Sometimes I wonder what would happen if the Doctor was more often forced by circumstances to stay and face the consequences of his interference in events. Margaret the Slitheen called Nine on that in Boom Town, when the TARDIS needed more time to refuel, requiring the crew to keep her with them until she could be returned to Raxacoricofallapatorius. She made some good points (though her arguments were inherently flawed), and her very presence made the others acutely uncomfortable.

One of the things that I love about Doctor Who, perhaps most particularly the pre-Hiatus era (which did this more often), is that it can make us think about how our own society is messed up by showing us an analogous situation in some completely alien (often literally so) culture and demonstrating how horrible it would be to suffer certain indignities.

Because I am a coward, I won’t go any further and draw any specific analogies to the way American or British society treat certain of its members. Anyone who cares to can certainly draw their own parallels (and if you find that you can’t, then perhaps you need to start listening more than you talk when such topics come up).

My point, though, is that the character of the Doctor is a double-edged sword here. Unbelievable (from the fictional standpoint) as it may be that despite all the myriad possibilities, all thirteen of his bodies have been white and male, that fact gives the character potential both to be role model and bad example.

To wit, when he takes Martha on her first full trip in the TARDIS, they end up some 400 years in the past. Ever oblivious to the nature of the privilege he enjoys as a white man, he pooh-pooh’s her concerns about possible danger to herself as a black woman. “Just walk about like you own the place,” he says. “Works for me.” He utterly misses the fact that it “works for [him]” because he already fits into the culture’s idea of what a person in power ought to look like.

On the other hand, the authority he is inherently granted by his race and gender can potentially be used to begin shifting attitudes that keep us from realizing the ideal the Doctor is meant to embody: every life is important. The more often we see the Doctor granting people of other genders and gender expressions, races, religious beliefs, sexual orientations, physical abilities, body types, or any other artificial marker of “otherness” unquestioning equality in his own actions toward them, the more that kind of inclusive behavior will seem both normal and desirable to his fans.

It seems to me, then, that if the Doctor had to stay behind more often and see the repercussions of the solutions he sets in motion, he’d have more opportunities to observe the way people fail to embody his ideals. And his experiences, in turn, would require those of us (me included) who also sometimes fail, to look at ourselves more critically and work toward change in our own lives.

The Doctor is at his best when he challenges us, and we’re at our best when we accept those challenges. So here’s hoping our next Doctor will have more opportunities to serve as exemplar than as cautionary tale. The show and the fans deserve no less.