Highly evocative Dr Who end
September 23rd 2007 06:30
Dr Who's Tardis
Last night's ABC showing of the final in the present series of Dr Who was highly evocative emotionally and even spiritually. No wonder it has a cult-like following of avid supporters. Even older, mildly avid viewers like me get excited enough to want to write about it.
It's interesting to see how biblically similar the plots of Dr Who have become. Last night we glimpsed a foretelling of the end of the world, a furnace for all Earth's poor souls trapped in their individual spheres.
Dr Who stands for the good time lord. The other time lord stood for evil. He enslaved the people, called himself the master and made broadcasts obliging the people to rejoice in him.
Had the plot followed the biblical way, his ending might have been in the furnace too. But no, the scriptwriters decided on another ending. After loosing his powers then receiving a life- threatening shot to the chest, the master preferred to suicide. Faced with the alternative of prison locked in the Tardis (Dr Who's time machine), he refused to use his time lord's capability to regenerate.
"I win", the master uttered just before dying in the arms of Dr Who, who pleaded with him to regenerate.
Earlier the evil master heard the word's from Dr Who that he most dreaded and definitely did not want to hear. "I forgive you", said Dr Who. More highly evocative script.
So what is it in us that gets evoked when we see something like this? Why do we get so excited that we seek out others with whom to share the experience? Some in these groups get so enamoured that they organise international travel to places where these fictitious events were said to have taken place. Adherents to the story of The Da Vinci Code do this, and travel tour operators to Europe are happy to oblige.
Does anyone remember the kid's film "Never Ending Story", especially the part where the boy reading the book is confronted when the book seems to speak to him something like this: "Children's disbelief in fairy tales is the reason that the heaven for kids is disintegrating - and your own disbelief in this story at this moment."
An adult in the cinema audience of about age 35 at the time, I was no kid. But at that moment in the film, the book seemed to be talking to adults too. I had the sense that my disbelief had dire consequences far beyond just me.
That is why I write the kind of thing for Orble readers that I do now, observing things like this: How interesting that the Dr Who scriptwriters picked prison in the Tardis time machine as Dr Who's penalty intended for the master. Because in the bible the devil faces a thousand years prison from the time of Christ's second coming until the very end of the Millennium period. Then he gets a release like Napoleon got from the Island of Elba, to cause even more torment and misery in a final battle.
Dr Who is fiction. Never Ending Story is fiction. But Napoleon was real. Which is most exciting, fiction or truth? Which is most evocative? And what is it in us that gets evoked?
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