Faith and the new Doctor

Last night's premiere of season 8 of Doctor Who was good. It was far from being among the best the series has offered, but it did what a regeneration story needs to do: it breathed new life into the series. I'm especially delighted with the dynamics between Capaldi's Doctor and his current companion, Clara--a character who until now seemed destined never to live up to her original promise. The monsters were creepy and the callbacks to prior series were nice touches without being overbearing; plot inconsistencies were few. I also like the new title sequence a great deal, though I'm not too keen on the remixed theme song. Better still, the episode bugged me--in the good way that fiction sometimes does, entertaining you while you're consuming it but not leaving you when you close the book or turn off the television. Good fiction keeps working its way into your brain and shuffling things around. It changes you.

I don't want to overstate this. Doctor Who is a very silly show. That's one reason I love it. It's also a deeply thoughtful show, which is another reason I love it. It's not Great Art (or at least, not usually) but it often does for me what the greatest art does: it shines a revelatory light on some corner on the universe, allowing me to glimpse a truth. For now it's still just a notion, but I'm going to try to tease it out. There's lots more I could write about the good and bad of this episode, but that's not what I want to talk about. The review is up there in that first paragraph. What follows is less about Doctor Who than it is about me using Doctor Who as a mirror.

There's been something itching my brain since last night. The series has from time to time drawn symbolic parallels between the Doctor and God (or a god). It's sometimes ham-fisted and occasionally really interesting. As a believer and as a fan, I've got to stress that such symbolism, interesting as it can be, shouldn't be carried too far. Doctor Who isn't at all allegorical. Anyway, this isn't one of those episodes--that is, as far as I can tell, that subtext wasn't intentionally written into this episode. And yet  I think this episode is teaching me something about my relationship to God.

The rest of this post contains SPOILERS for Doctor Who season 8 episode 1, "Deep Breath."

"Deep Breath" is a regeneration story; it's about the Doctor and his companion coming to terms with this profound change. He's got a different face, a different voice (new and yet old), new personality quirks have surfaced and old ones have subsumed. He is the same man at his core--we know this because it is the twelfth time we (or rather, I; for you, maybe it's the third, or the first) have seen him go through this process. This episode deftly handles questions about the continuity of self, but I'm getting off track. I want to talk about Clara. I'll work my way back to her from here.

Like his companions of the moment, usually I'm quite skeptical of the new Doctor, but it rarely takes long for him to win me over. This time, for me, things were a bit complicated because I've been totally excited for Capaldi's take on the part since the casting was revealed, and it seems like Moffat was aware of that feeling among many of the audience because the story actually takes some pains to alienate us. Regeneration is always difficult for the Doctor; he's always disoriented for a while, or unconscious, and his companions are always weirded out and upset that the man they trusted with their lives suddenly seems to be someone else--someone far more alien than he seemed--someone they're not sure they know at all. But this time the new Doctor isn't just addled, not just unruly. He is dangerous. At a critical moment when it seems he and Clara have at last been reunited, when they're finally starting to reconnect, they're attacked by the creepy robots who've been harvesting human body parts to repair themselves for millennia...and he abandons her. As the metal door slams shut between them, she begs him to at least leave her the sonic screwdriver, but he won't even do that much. Sitting safely (as I thought) in my comfy chair, I felt like I'd been slapped hard.

Left all alone, Clara has to save herself but she can't. She does her best, she doesn't give up though she's running out of options and she believes--she really believes the Doctor would not abandon her, but she isn't sure and she's terrified she's wrong, that he's not the person she thought he was. And she reaches out behind her because she needs him to be there to rescue her. And at what seems like the very last moment he does; he's been there all along, hiding behind a mask made of human flesh. The fight is far from over but her struggle to survive alone has given them the information they need to ultimately defeat the enemy.

It's a triumphant moment for Clara, and a simultaneously reassuring but still unsettling one for the audience. I'm kind of furious at him for putting her through that. But it's not like it's the first time he's done that sort of thing, and like Clara, I still love him in the end and believe that even though he's scarier now than he seemed before, he's still him; that though he isn't safe (he never was really), he's still good. He did save her, like he always does--or almost always. He couldn't save Katarina, Adric, Astrid, Donna, or Adelaide. For that matter, he failed to save Clara not once but twice already. The Doctor isn't God. He's not even a god. He's a mad man with a box.

That's where the metaphor breaks down (we mustn't try to stretch it too far). God always saves us (He just doesn't always save us alive). For now though, I'm just identifying with Clara's terrified tears and shaking hand, outstretched to someone she must trust absolutely but whom she can't see and isn't entirely sure she really knows.

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