JO: But it really is the dawning of the age of Aquarius.<\/p>\n
DOCTOR: So?<\/p>\n
JO: Well, that means the occult. Well, you know, the supernatural and all that magic bit.<\/p>\n
DOCTOR: You know, really, Jo, I\u2019m obviously wasting my time trying to turn you into a scientist.<\/p>\n
JO: Well, how do you know there\u2019s nothing in it?<\/p>\n
DOCTOR: How? Well, I just know, that\u2019s all. Everything that happens in life must have a scientific explanation. If you know where to look for it, that is. Excuse me.<\/p>\n
JO: Yes, but suppose something was to happen and nobody knew the explanation. Well, nobody in the world, in the universe. Well, that would be magic, wouldn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n
DOCTOR: You know, Jo, for a reasonably intelligent young lady, you do have the most absurd ideas.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
And here\u2019s the second excerpt:<\/p>\n
DOCTOR: Come on, Jo, stir your stumps. Now then. All right? Now then, tell me. Who\u2019s that?<\/p>\n
(A papyrus image of a ram\u2019s head with the solar disc between its horns.)<\/p>\n
JO: An Egyptian god, isn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n
DOCTOR: Top of the class, Jo, top of the class. That\u2019s right, that\u2019s the Egyptian god Khnum, with horns. There\u2019s another one, a Hindu demon.<\/p>\n
ALL: With horns.<\/p>\n
DOCTOR: Oh. Thank you very much. And our old friend the Horned Beast.<\/p>\n
YATES: I don\u2019t get it.<\/p>\n
DOCTOR: Probably because I haven\u2019t finished, Captain Yates.<\/p>\n
YATES: Oh sorry, Doctor.<\/p>\n
HAWTHORNE: Oh, you could go on all day and all night showing us pretty pictures. I mean, horns have been a symbol of power ever since<\/p>\n
DOCTOR: Ever since man began? Exactly. But why? All right, Captain Yates, the curtains. Now creatures like those have been seen over and over again throughout the history of man, and man has turned them into myths, gods or devils, but they\u2019re neither. They are, in fact, creatures from another world.<\/p>\n
BENTON: Do you mean like the Axons and the Cybermen?<\/p>\n
DOCTOR: Precisely, only far, far older and immeasurably more dangerous.<\/p>\n
JO: And they came here in spaceships like that tiny one up at the barrow?<\/p>\n
DOCTOR: That\u2019s right. They\u2019re Daemons from the planet Daemos, which is?<\/p>\n
JO: Sixty thousand light years away on the other side of the galaxy.<\/p>\n
DOCTOR: And they first came to Earth nearly one hundred thousand years ago.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
While this might seem to reflect a consistent view of religion and superstition as outmoded foolishness and science as its ideal enlightened replacement, in fact a closer look reveals a much greater ambiguity. After all, those who reported what they saw and recognized the danger in it were apparently absolutely right and truthfully ported their experiences. The warnings of a self-identified white witch and various superstitious people during the episode seem consistently to be right on target in crucial respects. And so the Doctor\u2019s scientific dismissiveness rings somewhat hollow. He may have a superior amount of knowledge and understanding about the Daemons, but the religious and other such viewpoints do not seem to turn out to be far off the mark in their perception, at the end of the day.<\/p>\n
And so this episode, while its rhetoric is that of science instead of magic, is in fact a great example of science fiction preserving<\/em> key mythical concepts, plot elements, and characters, shifting them into a more modern, scientific framework, while keeping key elements intact. And when one reflects on this, whether in Doctor Who or Star Trek (e.g. \u201cWho Mourns for Adonais?\u201d) or any other sci-fi, the fact that so much science fiction intersects or overlaps with religious terrain should no longer seem surprising.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The session on religion and science fiction at AAR went well, and I will blog about that separately. But let me write my post now on one of the episodes I focused particular attention on in my own presentation on religion in Doctor Who: \u201cThe Daemons\u201d from the Jon Pertwee era. Two bits of dialogue […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":136,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[133,80],"tags":[503,2383,2399,2588,2765],"class_list":["post-4526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-doctor-who-science-fiction","category-religion","tag-aliens","tag-daemons","tag-damos","tag-demons","tag-doctor-who"],"yoast_head":"\n
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