Faith and the Doctor

Saturday 27 May 2017

"When I'm on a date, don't under any circumstances put the Pope in my bedroom!" Martha's ruined date was a moment of humour in an otherwise disturbing episode.  But what other programme would use the pontiff for a throwaway line like that?

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)

Bit of Politics there...

Saturday 13 May 2017

Eagle-eyed viewers of tonight's episode Oxygen think they may have detected a few political points and are asking on social media when Doctor Who got political.

Well, it has certainly had episodes with political references since the Pertwee era, if not before. These are just a few examples I can think of off the top of my head.  I'm sure there are many more.

• Environmentalists versus capitalism in The Green Death.
• Joining the Galactic Federation (Common Market) in The Curse of Peladon.
• Decolonisation in The Mutants.
• Margaret Thatcher in The Happiness Patrol.
• Tony Blair's 'dodgy dossier' in World War Three ('massive weapons of destruction', indeed!)

Politics aside, I thought it was a  very good episode.  I hadn't been looking forward to it, space zombies not really being my thing, but there was a very real sense of jeopardy.  This was not the sanitised space of Star Trek,  but a hostile environment, which is trying to kill you.

There were some nice touches,  such as the moment when Bill came face to face with her first blue-skinned alien.  And we didn't have an ending where everybody lived and the TARDIS crew escaped unscathed.

Looking forward to next week.