Especially in light of previous discussions I've had with friends about the Dungeons & Dragons alignments of each of the Doctor's incarnations and adversaries (specifically, Chaotic vs. Lawful), I found this chart fascinating:



Quoth its creators:

Doctor Who: Revolutionary or Tool of the Man?"

Methods: We counted the number of stories in each season where the Doctor overthrows the status quo. (For example, in "The Savages" and "The Happiness Patrol," he encounters a stable society and leads a revolution.) Then we divided that number by the total number of stories in that season, for a percentage. Then we included other events at the time that could explain the Doctor's changing politics.

[...] In general, we noticed the Doctor is more likely to overthrow the government on alien planets, or in the distant future. When he visits present-day Earth or our history, he's an arch-conservative. (He ousts Harriet Jones as prime minister of England in "The Christmas Invasion," but that's not the same as destroying the whole government.) Also, the Doctor acted out way more during the Thatcher era than any other period. During the Blair/Gordon Brown eras, he's been quite well-behaved.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the UNIT-era Doctors seem to have been the most pro-establishment, working as they did for big government and the military industrial complex (although it disappoints my fannish heart to be faced with the reality check that Tom Baker was apparently not nearly the mad anarchist that I fancied him to be). However, as someone who's only learned to appreciate Sylvester McCoy many, many years after the fact, I was stunned to see that no less than half of his adventures ended in him overthrowing authority.

This article doesn't take into account the Doctor's relationship to his homeland.

We first meet him as a hunted exile. The Troughton ear ends with him being recaptured, tried, and punished by surely the most ultra-conservative of patrician socities (ass BBC Empire-British as they come).

Pertwee is pretty much the Englishman abroad in the Colonies, solving the natives' problems with his superior breeding.

Baker goes from being Time Lord radical to anarchist overthrowing his own government to staunch defender of the old ways reinstating what was there before on Gallifrey. There's also his weird encounter with the Sisterhood of Karn, at that stage the only females we'd seen associated with Time Lords.

By Davison's time the Time Lords are ever more incompetent and impotent, requiring his constant help to stop renegades and correct past mistakes.

Colin Baker is again tried by his own people, but by now the entire government is corrupt and out to get him and is being manipulated by secret villains.

McCoy turns out to actually perhaps secretly be a founder of the Time Lords, up there with Rassilon and Omega. "You think he's just a Time Lord?" McCoy scares Time Lords and plays with their artefacts and trappings like an adult picking up childrens' toys.

New series Doctors have been more about being "the Last Roman" (or "the Last Briton") in a cold world where the comforting firm hand of empire has long since passed into anarchy.