changed her.  But series 8 did something we haven't seen before...the episodes were largely connected by themes.  Oh sure, we had Missy popping up from time to time, but for the first time, actual themes made up the connective tissue between episodes.

The loudest and clearest was the role of the soldier.  This is hardly surprising given the fact that Britain has been entangled in Afghanistan and Iraq nearly as long as Doctor Who's big new secondary market--America--has.  We have the character Danny Pink as the most obvious embodiment of the theme, an ex-soldier with a trauma in his past that, much like the identity of Missy, the show never really bothered to hide.  But Danny aside, we kept visiting soldiers (and the Doctor's dislike for them) over and over again.  Into the Dalek has the Doctor openly condemning soldiers, and refusing to take an otherwise viable Companion along simply because she is one.  Listen reveals a young Doctor terrified of being a soldier, and a young Danny inspired by a toy one.  The Caretaker is about an alien soldier that keeps killing because no one is around to give it the order to stop, and in case you hadn't noticed, Mummy on the Orient Express has an identical plot.  Both are resolved in nearly the same way; the Doctor assumes to role of commanding officer in one and surrenders in the other, letting both soldiers finally rest.  Soldiers are also at the heart of the series finale...but we will get to that in a moment.

The other re-occurring theme concerns the Doctor trying to understand who he is.  "Am I a good man," he asks Clara early on, and she has no answer.  Likewise we still don't know if the Doctor pushed the clockwork cyborg or if he jumped.  Episode after episode has Clara asking herself this question, wondering if the Doctor is still the man she knew or if she ever really knew him at all, and twice in the series, she actually borrows his identity.  Ultimately the show is asking us, the audience, this question in the wake of the 50th anniversary year.  If you have a broom and you replace the handle, the Doctor muses in the series premier, and then replace the brush and do it over and over again, is it the same broom?  Is the Doctor the same man, or is "the Doctor" really just an identity that gets passed on, an identity that even Clara can assume?   And further, is that identity a good man ("You made an exceptional Doctor," he tells Clara, "and 'goodness' had nothing to do with it") or Danny Pink's blood-soaked general who gets to decide who lives and who dies?

Both these themes come together, and are answered, in Dark Water and Death in Heaven.   While many rolled their eyes at Missy's identity ("What, the Master again?") the simple truth is a second string villain like the Rani doesn't get us anywhere near establishing the Doctor's identity.  It takes the Master, or now the Mistress, to remind us who the Doctor really is.  Both friends, both rogue Time Lords, both characters who play God and leave death in their wake, it is only by the Mistress trying to push the Doctor over the edge and into the shadows with her that we get to the truth.  That truth is a simple one; Doctors and generals are not so different.  Part of their job description is deciding who lives and dies.  But what the Mistress has never understood, and thus ends up reminding us, is that the Doctor plays God to help while she does it for her own amusement.  In a sense, she has a point; the Doctor's hands ultimately have more blood on them than hers do.  But Doctors and psychopaths bloody their hands for different reasons.

The Cybermen, of course, tie up the soldier theme for us, just as Missy's use of them answers the Doctor's theme.  In creating an army so the Doctor can rule the universe, Missy proves herself wrong and Danny Pink right.  Danny is right...the Doctor is an officer who uses others an occasionally sacrifices their lives.  But it is not a role he cherishes, but rather a cross he thinks he must carry.  And this, of course, is at the heart of his discomfort with soldiers.  They remind him of all the people he had led to their deaths.

In the end, the issue is not that the Doctor was darker this series, it's that the themes were. As I watched this, the fact that the finale aired so near Britain's Remembrance Day didn't seem a coincidence to me.  The entire series was an exploration of soldiers, of sacrifice, of death, and of why we still engage in things like wars.  It's heavy stuff, sure, but British and American kids very likely know soldiers who have served in the Middle East, and very likely question the purpose of war.  Doctor Who may not have the answers, but still its willingness to raise the questions is commendable.  The show stokes the childlike sense of wonder in kids, but often recognizes they have adult questions too.

ON FAIRY TALES

I am a firm believer in the Fairy Tale.

As an art form, I mean. That fairy tales are global and universal should probably tell us something about how essential they are to the human condition, but it is easy to overlook in a modern society where there is increasing pressure upon children (and adults!) to focus on “the real world.” There is also a very modern conceit that our ancestors were foolish because they believed in such stories, but this is a leftover of bad Victorian era scholarship. The truth is, pre-modern people told fairy tales for the same reasons we should; not because they believed them to be literally true, but because they knew them to be fundamentally true. To paraphrase G. K. Chesterson, the value of these stories was not in that they told people that dragons existed, but rather than dragons could be beaten.

Under “Fairy Tale” I would argue it is possible to lump the modern genres of horror, fantasy, and even comic book adventure so long as these conform to certain parameters. I would argue, for example, that Doctor Who, Dracula, and The Lord of the Rings are fairy tales while Battlestar Galactica, The Call of Cthulhu, and Howard’s Conan stories are not. Because it isn’t that fairy stories are aimed mainly at children—Draculacertainly was not—but because they all promise that no matter how dark, how horrible, and how terrifying the places they will take us into are, we will come back out into the light. You simply know, in a fairy story, that the dragon doesn’t get to win.

The dragon can’t win, because the fairy story is relentlessly humanist. The good guys beat the bad because this is how it should be, because it reaffirms our inate sense of justice. It doesn’t necessarily have to be easy, nor is it usually free. Stoker’s band of vampire hunters suffer horrific losses before defeating Count Dracula, and Frodo endures all manner of hardship in his quest to destroy the Ring. But there is never any doubt that Dracula will be dusted and the Ring melted down, and the reason people read such stories again and again and again is that they reinforce that most ludicrous and human of qualities…hope. When a child asks breathlessly to hear the same story again, it isn’t because he or she doesn’t know the fable word for word and line by line, but because taking the journey once more makes the world seem less random and impossible. It gives them hope.

As an intellectual I can extol the virtues of H. P. Lovecraft, because his horror fiction portrays an image of the world as it is. Not that nameless gods and unspeakable alien horrors surround us, but because Lovecraft understands that the universe is vast, mankind is impossibly small, and that the former doesn’t particular notice or care that the latter even exists. But as a magician I can never be satisfied by Lovecraft in the same way I can by Stoker, because Stoker is reaffirming the value of my humanity. This may well be an illusion, but it is an illusion we all need to get out of bed every day.

Mind you, not every fairy tale needs a happily ever after, so long as it affirms human standards and values. In the earliest versions of Red Riding Hood, the girl ends up eaten. But she was eaten because she willfully violated those two most sacred rules—keep to the path and don’t talk to strangers—and the message is still positive because it illustrates to the listener why these rules must be followed. Had Lil’ Red kept to the path, ignored the wolf, and been eaten anyway, it wouldn’t be a Fairy Tale…it would be a tragedy the likes of which fill the media everyday.

Perhaps because I am a cynic and a realist, I find fairy tales far preferable to the alternative. There was no doubt that the Bride would get her just revenge in Kill Bill, that Harry would eventually defeat Voldemort, or that the Doctor will defeat the Daleks every time. Joining them as they accomplish these things is both cathartic and healing, and I daresay even vital. Because if human beings did not—like Alice—dare to believe impossible things, we would all still be living in caves.

THE DOCTOR

Doctor Who is often—and quite erroneously—explained to Americans as “the British Star Trek.” The problem with such a comparison is that, for all the fervor of its enthusiasts, Star Trek has always been peripheral to the mainstream American experience. Due perhaps to that stubborn old streak of American anti-intellectualism, Star Trek is generally watched by “geeks” and not spoken of in polite company. Doctor Who, however, has always been a family program, and the percentage of the British population glued to the screens to watch it is far greater than the percentage of American Star Trek fans. Who is, according to Guinness, the most successful science fiction series in history, both in terms of longevity and profitability. It is also, one could argue, only very nominally “science fiction.”

True, it is about an alien. When we first met the titular character in the November 23rd, 1963 episode “An Unearthly Child,” he was hiding in a junkyard, his remarkable alien ship disgused as an ordinary London police box. That first episode is dark, weird, and quite eerie, the story revolving around two teachers who cannot make sense of the mysterious new girl at school. A genius in mathematics, science, and history, the girl is befuddled and ignorant when it comes to the most basic things (in flashback, she mistakenly refers to British currency as a decimal system, and when the teacher corrects her, the girl responds that she had forgotten the British hadn’t moved to a decimal system yet). The teachers feel compelled to investigate, and follow her to her home address (the junkyard) where she apprently lives in a police box with her grandfather. Forcing their way in, they discover the truth; the girl and her grandfather are aliens, not only from another world but another time. We are told nothing else about them; not the name of their planet, their people, or why they are on the run from them. We are not even told their own names (the girl’s, “Susan Foreman,” is clearly an alias and her grandfather is called simply “the Doctor,” begging the question that gives the show its title).

Which is of course the crux of Doctor Who’s charm. There is no techno-babble here. Where similar science fiction programs struggle to explain the mechanics of things, Doctor Who veils everything in mystery. The show embraces Clarke’s assertion that “sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Thus, while Star Trek tech is from just a few centuries in the future and therefore expected to be somewhat comprehensible to us, the Doctor points out, his people had mastered all time and space when humanity was struggling with the wheel. Even if he tried to explain the workings of his science we wouldn’t be equipped to understand. His mysterious ship can therefore be physically larger on the inside than the outside, can change its appearance at whim, travel througout all of time and space simply by vanishing and re-appearing, and to some degree sentient, without us needing to know “how.” And the Doctor himself conveniently “regenerates” when seriously injured or an actor gets tired of playing him, changing both his physical features and to some extent his personality. Thus, eleven actors have played the Doctor in the series, but unlike the various James Bonds, they are all understood to be the same character in sequence. As the show unfolds it becomes clear that even the Doctor and his people have forgotten how everything “works.” They are so old they cannot even recall how their ancestors came up with the technology, and everything is veiled in ritual and evocative names (the black hole that somehow powers the whole time-travel thing is charmingly called “the Eye of Harmony”).

What this does is make room for stories, and oh...what great stories they have been. Doctor Who careens wildly between horror, historical drama, fantasy, action, comedy, and sci fi. And yet remarkably—impossibly—it follows a loose sort of story arc. When we first met the Doctor he was callous, self-absorbed, and utterly contemptuous of humanity. He abducts the two teachers who learn his secret and seems to spare them only at the urging of his grand daughter. He demonstrates over and over again cowardice and a lack of sympathy for the suffering of others. But it is through his travels, and his interactions with these human companions and others that follow, that the Doctor begins to evolve. He begins to care. In one of my favorite episodes of the program, The War Games (broadcast back in 1969), he even runs into a situation he realizes he cannot handle on his own and is forced to call his people. We learn a bit more about him here—he is a renegade being hunted by his own race, his ship stolen. But he risks capture and punishment to save other lives. It is a character-defining moment, splendidly acted, and the Doctor pays the ultimate price. His people help the human out and then punish the Doctor by exiling him to Earth, his vessel disabled, and in a weird form of capital punishment “kill” his current incarnation, forcing him to regenerate into a new actor (this matters only because we learn that the Doctor’s people ultimately only have 13 such lives in them).

From here the Doctor softens, working with the United Nations to defend Earth against alien attacks, doing his best to help the primitive humans learn and grow. When his ship is restored to him, he continues to act as a sort of crusader, righting wrongs whenever he can. As the series progresses, his schemes become grander, and darker elements of his past re-emerge. He becomes more ruthless in fighting for what he thinks is right, until finally destroying both his own home planet and its mortal enemies when the war they are fighting threatens the rest of the universe. After its 26-year run ended in 1989, the series returned in 2005 with the Doctor as the last of his race, a mythic figure so ancient and so far ahead of anyone else that he sees himself as the custodian of all creation. Despite his altruism, the Doctor’s old arrogance, his sense of absolute suoperiority, frequently rears its head, making him a very complex sort of hero. In what is arguably the single best episode of the revived series, the Doctor takes it upon himself to change history, saving the life of a woman whose death will actually inspire others to future greatness. Being the last of his kind, he boasts he no longer has to follow the rules. He is the “Time Lord Victorious” and can change history if he pleases. In the end, knowing what her destiny was supposed to be, the woman he saves commits suicide to restore the balance. It is brutal, deeply emotional, and highly philosophical all at once (not to mention a very clever inversion of the most praised Star Trek episode of all time, “City on the Edge of Forever”). It reminds us of what a previous human companion once said to him; he needed humans to travel with him because sometimes “you need someone to stop you.”

I have no doubt that the Doctor will make it to fifty. The revived series is going strong, and the Doctor Who brand sells better than ever. The premise is inexhaustible—stories anywhere in time, anywhere in space—and there are built in excuses to change lead actors and key sets. It continues to attract creative minds; Douglas Addams has written for Who,and last year the man behind Notting Hill and Love, Actually did a touching story about Vincent Van Gough. Now, Michael Moorcock—probably England’s greatest living fantasist—has written a Doctor Who novel and there is talk of him doing a script. Where the Time Lord will go from here is uncertain, but I will definitely be along for the ride.