In “The Forest of Fear,” the third episode of Doctor Who‘s first story, the Doctor tries to murder a helpless man by bashing his head in with a rock. Well, he almost tries. Well, he probably almost tries. Ian grabs his wrist to stop him as soon as he picks up the stone, and the Doctor claims he was going to ask the wounded caveman, Za, to draw a map in the dirt showing the way through the forest. But the Doctor’s acting pretty sketchy and is almost certainly lying. You see, although Za has been seriously injured and is no longer a threat, his tribe is likely still after them. The Doctor wants to abandon their enemy to die, but Barbara, Susan, and Ian refuse to prioritize their safety over his life.
This is a pretty famous moment in Doctor Who fandom, and for good reason. The usual take is that it shows how much the Doctor changes after the first couple of stories. Not only wasn’t he originally the hero of the show, he was sometimes an antagonist, working against Ian and Barbara almost as much as he worked with them. The Doctor we come to know would never murder a helpless enemy.
Except… wouldn’t he? While I do think this moment is an excellent example of how the Doctor’s character changes, I’m not so certain it’s in quite the way everyone says. Are we really pretending he wouldn’t kill a helpless foe? He straight up murders the already-defeated Solomon in Dinosaurs on a Spaceship. In Terror of the Zygons, after setting the aliens’ ship to self-destruct, he locks the door behind him so none of them can escape the blast. In Remembrance of the Daleks, the Doctor has already sabotaged the Hand of Omega, foiling Davros’ plan, but he uses it to destroy the entire planet Skaro anyway – not just killing defeated enemies, but committing genocide against them. And there are countless examples of him killing foes in combat without feeling an ounce of remorse. There’s no second chance for the Sycorax leader in The Christmas Invasion, and Shockeye in The Two Doctors gets his “just desserts” when the Doctor suffocates him with cyanide.
All these examples are arguably justified by the Doctor’s concern for innocent lives. With Za, though, he doesn’t care at all about saving Ian and Barbara – moments earlier, he was prepared to leave them to die in order to save himself and his granddaughter. Self-sacrifice to protect innocents sounds more like a quality of the Doctor we now know and love; is that the change this moment illustrates?
Well, no, not really. Sure, the Doctor is much more concerned with saving lives now than he was then, but we can’t say it’s always his first priority. She’s quite happy to let Ko Sharmus sacrifice himself in her place in The Timeless Children, not offering even a token protest. The whole point of The Almost People is that the Ganger duplicates are sapient, which doesn’t stop the Doctor from liquifying Ganger-Amy. He floods Atlantis in The Underwater Menace without knowing if any of the innocent Atlanteans – not to mention Polly and Jamie — have made it to safety. And, revisiting Remembrance of the Daleks, was he really sure there weren’t any Thals still wandering around the radioactive forest when he turned Skaro’s sun supernova?
Obviously, I’m picking and choosing, and there are far more counterexamples of the Doctor putting life, all life, first. It’s a sixty-plus years old show, after all, which has had many, many writers, not all of whom are going to portray their main character’s morals consistently.
But this moment with the stone and the caveman – it doesn’t feel out of place because the Doctor’s trying to kill a defeated foe, or because he’s putting his own skin first. It’s out of place with what the show becomes because the narrative portrays him as wrong to do so, and, more importantly, as unable to understand why he’s wrong to do so. Barbara says to him directly, “You treat everybody and everything as something less important than yourself,” and she’s right. When Hur, Za’s mate, can’t understand why the strangers would want to help them, Ian says “How can we explain to her? She doesn’t understand kindness, friendship.” There’s an implicit comparison there to the Doctor, who, throughout this entire scene, expresses bafflement at, and disdain of, the teachers’ and his granddaughter’s acts of mercy.
I said Barbara was right when she said the Doctor treated everyone as less important than him, but she’s not completely correct – the Doctor does value Susan, his only family, and it’s for her sake that he risks his life to linger while they help Za. At this point he feels some responsibility for getting Ian and Barbara into this deadly situation, but it only goes so far – he tries to abandon them in this scene, leaving them to die in pre-history. It’s because he can’t force Susan to come with him that he doesn’t.
It’s a cliche that villains don’t feel love. Real-life villains don’t lack love, they lack empathy. They can love those in their immediate circle, but are incapable of feeling empathy for those outside it. That’s the difference between the Doctor of these first stories, and the Doctor as we’ll come to know them. Yes, there’ll always be inconsistencies across writers. He’ll still be the sworn defender of life in one episode and a slaughterer of monsters in the next. Nevertheless, the Doctor of An Unearthly Child, who stands over a helpless man contemplating murder, has transformed into the Doctor of Joy to the World, who takes time out from saving the world to comfort a dying hotel manager. Those words of comfort, not the willingness to kill or the instinct for self-preservation, are the real reason the scene with the rock would feel out of place in Doctor Who even a few episodes later, let alone today.
