Typing Doctor Who: Sarah Jane Smith (INTP)

INTPs:

Seek to develop logical explanations for everything that interests them. Theoretical and abstract, interested more in ideas than in social interaction. Quiet, contained, flexible, and adaptable. Have unusual ability to focus in depth to solve problems in their area of interest. Skeptical, sometimes critical, always analytical.

I have some special expertise in this subject matter, because the INTP personality type is actually my own type. I spoke about the Eleventh Doctor, an ENTP, last time, and INTPs are the dorky, introverted cousins of ENTPs. As the description above indicates, INTPs are a highly analytical and intellectually creative personality type, ruled as they are by their urge to understand and make sense of things according to their own personal logical framework. INTPs live more in their own heads than in the physical world, as they are relentlessly contemplating ideas and generating new ideas in their heads. This also makes them, stereotypically, both quite absentminded and lazy: they prefer thinking about exciting possibilities rather than actually putting them into action. INTPs are also highly independent, both intellectually and socially, and typically crave social interaction to a lesser degree than most people.

I’ve tentatively typed one of Doctor Who’s most all-time beloved companions, Sarah Jane Smith, as an INTP (although an N.B. to this is that I’m basing my evaluation predominantly on Sarah Jane’s character in The Sarah Jane Adventures and the modern Doctor Who series, as it’s been a while since I’ve seen the classic Sarah Jane serials). I’ll admit I wouldn’t have picked Sarah Jane as an INTP at first, especially when I compare her to myself and other INTPs, but, after thinking about it, it’s the conclusion I’ve (tentatively) come to.

I’ve often seen Sarah Jane typed as an INFJ, so it’s worth beginning by detailing why I opted for INTP over INFJ. I’m definitely inclined to see Sarah Jane as a Thinking type rather than a Feeling type. While Sarah Jane, no doubt taking the Doctor as her example, holds strongly to a set of personal values which inform her worldview and guide her actions, having strong personal values is not of itself an indicator of Feeling. In any case, I’m almost certain Sarah Jane does not have high Extraverted Feeling (Fe): she isn’t highly attuned to the feelings and values of others, at least not as her first, natural instinct, nor does she particularly care what others think of her or seek the affirmation and recognition of others, as a high Fe-user would. She spent literally decades of her life in self-imposed solitude and reclusion after she and the Doctor separated, and, until she became embroiled with Maria, Luke and Clyde, seemed perfectly content with that life. That indicates strongly that she’s not an FJ type.

Rather, my impression of Sarah Jane is that she’s in fact very logical and analytical, as her dominant mode of operation. She tends to be highly rational when making decisions, and doesn’t make decisions before carefully considering all the available data. Despite being constantly engrossed in the alien and the extra-terrestrial, she brings a healthy dose of scepticism towards her work, often expressing scepticism when her young charges imagine fantastical situations involving malevolent alien intervention from things that, she insists, could easily be much more mundane. That said, she’s capable of perceiving and entertaining seemingly fanciful possibilities which her intuition presents to her, which she sets to investigating through the resources available to her and her own reason. She’s also highly inquisitive, being, after all, a journalist by vocation: she’s interested in seeking the truth, and has something of a subversive mindset in relation to powerful institutions such as governments and large corporations, treating the official platitudes of such organisations with scepticism and contempt, as in Invasion of the Bane with respect to the Bubble Shock corporation, interested, as she is, in finding the truth. This, to me, is all very indicative of the NTP type personality with Introverted Thinking and Extraverted Intuition.

More generally, what suggests Sarah Jane is an INTP to me is her lifestyle. She’s a highly independent woman, spurning the idea of working for UNIT or Torchwood. This is a very INTP thing: INTPs don’t deal well with authority and institutional hierarchy, nor do they like compromising their principles or their discretion as working for an organisation would require them to do. Sarah Jane eschews very attractive opportunities to work for UNIT and Torchwood in order to preserve her independence and autonomy. Moreover, her lifestyle in general is a very independent, and, until she became involved with Maria, Luke and Clyde (and Rani), a reclusive one—she was something of a bohemian, totally absorbed in her work. INTPs—I would suggest unhealthy INTPs—can be this way, throwing themselves wholly into some passion, whether intellectual or vocational, without feeling the need for things like love and meaningful human connection.

I anticipate that many objections to my typing of Sarah Jane as an INTP would be founded in a misunderstanding of the INTP personality. For example, that Sarah Jane spent so much of her life after parting ways with the Doctor pining after him and the life she led with him might be raised as an example of a very un-INTP thing Sarah Jane did: it seems an unusually sentimental thing for a super logical, rational INTP to do. I think such an objection would suffer from the very common fallacy of misconceiving INTPs as logical robots without emotions. INTPs feel emotions; we experience sentiment; and we can be as sentimental and intensely emotional as any other type, it’s just that we’re not comfortable trusting those feelings as part of our cognitive processes. Sarah Jane’s pining after the Doctor actually strikes me as a pretty clear manifestation of tertiary Introverted Sensing (Si): I can confirm from experience that INTPs are prone to cynically comparing the present with a happier time in the past, and find it hard to let go of memories and people (sometimes to the point of being loath to be open to new opportunities and possibilities in the present) when they’re seized by this kind of nostalgic, wistful cynicism.

Thoughts on: School Reunion

The highlight of this episode was its character focus. School Reunion brought back iconic Classic Who companion Sarah-Jane Smith and explored the dynamics of the Doctor-Companion relationship. The heartwarming reunion of the Doctor with Sarah-Jane (and K9) ought to have brought a broad smile to any Classic fan’s face. As should the very entertaining and telling interplay between Sarah-Jane and her successor, Rose. It’s clear that the Doctor’s companions, particularly the ones with whom he forms the strongest relationships, like these two, are very protective of him and jealous of their special bond with the Doctor, thus the rivalry between Rose and Sarah-Jane which played out almost like that between a wife and an ex-wife, as the episode indicated. They all think they’re special; they all think they have something special with the Doctor, and are somewhat resentful and put out when they realise the Doctor has had dozens of companions with whom he has been as close to before and after them—as Rose’s interrogation of the Doctor about her not being his first showed. They oughtn’t be so surprised, though. As the Doctor made touchingly clear, it’s too painful for him to stay with one companion for too long, to grow too attached, because he has to face watching them wither and die, and having his heart broken in the process, as he continues, ageless and eternal. This emotional dynamic between the Doctor and his companions was explored really excellently and movingly by this episode, and constituted the highlight of an otherwise mediocre story.

The episode also explored the effect travelling with the Doctor has on his companions’ lives. Sarah-Jane had evidently bottled up a lot of resentment towards the Doctor for leaving her behind. He had shown her the unbelievable, done the extraordinary with her and profoundly changed her life… and then, in her words, he “dumped” her. Back to the dull, dreary monotony of ordinary life on Earth, after all that. I think the Doctor underestimates how profoundly he affects the lives of his companions, such that he’s unwittingly wont to leave them permanently affected when he parts company with them. I don’t think the original series gave this aspect of the Doctor-Companion dynamic the attention it merited, and it’s refreshing to see that the revived series is more sensitive to the character dynamics in this respect, not only with Sarah-Jane but with subsequent companions, Rose especially. We seem to be already seeing how significantly Rose has been affected by her travels with the Doctor, as she seems to have become infatuated with him. At the end she seems immoderately put out by the prospect of Mickey’s joining them aboard the TARDIS. Compare with the end of World War Three in Series 1 when she was scolding the Doctor for not “allowing” Mickey to come aboard. She sees herself and the Doctor as having something special, love even, and Mickey as being an intruder on their special, private relationship. This will end in heartbreak.

The episode also did a good job of exploring the Doctor’s character more deeply. Apart from exploring his relationship with his companions, and the way he feels about becoming too close to them, as discussed above, the episode also delved intriguingly into the darker side of the Doctor’s character:

Finch: “Fascinating. Your people were peaceful to the point of indolence. You seem to be something new. Would you declare war on us, Doctor?”
Doctor: “I’m so old now. I used to have so much mercy. You get one warning. That was it.”

And also where the Doctor was tempted almost to join sides with the Krillitanes, tempted by the lure of absolute power, which his reason and experience tells him should not be wielded by anyone, not even the most noble-intentioned, but yet he’s tempted nonetheless. This is a far cry from the eternal goody-goody peacemaker that was the Doctor of Classic Who. We see again how the Doctor has changed since we last saw him in San Francisco in faux-Edwardian garb and long black curls. One of the revived series’ most successful motifs is exploring the way the Time War has affected the Doctor. It’s a compelling aspect of the revived series’ Doctor’s characterisation which, for me at least, never gets old (and was one reason why I didn’t like the way the events of the Time War were reversed in The Day of the Doctor). I’ve heard some say that these little glimpses we get from Ten, like here and more infamously in The Waters of Mars, show that Ten was potentially the darkest and most complex of all the Doctor’s incarnations. I’m inclined to think there’s something in that observation, and Ten’s usual irrepressible joviality, if anything, makes it all the more compelling a theory.

To say something about the plot, I’m inclined to think that, while admittedly it was not the main focus of this highly character-focussed episode, it rather let down the quality of the episode. To say the least, the plot consisted of very unimaginative, even trite, writing. The monsters, the Krillitane, were badly designed and were generally treated poorly by the production, although I’ll admit that their concept was quite interesting and had a lot of potential. For this reason I wouldn’t necessarily be opposed to their being brought back, although something fresh and interesting needs to be found to do with them, and, for goodness’ sake, change their form (at least that can actually be done). I feel like, thus far at least, Series 2 of Doctor Who has been more self-consciously a children’s show than Series 1. In this episode, this was manifest in the rubbish and simplistic plot surrounding the poorly-designed Krillitane, and in the depiction of schoolteachers as ugly shape-shifting bat-like monsters, something we all suspected as children and a children’s fantasy Doctor Who was obviously indulging. I mean, that’s not necessarily a bad idea in itself, but the way it was pitched squarely to children seems like lazy writing and production in that it lets the producers get away with pleasing the lower standards of children rather than creating something of genuine quality that all ages can appreciate.

I couldn’t find anywhere to fit these last minor points, but I think Anthony Head, or Uther Pendragon, as I know him, was superb as Mr Finch. He’s electric as the King of Camelot, and he was suitably intimidating and menacing as a giant bat in human form. He’s a great actor. And finally, I found the scene where Rose and Sarah-Jane were splitting their sides laughing at the Doctor together just gorgeous. Great writing, that bit—I was actually grinning broadly as I was watching. I wonder if this is what all the Doctor’s companions do when they meet?

Rating: 9/10.