After years of writing “Can grow a beard” on CVs and applications, I’ve finally found an area I’m qualified to write about! Facial hair in Doctor Who has a prominent role, if you know where to look. Most people dismiss face-fur as the mark of a lazy man, but I contend that it’s far, far more than that. A singer needs his voice; a surgeon needs his hands; and an actor needs his face. Does that include the fuzz that sprouts when he forgets to shave? Absolutely!
There are two broad ways in which facial hair can inform the viewer. The first, most obvious, one is that facial hair signals the passage of time. Months or years can be added to a face with a beard and, in a few short seconds, we may see the emotions that come with that. Anguish and loneliness, exhaustion and grief – all of these can be conveyed by the crafting of a beard.
The second means of analysis is to relate the beard to the character himself. The beard can be a manifestation of cultural moulding as well as the character’s personality and choices. While it initially sounds a bit far-fetched to believe that these deeper messages lie within tangled strands of keratin, it’s important to note that actors and filmmakers deliberately plan and tweak the details of what their character looks like. Costume, makeup, mannerisms are all commonly manipulated to achieve the desired effect and facial hair has a powerful role here. Beards take a while to grow fully and the decision to grow one is important when a man’s job revolves around his appearance; it cannot be taken lightly. The beard can drastically change a face – I look like a toddler when shaven, but when bearded, I look like a king or a pirate or a musketeer. Or a homeless guy.
In this article, I’ll examine the facial hair of the Master and the Doctor. While this decision is the one that gives me the most to talk about, I also chose those two because the parallels between their characters adds another dimension to the analysis.
Delgado’s Master
Just look at that goatee! If you’re not jealous, you should be. It adds weight and emphasis to Roger Delgado’s chin, giving his wide face a bit of a vertical stretch so it looks a little longer. The touches of grey hint at wisdom and experience, further evidenced by the sweeping back of his hair to expose the forehead. This receding hair and thick beard balance each other out so that Delgado looks like the classy, older uncle I wish I had.
To analyse the beard, we can’t really employ the view that it signals the passage of time. While it would be very pertinent to most other characters, this approach to pogonology is almost meaningless for Delgado’s Master. As demonstrated with the regeneration of the Eleventh Doctor into the Twelfth, a Time Lord can possess an older-looking body from the moment of renewal. Therefore, unless Delgado’s incarnation of the Master is the first, and there’s been no confirmation of that, the grey in his beard could simply be a regenerative fluke.
Instead, we may examine the beard in terms of character. The Master chooses to sculpt his beard into the shape he wears and the result is neat and distinguished. Smooth cheeks, well-defined lines and every remaining hair has bowed to his will. This demonstrates power over his face, mastery and dominance. It’s difficult work taming the stray hairs and keeping the stubble at bay, so this conveys a desire to control the beard, just as he desires control over everything else.
But why have the beard at all? It’s far easier to stay clean-shaven than it is to keep a beard tidy. The answer lies in the second character trait demonstrated by this beard: vanity. I’ve already discussed how good it looks on him, and the Master knows it.
Pratt’s and Beevers’ portrayals of the Master lacked facial hair. Because they lacked hair. And faces. So we’ll move swiftly onto…
Ainley’s Tremas
(Spoilers for The Keeper of Traken)
Tremas was a Consul of Traken and Nyssa’s father. His grey beard and hair flowed freely, immediately telling us that he’s approaching the latter stages of life. Not quite there yet, but it’s on the horizon for him. Note the resemblance to depictions of Greek philosophers and Renaissance thinkers – his appearance evokes preconceived ideas of wisdom and experience. As he’s in a position of power and high standing, this makes perfect sense.
However, at the end of The Keeper of Traken, the Master takes over Tremas’ body, presumably chuckling with glee at the anagrammatic foreshadowing.
Ainley’s Master
The big, bushy beard is gone now. If we remember what it represented on Tremas’ face, we can see this transformation as the stripping away of all that time and wisdom. I believe this was intended to be viewed as a perverted form of regeneration; it’s a renewal of the Master but a corruption of Tremas.
While the Master becomes young, it’s an ascension from the burned and decrepit body he’d previous inhabited. However, as Tremas becomes young, as represented by the dark hair and short beard, he loses the man he had grown into. He loses the symbol of the wise philosopher, he loses the mark of dignity and experience. As the Master ascends, Tremas regresses.
A case can be made for the view that Tremas’ visual corruption must occur in order to become the Master onscreen. After all, the Master represents those deepest, devilish urges for power and conquest. For the peaceful Tremas to become that character, he must bend to the Master’s will. His beard is tamed, refined and controlled. Also, the Master’s plans are irresponsible and impulsive at times while Tremas’ beard represents wisdom. While cunning, the Master is not a very wise man, so he twists Tremas’ facial hair into something the Master can relate to – an ornament of vanity, hearkening back to Delgado’s incarnation.
But despite the resemblance to Delgado’s beard, this one is different. Gone are the touches of grey, which further underline the abandonment of wisdom in favour of youth. This goatee is also thinner, a pale imitation of Delgado’s furry Masterpiece. Similarly, Ainley’s Master isn’t truly the Time Lord that Delgado’s was. He’s now a possessed Trakenite, a mortal shadow of what he once was. His ‘regeneration’ was a perverse abomination, bearing only the slightest of resemblances to the Time Lord process.
He’s still vain; he’s still power-hungry; his beard is still cartoonishly evil. This man is still the Master, but he’s a fallen and crippled Master, he’s just hiding his vulnerability behind the face of Nyssa’s father.
The War Doctor
I’m skipping Tom Baker’s sideburns because it was very difficult to see them under his hair, hat and scarf. John Hurt’s beard is more prominent and there’s more to say about it.
In The Night of the Doctor, we glimpsed the War Doctor’s reflection shortly after the Eighth’s regeneration. No beard. Then, in The Name of the Doctor, we see him with a beard. Time has passed, long enough for the dark hair to turn grey and a beard to grow. From the Doctor’s point of view, the Time War clearly occupied a large chunk of his life.
Now we can examine the character of the beard. Firstly, it’s a goatee. For decades, the goatee in Who has been associated with the Master and now the Doctor sports one. Perhaps it’s a coincidence, but that’s a boring answer. More likely, the parallel between him and the Master is being deliberately emphasised by both the creators and the character. I say “the character” because his cheeks are bare. The Doctor has chosen this beard and I’d contend that he’s chosen it to compare himself with the Master.
And it’s a fair comparison in his eyes. This Doctor is now a soldier. A killer, a gambler, a man who will murder a few to save the many. He has so thoroughly abandoned his rules that the Master, as an amoral renegade, may be the only person he feels safe relating to. After all, philosophies aside, he and the Master are very similar.
This parallel coupled with shame may explain the beard. It’s shame which drives his future selves to reject him and drives him to reject his own name. Shame may also drive him to hide his face, to wear a mask. This underlines the distance between him and the normally clean-shaven Doctor whilst strengthening his connection to the Master.
However, while similar to him, the Doctor is not the Master and is certainly not as vain. This is reflected in the scruffiness of the beard and the wisps of hair sprouting from his cheeks; he’s clearly not maintaining it as well as the Master would. This serves as reassurance that the Doctor, while similar to him, is not the Master. And perhaps, this scruffiness can be seen as hope for some sort of redemption, evidence that the old Doctor is still in there somewhere.
The Eleventh Doctor
The Doctor, by virtue of his Time Lordliness, defies strict linear time. He ages linearly along his own timestream, but it’s hugely out of sync with the rest of the universe. In addition, his appearance defies linearity via regeneration, showing no general trend in the visible age of his incarnations.
When the Doctor loses his timelessness, however, it’s a shock. It’s a loss of the freedom and power he’s had since he ran away from Gallifrey. So when the youthful Matt Smith sported a beard in the Day of the Moon and the Wedding of River Song, we immediately knew that the Doctor was stuck on the ‘slow path’ with us and that time was passing for him.
Aging the Doctor is a simple way of raising the stakes. It has been used four times in the NuWho era, but only on the second and third occasions, shown in the aforementioned episodes, was this done by adding a beard. The fourth occasion occurred in The Time of the Doctor, and it adds an interesting dimension to the concept of aging the Doctor.
Either the Eleventh Doctor’s chin went bald, or he’d been shaving over the 900ish years spent defending Christmas. Given that he’s previously kept his face clean-shaven most of the time, it’s reasonable to suppose that he’d been shaving at least some of the time on Trenzalore. But what does it mean? Why should anyone care about whether the Doctor shaves?
It’s a question of identity. We can look at the first occasion the Doctor was aged in NuWho – the Sound of Drums/The Last of the Time Lords. The Master (using something that wasn’t his TCE for unknown reasons) aged the Tenth Doctor into Gollum to weaken and humiliate him. It works because the Master took away parts of the Doctor that he secretly prized: his dashing good looks, his height, his hair and his athleticism.
The Time of the Doctor is a similar thing, but it’s the culmination of life taking things away from the Doctor since he regenerated. Initially, he was an innocent hero, a boyish wizard rushing about and righting wrongs. Series 6 showed us the unsavoury consequences, and the ideal of simple, innocent heroism was replaced with cautious, conscientious heroism. And then, Series 7 robbed the Doctor of his friends and repeatedly questioned his morality and heroism before the War Doctor resurfaced. Yes, the anniversary special allowed him to prevent the genocide he’d regretted for years, but the loss of innocence still remained. This is evident when discussing a blood-drenched final death on Trenzalore: The Tenth Doctor struggled to accept it, but the Eleventh had given up on denying it. He’s had to abandon the black-and-white morality he once held, in favour of the realisation that a battlefield might not be the least apt setting for his death.
Then he gets there, he fights, he gets old. And he shaves. Because time has already stolen his cherished worldview as well as his mobility, his hearing and patches of his memory. He won’t lose his face too. He wants to die as the Doctor he is, the Doctor he chose to be. So he keeps hold of what youth he can by shaving, and probably chuckling about his resemblance to his first and youngest incarnation.
It’s a unique instance of aging the Doctor in two respects. Firstly, he could easily have avoided staying on Trenzalore. He could have run, but he stayed in that stalemate by choice, thus aging by choice. Secondly, this is the only instance so far in which the Doctor has actively opposed the aging process. It’s also the only occasion in which he’s been allowed to, but it quietly illustrates the Doctor’s defiance in the face of the inevitable rules of getting old.
And that’s it.
Both the Doctor and the Master wore beards that reflected decisions which, in turn, reflected their characters. Who they are can be worn on their faces, if you know how to read them. Or how to use the material available to create a semi-coherent argument. But at least it’s fun to think about!
