Craig begs him to stay, saying that Sophie (his girlfriend) will be home soon, but the Doctor tells Craig that there is somewhere that he must be.
Craig tells him to wait and returns with a cowboy hat, which he tosses to the Doctor, saying, "You ride 'em, pardner!"
On his way to the TARDIS, the Doctor sees a group of kids; one of them later reflects, "I thought maybe he was a cowboy on his way to a gunfight."
I was intrigued by this cowboy hat and the associations it conjures up; in particular, this hat made me wonder, "Is the Doctor a gunslinger?"
This might seem like a silly question to ask about a man who abhors guns and violence of all kinds, but when Doctor Who is read in connection with Stephen King's The Dark Tower series (which begins with The Gunslinger), several interesting parallels arise.
[note: significant spoilers from both The Dark Tower series and seasons 6 and 7 of Doctor Who follow]
The larger structures of both texts bear similarities to each other as well. Season 6 of Doctor Who is a giant loop in time, framed by the Doctor's death on both ends. And for those of you who have read through the end of The Dark Tower, you know that King's entire 7-book series is a giant loop that Roland has to relive, time and again.
Additionally, the Doctor and Roland play similar roles in the universe. In "The Wedding of River Song," the crew of the Teselecta (a giant shapeshifting robot) tell the Doctor that, like him, they are "champions of law and order"--a role that Roland plays as well. And both the Doctor and Roland come from long lines of noble ancestry--Roland from the line of Arthur of Eld, and the Doctor from the Time Lords of Gallifrey.
But it is in the relationship between each man and his traveling companions that I find the most significant similarities. Roland travels with Eddie, Susannah, Jake, and Oy--a group bound together by fate that he calls his "ka-tet." The Doctor travels with a variety of companions, most recently Amy Pond and Rory Williams, and episodes like "The Power of Three" in Season 7 present these three as a unified team--a cube, in this case.
In spite of these close connections, however, the Doctor and Roland stand alone. Although they are both surrounded by core groups of wonderful friends and traveling companions, both gunslingers have seen too much and lived too long to really be able to fit in. And in the end, they both must leave their companions behind, or be left by them.
This tension between belonging to a group and standing alone is ultimately what brings the Doctor and Roland Deschain together--two champions of law and justice who stand against the forces of space and time to do what is right, even at great personal cost.
Both of them gunslingers.
By Jen Miller