This got me thinking about religion and faith in Doctor Who. Before I start, I should make plain that I am an agnostic whose only real belief is in what Jerome K Jerome called 'the cussedness of things in general' and is otherwise known as Sod's Law. (Yes, I did put the garden furniture out on the hottest day of the year to date and the weather changed.)
Faith and belief is not always positive in Doctor Who. For a start, there is the faith/belief versus science and reason theme which appears in many stories (Meglos, The Face of Evil and The Mutants) to name but three. More recently, the whole tenure of the Eleventh Doctor was defined by a story arc in which events are manipulated by a religious order whose primary belief is that the Doctor must be prevented from answering the oldest question on the fields of Trenzalore. On a smaller scale, faith (in anything) proves lethal in The God Complex.
In contrast, faith proves helpful in holding back Haemovores in The Curse of Fenric, and in Last of the Time Lords the Master is ultimately defeated by a form of faith in the Doctor, magnified by the Master's own Archangel network.
Tonight's episode, in contrast was not about faith, but about love, or at least the Monks' need to be loved. With the bleak ending, we need hope next week. Is the Monk trilogy actually based on 1 Corinthians 13?
"And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love" (1 Corinthians 13.13 New International Version)
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