The Ottery
“If an otter can’t have fun doing something, it just simply won’t do it.”

Tea: The Preferred Drink of Time Lords

October 12th, 2006

Now that I’ve seen “The Christmas Invasion,” the 2-hour special that launched David Tennant’s stint as the tenth Doctor Who, I think I can safely declare myself a “Doctor Who” fan. Unlike many of my peers, I didn’t grow up watching “Doctor Who” on PBS, so I’m a newbie. I only started watching when the ninth Doctor appeared on the Sci-Fi channel this spring.

For anyone who’s more a novice than I am, Wikipedia’s “Doctor Who” article probably offers the best introduction. For now, all you need to know is that Doctor Who is a Time Lord, the last of his kind, and that he travels through time and space in a phone-box called the TARDIS, along with a British female companion, saving various planets from destruction. Because so many different actors have played Doctor Who, writers gave his character the ability to periodically “regenerate” in a new body.

So, in the episode prior to “The Christmas Invasion,” Doctor Who has self-sacrificially saved us all once again, necessitating his regeneration as a new body (hence the transition from the ninth to the tenth Doctor Who). Apparently regeneration takes a lot out of you, though, because after his initial appearance, Doctor Who Ten collapses and goes into a coma-like state. In the meantime, of course, naughty aliens try to invade the Earth. Things look bad for humans.

However, naturally the Doctor wakes up in the nick of time. What brings him out of his deep sleep? Tea. Yes, tea, that best of all God’s potable gifts. The official BBC “Doctor Who” site (click on the big picture on the home page, and then select “The Doctor wakes up” from among the videos) contains this video of the Doctor’s first moments awake, in which he praises tea and complains that he hasn’t returned with ginger (red) hair.

The zany humor continues as he, still clad in his pajamas, duels the head Sycorax. After the Doctor wins, Rose hands him his bathrobe, leading him to declare, “Not bad for a man in his jim-jams! Very Arthur Dent. Now, there was a nice man.” Oh, dear. If the writer had been deliberately trying to appeal to me, he couldn’t have done much better. Arthur Dent, tea, and dueling in pajamas! All that’s missing is an otter. David Tennant’s Doctor does have an otter’s sense of mischief about him, though.

The show isn’t entirely fun and laughs, however. You think the climax of the episode comes when the Doctor defeats the Sycorax, telling them to let everyone else out there know that “the Earth is protected!” But, no, the big, heart-wrenching moment actually occurs after they return to Earth. Harriet Jones, the British prime minister who has helped Doctor Who before, fires a sort of long-distance laser weapon at the departing Sycorax ship, blowing up everyone on board. The Doctor turns on her, accusing her of slaughter (and, since all his people were wiped out by the Daleks, the Doctor is particularly passionate about the preservation of life whenever possible). “I gave them [the Sycorax] the wrong warning,” he says bitterly. “I should have told them to run, as fast as they can. Run and hide, because the monsters are coming – the human race.”

As far as I know, this is a new twist for “Doctor Who.” Here we’ve been thinking we’re innocent little humans trying to defend ourselves from the evil aliens, and it turns out that we are the true monsters. The Sycorax didn’t even have the ability to do more than pose as conquerors, while Britain had secretly been developing a “weapon of mass destruction” known as Torchwood. The very name makes me think of Wormwood, a fallen star—and also the name of an apprentice devil in C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. Apparently there’s going to be a whole spin-off TV show called “Torchwood,” so this will continue to be a theme.

If life-and-death ethical situations like this one appeared in a sci-fi show featuring stilted, pseudo-medieval speech (as in Star Wars), I doubt I’d be interested. But give me ethics mixed in with some Douglas Adams-esque patter, and I’m hooked.

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