What If?
This past weekend, I watched Children Of Men, one of the most powerful films I’ve seen in a long time. I also caught up on a number of Series 2 Doctor Who eps that I had missed when they aired on Sci-Fi. Despite the vast difference in tone, I found there to be an interesting resonance between the two. And not just because of the British-ness.
The pre-apocalyptic world of Children Of Men is an example of my favorite type of speculative fiction: a high concept “what if” used as a springboard to explore human nature. What if there were no more children born to the human race? What if the last generation of humanity knew they were the last? The answer isn’t pretty. Governments and nations collapsed. Today’s Bagdad spread to every corner of the Earth. Denial, despair, death. And perhaps most frightening of all, as seen in Clive Owen’s Theo early in the film, utter apathy. It’s a good day when you don’t die. But what good is escaping the bomb when there’s nothing else left for you, for anyone? What’s the use of crying over the murder of a young man when, alive or dead, he is just the symbol of the end?
How does this dark, gritty tale relate to the continuation of a campy sci-fi TV series that features an alien ship permanently “disguised” as an outdated police call box, a terrifying alien menace that looks like a sex toy add-on, and the ultimate all-purpose sonic-powered tool good for obtaining pocket money or committing genocide? Quite simply, the new Who asks the same what if. What if you were the last?
In contrast to the old series, the current Doctor (or Doctors–we’ve already seen the Ninth and the Tenth incarnations of the character) is the lone survivor of an ancient, wise, and powerful alien race, a restless wander whose gleefully carefree mask conceals a loneliness that stretches to the farthest reaches of time and space. It’s a good day when everyone lives, but it can never erase the knowledge that countless numbers, evil or not, intended or not, have already died at your hands. What good is the power of a lonely god when it means that your mistakes have catastrophic consequences for whole races, whole planets? What good is time travel when all it does is show you an infinite variety of quiet, perfectly mundane lives, the one thing you can never have?
“And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love.” But for human and alien alike, even the most beautiful of intangible concepts need to be embodied in something real to be more than just words. A pregnant womb contains more than the seed of survival. A Companion is more than someone to sightsee with. Whether it is an infant or a shop girl, watching someone take her first steps into a larger world that you know to be both beautiful and terrifying, realizing that you have the chance to see it all as new again through their eyes, accepting that you have a duty to guide them and protect them, that is what allows both Theo and the Doctor to go on and strive for more than simple survival. Protecting something smaller than ourselves, granting it the opportunity to blossom into something bigger than we can ever be, finding out that faith, hope, and love are still alive and well in the universe: that is the true adventure. Trigger-happy terrorists, corrupt cat nun nurses, bloody war zones, and emotionless cyborgs are just proof that wallowing selfish desires, convincing ourselves it is all for the greater good, only leads to stagnation at best, complete disaster more often. The beauty of the universe lies outside of ourselves.
So what if you were the last? What if it were the end? The answer is simple. Find a beginning.