Doctor Who: The Night Behind Which Is Dawn

"I'm sorry. I didn't realise..."
"All my life, I've been called heartless. My other life, my real life, the one you rewrote. Now look at me."

And just for a second, he wonders.

He wonders if once, some god, or perhaps some demon interfered, for a reason he never realised and can never know.

He wonders if somewhere in time there was once a Time Lord of the Prydonian Chapter, a man with a real name who had no reason to find another, a proper Time Lord with an ordinary job and an ordinary life, who never hated, passionately loved, or horribly suffered in any of his thirteen incarnations, a man who simply observed and never interfered like all the others, who was content to end his days on Gallifrey, who never had to grab a granddaughter's hand and run, who never stole a time-machine.
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“Have you ever thought what it's like to be wanderers in the fourth dimension? Have you? To be exiles? Susan and I are cut off from our own planet—without friends or protection. But one day we shall get back. Yes, one day...”

He doesn’t really believe it. Go back? Why? What for?

How?

He can’t even fly the TARDIS properly yet. And well, let’s just say that his people don’t look kindly on renegades.

Must he have just one motive? But his face always goes dark when someone asks him what happened that day, and he mumbles something about wanting to see the universe. 

And he does see it. He sees Skaro, ruin and destruction breeding more destruction. He sees Earth’s brutal past and doesn’t dare change it. He sees horrors and evil he never thought possible. He sees humans die just when he’s starting to get fond of them.

“The waste... the terrible waste...”

(He has to let Susan go.)

They all leave eventually, Ian and Barbara, Steven and Vicky, Dodo Chaplet. These are the lucky ones, who leave while they’re still breathing. 

And he realises that this is how it’s always going to be.

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Terrible things must indeed be fought. But why must he always be the one to fight them? 

Cybermen, and Daleks, and the Great Intelligence, and Krotons, and Ice Wariors, and ruthless dictators. Stupidity and ignorance. Hubris. His own people, as predicted. 

Above all, cruelty. 

“They'll forget me, won't they?” 

He won’t, not ever, even though they kill him.

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Exile on one planet, in a single time zone, would normally drive him mad with boredom now. But it’s Earth and there are familiar faces. There are also new ones. So he tries his best.

(He is impatient and irritable, and he says many things that he regrets the moment he sees the hurt or sadness on a friend’s face. I'm sorry, I didn't mean it. I know you want to do your best too. It's not your fault that the world has grown crueler.)

It doesn’t save the Silurians, though. Nor the four billion people of the alternate Earth that suffer under a fascism he doesn’t get the chance to bring down and finally die in the flames of their collapsing world. It doesn’t prevent him from enduring his most painful and horrible death yet. 

He holds it off as long as he can and this time at least, he’s not alone in the end.

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He just does it to prove a point, but when he takes Sarah Jane to 1981 and Earth is a lifeless wasteland, it hits him for the first time just how fragile the balance is. Sutekh is defeated. But there will always be another threat. How can he possibly hold them all back?


He meets Davros. A lot of people die and the Daleks are still created. And the rest is history. 

He receives a summons from Gallifrey, but he won’t take his friends there. Bad memories. 

“Don't forget me.”
“Oh, Sarah. Don't you forget me.”

Given the conspiracies he gets dragged into, the threats and torture he has to go through, and the absolutely hellish experience inside the Matrix he’d sooner forget, he decides that he was absolutely right in his judgment. He keeps telling himself that there are good people on his planet.

(Romana certainly is, but she can’t stay forever either.) 

The less said about the Fendahl and Meglos, the better. The most disturbing part is how he’s getting used to a universe that seems filled to the brim with evil and painful death.

A good man’s life is swept away at the Master’s whim, and off he goes again for world domination. Not a good plan. And even though he’s getting tired, he can’t have all of existence on his conscience. He stops him and pays the price.

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Maybe it’s the deceptively youthful face, but this time he starts out much more hopeful. Then Adric dies.

(Tegan, Nyssa, and Turlough leave him too. But at least it’s their choice.)

“There should have been another way.” 

He wonders if it really could, as he lives and counts more and more dead.

So when by a whim of fate, he ends up on Androzani with a human he’s really only just met, and everyone threatens to kill them (or even try to carry out their threats, fortunately without success), and he discovers that they were doomed from the beginning by a random poison, he can’t laugh at the irony. He rages against it instead, and a bitter, inhuman determination takes hold of him.

He’ll save her. She’ll live even if he has to keep her heart beating with his own hands, if he has to rip out one of his own and put it in her chest.

He runs, then stumbles, then almost has to crawl through the chaos (he doesn’t care any more if these people perish, and they do). He carries her to the TARDIS and they take off with seconds to spare.

She lives. He dies and he can’t bring himself to care any more if this time it’s permanent, like he feels it is.

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“Just a minute! Did you call him the Doctor?”
“There is some evil in all of us, Doctor, even you.”

Can his future really be like this? To end up actively adding to the misery and sorrow of the world? To become like the monsters he’s spent centuries fighting? After all that he’s done and tried to do?

(Forget the Time Lords. The real trial begins now. Every time you close your eyes, you stop to think, you make another decision, you feel guilt. What have you really done and why?) 

“What would you say if I were to tell you that I once destroyed an entire race, that I have led friends to their deaths, and caused numerous wars. That my intervention has led to peaceful races taking up arms and good people having their faith or reason destroyed. Because I failed to act, millions upon millions of people have been enslaved or killed. What if I had done all those things, but had always, always believed I was doing the right thing!”

Well then, why not? 

In some particularly black days, he thinks that the old Earth saying about the road to Hell being paved with good intentions is quite apt.

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When Ace tells him of her best friend, murdered at just 13, he is enraged beyond reason though he hides it. Because it was humans who did it. And evils from before the dawn of time can’t always be defeated with luck and spontaneous ingenuity. 

“I need to be in control.”
“You can't control everything.”
“I can certainly try.”

The universe becomes an endless chessboard; and he always wins because he’s clever. But next to a battle lost, the saddest thing is a battle won.

There’s always a cost, and his machinations slowly wear him down. 

He’d think his manner of death quite ironic –the scheming mastermind shot by accident during an unrelated gang war and ignorant human doctors trying to solve a non-existent problem– but he doesn’t get the time.

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“Come with me.”
“You come with me.” Well, that’s a first.
“Me, come with you?”
“Yes.”
“Me, come with you? It's tempting.”

(It’s even more so after they kiss.)

“They thought you were all memento mori.”
“What?”
“Reminders of death.”

As if he needed such a thing. (All timelines are there in his head, conflicting, all horrible.)

After Zagreus and anti-time, Light City, the Daleks conquering the Earth. After he gets tortured so horribly, he can’t even remember why or who did it any more. After he’s almost driven insane by imprisonment. While the guilt rises and rises. Why does he get to live?

“I denied that was the reason of course, and as you said, friendship, companionship. But over the years, over my many lifetimes, as my friends all left me one by one, I began to wonder that they really might have had a point after all.

After the Time War starts and he desperately tries to mend the wounds while they hate him. He pleads with his own people, rages against them; leave that planet in peace. Because we are not Daleks. Who can tell the difference any more?

“I help where I can. I will not fight.”

Suicide. It was suicide. Death by despair. Maybe he should have gone with Grace after all.

“Physician, heal thyself.”

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The War does not have years. It just feels like a very, very long day. And then everyone dies.

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“You think it'll last forever. People, and cars, and concrete. But it won't. One day, it's all gone. Even the sky.”

(Everyone lost, and the coward survived.)

“You let one of them go, but that's nothing new. Every now and then a little victim spared, because she smiled, 'cos he's got freckles, 'cos they begged. And that's how you live with yourself, that's how you slaughter millions. Because once in a while, on a whim, if the wind's blowing in the right direction, you happen to be kind.”

(No, not the coward. The killer.)

The Daleks survived too. And after the initial fear and maddening hate, there’s a vicious, desperate stab of glee: It’s your fault. You did this. If you caused this, it’s not on me. If it’s really your fault, I cannot be guilty.

Of course, he still is. So even though he slowly learns to live again, to hope, (to love), when they come again and an already desolated Earth is threatened, he sends Rose home, and decides to sacrifice everyone else on the Game Station to stop them. Especially himself.

Enough, now. Enough.

(The universe disagrees and initially he thinks himself lucky, forgiven; the fool that he is.)

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He gets separated from Rose. Reinette dies waiting for him. The Face of Boe dies and it’s a relief because that should have never happened to Jack. Joan has her heart broken.

“Why can't I be John Smith? Isn't he a good man?”

(It’s not a good man we need.) 

“Answer me this. Just one question, that's all. If the Doctor had never visited us, if he'd never chosen this place on a whim, would anybody here have died? You can go.”

The Master dies just to spite him. Martha leaves him eventually. Jenny dies in his arms. Everyone in Pompeii dies because he kills them. Adelaide Brook dies to stop him. River Song dies in his place and fills his future with heartbreak. If there is a future, that is. Donna… oh Donna, what he had to do.

(Funny, how he clings on to his life, to a mere body, now. He used to be borderline suicidal. Maybe it’s because that is the only thing he has left.)

Wilfred Mott doesn’t die. It’s not fair, and he’s terrified out of his mind. But he’s lived too long. He collapses against the glass and screams and screams, curled in on himself.

Then the pain goes away. And he cries, because a different pain is starting and he has to go away too.

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The TARDIS crashes into a small garden, is discovered by a little girl, and a fairy tale starts.

“Come along, Ponds!”

He’s going to make up for those five minutes. And fantastic, funny Rory is welcome as well. When they get married he’s over the moon. River drops by whenever she wishes, as if Stormcage is made out of cardboard. A family.

(But he has forgotten how dark fairy tales can get.)

Even after Rory is restored, he doesn’t learn his lesson. They risk death wherever he takes them, and he keeps coming back. It’s his fault that they too have to learn to kill, to see countless people die, to witness unimaginable horrors while he promises wonders he hardly ever provides. It’s his fault River lost her childhood. No matter what he says, an Amy who is just as real as the one in the TARDIS dies, and Rory bears half the guilt, as he bears 2,000 years of waiting in his human head.

Sometimes he thinks that the Silence maybe had a point after all. But they are still happy.

(“Every time you see them happy you remember how sad they're going to be. And it breaks your heart. Because what's the point in them being happy now if they're going to be sad later? The answer is, of course, because they are going to be sad later.”)

Rory’s loss is hard enough and his inability to help nearly drives him mad. Not his Amelia too.

An ocean of time lies between them, but Amy is never the one to hesitate to choose when Rory isn’t there. What if she gives up safety, agelessness, an endless adventure in a world where time is what you want it to be? What if she gives up life, that fragile immortality the blue box grants?

“Come along Pond –please.”
“Raggedy man… Goodbye!”

He turns wordlessly to Rory’s gravestone, and breaks down when he sees Amy’s name.

He never takes River to Darrillium. He tries, oh God, he does. But he’s lonely, and he keeps delaying and when he realises that time is running out, that all their dates have been spent, he retires and pronounces his wife dead. Because if he meets her just one more time, she most probably truly will be.

Clara saves him from the darkness, saves his life across all of Time, helps him save Gallifrey. And he’s happy, he's happy, he's immeasurably grateful. But a fixed point is a fixed point, and he lies, and he sends her home to live. Nine hundred years. Victory after victory.

(Barnable does die of course, at the age of 86, and after the man who won’t give his name lashes out at the sky in impotent grief, nobody attacks the little town for a year, afraid of his wrath.)

He can’t hold back the night forever, he knows. He’s seen it. He has accepted it.

She comes back, and the rules are broken, and she saves the Doctor one last time. He goes to his rest. Nothing sad about it, he’s had his time, a part of him even wants it. It’s just that he has to leave her behind.

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The new man is confused, unsure of himself. Slowly, they build things back up. A different, rocky friendship, but no less strong in the end. Keep saving everything, together. Fight the good fight.

“Yes, a lot of people died and maybe the wrong people survived.”
“Yeah, but we saved the world, right?”
“We did. You did.”

Danny Pink also dies in a senseless accident. The Master returns, and what she does with the dead disgusts him to the point that he admits she has to die. Not that it sticks.

Danny can’t come back after all, and Gallifrey is not where it should be. All they have is each other. Recklessly, they push it to the limit.

Clara is going to die some day, he knows, and it becomes an obsession that she must live. Duty of care. In a way, he is almost disappointed when he doesn’t meet his end on Skaro, at the army base in 1980, when he’s travelling alone. Because if he did, Clara would still be living.

(“Not with me! Die with whoever comes after me. You do not leave me.”)

It becomes distressingly clear that the feeling is mutual. As is their sense of adventure, their pain for past losses, their ingenuity, their ability to lie, their need to take control and save people. To be the Doctor; whatever the title really means.

And Clara does die because she’s selfless and because he’s sick of losing people.

He spends 4.5 billion years in hell, and he reaches home, and finds that his own people are responsible. Of course they are.

Clara must live. Even if they have to part, though he viciously pushes that thought away for now. He lies and he forces the Time Lords to save her at gunpoint and he flees to the end of the universe. Time won’t let him, and when Clara understands she doesn’t let him either.

(He tries in vain, and when the tears come to his eyes later, it’s not to keep a timeline stable and it’s not just the wind.)

He's so old now. And maybe, after all this time, it’s time for Christmas day. Happy Christmas, dear.

(Be happy.)

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He wonders, just for a second.

"Better a broken heart than no heart at all."