Our favourite timelord has faced Daleks, Cybermen, Sontarans and even renegade members of his own race but surely this is one enemy he simply cannot defeat.
The universe’s ultimate bachelor is currently facing his greatest threat… commitment. In the latest series of time and space shenanigans, the Doctor is lumbering towards a marriage with archaeologist/scientist/adventurer/sass-merchant River Song, and the fact that their timelines are moving in opposite directions means the good doctor has no escape.
“You’re building me the perfect prison, and it still won’t be enough” – The Doctor, Day of the Moon
This series also featured an episode tantalisingly entitled ‘The Doctor’s Wife’. Did anyone believe that he would actually tie the knot? Hardly. Instead we got a beautiful tale from Neil Gaiman about the greatest relationship the Doctor will ever have. Any anyway, this isn’t the first time he faced the threat of commitment and the Doctor always finds a way out. Always.
“Got married! That was a mistake. Good Queen Bess. And let me tell you, her nickname is no longer… anyway” – The Doctor, The End of Time
I was born in the 80s so the earliest Doctor I remember was Sylvester McCoy. And while he is not the most fondly remembered Doctor, his companion Ace (played by Sophie Aldred) stirred something inside of me. As my brother once put it, “I knew I liked it but I was too young to understand why”.
However the Doctor did not share my romantic yearnings for Ace and as was the case with his predecessors, was simply not bothered by girls. The only one who came close was Tom Baker as the fourth Doctor whose real life relationship with Lalla Ward who played Romana Mk II made for some very un-Doctor-like sexual tension in the TARDIS.
“I love humans. Always seeing patterns in things that aren't there” – The Doctor, Doctor Who TV Movie
It wasn’t until Paul McGann briefly played the eighth Doctor that he began to notice girls. Or more the fact he noticed that they noticed him. Even though he only played the Doctor once, he racked up more lovin’ that his seven predecessors seemed to in 30 years (or 890 years depending on how you look at it).
Once bitten by the love bug, he was hooked. Doctor number nine (played by Christopher Ecclestone) went for the hard to get route with companion Rose Tyler and only got some action when removing lethal energy from her through the form of a kiss. His successor, played by David Tennant, faired better and made Ms Tyler a happy woman by err… leaving a half-human clone of himself with her on a parallel universe.
Before his eventual regeneration into Matt Smith in 2010, he found time to fall deeply in love in Madame dePompadour and leave her to die alone, treat Martha Jones like shit simply because she wasn’t his beloved chav Rose Tyler, and enchant Kylie Minogue to the point that she was willing to die for him. Obviously a busy boy.
“Oh, he does love playing with Earth girls!” – The Master, The End of Time
How can one man, albeit in eleven different guises, get so many women in a tizzy? Look at the latest girl to fall for his charms, Amy Pond found time at her own wedding to flirt with him in front of her new husband and all of their friends and family. Perhaps because he’s the ultimate bachelor – coming and going as he pleases throughout time and space, with little regard for the affect he has on women and relationships. Even before romance was an issue, the women in his life (lives) struggled to move on. Sarah-Jane Smith, who was one of the first strong female characters in sci-fi, resigned herself to a life of loneliness because no human could ever live up to the man in the blue box.
“Well... there was this one guy. I travelled with him for a while. But he was a tough act to follow” – Sarah-Jane Smith, School
Her predecessor Jo Grant fared only slightly better, leaving the TARDIS to marry a man she described as a younger version of the Doctor but she always harboured resentment that he never made a house call for her. It also begs the question of why Jo and her husband couldn’t stay with the Doctor and travel the universe.
It’s a life she and many others have had to leave behind. Martha Jones is the probably the most recent, realising that she would never win the Doctor’s affection, left the TARDIS to try and get on with her life.
“Is that what happens though, seriously? You just get bored of us one day and disappear?” – Martha Jones, Utopia
The Doctor isn’t the guy that girls settle down with and have families. He’s just not that sort. He's always ready to close the TARDIS door on someone and leave their life forever to go on to his next adventure.
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