Doctor Who Season 11: 10 BIg Questions After The Ghost Monument
6. Was The Doctor Being Hypocritical?
The Doctor does not have a particularly good track record when it comes to honouring her pacifist ideals. That much was made abundantly clear during Moffat’s tenure, coming to a head with the War Doctor. So whenever the Doctor gets on her moral high ground, it very often feels a bit rich to say the least. Even here, in this episode, having just chastised Ryan for going all Call of Duty on a bunch of robots, her solution is a far cry from the negotiating approach she advocates.
In a world governed by competition and the survival of the fittest, the Doctor’s message of working together to share the spoils of victory is of course a welcome one, and by the end of the episode she has encouraged a significant rule change. But permission for Epso and Angstrom to be equal winners is only conceded after they have both threatened Ilin with violence. It’s hardly then a moral victory.
The Doctor continues to come across as a Sunday School teacher, slightly patronising and perhaps even mistaken in her idealism. On the plus side, there is a vulnerability that unlike her immediate predecessors, she is more than willing to accept. Recognising when she has made a mistake, and thinking immediately of its impact on others rather than her own sense of self-importance is the mark of wisdom that was so lacking in Capaldi and Smith’s Doctors - so much so that in their very different ways, they both came across as petulant children at times.