The Theology of Doctor Who: "Smith and Jones"

“If you’re touching on big issues, you’ve got to keep turning these things, examining them, looking at the opposite of what you think.  For example, as an atheist, I set out to include the ‘Old Rugged Cross’ sequence in Gridlock to show how good faith can be, regardless of the existence of God - how it can unite and form a community, and essentially offer hope.  That was my intention, or my starting point, and yet the real me came bleeding through, because it transpires that hope stifles the travellers.  It stops them acting.  By uniting, they are passive.  The Doctor is the unbeliever.  The direct consequence of the travellers in the traffic jam singing that hymn is that the Doctor realizes that no one is going to help them.  There is no higher authority.... But I didn’t write Gridlock thinking, this is my take on religion.  My foremost thought, and my principal job, was to write an entertaining drama about cats and humans stuck on a motorway.  Everything else just bleeds through.”

- Russell T. Davies, Showrunner for Doctor Who from 2005 - 2010, in The Writer’s Tale

For two years, my husband and I taught catechism: Confirmation classes, from noon to two on Sunday afternoons, to two-dozen-odd teenagers who were (mostly) there only because their parents said they had to be.  Suitably daunted, we fell back on what we knew.  Each class was built around one or more film clips, discussion of which would lead into the moral or theological issue to be covered that day.

It worked.  And one of the shows that worked best (to what I presume would be Russell T. Davies’ great annoyance if he knew we existed and thought us worth bothering about) was Doctor Who.

Davies certainly never set out to write Catholic theology, but he is an utterly, maddeningly brilliant writer.  And the theology works because the stories work.  And I would argue that they sometimes work on a level beyond the level he recognizes.

Let’s take Gridlock, shall we?  Is it true that no one is going to help the travellers?  No, it’s not.  The Doctor is going to help them.  (As Gandalf asks, “Surely you don’t disbelieve the prophecies, because you had a hand in bringing them about yourself?”)  And “no higher authority”?  At the conclusion of the episode, the Doctor will discover that the only reason any of the travellers are still alive is that an unimaginably old being has been slowly, over many years, giving his life to sustain them in existence.  As metaphors go, I’m now looking at two of the Persons of the Trinity.  (No, the TARDIS is not the Holy Spirit.  Although...)

So yes, something bleeds through, and that something is frequently truth.  Never has that bleeding been more striking than in the Season Three opener, Smith and Jones.

The episode has, for Doctor Who, a simple enough premise.  A human-looking plasmavore, calling herself Florence, hides on earth to escape a murder charge and checks herself into a London hospital, where she has access to all those lovely blood banks.  Intergalactic enforcers, the rhinoceros-like Judoon, transport the entire hospital to the moon, where they can search for Florence at their leisure.  The Doctor and his new companion, medical student Martha Jones, discover that Florence has killed one of the hospital’s consultants - draining him of all his blood in order to mask herself from the Judoon scans, which are looking for non-human blood.

And, with beautiful simplicity, the Doctor sees the solution: Florence must “assimilate” non-human blood.

Playing a panicky idiot, the Doctor bursts in on Florence, babbling about “rhinos in space,” and lets slip that supposedly the Judoon are going to move up to a “Level Two Scan.”  Florence takes the bait, and the Doctor’s blood.  It is left for Martha to realize what he has done, aim the Judoon scanner at a stunned Florence, and then (in the interests of continuing the series) invent two-hearted CPR.

I particularly love this climax because it goes beyond the Doctor offering his life to save humanity (which he does several times a season) to present a precise theological reflection on the exact nature of that sacrifice.  He’s not just stopping a bullet here.  Florence thinks his blood will be her victory, but his blood turns out to be her downfall.  This is a triumph that can only come through defeat.  Good Friday, anyone?

Now, none of the above is intended to suggest that such a meaning is intentional on Davies’ part.  Insofar as it is intentional, I’m certain it’s meant to debunk the Christian story: “See, that’s not so hard to make up.”

But the point is, this story is beautiful.  The point is, we all want a man like the Doctor: brilliant, confident, endlessly knowledgeable, at once wrathful and compassionate - a man extraordinary in every way, and yet willing, in a (double) heartbeat, to lay down his life for ordinary humans who may not even know he exists.

On some level, we all desire Christ.  Even if we reject Him.