Top Ten Stories of Doctor Who With Religious Elements and Themes

8. New Earth

As the first story of the Tenth Doctor’s first season (The Christmas Invasion being an independent, post-regeneration special), New Earth in many ways serves as the foundation by which we get to know the Tenth Doctor.

The story takes the Tenth Doctor and Rose to New Earth, to visit an old friend of theirs, the Face of Boe, who is said to be dying and has special words to give to the Doctor. While there, the Doctor finds himself in a hospital run by cat-like Nuns, the Sisters of Plentitude, only to find that the hospital has a gruesome secret behind its medicine: a secret program which creates and uses clones for experimentation with diseases, bringing them to life and death with much pain and sorrow so that elite patients can be given cures for diseases no other place knew how cure.

Once the Doctor finds out the secret of the hospital, his goal is to find a way to save the clones, curing those he meets of any diseases they have been given, while shutting down the hospital and having the nuns put under arrest for their crimes. He wants to make sure the clones are given human dignity and respect, to know that they can be loved, and that their life, as is all life, is important.

This is what makes the story religious in nature: it is an examination of the dignity of life, questioning the amoral exploitation of the life of some (or a multitude) through science. All life should be held dignified in and of itself and not just for what it can give for others. Science can achieve great things, but when it does so through exploitation, it must be stopped; wisdom is needed beyond the desire to experiment and find solutions to problems. This theme, to be sure, is found often in Doctor Who stories (such as in The Underwater Menace), but here, the theme is done to perfection, and the joy of the Doctor for truly being a doctor, a healer of souls and bodies, is one of the most heartwarming scenes of the whole series.

This love for life, this mercy and dignity which should be given to all, is further highlighted in the secondary plot element of the story.  A villain the Doctor and Rose had met before, Cassandra, “the last human,” was also dying. She was old, existing as a brain in a vat connected to a flattened out body.She wanted to find a way to survive and thought the best way was to take control the body of either Rose or the Doctor. The Doctor has to deal with her while trying to save the clones, and in doing so, she has a change of heart and comes to realize she must accept her fate. While clearly in the wrong, her change of heart actually affects the Doctor who clearly feels for her and her fate. He wants to help her, not to extend her life beyond what it should be, but to find dignity in death, to have a good death. To do this he helps take her to one of her happiest days in her life, allowing her to revisit it in a new perspective, accepting her fate while finding the happiness she never had thanks to her metanoia. Here, with belief in the dignity of life, the story also highlights the dignity of an honest death, where forgiveness reigns. Again, a very touching scene and, without intending it, an important theme which touches religious dimensions, allowing this story with its moral questions about life, death, and human dignity, to be worthy of this list even if it was not necessarily intended to be such a story.