'Break the Cycle' - Doctor Who's sermon on Matthew 6 and the Iraq war.

Doctor Who usually peaks around Remembrance Day. This year is no exception, the following dialogue from Saturdays episode (starts from about 32 mins in, full section from 30m 22s). It's a cracking script & dialogue, covering war, forgiveness, repentance, Iraq, pride, sin, you name it. The Doctor is in blue, 'Zygella' the adversary in red, trying to justify her actions... 

It’s not fair

Oh it’s not fair, oh I didn’t realise that, it’s not fair! You know what? My TARDIS doesn’t work properly and I don’t have my own personal tailor.

The things don’t equate

These things have happened Zygella, they are facts. You just want cruelty to beget cruelty. You’re not superior to people who were cruel to you, you’re just a whole bunch of new cruel people. A whole bunch of new cruel people, who’ll be cruel to some other people, who’ll end up being cruel to you. The only way anyone can live in peace is if they’re prepared to forgive...why don’t you break the cycle.

Why should we?

What is it that you actually want?

War

Ah, right! And when this war is over, when you have a homeland free from humans (insert own personal enemies here) what do you think it’s going to be like? You know, have you thought about it, have you given it any consideration? Because you’re very close to getting what you want. What’s it going to be like? Paint me a picture. Are you going to live in houses, are people going to work, will there be holidays? Oh, will there be music? Do you think people will be allowed to play violins? who’s going to make the violins? Well? Oh, You don’t actually know do you? Because like every other tantrumming child in history, Bonnie, you don’t actually know what you want.  

So let me ask you a question about this brave new world of yours. When you’ve killed all the bad guys, and when its all perfect and just an fair, when you have finally got It exactly the way you want it, what are you going to do with the people like you, the troublemakers. How are you going to protect your glorious revolution from the next one.

We’ll win

Oh will you? Well maybe… maybe you will win. But nobody wins for long, the wheel just keeps on turning, so come on, break the cycle.

… when you fire that first shot, no matter how right you feel, you have no idea who’s going to die. You don’t know whose children are going to scream and burn! How many hearts will be broken! How many lives shattered. How much blood will be spilt before everyone has to do what they were always going to have to do from the very beginning – sit down and talk! … listen to me, listen, I just want you to think. Do you know what thinking is? It's just a fancy word for changing your mind.

I will not change my mind

Then you will die stupid. Alternatively, you could step away..

..No, I’m not stopping this Doctor..do you think they’ll let me go after what I’ve done

You’re all the same you screaming kids, you know that? 'Look at me, I’m unforgiveable', well here’s the unforeseeable – I forgive you. After all you’ve done. I forgive you. 

Doctor Whumanist: Can the Physician Heal Himself?

The rebooted Doctor Who has a pretty thorough track record of raiding the cupboard marked 'Christianity' and smearing the contents:
 - Not one, but two lots of deadly angels, the stone ones, and the 'Angel Hosts' on the spaceship Titanic.

 - The clergy are now an armed unit of soldiers, who work for the Church of the Papal Mainframe, the evolution of the present church into a military authority. The Church decides the Doctor is a threat to the universe and a whole series is centred around their despatch of River Song to assassinate him.

 - Monks: oh yes, headless monks, not very pleasant either.

 - Confession: has its own species, the grim looking 'Silence', who maintain confidentiality by making people forget they've ever met them. Bad lot. Another enemy for the Doctor to save the world from.

 - And the Daleks recast as evangelical fundamentalists worshipping their Emperor and zealously destroying everything in their devotion.

 - religious faith portrayed as a self-destructive mania

meanwhile creating secular/scifi analogues of spiritual practice: e.g. the regeneration of David Tennants Doctor through the 'prayers' of the planet via the Archangel satellite network (actually, people all thinking about him at the same time), creating a computerised form of eternal life, and an updated Exodus story broadcast around the Passover season.

The casting may have changed, but the Richard Dawkins subplots haven't: here's a dialogue clip from Episode 1 of the new series:
"I will not die I will reach the promised land" (robot baddie)

"There isn't any promised land, this is just a superstition that you've picked up from all the humanity that you've stuffed inside yourself." (Doctor)

Here we go again....

Both episodes have ended with a mysterious character, Missy, who seems to know the Doctor, welcoming people to Paradise, the promised land, 'Heaven'. Here beginneth the story arc for the current series, and I somehow doubt that 'Heaven' will turn out to be paradise.

CS Lewis wrote the Narnia books as a deliberate attempt to appeal to the imagination and feeling, rather than reason, to commend the Christian message. Worship, sacrifice, resurrection, judgement, were experienced positiviely by the characters (and the reader) rather than described in theological words. Doctor Who seems to be doing the reverse: working its way through the Christian imagination, and recasting everything in it as either villanous or imaginary.

And yet the parasite needs the host in order to feed: Episode 2 has the Doctor trying to save the soul of a Dalek (his words), by appealing to how he felt when he saw a star born, and how that feeling showed him the truth about the universe. How postmodern, thinking with our feelings. The doctor tries to change the Dalek by putting himself into the Daleks mind, who has a conversion experience as the Doctor redescribes the universe to him: "I see beauty, I see endless divine perfection"  which the Doctor encourages him to make it a part of himself, put inside himself and live by. Is this a scifi/humanist version of the Holy Spirit? But the Dalek goes off the rails, because his saviour is himself not whole: "I see into your soul Doctor, I see beauty, I see divinity, I see...... hatred. I see your hatred of the Daleks, and it is good!" And back to EXTERMINATE it goes, just with a different target.

The Doctor asks at the end of Clara, 'Am I a good man?' to which she responds 'I don't know, but I think you try to be and that's probably the point.'

Great line, and I'm impressed by a lot of the scriptwriting so far. But even as Doctor Who debunks faith, it actually makes a profound point: yes we can change, but we need a power to change us that isn't itself tainted by the same thing we are. An imperfect saviour will not do. What we put inside ourselves, what we live by, what we are saved by, has to be entirely pure in order to work.

(use the 'doctor who' tag for previous posts on moral/spiritual issues in Britains favourite sci fi show)

The Right Honourable Doctor?

It's emerging that several members of the Cabinet were hoping to be named as the new Doctor Who, and are disappointed that the role has gone to a fictional spin doctor. Various names, and the reasons they were turned down, are emerging:

Teresa May: was planning to repaint the TARDIS with the UK Border Agency logo and travel the universe with the message 'Aliens Go Home'

Michael Gove: new outfit closely resembles that of a grammar school headmaster, and showed a strange reluctance to travel forward in time past 1975, a bit like his education policy

Ed Milliband: hopeless, can't distinguish between UNIT and UNITE, unable to speak to any of the UNIT personnel without saying 'no, I don't want your money, now quickly go away we mustn't be seen together'.

Nick Clegg: spends the last 5 minutes of each episode trying to explain why he'd do things differently whilst everyone else is saving the universe.

Eric Pickles: planned to travel the universe taking away whatever financial resources the local leadership has, and then leaving them to sort their own problems out.

David Cameron: only turned up for 1 in 3 episodes, leaving Clegg and William Hague to do most of the fighting for him. Catchphrase 'must work hard and get on' not really zippy enough.

William Hague: has been cast as a Sontaran

Attempts to cast a real doctor were scuppered by the fact that none of them were available at weekends.

A Town Called Mercy: Atonement 101

Catching up with the latest Doctor Who on Iplayer, and what a brilliant episode. Cowboys versus Aliens, but done well. And at the heart of it, a superb meditation on violence, revenge, redemption, atonement and justice.

Part of my staple childhood diet was Westerns, I would go round chewing spent matchsticks pretending to be Clint Eastwood (and fail just as badly as the Doctor does in Mercy). The plot was always the same: baddies do something bad, ride around scowling and looking swarthy. Good guy (usually Lone Good Guy) has showdown with bad guys and shoots them dead. Justice = revenge.

So Doctor Who plunged straight into this moral maze and asked a lot of questions of it. At the centre of the plot is Jex, an alien doctor, a war criminal, who has landed in a Western town, saved it from a cholera epidemic and introduced it to electricity. He saved the town. But now he is being hunted down by a cyborg gunslinger, who wants to bring him to justice for his past crimes, i.e. shoot him. The Doctor ends up embroiled in all of this, and is pulled in all directions:

First, he looks to hand doctor Jex over to the cyborg, one man dying to save the village: 'When did killing someone become an option?' asks Amy, not unreasonably. The Doctor replies with an outburst that might become one of this generation's 'do you remember?' moments in years to come: 'Every time I negotiate, I try to understand. Not today. No, today, I honour the victims. His, The Masters', The Daleks'. All the people who died because of my mercy.'

then later tries to save him, and eventually Jex takes his fate into his own hands. Along the way are several nods to faith: the village gathers to pray whilst the Doctor tries to save them from the cyborg, and Jex speaks of what he expects after he dies, that he will have to climb a mountain, carrying the souls of all the people that he's killed. In a nice contrast to the usual run of things, his faith and religious worldview is part of the plot, rather than seen as a mania.

There are longer and more thoughtful reviews at:
Shadowlocked
From the North
Exploring our Matrix

and A Town Called Mercy leaves lots of questions hanging:
 - is revenge justice?
 - is it possible to atone for past wrongs, and who gets to decide when you've managed it?
 - is justice done to us after death, and does this make a difference to the justice we mete out to the living?
 - are there different moral rules in war?
 - if mercy results in more people dying, because you were compassionate to someone who went on to do more evil, then is it better to be ruthless?
 - (at a wider level) how far has the Western/American view of justice been drip-fed into our culture via film and media, and how far does it inform US views of justice and foreign policy, and by extension our own? Do we base decisions on a robust morality of justice, or a more emotive desire to avenge?
 - Can you run a society purely on mercy?
 - (from the last couple of minutes of the episode) how do you decomission people? The Gunslinger, built to be a weapon of war, can't see a purpose to his life beyond killing. The Doctor recommissions him to be an 'angel' of peace, watching over the town and protecting it. I once had a conversation with a former soldier, who remarked that life post-army was a struggle, compared to the level of camaraderie and intensity of life in the battlefield. There didn't seem to be a peacetime purpose which made him feel alive in the same way.

Great stuff.

The God Complex: Who Do Time Lords Pray To?

As noted before, Doctor Who is riddled with religious references, like a U2 record but without the faith. The God Complex was, as the title suggests, even more full on, but different. The difference was that rather than deal with religious institutions and symbols (Clerics, Angels, nuns, monks) it dealt with personal faith.

Plot synopsis: the Doctor, Amy and Rory find themselves in a hotel, which turns out to be a prison for an alien Minataur. The Minataur feeds off faith, 'an emotional energy', so the prison is regularly restocked with people who have strong faith (of various kinds). For each person, there's one room which contains their most primal fear, that throws them back on their faith, which in turn puts them at the mercy of the creature. From this point, they lose their minds and start to worship the Minataur, and to welcome death at its hands. The Doctor tries to save them, but realises that it's only by destroying people's faith in him as a saviour that he can actually protect Amy and Rory. The episode ends with the Doctor dropping A&R at a house, claiming to be saving them by leaving them alone, rather than exposing them to risk and probably death by travelling with him.

Here's a few quotes:
1. Quotes from sane characters
"why is it up to you to save us? you've got quite a God complex there" (spoken to the doctor)
"I'm a Muslim. Don't be frightened."
"It's not fear, it's faith: faith in conspiracy theories, luck, religion...." (the Doctor)
"they descend on planets and set themselves up as gods, which is fine until the inhabitants go all secular and make them a prison." (the Doctor)
"you must believe in some God or something...who do Time Lords pray to?" (Amy, to the Doctor. The Doctor is uncomforable at the question and deflects it)

2. Quotes from mad characters
"he has forgiven my inconstancy and soon I shall feast...praise him, praise him"
"the gaps between my worship are getting shorter, it's like contractions, It's all so clear now, I'm so happy, praise him, praise him."
"bring me death, bring me glory, my master,my Lord, I'm here, come to me, I'm waiting here for you, he has promised me a glorious death, praise him, praise him....I was lost in shadow but he found me. His love was the beacon that ledme from darkness to light and now I am blinded by his majesty, humbled by his glory, praise him"/'That's quite enough of that' (Doctor)
"I can feel the rapture approaching like a wave"

There's nothing crudely insulting here - the Muslim character is portrayed sympathetically enough - but look at the associations:
 - religious faith is put on a par with faith in luck and conspiracy theories.
 - faith in a saviour figure is a bad thing: even when they're out of the hotel, the Doctor wants to stop Amy and Rory depending on him or trusting him.
 - praise, worship and religious ecstasy are symptoms of madness, and the object of praise and worship is actually destructive and dangerous.

"an ancient creature, drenched in the blood of the innocent.. for such a creature death would be a gift" This line is nominally about the Doctor, setting up the series finale, but put me in mind of the miniseries The Second Coming, starring Christopher Ecclestone (the last but one Doctor). In it, God comes to earth in human form, but eventually is persuaded to kill himself to prevent all the suffering which religion brings. The writer? Russell T Davies, rebooter of the Doctor Who franchise.

So on the surface the faith of the one religious person is respected, but beyond that any references to faith are wholly negative. Even the Doctor himself, who is the one constant saviour figure, has to try to persuade us that to believe in him is toxic. Yeah, right, and what will he do next week I wonder......? Yet Amy's question, and the Doctors discomfort, still echoes: who do Time Lords pray to? In other words, is there any higher power, is there anyone greater than you, or have you enthroned yourself?

Other reviews at vicariously (serious feminist deconstruction, a great read), not a sheep, exploring our matrix.

General observations:
 - Liberal values makes the point that there are some subtle differences in the Doctors character in this episode. Last week (The Girl Who Waited) the doctor greets Amy and Rory with the words 'in the flesh!'. I'm pretty sure that at least one of the Doctor, Rory and Amy is Flesh, a doppelganger, rather than the original. I'm guessing it's the Doctor. So the death of the Doctor in the finale/opener only takes one of them out.

 - Suddenly Amy and Rory don't seem that bothered about their lost daughter, and quite happy to let the Doctor just disappear with this elephant sized bit of unfinished business. Sorry, but that doesn't work.

Doctor Who Gets Religion: Or Does It?

The rebooted Doctor Who franchise has always drawn heavily on religious imagery and ideas, from a giant fiery devil figure in The Satan Pit to the climax of the David Tennant/Master showdown where the entire world prays for the Doctor (via the 'Archangel' satellite) and he's effectively resurrected and transfigured all in one go, and then bestows forgiveness on his mortal enemy.

The current series doesn't show any signs of letting off. The mid-series cliffhanger introduced the Headless Monks (bad) and the 'Clerics' - the church has become a military unit, though it's not quite clear who they answer to. 'Lets Kill Hitler' had several religious allusions too:
 - River Song poisons the Doctor with a kiss, the poison is revealed to come from the Judas Tree. No prizes for guessing where they got that one from.
 - The Silence is revealed to be a religious order, not merely a species.
 - River is cared for in a hospital run by nuns, the Sisters of the Infinite Schism. Great name. Think I know some of those.

With the religious thing thrown in about the Silence on top of the Headless Monks, the current impression is that this batch of Doctor Who writers lean towards the 'Religion is Bad and Dangerous' pole, which, to be fair, is probably the view of most people. The name given to the nuns suggests they are on the margins of religion - suggesting it's here that you find good, not at the centre.

Does Doctor Who get religion? It clearly gets the power of religion to command allegiance, but that's mostly portrayed in a negative way. Institutional religion is armed (the clerics) and dangerous. It'll be interesting to see where the whole Silence part of the story goes. Many of the good bits - e.g. elements of the life of Jesus, prayer, resurrection, life after death (e.g. Silence in the Library, which could have been written by N T Wright*) are all Doctored to retain their appeal but turn them into sci-fi.

I've written so much stuff on this blog that I can't remember if I've made this observation before, but it's remarkable to see the transformation in the sci-fi genre. From the thoroughly humanist Star Trek, sci-fi and fantasy have become the genre of choice for exploring spiritual issues. With the demise of the Biblical epic, and the blockbusting precedent of Star Wars, if soap operas are where our society holds up a mirror to its morality, sci fi and fantasy movies are where we hold up a mirror to our souls. Jesus figures abound, from Gandalf to Harry Potter to the Doctor himself, issues of destiny, prayer, life and death, character, the nature of evil, and the great rules/powers/persons that govern the universe, it's all there.

What's being said, well, that's debatable.........

*Silence in the Library has a 'resurrection to eternal life' based on using an advanced computer chip to store all the vital data about a person. After they die physically, this data is uploaded to a giant computer, where the dead enjoy a new virtual life, dressed in white (really? you don't say...) and reunited with their loved ones. This bears a striking similarity to an image used by Wright to describe how the resurrection works.

Doctor Who and the Premier League

It's either consistency, or a scriptwriter running out of ideas, but in 2 recent Dr Who episodes, the alien of the week has used a cloaking device to disguise themselves as humans. Back in David Tennants swansong, it was green cacti humanoids, and on Saturday it was the turn of the fish from outer space who'd settled in medieval Venice.

More on that story later. But what if other things are using a cloaking device too? What happens, for example, if we disable the one used by footballs' Premier League? Here's the final table.

1. Mammon
2. Mammon United
3. Mammon
4. Mammon Hotspur
5. Mammon City
6. Mammon Villa (but see first comment)
7. Mammon
8. Mammon
9. Mammon City
10. Mammon Rovers
11. Mammon City
12. Mammon
13. Mammon
14. Mammon Wanderers
15. Mammon Wanderers
16. Mammon Athletic
17. Mammon Ham United
18. Mammon
19. Mammon
20. Mammon (or -Mammon, to be more accurate)

Back to the fish people. They'd hit a snag, having run out of females, so their idea was to (avoid if squeamish) drain the blood of earth women and replace it with their own, which would turn them into female fish folk. Given the origin of several of the above teams as social/youth projects, one has to wonder something of the original spirit of football has been drained out. What transfusion process has happened at the top tier of the 'beautiful game'?

Final connection: on Sunday we looked at Isaiah 6 - there's a change of government (the king has died) so Isaiah goes to pray. He sees God as he really is (awesome beyond words), through that he sees himself as he really is (sinful beyond words), but once the divine X-rays have revealed his own heart, Isaiah is then cleaned up and commissioned to be part of the solution. Seeing things as they truly are is how we diagnose sickness, and find the way back to health. If we'd switched off the cloaking device on the debt crunch and the housing bubble, perhaps we'd be in less mess now. I note that it's quietly being reactivated in the hope that nobody will notice.

Regular readers will know that I prefer cricket to football, and I'm fearful of the same tranfusion there. Will Yorkshire always be Yorkshire? Already their ground is named after a sponsor, though at least the sponsor is educational...

Who's Next?

Preview of the new Doctor Who series. Random notes:
1. After all of David Tennants agonising about whether or not to shoot anyone, there's a lot less moral agonising. Guns, fists, mallets, the new Doctor seems to like inflicting damage.

2. Swords, snogs, and jumping about in castles? Is this Doctor Who or Robin Hood (or Merlin)?

3. More Daleks (no brainer) and a few familiar characters from before - it will be hard to top Blink and the stone angels, but there they are.

4. 'Trust me, I'm the Doctor', the new writing team isn't afraid of corny lines. The preview is as much a marker of life after Tennant/Davies as it is a preview of a TV series. My main worry, seeing all this, is that it starts to become hard to tell apart from thing like Merlin, who also has a bony-jawed young man surrounded by damsels, swords and monsters on a Saturday afternoon.

But how dare they blow up a red telephone box! There are only 5 left in captivity, I'll have to check the one in Glastonbury to make sure it's still there.

So Long and Thanks for all the Eyebrows

For a moment during the last 10 minutes of Doctor Who, I thought I was watching the last 10 mins of Lord of the Rings 3, but without the beards and furry feet. Some good twists, a few things left open (hope we see more of John Simm as the Master. Did anyone see him sneak off? me neither), but for me it got a bit too caught up in the whole farewell thing. Not sure if you're allowed to say the words 'self indulgent' and Doctor Who in the same sentence, but I just did - the heavenly choirs over the final stagger into the Tardis were a bit, um, well.

Plenty of morality tales in there;
- the Doctors' refusal to take up arms against others,
- what you become through the choices you make - the Doctor refuses Wilfs gun because 'that's how the Master started'.
- Interesting ideas about what reward you get for the good you've done in this life, and the Doctors path being portrayed as a very bleak and lonely one. Is there a reward? Does it matter if there isn't? Would it make any difference?
- the Time Lords ethereal vision of the afterlife, which meant you could do what you want to physical space and time - bit of a pop at fundies there? Would be an interesting clip to use as an introduction to a seminar on Tom Wright and the theology of the resurrection.

The knocking 4 times was very very clever, and it was spot on that, in the end, the Doctor lost his life saving that of someone else. But it was all about Tennants final bow, and a final farewell to the most famous arched eyebrow in the known universe.

Advent & Doctor Who

So, there's this group of prophets, having dreams about the future. Bad dreams. Nightmares. And they've been waiting for the Doctor, the one who makes things better/heals/saves (delete where applicable). Except that instead of turning up when he should have, he's been off on a consumer binge. A very big binge - though I don't really understand how a Time Lord can possibly be late for anything.

Advent is a time of dreams, and of waiting to see whether the dream, or the nightmare, will come true. In CofE churches, the set readings focus on the future, on hope and expectancy, on where history and God's purposes are heading. Is it a dream or a nightmare? And when will the dream come true? Into this comes Jesus, welcomed by, for example, Simeon and Anna in the Temple as the sign that the good dream of God's people is becoming reality.

We've got a choice about how we wait for the future. We can wait passively, doing nothing. We can do the avoidance thing, diverting ourselves, consuming experiences and time and trying not to face the consequences - "you should not have delayed" "far too late, he has come". I don't know if that script was written with the Copenhagen conference in mind - a community growing far too fast? - but avoiding the future is a powerful theme, whether it's our own, or that of our community/nation (witness the scrabbling on pensions and power, because painful decisions have been delayed), or of the planet.

Or we can watch and pray. Most agents of change are motivated by a dream, some of those dreams are good (Martin Luther King) some are evil (9/11). Advent reminds us that our dreams of the future, and whether we embrace them or run from them, affect how we live in the present. How do we get dreams? The Ood have got community, and a splendidly low-tech little cave. In 21st century earth dreams have been colonised by the marketing industry and celebrity culture, there are 1000 people wanting us to have their dream, rather than letting us have our own. Dreams need detachment to give them a place to grow, and community to refine them and give them legs. A fellow vicar said that if he has a good idea for something new, he waits until at least 2 other people have the same idea before doing anything about it.

Yesterday on an clergy retreat day we were shown a clip from 'Mr Magorium's Wonder Emporium', not a film I've ever considered crossing the street to see. But there's some good lines - the two main characters are waiting for a clock to chime 12. "So now we wait" "Now we breathe, we pulse, we regenerate, our hearts beat, our minds create, our souls enchant. 37 seconds well spent is a lifetime."

Waiting for the rest of that Doctor Who episode, for Christmas to begin, for Christmas to be over, to see whether the dreams or the nightmares are the ones which will come true - we can choose how we wait, and whether its time well spent, or foolishly spent. And there's the ultimate event too: the Doctor is going to die, and so are we. As Gandalf/Tolkien says, what we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us, what we do with the waiting.

Every Passion Blending

Reports all over the place today of the Doctor Who Prom, which managed to combine Whovian geekery with a few well known bits of classical music, some dancing Cybermen, and sundry aliens. No doubt the purists will frown, but it's a great way to get classical music to a different audience. Whoever thought up the idea should get a 2 medals, one for creativity and one for bravery.

The idea of an event which blends two very different passions got me thinking about worship. Obviously, the controlling passion of worship is God, and many cathedrals manage to blend that passion with a passion for high quality choral and classical music. But if that particular blend of worship and culture is possible, then what other blends could work? Historically, we've blended worship with all sorts of art forms, though not (as far as I know) with Doctor Who. An attempt is even being made to blend it with sun-worship, with an inflatable church on an Italian beach (which nearly got blown away by the wind - divine judgement or something else?)

One Fresh Expression of church which seems to do this well is Legacy XS, on the first Fresh Expression DVD, a skatepark/church which encourages the skaters to express their worship through their skating and BMX tricks. I'm reminded of Eric Liddells line in Chariots of Fire "when I run, I feel His pleasure". What other words could we substitute for 'run' - sing, skate, dance, paint, work, serve, calculate, cook, garden, drive........? If we bring our whole lives in worship as a living sacrifice, then it should blend our every passion with our passion for God. Is that what really happens on Sundays.....?

Faith on the BBC: Bonekickers & Doctor Who

Caught up with Bonekickers, the latest BBC drama from the creators of Life on Mars, via Iplayer last night. Despite getting panned from some quarters, I thought it was quite fun, and didn't feel got at as an evangelical Christian, despite the Times reviewers concerns. ("I am not a Christian, but if I were, the demonisation of evangelicals, not to mention the casual “miracle” pulled off by a splinter left by the rood in a nurse's finger, would make me cross")

The episode focused on an archaeological dig which had uncovered some dead Templar Knights and (possibly) a fragment of the Cross. A right-wing preacher used it to back his message of kicking non-Christians out of the country, one of his followers decapitated a peace-loving Muslim, and it all ended in a dramatic showdown in an underground cavern full of Roman crosses - the Templars not being able to decide which was the 'true cross', so they kept them all.

Mostly cobblers, though it's interesting that the standard Christian character has evolved. Back in the 70's it was the ineffectual and naive vicar (Dick Emery, Derek Nimmo), the Vicar of Dibley has killed off the 'trendy vicar' stereotype by showing that modern is fine, and now the extremist bible-thumper is the caricature of choice. There was an alternative though - there were 2 other characters with faith, one a nurse, reading the Bible at the bedside of dying patients, and the other the fresh-faced newcomer to the Bonekickers team, Viv. At one point Viv challenges Gillian, the bossy team leader, on her claim that all religions do is cause wars. 'God is in the small things and the quiet places', a line which recurs later and gets some sort of vindication.

I'm intrigued that following the Sunday School backdrop to Alex's character in Ashes to Ashes (as well as a Christian nutter episode, if I recall), we have another series from the same writers where one of the main characters has some kind of faith. It would have been easy to trash Christianity entirely, but the show didn't. And in Hugh Bonnnevilles brilliant character, there's a chance to roll out the one-liners, I love the one on the trailer for episode 2.

Compare and contrast Doctor Who, a show which by rights should be getting as much debate as the Matrix did over spiritual themes and worldview. There are plenty of similarities, from carbon-copy special effects (frozen bullets, light bursting out of the main character at the moment of his 'death'), to the blend of religious worldviews at the core of the plot. At one level Doctor Who is thoroughly humanist - the Doctor believes in the human race, and he keeps on saving it (and other species) and tries to help people get along. At another level it is thoroughly spiritual, as I've posted before.

The question the series finale left me with is: does the pagan or Christian worldview call the shots here? There is recurrent Christian symbolism - resurrection, exodus, eternal life, and so on. But there's a strong pagan current too: the Pompeii episode has the Doctor and Donna being enshrined as the houshold gods, and the finale played both with the notion of prophecy and of fate. Something has brought Donna to the point where she is instrumental in saving the universe, and though the Doctor doesn't believe in fate, he can't avoid the fact that the universe seems to be placing Donna at the centre of events. At the same time the talking squid Dalek Caan has a 'prophecy' (he's seen into the future through a rift in time) of the end of all things, and that 'one will die'. Caan is clearly cracked, but then so was Ezekiel.

Even more interesting, it played with the idea of two natures in one person. Twice. Doctor II had the Doctors mind, but was mortal. Donna was human already, got the Doctors mind into her own, but couldn't cope with it and had to be returned to her life before she met him. If you're a Christology lecturer, and want to explore the issues around the divine and human natures in Jesus, and how two natures in one person works, then you could have great fun starting the lectures with this........

Okay, it's all sci-fi hokum, and we shouldn't take it too seriously, but you never got this sort of stuff in Star Trek. The fact that the 'story arcs' (to use the jargon) in these series are prepared to play with spiritual themes is quite significant:

1. If you want to know what the visual media think of religion, don't bother with Songs of Praise, watch the dramas.

2. Spirituality and religion is no longer the property of the church or the experts. That means that everyone is happy to have a go, whether they have the slightest clue what they're on about or not. It's much more of a free-for-all, but it's much more alive than the days when all spiritual conversation was the property of the church, or new age weirdos. Spirituality is mainstream.

3. It is pick and mix: these things are brought in to drive a story, bring emotional impact, and to make the drama work. So they don't have the same integrity they do when they are part of the Christian (or another) narrative.

And it also means that there are 10m people in the UK who saw that last episode, where there's a conversation starter: "Donna or Doctor? do you believe in fate or just stuff just happen?"

You heard (some of) it here first

On Monday I made some predictions about how tonights Doctor Who would finish up. In the interests of accountability and honesty, here's the scorecard:

"here's my guess at what will happen in the final extended episode.
The Judoon (big rhino people) will turn up just after the opening credits to save the various goodies (Sarah Jane, the Torchwood folks) who are about to be killed by the Daleks. WRONG

David Tennant will spend most of the episode in a coma, 'regenerating' (that's what I do after a pint too many at the quiz night), WRONG. Quite the opposite, we ended up with 2 of them.

Donna will do something heroic and turn out to be a Time Lord. RIGHT on both counts, including saving the universe, though technically she turns into a Time Lord rather than turning out to be one.

So far, Russell Davies hasn't killed off a single Doctors assistant, so unless he's planning a final flourish, I think they'll all survive. RIGHT

Some special gizmo, like the key Martha has, or the doctors' spare hand, will save the universe,
Half-Right: the doctors spare hand plays a part in Donna's upgrade.

and the Daleks will turn on Davros, just like they did in Genesis of the Daleks - there's already a bit of needle between Davros and the top Dalek. Half-RIGHT: Dalek Caan turns out to be on the Doctors side, and betrays Davros. However the rest of them end up getting pushed around like shopping trolleys by the Doctors chums.

Finally (in my dreams), the Doctor will regnerate as Matthew McFadyen." WRONG: Sadly not, but he seriously needs cheering up. The Christmas special has the only man on the planet who's does morose better - David Morrisey. Maybe they need the Top Gear crew signing up as travelling buddies?

Doctor Who Discussion notes: 'Midnight'

For the first time this series I got to watch a Dr Who episode when it was broadcast. This week was 'Midnight', a holding operation before the return of Rose, and probably the Daleks.



Last week there was a lot about death, and in what way we're able to live on after death, using technology as a way into some big questions. This week it was all about human nature.

So if you've split coffee on your John Stott notes, watch the 45 mins on Iplayer and discuss it. Plot summary and a few sample questions below...

Plot summary (warning: spoilers). The Doctor and a small group are travelling on a tour around the planet 'Midnight', which is very beautiful, but completely lifeless because of the toxic rays of its sun. The ship stalls, in the middle of nowhere, and whilst they are waiting for a backup ship to collect them, something starts knocking on the hull.

Next thing you know, one of the passengers, Sky, has been taken over by something (we never see what it is), and she starts to repeat everything that people are saying, copying words, inflexion, body movements. The 'creature' develops, until it is saying people's words at the same time, and then before folk actually say them. The other thing that develops is paranoia, as the other passengers (whipped up particularly by Lindsay Coulsons mother figure), become more and more frightened, and agree first to throw Sky off the ship to certain death (though she hasn't harmed anyone), and then the Doctor because he is too sympathetic.

Soon the creature begins to control the Doctor as well, and the passengers start to drag him towards the exit. The officious stewardess suddenly realises that the Doctor has been right, and takes herself and Sky out of one of the exits, sacrificing herself to save the others. The Doctor comes back to his senses, and everyone else realises they nearly killed an innocent man. He asks if anyone knew the stewardess's name, and nobody (not even the man who'd done the trip 14 times before) knows it. (nod to the Shawshank Redemption here?) Lots of awkward silences.

Issues:
It's a bit 'Lord of the Flies', what happens when mob hysteria takes over in a confined space, and turns a group of normal people into (almost) murderers.

Questions
- What does it take to turn normal people into murderers? It happens - Rwanda, Germany, etc.
- The mother figure doesn't try to drag the Doctor overboard, but incites the others to do so. What voices in society, or our own circle of friends and family, are the ones loading bullets for others to fire?
- Standing with others is risky - the Doctor is nearly killed for trying to protect Sky, even when he doesn't know if she's benign or evil. Who are the people we're afraid to stand up for? What have we suffered for defending the victimised?
- The Doctor openly states that he's the cleverest person on the ship. Is this vanity, or just truthful?
- The other passengers are quick to take offence at the Doctors words: how does this affect their conversation? Could they have responded differently? What else could they have said?

- If the episode shows us as we really are, then we clearly need protecting from ourselves. a) Is this how the Bible sees it? b) In the light of this, are government plans for ID cards and extra detention a good thing? Or are institutions even more dangerous than individuals?

Tom Wright joins Doctor Who writing team

Just watched 'Forest of the Dead', the latest Dr. Who, on Iplayer. Several thousand people are 'saved' from a giant Library by a computer storing them on its hard-drive whilst some flesh-eating shadows are dealt with. When it's safe, they are then restored and given their lives back again.

I'm pretty sure I heard theologian Tom Wright give the same illustration about the resurrection several years ago, that when we our hardware gives out and we die God (this is an illustration, remember), stores all our files in his memory, so that when the day of resurrection comes our 'files' - i.e. us, - are uploaded to a new system which will never get viruses, crash, or shut down.

When the final character is saved, they appear dressed in white in a kind of paradise world. Hmm, wonder what they were trying to suggest there?

and it was a fantastic episode too.

Doctor Who does God stuff

I've only got 10 minutes into the latest Doctor Who on Iplayer and it's fantastic.

Alongside a brilliant joke about the child support agency there's
- a creation story ('in the beginning God breathed life into creation, and then she sighed...'),
- an army convinced it has God on its side, but which has forgotten the reason it started fighting in the first place - in fact, fighting is their only reason for living. Wonder why they gave the general an Irish accent?
- medical ethics: does a person born created by a machine, using human tissue samples, rather than by natural parents qualify as fully human? (very topical with the embryo research debate currently happening in parliament).
- and 2 people divided with a peacemaker 'doctor' each side of the dividing wall of hostility, one of whom (Dr. Jones), through healing one of the people (fixing a disclocated soldier), becomes accepted and gets the chance to make peace.

Will someone have to die a sacrificial death to sort this all out? Brilliant scripts, and enough issues in 10 minutes to do a homegroup series.

I'm constantly amazed at how this series keeps coming back to religious themes, though in this episode there's a lot of religious scepticism too: the creation story is dismissed as a 'myth', and the Doctor contrasts his intellect with the armies confidence in God and force. Here is the secularist case, as put by Terry Sanderson of the NSS on Simon Mayo's show yesterday (go to 31 minutes in). Religions cause wars, we're better off without them, human reason has all the answers we need. Incidentally, it was good to hear a thoughtful rebuff to the NSS case by the other guests on the show, and one has the sneaking suspicion that the NSS would prefer to have religious voices silenced rather than debate with them.

Later: well well well, we even get a death and resurrection, the episode ends with the 'breath of God' (according to the doctor, just a cocktail of gases which can rejuvenate barren planets) bringing back to life the Doctors daughter, unnaturally born at the start of the episode but killed. Hmm, who does that remind you of? And it finishes in a paradise garden. Etc. etc. I wonder if they just chop up Bibles at random, stir them into a pot, pull bits out at random and build the script around it.

And there's even a gospel: "it can lift you out of these dark dark tunnels, into the light. No more fighting, no more killing. I'm the Doctor, and I declare this war over, " at which point the Doctor releases the forces (the gas cocktail) which will create a new world.

Brilliant

Doctor Who, The Ood, and the Exodus.

Back to the blogosphere after a week at Spring Harvest, of which more later this week.

Intrigued by the fact that the last 2 episodes of Doctor Who have ended with him being installed as a minor deity by first a family from Pompeii, then a race of squid-faced slaves whom he helped to free. Having watched a cartoon Moses in 'The Prince of Egypt' in the afternoon with my kids, it was rather weird to then see the Exodus story retold on iPlayer 2000 years in the future on another planet. Russell T. Davies has clearly been reading his Bible. Again.

I didn't realise that Saturday was the Jewish Passover festival until Cranmer reminded me. Doctor Who broadcast at just about the time - sunset on Saturday 19th April - that the Passover festival began, and retelling the story for a sci fi audience. Very clever. As far as I can see nobody else in the blogosphere has picked this up, but it's an incredibly subtle bit of scripting.

Add to that the 'rapture' at the end of episode 1 (and there probably are 1m Londoners who want their surplus body fat to just lift off into space), and the strong religious current in Doctor Who is picking up where it left off at the end of the last series. Add to that the Satan Pit - the previous Ood outing where the Doctor comes face to face with the Devil - and it's almost worth scrapping your weekly bible studies and sitting down to watch Dr. Who instead.

To quote the Times reviewer at the weekend: It's curious, in this supposedly godless age, how much religious imagery and supernatural longing finds its way into mainstream entertainment.

Kevin Spacey vs the BBC

After Kevin Spacey's barb at the Beeb for running 13-week adverts for West End musicals poorly disguised as primetime TV shows, it's payback time.

The new Doctor Who trailer nicks Spacey's most memorable cinema moment - the closing line of The Usual Suspects (this is the only clip I could find, but all you need is the first 5 seconds) -

and puts it into the mouth of their most succesful TV character. First they steal his customers, then they steal his lines. Or maybe they've got Spacey lined up to play the next incarnation of the Master. He's probably the only actor on the planet who could better John Simm.

Touching Base: 2007 and 2008

Challenged by my friends over at the Wardman Wire to do a 'review of 2007 and prospects for 2008' thingy, the latest Touching Base explores the meaning of this picture:

and this one:

in relation to the year gone by and the year ahead.

In case you don't recognise them, the first is Life on Mars, the second is Doctor Who, but for the rest you'll just have to go and look........

And I forgot to link to last weeks article, which was Questions Too Good to Answer.