Sci, I think in every incarnation the Doctor has been a rebel.
A rebel? Sure, to a point. But an out and out revolutionary? I'm not so sure. The First Doctor, for instance, certainly seemed to be putting on airs of traditional authority and classism.
One of the things that interested me about Nine was that he had very little trouble coming in and overthrowing an entire culture if he felt it was sufficiently immoral (e.g., "The Long Game"). So far as I can tell, most of the other Doctors are a bit more evolutionary rather than revolutionary in their attitudes -- they're more likely to try to fix a specific part of a culture rather than toss the whole thing out the airlock the way Nine would.
I don't see why he has to be working class to be a working class hero anyway. Frankly the Doctor should be a hero to all irrespective of class or wealth.
Well, first off, I didn't say that the Doctor
had to carry suggestions of a working class background (though my personal theory about his history is that his family was originally lower working class on Gallifrey). I said I liked that and missed it.
What interests me about a Doctor that specifically uses working class accents and imagery is the suggestion it carries for radical egalitarianism -- for the abolition of the entire concept of class. After all, the hero we're cheering for, fighting these corrupt governments and cultures and aliens, who's getting depicted as this demigod figure, is this guy who looks like some dude who works in a factory you see having drinks at the local pub. That utterly undermines the idea that "higher class" people should hold more power than "lower class" people in society.
I'm also tempted to argue -- though I haven't fully developed this idea and am not totally committed to it -- that the audience should have an easier time relating to a character that uses the iconography of the working class (since most people are not elites) rather than one that uses the iconography of the power elites the way Eleven looks like he might. It's all well and good to say that the Doctor should be a hero everyone can look up to, but if the creators are always using the iconography of the elites for him, that only re-enforces ideas of elite dominance, not egalitarianism. Re-enforcing the idea of egalitarianism means having heroes who are not the elites in coercive power structures.
Having a Doctor whose iconography appeals to traditional traits of "high class" or "upper class" (such as having him dress like a university professor) risks losing that egalitarian suggestion. Being "rebellious" isn't really enough, because rebelliousness is not the same thing as being revolutionary. A guy who gets picked up by the cops for tagging is a rebel. A guy who
overthrows the cops is a revolutionary. Rebels don't necessarily seek to replace the entire extant power structure.
That's why I hope that Eleven has a bit more of an edge to him than Ten did. Ten may have deposed the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in his first episode, but he didn't actually abolish the entire United Kingdom, y'know? He wasn't necessarily a character whose ideology threatened entire power structures, even if they were unjust. He had to be talked in to fighting for the Ood's liberation, for instance. He was a rebel, but he wasn't by himself a revolutionary -- and that's the sense I get with most of the previous Doctors, too (with the possible exceptions of Two and Four).
And comparing the Doctor to Che? Slightly offensive that!
I think I made it clear that I was drawing a parallel between the
popular image of Che and the Doctor, not the
reality of Che Guevarra. I even said that I consider him to be a mass murderer. But like it or not, there is a popular image of Che as a wandering working class liberator; it's a very real and very powerful image, even if it is a lie. The Ninth Doctor reminds me of that image (though I doubt that was intentional).
Though I do think it's interesting to note that the Doctor is apparently guilty of genocide multiple times over at this point -- between destroying both the Time Lords
and the Daleks, he has quite a bit more blood on his hands than Che ever did. Hell, Moffat even established in "The Doctor Dances" that the Doctor once blew up a weapons factory. Can you really tell me that if someone did something like that in real life, they wouldn't be labelled a terrorist?
Anyway, that was one thing that initially drew me to
Doctor Who -- science fiction heroics as a working-class liberation struggle. Certainly that's not the whole of what
Doctor Who and the character are about, but it was an aspect to Nine that I miss a lot.
And, to draw this back to something more on-topic (and link it to the horror of the real Che), one of the things I liked was the Nine/Rose relationship. Because in my mind, the Doctor's connection with Rose was the thing that kept him going absolutely made after the Time War, the thing that kept him from going all "Time Lord Victorious" on us by the middle of Series One rather than years and years later after he'd been alone for a long time. If the Ninth Doctor can be compared to the
popular image of Che (a moral working class liberator), I would argue that it is his relationship with Rose that made him such and kept him grounded. Without that relationship, the Ninth Doctor -- like the Tenth Doctor almost did when
he lacked a meaningful relationship with anyone -- could easily have turned into a mass murderer, into a monster. Into the real Che.
I hope that's an aspect we see in the Eleven/Amy relationship -- the relationship being the thing that keeps him grounded, keeps him from going bonkers with his own arrogance and power.
