SF Gospel

Doctor Who: Locking Hitler in the Cupboard

When the title card came up at the end of "A Good Man Goes to War," Doctor Who's last episode before the summer hiatus, I couldn't help but feel a bit of trepidation at what were no doubt intended to be thrilling words: "Let's Kill Hitler." After all, one of the central theses of everything I've written about Doctor Who over the last 8 years is that the Doctor doesn't kill anybody, no matter how bad they are. Those three words held a Damoclean sword over pretty much everything I have to say about Doctor Who and ethics.

Imagine my relief, then, when those three words are uttered not by the Doctor, but by a hotheaded TARDIS-hijacker who is holding the Doctor at gunpoint. It's Amy and Rory's childhood friend Mels, not our erstwhile explorers themselves, who wants to right the greatest of wrongs with a bit of murder. The Doctor's peaceloving ways appear safe... for the time being.

It's surprising, given the anticipation this episode's title was meant to create and sustain, how quickly Hitler is dropped from the story. After a pretty brief showdown in the Fuhrer's office, he is locked in a cupboard-- literally, in that the Doctor wants to get him out of the way, and figuratively, in that the problem of Hitler has been pushed aside. And Hitler is, indeed, a problem for Doctor Who, as flashbacks through Mels' history emphasize. In her youth, Mels got in trouble in school for declaring that "a major factor in Hitler's rise to power was the fact that the Doctor didn't stop him"-- which got her sent to the principal's office. But in the universe of this show, she's right-- the Doctor didn't stop him. That's a problem that can't be locked in a cupboard as easily as the man himself was in this episode, and I can only hope that this scene wasn't the last word on the matter. 

The rest of the episode suggests that this kind of conundrum is very much on the minds of the writers. The main baddie of this episode isn't Hitler himself, but the miniature crew of a robot doppelganger that travels through time pursuing and punishing war criminals-- doing, at first glance, what the Doctor can't, or won't. But we learn that their mission is not to prevent these war criminals from committing their atrocities, but rather simply to punish them at the ends of their lives, to "give them hell." This is a base form of retributive justice that can offer only the coldest of comforts. It's a kind of justice the Doctor has no interest in: it averts no atrocity; it soothes no grief; it simply offers a bureaucrat's sense of balance: this person caused pain, and received pain in return. The Doctor, naturally, wants no part of it.

In contrast to this is the Doctor's own mission in this episode, as he meets River Song at more-or-less the earliest point in her timeline that we have yet seen (not counting infancy, that is, or as-yet-to-be-revealed incarnations, or... oh, never mind). Originally, it seems, she was programmed to kill the Doctor, and that's what she's doing here. Moreover, we discover that, in the grand database of our miniaturized vigilante squad, River is considered the greatest war criminal in history. The Doctor doesn't want to punish her, or even to defeat her-- rather, he wants to remake this cruel, savage River into the hero we know she will become. That is the Doctor's brand of justice: transformation, rather than retribution. 

But some facts can't be simply transformed. Hitler is still lurking in that cupboard... How will the Doctor deal with him when he gets out? 

Do good Time Lords need rules?

[I’m going to go ahead and assume that, if you’re reading this, you’ve seen “When a Good Man Goes to War.” Meaning 1) I’m not going to bother with a summary, and 2) consider yourself spoiler-warned.]

Well, that sure was something. The last episode of Doctor Who before the mid-season break feels almost like a finale, answering as it does the biggest mystery of the last three years—who the heck River Song is.* It was great to see a greatest-hits type roundup of some of the neater minor characters, aliens, and neato costumes of the last few seasons, too. But most interesting to me was this exchange between the Doctor and mysterious-eyepatch-villain-lady Madame Kovarian:

Mme KOVARIAN: “Good men have too many rules.”

THE DOCTOR: “Good men don’t need rules… Today is not the day to find out why I have so many.”

Moral implications within moral implications there: first, the concept of an innate moral imperative; the idea of an obtainable absolute good—and then, the revelation that the Doctor does not necessarily have that moral imperative, and that he has not obtained that absolute good. 

Step back, then, and take a look at the army the Doctor has assembled to face down the military-church hybrid on Demons Run. (Yep, it’s the same cleric-military from “The Time of Angels”—more on that later.) The Doctor has assembled some old friends, from the space pirates of “Curse of the Black Spot” to the Spitfire pilots of “Victory of the Daleks" to Dorium, the blue-skinned fence. There were a couple characters we haven’t seen before, too: Madame Vastra, a sword-wielding Silurian from Victorian England, and Strax, a Sontaran warrior serving as a nurse as penance for an unknown offence.

The Doctor has worked with warriors before—heck, he spent years as a member of UNIT, which was basically the alien-fighting branch of the British Armed Forces. But his willingness to team up with Vastra—who we first see moments after she’s eaten someone (sure, it was Jack the Ripper, but still) and who kills one of the Church’s soldiers on Demons Run—poses an interesting moral conundrum. The Doctor has always shown an unwillingness to kill, or to participate in killing, no matter the purpose. For him, the ends have never justified the means. In “Genesis of the Daleks,” he had the opportunity to destroy the first batch of Dalek mutants, thereby stopping the Daleks from ever being created and saving every life they would otherwise have taken—but he couldn’t bring himself to kill. The 9^th and 10^th Doctor were fairly dark, as incarnations go, but that darkness was internal—it meant lots of brooding, not lots of violence. The 11^th Doctor, for all his surface happy-go-luckiness, is a much more dangerous Doctor by far. In the opening story of this season, he essentially instructs the entire human race to murder the Silence—not to imprison them, or drive them away, but to kill them. And he does so by implanting a message in the film footage of the moon landing—writing violence into an image of peace and human achievement. And when the title card announcing the next episode states “Let’s Kill Hitler”—well, one beigins to think that perhaps this Doctor might not have hesitated to kill that first batch of Daleks.

And it is in this context that we learn that the Doctor does not consider himself a “good man”—that he has had to make rules for himself to keep him from crossing certain moral lines. Furthermore, we learn that the Doctor’s actions have begun to affect galactic culture: the word “Doctor,” in some languages, no longer means “healer,” but rather “fierce warrior.”** He is affecting the very language with which reality is described and stories are told. (This, I think, is the reason for the future military using ecclesiastical titles: the meaning of words, in this part of the future, can no longer be trusted.) And when is the last time we saw a great assembly of alien warriors including the Judoon and the Sontarans? …When all of the “bad guy” aliens teamed up to imprison the Doctor in the Pandorica. And that episode, too, played with the Doctor's moral position, depicting him as a mythological monster, "a nameless, terrible thing soaked in the blood of a billion galaxies, the most feared being in all the cosmos." I may be reading too much into things—I do tend to pay extraordinarily close attention to the Doctor’s ethical decisions—but I think the Steven Moffat wants us to see the Doctor sliding away from his past morality and into murkier territory. Hmmm… Is the Valeyard on the horizon?

*I don’t think it’s bragging to say I had pretty much guessed it—but more specifically, I knew there had to be something going on with water names!

**Makes you wonder about Dr. River Song's honorific...

Doctor Who: Alpha and Omega

The fifth season of Doctor Who has ended, and so too has my series on the show for Religion Dispatches. Check out the final installment for James McGrath's thoughts on the Doctor's role in the (re)creation of the universe, and my discussion of Rory Williams, the robot who thought he was a man. See below for separate links to every post in the series (including a few that I seem to have neglected to mention here before. It's been a busy summer, folks).

Part one, discussing "The Eleventh Hour," "The Beast Below," and "Victory of the Daleks," plus some general thoughts on Doctor Who.

Part two, on "The Time of Angels."

Part three, on "The Vampires of Venice." 

Part four, on "Amy's Choice."

Part five, on "The Hungry Earth."

Part six, on "Cold Blood."

Part seven, on "Vincent and the Doctor."

Part eight, on "The Lodger."

Part nine, on "The Pandorica Opens."

Part ten, on "The Big Bang."

My deepest thanks to my co-contributors Henry Jenkins, Joseph Laycock, and especially James McGrath!

Doctor Who, vampires, and reenchantment

The third post in Religion Dispatches' series on Doctor Who is up now. This time, guest smartie Joe Laycock kicks off the discussion with some thoughts on the disenchantment of vampires. Check it out here.

Planetary Profiling: Doctor Who pt. 2

The second entry in my series on Doctor Who for Religion Dispatches is up now. This week James McGrath and I discuss the Weeping Angels two-parter, "Time of the Angels" and "Flesh and Stone."

The first post in the series is available here, and the current one is here.

The Doctor Who Media Club kicks off

Exciting news: I am spearheading a weekly series for Religion Dispatches exploring the intersection of religion, ethics, and maybe a bit of politics in the current season of Doctor Who! For the first week it's just me and James McGrath (of Exploring Our Matrix) posting, but we expect other contributors to join us shortly. In this week's installment, I discuss why the Doctor is an anarchist messiah, and James considers the Doctor's attitude to romance, interstellar exploitation, and whether or not the past should be changed (should one find oneself inside a time machine). Check it out here and check back again every week for new installments!

The Muppet Wicker Man

 
Why didn't somebody think of it sooner? An online comic book adaptation of the '70s bizarro-pagan horror classic The Wicker Man, starring... the Muppets. Read it fast, before the lawsuits hit.

And, while you're at it, check out my review of The Wicker Man from a few years ago, in which I explored the movie's depiction of clashing religious ideologies.

UPDATE:

Oh, hey, it's embeddable:

SF Signal's Mind Meld: SF TV shows that deserve a remake

The lovely folks at SF Signal have invited me to participate in another Mind Meld column, this one on long-lost SF shows that deserve a remake. Check out my answer here, alongside a bunch more. There's an impressive array of responses ranging from Space: 1999 to Darkwing Duck, including a couple very obscure ones that sound fascinating (I've got to track down The Starlost and Otherworld).

MIND MELD: SciFi TV Shows That Deserve A Remake (with Videos)

Some links from the last month

Continuing the great catch-up project, here are some links from the last month or so:

At Tor.com, Teresa Jusino ponders religion, science, and science fiction. I'm interested in her approach to the "provable" deities of (for instance) Avatar and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:

Most people who debate science vs. religion tend to ask the same boring question. Does God exist?  Yawn. However, the question in all of these stories is never “Do these beings really exist?” The question is “What do we call them?” It’s never “Does this force actually exist?” It’s, “What do we call it?” Or “How do we treat it?” Or “How do we interact with it?” One of the many things that fascinates me about these stories is that the thing, whatever it is—a being, a force—always exists. Some choose to acknowledge it via gratitude, giving it a place of honor, organizing their lives around it and allowing it to feed them spiritually. Others simply use it as a thing, a tool, taking from it what they will when they will then calling it a day. But neither reaction negates the existence of the thing.

I like the treatment of "Does God exist?" as a dull and tired debate. The first thing that question brings to my mind is "How are you defining 'God'?" Chances are the questioner is rolling up more than a few assumptions with that word. Even the most atheistic of scientists (and, yes, I'm thinking specifically of Richard Dawkins) can start to sound downright mystical when they start talking about the vastness of the universe or the philosophical concept of a "scientific law." So, yes, I think Jusino is right to argue that "what we call it" and "how we treat it" are more interesting ways to approach the interplay of science and religion than tired old atheist-versus-creationist fight.

Joe Laycock reviews Daybreakers for Religion Dispatches, finding Eucharistic themes amidst the blood-soaked chaos. I haven't seen the movie, but its vampire society is an intriguing premise (however much it may crib from the end of I Am Legend). And for the Marty Martin Center, Mr. Laycock has also penned a brief discussion of Avatar that draws a parallel between the planet-ravaging, sinful humans of that film with the planet-ravaging, sinful humans of C.S. Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet and its sequels. I recently read Joe's excellent exploration of real life vampires, Vampires Today, which is an intriguing and extraordinarily well-written look at a subculture with some unexpectedly religious elements. And you can read it too.

For the Guardian, Toby Lichtig takes a quick look at secular apocalypticism. He points out an interesting contrast between environmental nightmares and Cold War nuclear scenarios:

Put simply, the difference between the current threat and older ones is this: we are all, personally, to blame. Almost everyone (especially in the well-read west) is doing their bit to make the world a warmer place, and thus we are all implicated in the calamity that will this time surely spell the End.

This pushes secular apocalypse back into religious territory. Nuclear war can't be framed as punishment for individual sin, but environmental collapse can. Of course, it's not just climate-change nightmares that can be framed this way: as I pointed out in my review of Cloverfield, some giant monster attacks may be caused by your inconsiderate cell phone use. 

Scott Timberg has written a six-part series on Philip K. Dick's Orange County years for the Los Angeles Times, which is particularly interesting because it was in those years that Dick had his vivid religious experiences. Timberg tackles that topic in part four, treating it generally as a "mystery" that can never be solved, and giving a bit too much credence to Thomas Disch, who I believe was sorely mistaken about the nature of Dick's religious thought. It would have been nice to have a paragraph or two about the actual content of Dick's theological writing-- but I guess asking for theology in the LA Times might be a fool's errand.

Religion Dispatches is running a weekly feature on Caprica. 

And that is all for now-- though I'm not actually quite caught up on my RSS feeds, so more may follow shortly.

You should watch Caprica, because it is a good show.

In case you haven't seen a billboard lately, Caprica premieres tonight on Syfy. The pilot is quite good, and, as I explained in my review a couple months ago, some of the same religious questions that drove Battlestar Galactica are central to the story:

Hidden deep in the heart of the Caprica pilot is a "how the leopard got its spots" tale—but for "leopard" read "Cylons," and for "spots" read "monotheistic religion." If anything, the conflict between monotheism and polytheism will be even more central to Caprica than it was to BSG.

And if the advertising image at left is any indication, the show will explore the preamble to apocalyptic war as a fall from Eden-- so the "sin" theme that emerged toward the end of BSG should be pretty important, too. I am certainly looking forward to seeing how the series unfolds.

Read my review of the Caprica pilot here. 

(Oh, and that opening thing about the network trying to tank the series? I think the ridiculous amount they seem to have been spending on advertising for the last month or two disproves that little theory.)