The Doctor Is Not Jesus!
I
used to get really annoyed every time the Daleks appeared again.
First of all, they're very silly. Their ridiculous computer-generated
voices grate on my ears. Their pepper-pot shape drives me crazy. Their arbitrary decisions about when to exterminate and when to stand
there like idiots for the convenience of the plot pushed me beyond
endurance.
But
then I realized why it is important that the same enemies come back
over and over again and why the Doctor has to defeat them time and
time again. After each encounter, he believes he has eradicated them
for good. Each time, they come back and threaten humanity again.
The
reason this matters is that each
time they are threatening different
humans.
Each
human needs to be saved, each time. So he saved the earth from Daleks
in 2005; well, he needs to save the world from them again in 2007, or
in 5100, or in 300 B.C., because the earth contains different people
every time. Some have been born and others have died in the
intervening time, and he has to save them all, over and over and
over.
I
see two matters of thematic importance as a result. I'll post this
theme today and another one tomorrow.
First,
this is a major difference between the Doctor and Jesus. I blogged
last time about how the Doctor is a “Christ-figure” in the
literary sense. But Jesus only gave Himself once. The Doctor has to
give himself over and over and over.
Now,
there are a lot of things I could say about that.
I
could talk about how the Doctor doesn't really die; he's always saved
at the last minute. There are a few times that he does die, though,
and then something wibbly-wobbly has to happen to reset time the way
it was supposed to be.
That
could lead me to talk about Predestination: the Way Things Were Meant
To Be. Think back to Series One, the episode “Father's Day.” Pete
Tyler was “supposed” to die that day, and when he didn't, the
entire universe began to fall apart and everyone else was destroyed.
But who said he was supposed to die that day? Did God ordain it? Did
it have something to do with linear time, like a story—since he
died the “first time” through that time, he had to the “second
time” through that time? (we'll come back to that later).
Or
I could talk about resurrection and regeneration; is every kind of
regeneration/rebirth/return in literature always a symbol of
resurrection? Or is resurrection just our longing for regeneration
turned into a wish-fulfillment doctrine?
Or
I could get into the symbolic ways in which Jesus' sacrifice is
remembered over and over again, such as in baptism and the Lord's
Supper. In Roman Catholic Christianity, of course, the sacrifice is
literal in each celebration of the Mass: the elements become Christ's
body and blood, thus enacting His death and resurrection over again
for each believer. So maybe in that sense the Doctor's repetitive
sacrifice is still a very accurate spiritual symbol.
Or
I could talk about another important part of the Dying-and-rising-god
conversation. In most other religions that have a
Dying-and-rising-god (besides Christianity, I mean), the god's life
cycle is tied to the cycle of the seasons: he or she dies and rises
every year, and the resurrection is connected to the regeneration of
plants in the springtime. So another argument against Christianity is
that it is just another permutation of these seasonal cycle myths:
after all, Easter is celebrated in the springtime. The opposite
argument is possible, too: that all the other seasonal cycle myths
are wish-fulfillment and Christianity is the real thing that happened
just once, historically.
Which
brings me back around to where I started. Jesus died just once, in an
efficacious, substitutionary atonement with eternal consequences. In
this piece of fiction, even within the fictional world (unlike, say,
Aslan, whose sacrifice occurred only once), the Doctor's sacrifices
do not stick. He has to do it over and over and over again.
Of
course, that's also just necessary to keep the show going. If he went
back to the beginning of time and did something so huge that it
destroyed the Daleks, Cybermen, Carrionites, Sycorax, and Weeping
Angels all in one go, there wouldn't be any story.
Come
back tomorrow to read about the other theme this brings to mind!
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