stunt_muppet

NEEDS MOAR EYEPATCH!BRIGADIER.

Come on, New Who. How am I supposed to take an Alternate Universe of the Fascists seriously if it hasn't got eyepatch!Brig in it?

I forget who he's trying to encourage when he says it, but while he's trying to get everyone to fight back against the Cybermen and stand up to the commander of the Antarctic base, Ben calls out "C'mon! While there's life, there's hope!"

Which, of course, was the Third Doctor's last line before he died in Planet of the Spiders, though strictly speaking he didn't make it all the way to the end of the sentence.

Aside from the fact that I can't remember if the Doctor was even there to hear that line when Ben said it, I find the use of the phrase in that context interesting, especially given that the Doctor spent much of The Tenth Planet ill and dying.

Perhaps the line's meant to link the One-to-Two and Three-to-Four regenerations together after the trauma of the Doctor's forced regeneration from Two to Three; a kind of signal that things are as they should be again, that the Doctor's died for a purpose and surrounded by his friends, as opposed to the meaningless and lonely death he suffered at the end of The War Games.

Or, alternately, perhaps it's a reference to how Three's character arc almost echoed the First Doctor's: Both One and Three started out as very alien characters, aware of their separateness from and not particularly sympathetic to humanity. Both, at the beginning, emphasized their exile (One's assurance in An Unearthly Child that he and Susan will get back to Gallifrey and pretty much the entirety of Season 7, especially the "stranger in a foreign land" line in Inferno). Both, by the end of their run, came to define themselves as wanderers and adventurers rather than exiles, and came to find friendship in humanity rather than relations of necessity.

One could argue that The War Games might be a more painful re-enactment of the First Doctor's exile from Gallifrey in the first place, and as such the Third Doctor must go through the same transformative experiences as the First did in order to become 'the Doctor' as he would define himself in his later regenerations (i.e. Four's "walking in eternity", Seven's "homeless wanderer...his days like crazy paving", Two's "professor of a far wider academy").

But. But there's one difference, and I think it's an important difference. When One nears the end of his life, he retreats back to the TARDIS, almost locking Ben and Polly out when he does. When Three nears the end of his life, he returns to Earth (specifically to UNIT HQ) and chooses to die with the Brigadier and Sarah Jane present rather than alone. One could take that simply as an aversion reaction to Two's solitary death in The War Games, but there is also the most interesting and problematic line: the Doctor tells Sarah Jane that the TARDIS "brought [him] home".

I'm fairly certain that "home", here, is not referring to Earth; it'd be interesting if it did, but given that the Doctor never does that again, I don't think it could. Rather, I think it's referring to the humans he knows and trusts, his companions (Sarah and the Brigadier in this case). They, not a particular planet, are how he defines his "home", his default.

And despite the parallels between One and Three, I think that line establishes the critical difference in their respective character arcs. At the end of his life, One was still very alien; we got the sense that he'd occasionally prefer to travel alone, and that while he enjoyed his companion's company he didn't think he needed them, even when he did*. During Two's era, the companions began to seem as important to the Doctor as his ship was, to the point where his travels necessarily included at least one companion (Two was, significantly, never companionless, even between serials; One wasn't either, but he would have been after The War Machines had Ben and Polly not snuck on board. Two was never companionless by choice, because of Jamie.). The exile at the end of The War Games hit the reset button as far as that development was concerned, bringing the Doctor back to the self-reliant state that defined himself as foremost a solitary and unique individual. But, in re-living the First Doctor's growth, the Third Doctor completed the process that the First had not. He defines his friends and companions as part of himself - as part of who and what and where he is - rather than thinking himself singular by nature. (Much as ordinary humans do, really.) In a sense, he regains that aspect of his Second identity. He is made human in a way that has nothing to do with his actual species nor his specific intellect, and everything to do with the question of selfhood and what, precisely, the perpetual wanderer calls home.

*By "companions", here, I refer to those who aren't Susan, with whom One's relationship was necessarily different.