Are any of you “Doctor Who” fans? That is to say, Whovians? I would just like to say that David Tennant has to be the best Doctor since Tom Baker. Yes, he is too young, but he projects a persona that is both madcap and enigmatic. Also, the writing for that series has really gotten good. This last two-part episode about the Library had to be one of the most remarkable plots I have seen on TV, with layer upon layer of metafiction, time paradox, virtual reality, epistemology, and puzzle upon puzzle, all resolved in stunning fashion. Watch for this one in re-reruns, and if you haven’t seen the show since you were a little kid, give it a try again. (And if any of you watched them, this thread is open to a discussion of the Library episodes.)
Doctor Who is good again
June 30th, 2008 | television
11 comments ↓
I started following Doctor Who for the first time when David Tennant came in. Love the show! It is perfectly fine with cheesy villains or terrifying ones and doesn’t seem to take continuity too seriously.
The Library episodes were great. (Well, besides the fact that dematerializing people’s body to save them to a hard drive is killing them, only to created an exact copy later on. This is one thing that has always bothered me about SciFi technology. Too often does transportation, and sometimes virtual reality, involve deconstructing the user’s body atom by atom.)
Rumor has it that David Tennant is leaving, which seems to match the direction that “Stolen Earth” is heading.
Gene,
I have watched last season and this season of DW. Awesome shows. Youtube offers alot of shows, trailers and interviews.
I also like your book God at Work. I have been reading your book at work during my lunch hour and it has given a better perspective in what I do at work as a Christian.
Paul
I just started watching Doctor Who about a week ago with the episodes of season 4 (just finished Stolen Earth this morning). Despite being incredibly confused about Rose and Martha and Torchwood (wikipedia is so helpful in this matter), I’m pretty hooked.
The David Tennant rumors are pretty contradictory. He’s signed up through 2010 and for several specials, but he’s regenerating and that seems to always indicate a new Doctor. But his progeny regenerated as herself so it might be a twist in the regeneration theme. I’m not ready to give up on David Tennant though.
Anyway, the library arc. There’s the reference to all cultures being afraid of the dark because there is something that hides in the shadows. Vashta Narada seem more primordial than any other villain in the series or even in recent sci fi thrillers (*cough*Indy).
The encounter with River Song (Riversong?) seems to fall into those flash forwards that are the rage of late (Desperate Housewives definitely and another that’s not coming to mind). It’s interesting to think of a time the Doctor hasn’t been to, especially with his reference to how he sees the world in fixed and unfixed points in the Pompeii episode.
Also SimDan’s teleportation/saving a copy comment is interesting. I’m a big fan of that particular sci-fi invention especially during 12-hour car trips, but it brings up mysteries of the connection between the tangible and intangible. Is Dr. Riversong really alive in the library’s memory? Is the pretty one who died in the Vashta Narada attack? If those are both nos, then what about Donna? I think it’s one of the intriguing points overlooked in Philip Pullman’s books that he makes the intangible soul kind of correspond to the daemons. (It’s not a perfect correspondence, but it seems the easiest one to make.) Then we watch what happens when the daemons are forcibly separated from the children in the first book and again in the third. The pain is real, and they are irrevocably changed. Would the same be true of the intangible aspects of a person in teleportation, in creating exact copies? Or is it more a matter of well matter being converted into energy and then back again so there is some intangible cellular/atomic memory that binds the whole person together again? Maybe we need to know more about how Project Indigo works…
The first season with the chap (what was his name? The Yorkshireman?) previous to Tennant was particularly good - they’d apparently saved up the best stories over ten years without any airing. I recommend looking up that season. Lots of thoughtful stuff.
And they can do suspense, something that Tolkien could do, and Peter Jackson could not do.
Torchwood is something I have very mixed feelings about. If only they didn’t have all of the rampant, on-screen homosexuality/bisexuality, it would be a very entertaining show. But with it I wish for fast forward, or a bowlderized copy.
Neither come close yet to Babylon 5’s depth of thinking about philosophy.
The whole ‘new series’ is better than the previous and both of the new regenerations are up there with Baker, Pertwee and ‘Tristan’, so far as I’m concerned. It was genius to tie it in with Eastenders and ‘real life.’
Bethany-
The Doctor’s “daughter” might be considered a special case as she is a newly minted modified clone of the Doctor. It will be interesting to see her return, most likely in trouble.
Anon-
I haven’t watched much of Torchwood, but Jack is an interesting case. He’s from a time where relationships between various intelligent species is widely accepted. With attraction no longer limited to humans, the smaller difference between the sexes also became unimportant. This, however, in no way justifies him.
I love how the Doctor tries to temper Jack’s flirtations with anyone, “Stop iiiit!”
The Doctor is a god of sorts, wise, nearly immortal, coming and going as he pleases and answering to no one. However, he is also quite flawed, unable to keep those he cares about alive with him and full of pain and regret, never lets his closest friends truly know him and at times arrogant, which, in one episode this season, prevents him from gaining control of the situation and nearly killed. He flies across time and space to save the universe and yet ancient evil foes always find a way to return from oblivion (Daleks, Cybermen, the Master).
The Library episodes also advanced the Doctor’s own storyline: The professor from the future whispered into his ear HIS NAME. No one knows that! Except, apparently, a special someone who is. . .his wife? (Did I interpret that correctly? And did the bit about no one knowing his name appear earlier in the series?)
Concerning teleportation/digitization of people:
The body is destroyed. This is a death and results in the body being divorced from the soul, an unnatural state. Unless one was to argue that the people in the various Sci-Fi universes have found a way to create a new body, or recreate the original, and join it to the original soul (ie, resurrect the individual) then we have nothing more than a very accurate clone.
Man is just as much body as he is a soul. The best that computers can hope to do is simulate the body and thus the brain. This simulation could, in theory, be very real. However, we cannot simulate a soul and nor can we join a soul to a chunk of computer code.
In both cases you can think of the electrical representation of a person as a sort of simulated clone of the original. This also spills over to the realm of AI and AI rights.
We just may be able to develop technology to do these things. Thus, it is important that we think ahead on the ethics and morality of these technology.
Veith-
Yes, that would be my guess, that she becomes his wife. Still, the question is who is she?
As far as I know, the Doctor has always referred to himself as “The Doctor,” saying, “No, it’s just the Doctor.” This is where the series title comes from, “Doctor Who?” He has, from time to time, gone by various aliases, such as John Smith. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_%28Doctor_Who%29#.22Doctor_who.3F.22
[…] I have been enjoying following Gene Veith for the last few months (even when he repeats the canard that Calvinists aren’t Christ-centered, yadda yadda yadda), but I think he earned a permanent spot in my newsreader when I discovered that he’s into Doctor Who. […]
SlimDan,
It isn’t just Jack, it is everyone in Torchwood except for Gwen. I find it very, very repulsive. Otherwise it would be a very engaging show. I probably shouldn’t watch it.
I wouldn’t call the Dr. a god of sorts. I see what you mean with his characteristics, and possibly in the Greco-Roman sense he could be a minor hero, or a titan. But he isn’t portrayed as the Creator (though he might well be “the other” who helped Rassalon found the Timelord portion of Gallifreyan civilization and history). He isn’t perfect, with his attempted genocide of (was it the Daleks or the Sontarans) which failed, but did result in the genocide (as far as he knows thus far, with one and a half exceptions) of the Gallifreyan species.
Dr. Veith, throughout the series from its very beginning, we’ve never known the Dr.’s name, hence “Who”. With that enshrined in the name of the series, I suspect they will never tell us, or only at the very end, which is probably not planned. They do drop hints, though, just to keep everyone (probably including the writers) guessing.
SimDan,
The transporter is a destruction/recreation device, but teleportation is thought to be more along the lines of the Holy Spirit moving Philip from the Gaza to Samaria. Then there are wormholes and tessarcts which avoid that problem as well with mathematically possible (not necessarily physically possible) systems.
For teleportation, another possibility is the direct conversion of our body’s matter into energy and transmitting that energy (without loss or change) to a remote location at the speed of light and then reconstituting that energy back into matter.
When I read it, it wasn’t used as a way to avoid body-soul connection problems, but that’s what I thought of. This is closer to what physicists are actually trying to do than the Star Trek methods of teleporting things around.
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