May the 4th Be With You! – Finding Hope and Fear on “The Ark in Space”

Happy May the 4^th everyone!  Today is the day we all celebrate the Fourth Doctor, Tom Baker himself – the man who has played the Doctor longer than anyone else.  Getting into the spirit of the day – celebrating what it means when the Doctor is with you – I’m looking at “The Ark in Space.”  After regenerating, the Fourth Doctor’s first outing with Sarah Jane Smith (Elizabeth Sladen) and Harry Sullivan (Ian Marter)  finds them exiting the TARDIS on Space Station Nerva in the year 16,087.  Nerva holds thousands of humans in cryogenic sleep alongside animal and botanical life and a vast store of “the entire body of human thought.”  However, the station also holds the Wirrn, a parasitic insectoid race bent on absorbing all human life.  Russell T Davies has said this was his favorite Classic Doctor Who story.[1] Steven Moffatt cited it as the best Fourth Doctor story.[2]  And (allegedly) it was Tom Baker’s favorite episode he ever filmed.[3]  I love it because space provides a unique setting for our stories, one as likely to inspire hope as soul-shaking horror.  Space holds endless possibilities and endless peril.  I chose “The Ark in Space” for this May the 4^th piece as it gives us both while beautifully showing what  happens when the Doctor is with you.

Doctor Who’s “The Face of Evil,” the Nature of God, and the Role of Religion

Doctor Who is, in many ways, an inherently religious show.  At least according to Tom Baker, the Fourth Doctor himself, who’s played the Doctor longer than anyone else to date (a grand total of 172 episodes across eight seasons).  I agree.  In fact, I’d argue one of the many, many reasons Doctor Who has been around for nearly sixty years is because it does what religions often do and we, by nature, are drawn to such stories.  By this I mean it addresses the fundamental questions of human existence and invites viewers to dialogue with these questions of meaning, purpose, morality, and the like.  It offers hope, even when such stories are out of vogue.  Most of all, its central catechesis is to be kind.  Religions, when they are operating at their best, call us to do the same as they seek to connect us to the Divine and to each other.  However, religion doesn’t always operate at its best and this can lead to confusing conflations of our ideas of “good,” “evil,” and “God.”  “The Face of Evil,” the fourth serial of Series Fourteen of Classic Doctor Who, brilliantly explores the dangers of conflating the role of religion with the will of God.