Sometimes one line can shake the foundations of Doctor Who mythology to the core. Russell T Davies challenged assumptions about regeneration limits in a Sarah Jane adventure (The Death Of The Doctor) and River Song (yes her again) claimed that the wheezing groaning sound of the TARDIS was down to the Doctor's mishandling of a TARDIS designed to land silently. But the award for the most controversial line of all time goes to Matthew Jacobs, from his script for the 1996 ill fated pilot, The TV Movie. Written out of canon by those who like to give credence to such a term, or reinterpreted as a joke, it's clear that the vast majority of fans are unhappy with the suggestion. Not surprisingly the idea has not been revisited since. And yet in the early days of the show, despite the brief that he was from another planet, it is never clearly spelt out that the Doctor is an alien. In The War Machines, Wotan not only calls him Doctor Who, he also wants his "human" brain. Steven Moffat posed the following question in a recent Doctor Who Magazine: "In which story is it confirmed, definitively, that the doctor is not human?" The answer is episode eight of The War Games, and since then there have been a few times when the Doctor has made it clear he is a bona fide alien. In The Pyramids Of Mars, the fourth Doctor tells Sarah "I'm not a human being. I walk in eternity." But in fairness in what sense is a half-human a human being? And what's to say we humans aren't half-aliens in the Doctor Who universe, if not our own?
Paul Driscoll is a freelance writer and author across a range of subjects from Cult TV to religion and social policy. He is a passionate Doctor Who fan and January 2017 will see the publication of his first extended study of the series (based on Toby Whithouse's series six episode, The God Complex) in the critically acclaimed Black Archive range by Obverse Books. He is a regular writer for the fan site Doctor Who Worldwide and has contributed several essays to Watching Books' You and Who range. Recently he has branched out into fiction writing, with two short stories in the charity Doctor Who anthology Seasons of War (Chinbeard Books). Paul's work will also feature in the forthcoming Iris Wildthyme collection (A Clockwork Iris, Obverse Books) and Chinbeard Books' collection of drabbles, A Time Lord for Change.
