Dr. Who constantly is going after alien races who would kill you as soon as look at you, for example the daleks. Why do the daleks wait for the doctor to do his talking and the rest whereas they’ve shown time and again a willingness to shoot everyone else on sight. If they just disintegrated him the moment he sticks his fez out, life would be much easier for them even if it somehow hurt their current plan. I mean according to the show he is the stuff of terrors for the daleks and never seems to even fight them directly.
Because the Doctor is about outwitting your enemies. They don’t just kill him because he usually has something that that want to know.
In Asylum of the Daleks, the Prime Minister of the Daleks says it’s offensive to them to extinguish “divine hatred”, and “Perhaps that’s why we’ve never been able to kill” the Doctor.
The series would end abruptly.
To be fair, he has died thirteen times. But in general, I agree with your original premise.
If you were a race of beings who felt that anything other than your race were worthy of death merely because they’re not like you, and you had one thing that terrified you beyond all else, wouldn’t you just kill that thing and sacrifice whatever plan you might currently be plotting in order to “exterminate” that thing?
Kill him and keep killing him until he stops regenerating, it’s not that hard.
You have a point. Granted, lots of times he’s able to parlay information into staying alive a bit longer.
Also, as others pointed out, you can’t just kill him because he’ll regenerate. Does that still hold true if he’s vaporized?
Not just Daleks either. How many times has he just shown up in the command center or bridge of some space ship or military installation, often in the midst of combat? And most of the time the security forces just look dumbfounded instead of shooting him as an intruder.
There’s a couple things that bother me about The Doctor. The way he waffles between protective and highly judgmental towards humanity. His hypocrisy about weapons, unless it’s a weapon he’s jury-rigged himself to obliterate a solar system. His general hypocrisy about the military in general (although he’s been called out on that a few times in the show).
My personal theory is that The Doctor, as a Time Lord, has similar powers to Nicholas Cage in Next. He can just sense all the possible outcomes for a particular situation. To us, it just looks like he’s being an idiot. But in reality, his bizarre behavior is the only path to delay getting laser-beamed in the head long enough to find a way out of whatever mess he’s in.
Well, they often do try to exterminate the Doctor. But he can find ways to avoid being hit. He either leaves the scene or offers them something they need.
He’s really good at bluffing.
I think the Daleks want the Doctor to witness their ultimate success before killing him. That’s why they wait. Plus they don’t have sharks with freakin laser beams.
Well, in the finale of Matt Smith’s first season, we see what happens when someone came up with a trap that should seal the doctor away for eternity - the future doctor who was freed from the prison went back in time to free his past self from the prison. It’s pretty clear that the Doctor actively avoids crossing his own timeline or creating paradoxes and is terrified of doing so as an absolute rule that, like every other rule, he breaks when it’s important enough. Actually killing off someone who’s future self will come back with complete knowledge of what you did and how to prevent it happening and stop you is pretty difficult.
That’s how I see it too. He’s smarter than we are and to us it looks like he’s just blathering away and luckily not getting shot, but he’s probably calculating exactly what to say and do to not get shot. Plus he’s beaten them so many times the Daleks probably assume just shooting him on sight won’t work anyway. It’s frequently the assumption he’s a badass that causes his adversaries to hesitate long enough for him to get away and formulate a plan, not that he always is a badass.
For at least twenty years, comic-book fans have joked that Batman must have a twist on the Shadow’s famous Power To Cloud Men’s Minds – in that Superman, who in his own title is bright enough to outwit Lex Luthor, becomes a doofus in need of advice during any team-up; and gloating murderers put our hero in escape-artist situations instead of just killing him; and the world is otherwise full of otherwise-competent folks who fawningly wait to hear whatever the guy says so they can nod in dull agreement.
“What’s that? You’ll dress in black, and sneak around in a bulletproof costume while I’m playing bare-legged Boy Target in a bright yellow cape? Well, why the heck not?”
“Hey, I’m just a police scientist who thinks at superspeed and has tons of experience using my powers; please help me figure out what to do next.”
“I run a worldwide crime syndicate you’ve repeatedly thwarted during your war on crime; would you marry my daughter and replace me?”
John Constantine gets away with this sort of thing because he’s skilled enough to bluff the enemy into thinking that he’s got something big up his sleeve to hit them with until he can find something big to hide up his sleeve to hit them with, and then he pulls the something big out of his sleeve and hits them with it.
Chuck Bartowski gets away with this sort of thing because he has the ability to stop professional assassins from killing him merely by putting out his hand and shouting “Waitwaitwait!”, which is so stupid they pause just to marvel at how amazingly stupid this approach is. He then gets incredibly lucky.
The Doctor basically combines the two approaches.
As far as I can tell, James Bond gets captured on every single adventure – at which point bad guys patiently explain things to him and then sort of wander off while, ah, expecting him to be no trouble at all.
If those were the stories of Jane Bond, we’d call that out as insanely sexist.
That’s pretty much Black Widow’s “interrogation” technique in Avengers, although they don’t wander off because she beats them up first.
This is an old tradition in storytelling - the protagonist can get away with doing the absurd and walk away alive, while anyone else (usually a guest star, to drive the point home about how dangerous adventures are) would get killed instantly.
It’s somewhere between fear, respect, and an insatiable curiosity on the villain’s part to wonder what’s going to happen next. Sure, the hero’s going to die, but if he chooses to be entertaining in his last moments, what’s the harm?
(The harm is unquestionable, total defeat. But maybe it’s different this time!)
This also happened when the Doctor was surrounded by a ton of Sontarans in The Poison Sky and they broke out into their war chant instead of gunning him down. He of course escapes while they shout and stomp.
Right. I haven’t watched any nuWho, so I don’t know how it’s been changed, but I felt that the Daleks inherited Davros’ supreme ego and arrogance. The Doctor has foiled them so many times that it’s no longer enough just to kill him, they have to prove both to him and, really, to themselves that they have outmaneuvered and outsmarted him, to where he has no choice but to admit their superiority before they can exterminate him.