a darker Doctor (and a series 7 storyline)

After watching Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, two thoughts are foremost in my mind:

First, that Moffat meant it when he said Series 7 was more a series of disconnected episodes than a multi-part story.*

Second, that we are seeing a darker Doctor.

In the Doctor's Daughter, the Tenth Doctor aims a gun at the head of the man who killed his titular daughter... but then lowers the gun and reveals: “I never would. Have you got that? I *never* would.” In Journey's End, he is even willing to save Davros, creator of the Daleks, after he attempts to destroy all of reality.

At the end of this episode, the Eleventh Doctor traps Solomon on a ship, throws in a bomb (technically, a homing device onto which missiles are locked), and leaves him to die.


In Batman Begins, Batman pins Ra's al-Ghul to the floor of a train Ra's has rigged with explosives and boarded to pilot towards a building. Unbeknownst to Ra's, Batman's friends have blown up a section of the track so that the train will detonate away from bystanders. Refusing to stab Ra's, Batman flies out of the train, saying “I won't kill you... but I don't have to save you.” By boarding a train he himself rigged with explosives, Ra's arguably brings about his own death: Batman merely refuses to save him.


In Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, the Eleventh Doctor does not (easily) have this defence: against the Doctor's wishes, Earth launched missiles at the ship because it strayed too close to earth; it strayed too close to earth because Solomon was unable to pilot it. (He discovered he was unable to pilot it after killing its last pilots.) The Doctor prevents Solomon from escaping in the latter's smaller craft, rescues Nefertiti from that craft, and then throws the beacon onto which the missiles are locked onto Solomon's craft before expelling it. Nefertiti had Solomon pinned to the ground and the Doctor could have turned him over to intergalactic police... but he does not.

This is a darker side to the Doctor than we have seen since the Sixth Doctor. (He and previous Doctors killed or paralysed villains on a few occasions.)



*Alternatively, perhaps Series 7 does have a storyline, and we are watching it in reverse order. This would be the sort of cleverness that Moffat is known for: as Dana Seilhan commented, “Stephen Moffat [...] WRITES in time travel” : he already wrote into Flesh and Stone the kind of thing (to quote James McGrath) “that LOST could have done had it had the foresight”, and every episode with River Song played out in the 'wrong' order. This Redditor explains.