Discursive Essay: Doctor Who S8.02 - Into the Dalek

The Time:            2000 + more years AD

The Place:           A Dalek

The Situation:    Mapping the Anatomy of Good and Evil

In this episode the Doctor meets up with the Combined Galactic Resistance on the medical ship Aristotle where they are hiding from a force of Daleks. They have captured an injured Dalek who by all appearances is ‘good’ – in the sense that he wishes to exterminate Daleks rather than regular people. But his injuries are killing him. Knowing what a difference having even one good Dalek might make, the Doctor agrees to be shrunk and sent into the Dalek’s body to locate and fix the damage.

“Fantastic idea for a movie. Terrible idea for a proctologist.”

~The Doctor

The main conflict in this episode is the classic one of good and evil. What is ‘Good’? What is ‘Evil’?

The contrast is placed between two morally dubious characters: The Doctor, and his patient.

The Doctor is conflicted because he is one of the most dangerous people in the universe: a justified racist. Every encounter he has had with the Daleks has asserted their genocidal, single-minded nature, their disrespect for life and individuality. This is his first encounter with one who does not fit into that mold, and so he is now left in the difficult position of overcoming his own racial hatred. It’s a kind reminder that all judgment is technically prejudice, because things can always change tomorrow. After seeing a stone fall a thousand times, we are certain – and right – to act on the notion that gravity will intervene the next time the stone is dropped. But that does not mean that it can’t float when dropped. It is just highly improbable. For The Doctor to see a floating Dalek after 2000 years of seeing them fall, it is the most improbable thing in the world. He needs one who has has not felt the gravity of the Daleks so deeply.

Knowing that he needs a companion at his side to govern his nature and hold him back when his prejudice blinds him, he fetches Clara.

“Yeah, my carer. She cares so that I don’t have to.”

The Doctor and his Dalek, Rusty, are greatly similar in the sense that both hate Daleks. In Rusty this is a malfunction, and to an extent it is also a malfunction in The Doctor. The racism they share is described as a ‘block’ in their memory filters that discounts any evidence to the contrary of what they have been told to believe. In The Doctor it is a malfunction for this block to exist. It the Dalek it is a malfunction for the block to be removed.

In light of this, is ‘function’ something that can be an indicator of morality? Is a ‘good’ Dalek one who behaves like a Dalek? Do we only see The Doctor as ‘good’ when he functions as we expect humans to behave, even if he is not human?

This is the idea of morality as a social construct. It is very often seen as being the case in real life, too. Only in very close-minded communities is sex now seen as a sin if done as an act of pleasure, but even two centuries ago this ban on pleasure was an idea of the mainstream, and an indication of morality. There are other constructs we have that allow us to make assertions on people’s moral nature that are almost certainly a product of social norms, from judgment passed on piercings to hairstyles to blood types. The question is, is the moral relativity between the Daleks and everyone else a matter of social norm, or is there a deeper, more universal measure of morality to direct it?

We get to see the Doctor portrayed in the light of evil as the Aristotle’s crew descends through the Dalek’s body. He tells a lie of convenience to a soldier who is about to be killed by antibodies. He does not mourn the soldier’s death even when swimming in his digesting proteins. He distrusts and belittles the Dalek as they converse. The Doctor is always like this, of course, but it is doubly important in the context of this episode because it strips away what might be termed as Superficial Morality. It is very easy to judge people as ‘good’ because they are sweet, or polite. But in the end, are these really the qualities that make a ‘good’ person? Especially a good Doctor? Or do we rather judge the goodness of a Doctor on its ability to deal with that wonderfully impossible vow, ‘To do no harm’, and to cure any patient who asks for their aid?

Bedside manner isn’t really worth all that much. Treating a patient’s feelings rarely takes preference over treating their wellbeing.

As the Dalek is explored further, the reason for its conversion becomes clear. It has witnessed and processed the memory of the birth of a star – undeniable proof that the universe itself creates life, and will perpetuate the conditions under which life will arise. This is an example of another type of morality: Universal Law. If the universe has an objective contrary to that of any of its internal forces, that internal force puts itself in competition with the universe, and is doomed to fail. There is in fact an objective, universal morality which exists outside of social construct. Is it then moral to side with the will of something so large and undeniable that it is godlike? Is ‘the will of the universe’ morality?

"Resistance is futile. Life returns. Life prevails. Resistance is futile.”

Ultimately, the Dalek cannot be saved. As soon as its injury is healed, the electronic filters in its memory kick in and it forgets the star birth which led it to conclude that the Daleks were evil. It’s back to what it always was, led by the chains of its species and social morality. Exterminate. Exterminate. Exterminate.

The significance of this is to point out that there are no ‘fixes’ to make us good or evil. It isn’t an on-off switch, and even when we are healthy and at our best, we are still capable of being evil because prejudice is part of our nature, something in our brains that blurs experiences together to make a firm operating code. It is never a war that can be fought passively. It is based on active choice.

The Doctor gives up hope for a little while, until his external conscience reminds him not to be a racist.

“Is that really what we’ve learned today? Think about it. Is that what we’ve learned?

~The Inestimable Clara Oswald

What they learn inside the Dalek is that Dalek’s are capable of independent thought, but that independent thought has been stripped from them to make the perfect soldiers. They have been forced to hold one particular belief, no matter what changes they perceive in the world around them. They have an engineered prejudice, an inner code which overwrites their reason and forbids choice.

So long as they cannot act on their own initiative or learn from the memories incarcerated in their Cortex Vaults, they remain evil beings. Evil, in other words, is to take perceptions on the level that they are presented: as orders, as motivators of instinct, without thinking about them and reaching new conclusions. Evil is the unthinking prejudice of a soldier, the absence of free will.

“Am I a good man?”

The Doctor reveals that after going to Scaro and meeting the Daleks, he realized who he was by knowing he was not them. He positioned himself in direct opposition to them, knowing that everything they were was everything he hated. This is yet another type of morality in being the morality of opposition. In a sense it is an instinctive morality, because it judges right and wrong based on feelings. But most importantly, it is Subjective morality. It is the act of deciding on what is right not as social propriety, or as deference to a superior force of nature, but rather from the perspective of an individual actor set against all of these things. An individual’s morals are based on choices that are made despite the pressure of these external forces.

But there’s a problem that comes with subjectivity: it marks all choices as equal. It presents the notion that choices are little more than personal opinion, whim and emotion. If The Doctor’s nature was primarily based on hatred, could he honestly say his choice was any better than a Dalek’s?

“I see beauty. I see endless, divine perfection.”

“Make it a part of you. Put it inside of you, and live by it.”

“I see into your soul, Doctor. I see beauty. I see divinity. I see… HATRED. Hatred of the Daleks. And it is good.”

Here we see the war between the subjective hate The Doctor has nurtured, and the objective acceptance of the perfection of the universe. Both are fighting within him. The Doctor does hate. By seeing beauty, he admits love. Love and hate are inside of him simultaneously, fighting for supremacy. He makes a conscious effort to choose love over hate; peace over war. Understanding over obliteration. In this the nature of morality cannot be more clear: it is choice. Not only having a choice, or producing choices, but in making a choice you can live with. The Doctor’s choice is to unite his subjective morality with an objective morality, claiming one as the other and through it holding himself up to something higher than race or emotion; he is a scientist. He sees the perfection of the universe as his own personal perfection.

But Rusty does not. Even turned into a tool against the Dalek empire, it lets hate dominate over beauty. It fails to become good, even though it fights evil, because extermination is more important to it than perfection. It makes the wrong subjective choice, falling to the trap of believing an objective will has no relevance.

“I am not a good Dalek. You are a good Dalek.”

~Rusty

It doesn’t really matter that the Doctor is flesh and time and the Daleks are pus and metal: in a similar way that we could speak of Daleks as humane or inhumane, and endow them with the potential of humanity, they speak of The Doctor as Dalek, having inside of him the potential for both good and evil. It is individual choice that makes a person good or evil. Not their race.

A bad wolf follows the orders of her stomach. A good man chooses its own orders.

Miniaturization?

Symbolically this looks at the idea of what happens when a body becomes a person’s universe, the objective “Universal Law” that is one component in choosing moral behavior. The intention of this is to point out that moral objectivity isn’t only something that operates out in the world, but inside people, too. The Doctor, if taken as a follower of objective morality, believes in beauty and perfection because everything in the world around him gravitates towards beauty and perfection. But in entering a universal body of a Dalek, everything around him instead gravitates to disgust and extermination. If he were purely objective, he would adopt these policies as his guiding laws. Good becomes the subjective decision to act against the will of the universal Dalek. It is questionable whether The Doctor would succeed in fighting against this evil universe if he had not brought his own external (objective) conscience with him in the form of Clara. He himself sees that his subjective will towards the Daleks is to commit evil, and if the objective decision too is evil, he has lost sight of all possibility of good.

Companions as Conscience

A recurring theme in Doctor Who is in that he lacks the moral centre needed to make good judgments. This is why he chooses human companions, and debatably, female companions. Being an immensely ancient and powerful being, there are times when his bedside manner is truly deplorable, as he has the power to do anything – anything – and none of the awareness of how it might impact an individual life, governed by fragmented perceptions (feelings) of what he sees clearly. While he tackles the big problem of fixing wounds in the galaxy, his companion acts as a nurse and treats the individuals affected by the problem, just as when combatting a plague a doctor investigates and fights the symptoms while the nurse keeps the patients alive long enough to benefit from a cure. Because of this, they often arise as his best resource for acquiring important details he may have overlooked in the course of diagnosis, such as in this episode when Clara points out that when liberated from anatomy, Rusty would act against the Daleks.

Humans, perishing little things that we are, imperfect in sense and sensibility, are the perfect companions for The Doctor, being the emotional or ‘subjective’ component functioning in a universe where he plays as an objective god. Females are selected over males because they are seen to be more in tune with the emotional, more likely to use diplomacy and understanding over ‘Soldiering’ when confronted with the unknown. They stand up to him when he is losing his ‘humanity’ rather than blindly following his orders.

This is the function of a conscience: a con-sci-ence: a complete condition of knowledge, or a regard of all things. To have an awareness of all factors of the universe, both very complex and very basic. While The Doctor has a knowledge of complex things, he could never be accused of being basic. He needs a human for that. Together they form conscience, making good decisions for the patient and for their condition.

Aristotle: Medicine & Ethics

The medical spacecraft where this episode takes place is called the Aristotle, named (presumably) for the forefather of the scientific movement. Aristotle did not make his mark on medicine so much as he did on ethics. But it is important to note how deeply the two are entwined. Who is put in the position of doing more good or harm to an individual life than a doctor? Doctors blur the line between good and evil, hurting others in the process of healing them. Sometimes they are even called upon to fix things that are not broken, and are faced with the ethics of changing a person’s nature to be socially acceptable, even if doing so is against that person’s will. This episode cleverly portrays the obscurity of morality through the practice of medicine.

Particular to this episode, Aristotle’s concept of Ergon is exhibited, the idea that all things have a proper function and are judged as ‘good’ by adhering to it. A good pencil writes marvelously without splintering or needing to be sharpened regularly. A good poison kills efficiently and with the required amount of suffering. Ergon is goodness as functionality. In this sense, Daleks are good by exterminating efficiently. The Doctor’s haunting question, “Am I a good man?” takes on a darker edge: does he possess any of the qualities of a functional human being? Can he even pretend to be one? Or is he so utterly alien as to be unable of even knowing what is right by other species?

To continue the course in Aristotelian ethics we have Logos, or Reason, which is taken as the correct framework for the animating spirit of man. In a sense this spirit it the ‘objective’, or the ‘form’ common to all men, oftentimes contradicted by the ethics of contextual decisions. An ideal human does not hack off people’s limbs. But a doctor might, to stop an infection. This is Phronesis, practical wisdom under which decisions can be made in the grey between Logos and Ergon.

Recap on Subjectivity and Objectivity:

Subjectivity   – The belief that the Subject of the universe is the Self, or the Observer, or the Decision-Maker (in brief, You, reader). All other things in existence are objects on which the Subject acts.

Objectivity     – The belief that the Subject of the universe is external to the Self. The self and other things in existence are all objects, acting according to the will of a conceptual Subject.

While some might say “Well it’s all perspective, innit?” it really isn’t. Yes, we all make decisions. But who we are to begin with is entirely a sum of nature and nurture, determined by contact with objects around us and our ability to reason out their meaning. Rebellion to an Objective Subject is based on the failure to reason, and while it is entertaining resistance is ultimately futile and a predetermined failure, just as if at this very moment you chose never to urinate again. Objects act against others until logic forces an assertion of universal will. While an illusory freewill gives us all an impression of being a Subjective Subject, it is an awareness of the limitations of choice that offer a counterexample, and an ultimate truth: what is Subjective and acts askew to the Objective is suicidal, whether as an individual or as a society, such as in the Dalek Empire. What is done from a Subjective vantage aligned with the Objective may temporarily fail but will ultimately succeed, promoting life, longevity, and perfection.

PINK

Clara is joined in this episode by a new love interest: ‘Rupert’ Danny Pink, who ironically enough used to be a soldier. The Doctor hates soldiers for the same reason he hates Daleks: they kill indiscriminately, following orders rather than making choices themselves, and they destroy things they do not fully understand (most soldiers die in Doctor Who, and in many cases are killed by things acting in self-defense. Many, but not all. When they shoot at things they don’t understand that really are trying to kill them, the Doctor is reasonably quiet.)

Pink is an interesting mess of emotions. On the one hand he respects soldiers (markedly distinct from the officers who direct them), and on the other he is wracked by guilt for accidentally shooting a civilian in the war. He rejects the idea that the only purpose soldiers serve is killing, and makes it known that he spent much of the war digging wells in drought areas.