I don’t know if it says more about me or about this story that I’m going to spend this post talking about its title. Or maybe there just comes a time in every Doctor Who blog for the inevitable post about story titles.

Doctor Who story titles are contentious. Several early stories don’t have official titles, which gives us ample opportunity to argue about what to call them. Me, I like 100,000 BC (as the best of an inaccurate lot), The Daleks(because I just can’t come at two stories called The Mutants) and Inside the Spaceship(which avoids calling that story The Edge of Destruction, which would bug me only because its second episode is the nearly identical The Brink of Disaster. If there was a third episode, presumably it would have been called The Verge of Devastation. And so on, unto lexicological exhaustion).

Then there are stories like this one, which inconveniently buck the series’ norm. It seems that just because of just one dodgy title card, we’re doomed to have to call this story Doctor Who and the Silurians. To me, it’s so obviously a mistake that I prefer to retrofit it into consistency and just call it The Silurians. The level of pedantry which insists on calling it Doctor Who and the Silurians extends to people who want to include punctuation marks in “The Invasion” and respect the unusual-for-the-time capitalisation of ATTACK OF THE CYBERMEN. Even though most Doctor Who story titles are capitalised.

These days, we’re sticklers when naming multi-part stories rather than giving them overarching titles. Strict accuracy requires that we call that Series 3 finale Utopia/The Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lordseven though it’s deeply irritating to do so. Still, we should think ourselves lucky that it hasn’t been retconned into the classic series, lest we have to invent still more titles for those early nameless tales. The Edge of Destruction/The Brink of Disaster might be just about acceptable, although needlessly repetitive, but can you imagine The Daleks’ Master Plan? Pedants would insist on Invasion/Invasion of the Dinosaurs. (And by “pedants,” I mean me.)

I tend to lean towards DWM archivist Andrew Pixley’s point of view, expressed in an article once where he basically said, “Call ‘em what you like. We all know which story you’re talking about.” The more salient point is that The Silurians and its awkward title reminded me that some people like to call our lead character “the Doctor” and some like to call him “Doctor Who”. And both sides often vehemently claim that the other’s wrong.

How did this start? In the 1980s, that very earnest time to be a fan, there seemed to emerge a sort of mantra about this. “The character’s name is the Doctor. Doctor Who is the title of the programme.” See? I even remember it off by heart. It was reflective of a kind of strict adherence to accuracy because the TV series never referred to the character as Doctor Who. Except for the time when it did. And when the film did. And all the times the character had been credited as such. Which were many.

So there was a kind of party line which said that, on the weight of evidence, he was called the Doctor, not Doctor Who. And that fannish insistence then came to be seen as a hallmark of obsessiveness. It was the sort of thing an Anorak might say. And it came from a place of isolation, of cutting oneself off from the rest of the world where most laymen, from the press to the TV announcers to any not-we you happened to meet, called the character Doctor Who. Insisting on calling him the Doctor was a kind of stubborn ignoring of public opinion.

Lately though, there’s been a resurgence in people wanting to call our lead character Doctor Who. It’s, in part, a deliberate swipe at the obsessiveness of fans and their insistence on clinging to an imaginary “fact”. It’s also a reaction to fans who say things like, “the character’s name is the Doctor,” which marks themselves out as fans and separates them from the majority of casual viewers. It’s a bit cooler, these days, to refer to Doctor Who. And it also has the added benefit of riling those more earnest fans. It’s a call to not take the show so seriously.

(Doctor Who is probably just more efficient anyway. “Jodie Whittaker is the new Doctor Who,” is a sentence that tells you everything you need to know. “Jodie Whittaker will play the Doctor in the next series of Doctor Who” doesn’t have the same punch. “The Doctor” is a term that always has to be put in context. “Doctor Who” explains itself.)

This divide between the Doctor fans and the Doctor Who fans gets commented on in World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls (to use its full title, and to note that it’s not called World Enough and Time/Doctor Who Falls). In it, Missy is role playing the Doctor and introduces herself as Doctor Who. When Bill asks her why, she says because it’s his real name, and there’s some cockamamie story to go with it. But the crucial bit comes when the Doctor says, “Bill, she’s just trying to wind you up.”

Writer Steven Moffat has decided to play it all out in front of our eyes, complete with some advice to the Doctor fans to calm the Foamasi down. He loves to quietly reference the funny little things which divide us as fans. It’s amazing he didn’t get round to what the rules are to qualify as a companion and whether those Morbius faces were earlier incarnations the Doctor. Or Doctor Who.

None of this offers anything of note about The Silurians. I apologise Silurian aficionados! Um, CSO, Peter Miles, lots of caves, remarkable efforts to extend the plot…

But it might be some recompense to make this observation: that if you’re the sort of person who’s going to sit through a 7 episode morality play, with fuzzy picture quality, variable colour, music played by kazoo and monsters with muppety voices who do everything by waggling their head and flashing their head light…. And then read a blog post about it… you’re probably the sort of person who thinks about the difference between the Doctor and Doctor Who. Well, that’s what I’m banking on anyway.

LINK TO Fear Her: In both, Doctor Who faces trouble with drawings on walls.

NEXT TIME: Doctor Who goes supersonic in Time-Flight.