Ethical dilemma

[shivver]

Here's a question to think about.

Let's change "The End of Time" in the following way: While the Doctor is talking to Wilf in the cafe, Wilf asks him to come back and fix Donna, to give her back her memories and her life with the Doctor. We know that the Doctor can't do that, but let's change it so that at that moment, he realizes that he knows how to do it - he can use his current biodata to filter from Donna what's actually him and remove it, leaving just her behind as a perfectly normal human, with intact memories of her life up through traveling with the Doctor.

With that knowledge, he and Wilf go off to find Donna to fix her, but the other events of the episode begin to happen, and they proceed as we saw on screen. After the Doctor defeats Rassilon and Gallifrey retreats back into the Time War, Wilf knocks four times. The Doctor then must choose: if he saves Wilf, he not only dies, but the regeneration rewrites his biodata and he can no longer fix Donna; but to save Donna, he must let Wilf die.

So, the question is, what do you think the Doctor would choose? And also, what would you want him to choose, since they are not necessarily the same thing? (Note: Meta is not within reach, so you can't choose "Save Wilf, then go get Meta to fix Donna." ;) )

Comments

[tkel-paris.livejournal.com]

All good points. I guess the big issue is that Donna didn't appear to consent to what the Doctor did, and that - I think - is the real issue that remains unresolved. What would Donna have chosen had she been able to choose? And in light of the issues being brought up these days, it's a topic that needs revisiting. That is, the Doctor's habit of not respecting that his/her companions have a right to choose for themselves so long as their choices do not infringe on another's rights. (It's a more complicated issue than I have time for. Especially since I'm on a quest to improve my life.)

[shivver13.livejournal.com]

Well, it would really depend on if you feel that it's wrong for a physician to treat and save the life of a heart attack victim who is unable to voice consent at the time. Or, if you prefer, is it wrong for a policeman to haul back to safety a person who's trying to commit suicide and yelling at him to let her jump? Because that's the correct real-world parallel.

It is not valid to compare Donna's situation to the current discussions about consent to sexual activity. There are certainly cases of the Doctor not respecting companions decisions that are questionable and can be compared to that, but Donna's is not one of them.

[tkel-paris.livejournal.com]

No question those are the correct real-world actions! No one would feel right doing otherwise!

I don't fault the Doctor for not wanting Donna to die. What I DEFINITELY fault him for is that he HAD the time to ask her before she started deteriorating, while they flew the others home, and see if that bit of Human could come up with alternatives. But he didn't.

Perhaps the big issue for me is, how safe is she from further harm? Could there be a slow deterioration from the strain of the meta-crisis still being inside her? What effect would that have on her life and on her family? And what if an enemy goes after her? (I could've seen Missy going after her, as part of a plan to torment the Doctor.)

Maybe I'm a little too good at thinking about how things could go wrong with the Doctor's ideas? Or maybe I've looked at some books on how the Human mind works and wondered how effective the mind-wipe will be at keeping her from making enough connections on her own.

*sighs* I guess I'll leave it at that for now. Is it fair to suppose that the fact that all sorts of topics can be brought into the discussion - whether applied rightly or not - is a sign of how big the plot holes were regarding the entire resolution - for lack of a better word - of Series 4?

[shivver13.livejournal.com]

That is a good point. He should definitely have brought it up earlier - or to put it bluntly, he should have talked to her about the problem rather than waited for it to preciptate. That's a life lesson right there.

(In no way intended to refute or belittle your good point, upon revisiting the whole scene, I think that Donna already knew and had no solution either. The characters don't tell the audience this directly; instead, RTD communicates it in that way he does so well, through the characters' actions. The moment they get back in the TARDIS, Donna begins babbling about where they should go next, in the same way that the Doctor babbles when he's trying to either hide a problem or keep the other person from saying something he doesn't want to hear. (Refer, for example, to the same scene the year before with Martha.) This isn't a Donna character trait - it's absolutely the Doctor's, given to her through the metacrisis.

As the Doctor tries to gently broach the subject, Donna gets increasingly desperate to shut him up with babble, until her mind breaks down. She already knew it would happen and was trying to deny it. The other clue is her line, "If it's in your head, it's in mine." She not only knew, just like he did, what was going to happen, but she also knew what he would do to fix it - her first line after admitting the problem is "I want to stay", indicating that she knew he was going to send her back. Thus, she had as much time as he did to come up with an alternate solution, and we can only conclude that she was unable to.

Of course, he STILL should have talked to her directly about it earlier!)

I'm very hesitant to, as a general philosophy exercise, to go down the "what happens after the Doctor leaves" rabbit hole. it's a great idea for, say, a single story, in which something specific happens as a result of a specific action and the author explores the consequences of that. But the general question is too, well, general. The Doctor's had something like 40 companions and almost all have gone on to life after traveling with him. Whatever life they have must be influenced to a small or large degree by their interactions with the Doctor, and all of those what-if questions apply to them as well. For example, Missy could have easily gone after any of them. Any of them could develop issues from things they encountered in their travels or things the Doctor had to do to solve the situation at the time. (In fact, Tegan did - she developed cancer from something she was exposed to when she was with the Doctor. And exploring that made for a great audio.) I really can't see any meaning in exploring the general question of "should the Doctor be held responsible for everything that might possibly go wrong in the future." (Which, of course, is why Ashildr's storyline fell completely flat.)