The Horns of Nimon

In the totally canonical Curse of Fatal Death it is established that nature abhors the absence of the Doctor. If his existence is threatened then the Universe itself will intervene to save him. 

At the end of the Key to Time saga, the Doctor seems to have become consciously aware that he is a fictional character. He has entirely ceased to take the Universe seriously. But the Universe only exists for the Doctor’s benefit. If he has stopped believing in it, then mere anarchy will be loosed upon the world. 

So the Universe herself intervenes. She divides the Doctor into two beings: a Serious Doctor and a Silly Doctor. It may be pure coincidence that the Serious Doctor happens to be female and the Silly Doctor happens to be Male: or it may be that the Universe is making a sly feminist joke. 

The Fourth Doctor was always a multi-faceted character: that was what made him so fascinating. He could pivot from the serious to the silly in a moment; he would treat the gravest subjects lightly and the most frivolous ones with gravity. But after the Universe’s intervention, we are left with a female Doctor who has no sense of levity; and a male Doctor who is incapable of being serious. Neither of them could carry a TV show or save the planet alone; together, they add up to a hero. 

When did the split occur? Perhaps, as soon as the Guardian decided to gather the segments of the Key, the Meta-Doctor became an inevitability. The origins of Romana are somewhat occluded: she arrived in the TARDIS claiming to have been sent on a mission by the Time Lord President; but later learns that the person who instructed her was the White Guardian. 

How if the Guardian had borrowed one or more of the Doctor’s lives and formed a woman out of them? This kind of thing is possible: in future stories we are going to see it giving rise to beings like “the Watcher” and “the Valeyard”. Before Romana, the Doctor was always represented as a brilliant scientist and a pioneer, after her arival, he was revealed to have been an academic failure. And this makes perfect sense. His Feminine self contained the Doctor's learning and expertise; while the Male persona retained his experience and intuition. 

But by the time of her anomalous regeneration in Destiny of the Daleks Romana is clearly fully aware of her role: she presents herself in an exact replica of the Doctor’s clothes; and then in a “feminine” version of them. But it is only now, in The Horns of Nimon, that her function becomes explicit.

She even has her own sonic screwdriver.

It’s the Doctor who dismantles the TARDIS on a whim, and Romana who tries to persuade him not to. It’s Romana who verbally chastises Soldeed before his death. “The Nimon told you what you wanted to hear, promised you what you wanted to have. They are parasitic nomads who’ve been feeding off your selfishness and gullibility.” She delivers the lines dead-pan: it is no longer possible to imagine the Doctor doing so. 

Look at the Episode Two cliffhanger, and its resolution. Romana is doing a perfectly workpersonlike job shepherding the young people (who have been sent from Aneth as a sacrifice) through the labyrinth, and doing her best to keep their spirits up. They discover the Nimon’s larder, which looks something like the frozen humans on the wirrn-infested Ark and something like the tombs of the Cybermen on Telos. “ I'd guess that the Nimon feeds by ingesting the binding energy of organic compounds such as flesh” she techno-babbles. The nasty Co-Pilot appears and summonses the Nimon; he grovels about, zaps it with an ineffectual ray-gun, and is shot himself with its luminous horns.

This may not be the greatest piece of TV ever, and you might think they could have reshot the scene when the co-pilot’s pants very obviously split, but we are clearly watching a bog-standard episode of Doctor Who. You are a liar and a coward. You will die. Mercy Lord Nimon. The episode ends with the Nimon advancing on the captives, and Romana thrusting her arms out, as if that would help. 

And then, at the beginning of Episode Three, the Doctor arrives.

He is holding a large red cloth, or a very small cape. His opening gambit is “Is this a private party or can anyone join in?” He treats the monster as if it were a naughty child or a yappy puppy-dog “Tell me are you really terribly fierce”? He holds the red rag as if he were a bull fighter; the Nimon lowers its horns as if to charge, but instead zaps the rag. One of the cryogenically frozen extras falls to the floor. It isn’t entirely clear what happens next: I think Romana shoots the controls with the Co-Pilot’s zap gun to create some smoke to cover the sacrifices' escape. The Doctor puts the red cape over the face of the boy who fell out of the larder.

It's not, truthfully, all that funny. And it begs all sorts of questions. Does the Doctor seriously imagine that the Nimon is likely to react to a red rag in the same way as the earth creatures that they happen to resemble? Or is he intending to mock it by pretending that he thinks it is an actual bull? (But why does he suppose that the Nimon will get the joke?) Or did a race-memory of the Nimon's literal attraction to red things give rise to the human blood sport of bull fighting?

Actual bulls are, as everyone knows, colour blind.

These are of course, silly questions. We can all see what has happened. When the Doctor arrives, the episode changes from melodrama to farce.

And that might have been an interesting direction for some future iteration of Doctor Who to have travelled in. The Sensible Doctor is the problem-solving scientist; the Silly Doctor is the trickster who enters into the narrative and changes the rules. She may think she is in a story about the Minoan Bull, but he will treat it as a skit on Spanish toreadors.

But the Silly Doctor does understand that he is in a Doctor Who story. He knows the rules of the game and keeps complaining about them. He points out that whenever he uses the phrase “what could possibly go wrong”, something does go wrong. He observes that whenever he arrives on a planet “there are always people pointing guns or phasers or blasters at him”. He responds to the phaser-wielding guards with the biggest cliche of all: “Take me to your leader.”

And we know the rules too. We are not surprised that, when the Doctor tries to fix the TARDIS console, it blows up in his face. We are not even surprised that he responds calmly "Well, thats odd". ("Don't you think that's odd, K9?" About two thirds of his humour now depends on irritating repetition.) But we were perhaps not quite expecting the explosion to be accompanied by Monty Python level comedy sound effects: an explosion, a siren, an electronic whizz, a boing, a twang.  

“But Andrew: the TARDIS is an alien craft, and for all we know removing the gravitic anonomyser would produce a sound like a schoolboy vibrating a wooden ruler on his desk.” 

Yes: indeed. But the fact remains: the universe is now such that when the TARDIS is in proximity to the Doctor it produces funny noises. 

And then there is K9.

At the beginning of Episode One, when K9 appears damaged, the Doctor literally tries to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. ("But Andrew, how do you know that K9 is not the kind of computer that can be rebooted by air from a Time Lord's lungs?") When the robot is about to say something inappropriate, the Doctor covers its mouth. And when it appears that the TARDIS is going to be crushed by a black hole, the Doctor literally puts his arms around the machine for comfort. Indeed, he produces, from nowhere, a red rosette marked First Prize and attaches it to K9's ear, adding that he is “the best dog I ever had”.

K9 is, so far as we know, the only dog he has ever had. And in any case, he is not actually a dog.

There has been more than one science-fiction reworking of the Pinocchio story: the robot that wants to be, or believes itself to be, human. But K9 does not seem to perceive himself as a dog. It isn't quite clear if he has any self-awareness at all. Nearly all his humour comes from an inability to understand human language and idioms. (When the Doctor uses an unfunny mixed metaphor, up a gumtree without a paddle, K9 takes him literally.) But the Doctor treats him as a living creature, referring to him as "my dog" and calling him "good dog" and "good boy". (If he is sentient, this is actually rather degrading.) One almost feels that the Doctor is treating K9 as a toy: an inanimate object that it pleases him to pretend is a domesticated animal.

Do Time Lords even keep pets? Is there a Gallifreyan equivalent to the Terran dog? Or is this another example of the Doctor hyper-correcting: pretending to have a dog like the mortals on his favourite planet, but not quite grokking how it works?

The Doctor saves the TARDIS by putting it into a spin so it skims off the surface of the high gravity asteroid. And then he muses out loud “Sometimes I think I'm wasted just rushing around the universe saving planets from destruction. With a talent like mine, I might have been a great slow bowler.”

He is joking, obviously: although later stories will flirt more seriously with the idea that the Doctor might eventually retire. But to whom is the joke directed? K9 doesn’t understand humour. Is the Doctor breaking the fourth wall? Talking nonsense for the benefit of "all of you at home"? “Rushing around the universe saving planets from destruction” is very much how a casual viewer might perceive the character of the Doctor. It's not quite how the in-universe Doctor would see himself.

My sense is that at the moment he says the words, he means them. He genuinely does think he would rather have been a cricketer than a time-traveller. He speaks whatever thought happens to have flitted across his mind. Perhaps when he was split into two beings, one of the things he lost was his "filter".

The Doctor doesn’t only say goodbye to K9: he also says goodbye to the TARDIS. Sailors, of course, do refer to their ships as "she": but the Doctor literally speaks of his time-machine as if it were a human friend."Well, it's been a great, great partnership, old girl”. And at the end of the story, he says that the "old girl" still has a lot of life left in her. Romana takes him to be talking about her, although he is actually talking about his ship. At first she scowls, and then smiles at the Doctor's little joke. It seems to convey a genuine partnership; a rapport. The two sides of the Doctor are complimentary, not antagonistic. (Lalla Ward is very good at acting.)

Perhaps, in fact when he says "you've got a few millennia left in you" he is talking about the Doctors Who, both of her, and the series which bears their name.

Despite hitting rock-bottom, it is going to survive. For a few seasons more. The Universe can't bear to be without Doctor Who and this is the nearest thing to Doctor Who she has been able to salvage. If you agreed with this essay, then please consider supporting Andrew's patreon.  If you did not agree with this essay, then please consider supporting Andrew's patreon.