There used to be limits to my nerdiness.\u00a0 Of course I liked Star Wars<\/em> (who doesn\u2019t?).\u00a0 I fessed up to liking Star Trek<\/em>\u2013but only Next Generation<\/em>, not those other weird spinoff series.\u00a0 Then Netflix came and I binged on Deep Space Nine<\/em> and discovered it was the best Trek <\/em>of them all.\u00a0 I watched the rebooted Battlestar Galactica,<\/em> because it was cool, but not the \u201870s original, because it was corny.<\/p>\n There was one line I wouldn\u2019t cross.\u00a0 I was dimly aware of some uber-geeky British sci-fi series from the \u201860s that was, inexplicably, still on the air and wildly popular with the sort of crowd that goes to comic-con in full costume.\u00a0 That is decidedly not me; therefore, I would not be watching Doctor Who<\/em>.\u00a0 Ever.<\/p>\n Then one day out of sheer boredom I decided to watch a few episodes to prove how terrible and unwatchable the show was.\u00a0 And I proved to myself beyond doubt that Doctor Who <\/em>is one of the best TV shows of all time.\u00a0 It celebrates its 50th anniversary this week.\u00a0 Don\u2019t laugh.\u00a0 I\u2019m too busy learning to tie a bowtie for the next convention.<\/p>\n I.<\/p>\n I\u2019d say Doctor Who <\/em>needs no introduction, but that\u2019s not really true.\u00a0 Like all cult phenomenon, outsiders (as I, alas, used to be), most certainly do need an introduction.\u00a0 But introductions inevitably make the material sound daft: the Doctor is an alien time-traveler whose ship is a blue 1960s British police box that\u2019s bigger on the inside; he travels about in time and space armed only with his sonic screwdriver, accompanied by a human companion, having adventures and saving the world from Daleks, Cybermen, The Master, and sometimes himself.\u00a0 The show is full of idiosyncrasies and mythology that delight fans and confuse the uninitiated.\u00a0 The ship is a sentient being called the TARDIS (Time and Relative Dimension in Space).\u00a0 The Doctor is a Time-Lord who regenerates after his body is killed, which is why the show gets a new actor to play the lead role every couple of seasons (the twelfth actor begins his run this fall).\u00a0 And so forth.<\/p>\n But that introduction fails to do the show justice.\u00a0 The description of the setting and the rules of the fictional world is just the furniture:\u00a0 the real gem of the show is the people, the stories, and the feel<\/em> of the show.\u00a0 The show is weird, to be sure, but it is charming; it exists on whimsy; it doesn\u2019t take its own conceits too seriously.\u00a0 Star Trek<\/em> has legions of fans and script-writers who intimately know Treks\u2019 fictional laws of physics and go barking mad at the least deviation from them (ahem, like I did in my review<\/a> of Into Darkness). Doctor Who<\/em> has no such thing.\u00a0 Instead of trying to concoct plausible-sounding science, the Doctor waves his hand, and says its just a bunch of \u201ctimey wimey\u201d stuff.\u00a0 That\u2019s the screenwriter\u2019s way of saying \u201cthe plot required this to happen\u201d with a wink in their eye. The show puts on just enough flash and weird sets to delight sci-fi geeks, and quickly moves past them to focus on the people\u2013most centrally, the Doctor.<\/p>\n II.<\/p>\n The Doctor never carries a gun, doesn\u2019t believe in violence, and almost always outwits his enemies instead of killing or overpowering them.\u00a0 He always gives bad guys a choice before defeating them: on principle, even the worst should be given the opportunity to repent.\u00a0 He even tried to help the Daleks (think Nazis) evolve into a more compassionate, less hateful version of themselves until they turned on each other.\u00a0 He is cosmopolitan and egalitarian:\u00a0 he respects everyone, tolerates everyone, loves everyone\u2013except and until they pose a threat to others.\u00a0 That is because the Doctor delights in life.\u00a0 He is the ultimate tourist.\u00a0 He travels because there is simply too much to see he can\u2019t imagine staying still for any length of time.\u00a0 The universe is filled with mystery and beauty and wonder, and he wants to see everything and know everything and love everything.<\/p>\n In other words, the Doctor is the god of liberalism, the projected wish-fulfillment of worshippers who want a kinder, gentler god.\u00a0 I\u2019m not making this up.\u00a0 The Doctor\u2019s similarity to a deity are so obvious that others have remarked on it (here<\/a> and here<\/a>).\u00a0 The Doctor is immensely powerful.\u00a0 He did not create the universe, but he did \u201cre-boot\u201d it once.\u00a0 He saves the world, the universe, Time, and Reality, in successive season finales.\u00a0 He boasts in his title, \u201cTime Lord.\u201d\u00a0 He became so big that a religion was founded to oppose him and bring him down (Seasons 5 and 6) : he defeated them too.\u00a0 He is curious, compassionate, loyal and, occasionally, self-sacrificial.\u00a0 He is all that we want in a god.<\/p>\n Including sin.\u00a0 God is more approachable if he is flawed and fallible, like the rest of us.\u00a0 The Doctor is not perfect\u2013that would make his presence intolerable and the show unwatchable.\u00a0 The Doctor\u2019s original sin is that in the far past (never shown in the actual show), he ended the legendary Time War with not one act of genocide, but two:\u00a0 he annihilated the Daleks and the Time Lords, his own people, a double sin for which he atones for the rest of his life by never killing again.\u00a0 He both embraces and repents from his role as Judge and Executioner.\u00a0 When the Doctor\u2019s wrath is aroused, he is Judgment Day to the wrongdoer.\u00a0 He is known as The Oncoming Storm to the surviving Daleks.\u00a0 But he grows arrogant, unhinged, when no one is there to check him.\u00a0 He once declared himself \u201cTime Lord Victorious,\u201d because he survived when no one else did.\u00a0\u00a0 If the Doctor is a god, he is a god who is aware of his role in the Old Testament, and fights to escape it.<\/p>\n Finally, the Doctor is lonely.\u00a0 He is the last of his kind, and he cannot stand his own company.\u00a0 He knows that he needs companions who will admire him, love him, and, by their love, restrain him from his worst instincts.\u00a0 He travels with humans, whom he loves and admires because of their adaptability, their potential, their humanity (the show is given to cheesy speeches about how great humanity is).\u00a0 The Doctor is a god who returns our worship back onto us.\u00a0 When all else fails, the Doctor always puts his faith in his companions, and they always come through.<\/p>\n III.<\/p>\n There is an old joke that God made man in his image, and we returned the favor.\u00a0 We have a tendency to image a god who is just like us, just a little bit better\u2013someone we can identify with but look up to, who challenges and inspires us without setting impossible standards.\u00a0 That has never been truer than with the Doctor.\u00a0 The Doctor is the expression of our highest hopes for ourselves.\u00a0 He is a god we can imagine traveling with because he is enormous fun and not too demanding.\u00a0 The God of the Bible\u2013absolute, terrifying, perfect, and all-powerful\u2013is far more alien than the time-traveling Doctor.\u00a0 (Yet, ironically, in Jesus, God is also more<\/em> human than the Doctor).<\/p>\n How comforting to think that God, in his loneliness, his neediness, comes to us so that we can help him through our love and admiration.\u00a0 That God is on some eternal quest of atonement, repenting for his past crimes against the universe, and that we are there to help him along in his own spiritual journey.\u00a0 In this universe\u2013very far from the one of the Bible\u2013it is not we who rebelled, need saving, or must work for sanctification, but him.<\/p>\n As with liberal theology, the weakness here is its blindness to human evil and its attendant low view of the divine.\u00a0 The show has a vast menagerie of villains, but they are rarely human beings:\u00a0 evil is projected onto other races and forces.\u00a0 The show wanders into hopeless naivet\u00e9 and cheesiness when the plot requires humanity to show some great act of collective love or sacrifice (we always come through).\u00a0 Our greatest crime is stupidity; once we are enlightened, we almost never stray.\u00a0 Once we are enlightened, we are virtually indistinguishable from the god whom we worship.\u00a0 But if the best we can do is worship ourselves, it shows, I think, how small our religious imagination really is.<\/p>\n The world of the Doctor is immensely appealing, which accounts for its longevity.\u00a0 The show premiered in 1963.\u00a0 Fifty years is an astounding run for any artifact of pop culture.\u00a0 The clever trick of requiring the doctor to regenerate every so often enables the show to reboot itself regularly. But even without that plot device, something like the Doctor would be on our screens anyway.\u00a0 The idea is just too appealing and too pervasive and too easy to exploit.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Happy 50th birthday to the lonely god in a blue box.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1123,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[120,7,424],"tags":[546,469,547,548],"class_list":["post-1908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fantasy-films","category-films","category-tv-show","tag-david-tennant","tag-doctor-who","tag-matt-smith","tag-peter-capaldi"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/266\/2013\/11\/DOCTOR-WHO-50TH-ANNIVERSARY-THE-DAY-OF-THE-DOCTOR-5_BBCA-insert-2.jpg\" "\\"STRICTLY")
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