New!
Author resources • Lorehaven Guild
Podcast sponsors • Subscribe for free
Crew manifest Faith statement FAQs
All author resources Lorehaven Guild Subscribe for free

The Chase
Book Quests, Apr 1, 2023

Once Upon a Ren Faire
Reviews, Mar 31, 2023

How to Disciple Your Kids With Dangerous Books
Ticia Messing in Articles, Mar 30, 2023

Library

Find fantastical Christian novels

fantasy · sci-fi · and beyond
middle grade · teens + YA · adults
All novels Search Add a novel
Enhanced, Candace Kade
Bear Knight, James R. Hannibal
The Wayward, Tabitha Caplinger
Fortified, V. Romas Burton
Canaan Sleeps, Daniel Camomile
Silver Bounty, Victoria McCombs
A Sword for the Immerland King, F. W. Faller
Calor, J. J. Fisher
Once Upon A Ren Faire, A. C. Castillo
The Genesis 6 Project, Michael Ferguson
Exile, Loren G. Warnemuende
Aberration, Cathy McCrumb
The Truth Beyond the Lies, Kathleen Bird
Frost, Winter's Lonely Guardian, E. E. Rawls
Podcast

Get the Fantastical Truth podcast

Podcast sponsors | Subscribe links
Archives Feedback

155. How Might Sentimentalism Threaten Christian Fiction?
Fantastical Truth, Mar 28, 2023

154. What If You Had to Fake Being Genetically Modified? | Enhanced with Candace Kade
Fantastical Truth, Mar 21, 2023

153. When Can Deconstructionism Threaten Christian Fiction? | with Michael Young aka ‘Wokal Distance’
Fantastical Truth, Mar 14, 2023

152. How Can Christian Fantasy Fans Heal from Church Trauma? | with Marian Jacobs and L. G. McCary
Fantastical Truth, Mar 7, 2023

151. How Can Fantastical Satire Sharpen Our Theology? | The Pilgrim’s Progress Reloaded with David Umstattd
Fantastical Truth, Feb 28, 2023

150. Is the U.S. Government Covering Up Spy Balloons or Alien Spaceships? | with James R. Hannibal
Fantastical Truth, Feb 21, 2023

Quests

Join our monthly digital book quests.

Lorehaven Guild Faith statement FAQs
Reviews

Find fantastical Christian reviews

All reviews Request review
Gifts

Find new gifts for Christian fans

Archives

The original SpecFaith: est. 2006

Speculative Faith | archives

Lorehaven issues (2018–2020)

Order back issues online!
New
Library
Podcast
Quests
Reviews
Gifts
Archives
Lorehaven helps Christian fans explore fantastical stories for Christ’s glory: fantasy, science fiction, and beyond. Articles, the library, reviews, podcasts, gifts, and the Lorehaven Guild community help fans discern and enjoy the best Christian-made fantastical stories, applying their meanings to the real world Jesus Christ calls us to serve. Subscribe free to get any updates you choose and to access the Lorehaven Guild.
Subscribe free to Lorehaven
/ SpecFaith /

Fourth ‘Doctor’ Season Brings New Alien Agendas, Part 2

Some makers of the fantastic sci-fi series “Doctor Who” want to present humanism and even pro-homosexuality beliefs. Instead the time-traveling Doctor often gives echoes of the true Time Lord, whether or not they hear those truths.
E. Stephen Burnett on May 8, 2008
No comments

Last week’s column (my first in a long time on Speculative Faith) focused on not-so-hidden intellectual invasions inherent in Doctor Who, courtesy of the British sci-fi programme’s head writer/producer, Russell T. Davies.

His goals were made more explicit in a British newspaper’s article early last month, as the series’ fourth season was underway: Davies gushes, for example, over a guest appearance by angry Atheist Richard Dawkins in a forthcoming episode, and claims directly that he hopes young boys will imitate one series character’s example and declare their own homosexuality.

However, I’m actually not going to undertake another one of those anti-culture Christian rants, like the kind you read about in email forwards. To be sure, Christendom often needs those sorts of rants (even in email forwards), to oppose truly harmful movies, television programs or other art forms, politicians, organizations or whatever. This column, continued from last week, just isn’t going to be one of them.

Instead, the Doctor practices such heroism and wages true battle against evil influences, resembling Christ like other famous fictitious Christlike-figures, that it’s well worth seeing.

This meat may have indeed been sacrificed to idols by its makers (a la 1 Corinthians 10: 23-33), in the hope of furthering anti-Christian agendas. But Biblical truths are there in these epic stories anyway — like the time-traveling TARDIS ship itself, surrounded by a perception filter, it seems the writers may just not be able to see such “spiritually discerned” elements.

Echoes of the true Time Lord

For those unfamiliar, the Doctor is a 900-year-old “Time Lord,” the last of a benevolent species of time-traveling aliens from the planet Gallifrey. In the new series, he is the (almost) last of his kind, following a great war between the Time Lords and the evil Daleks. Roaming time and space in his fantastic time-ship, the TARDIS, the Doctor repeatedly finds himself saving the Earth and universe, often with the aid of one or more human companions.

Previous Spec-Faith columns, including this one and this by guest blogger Jim Black, have pointed out how the Doctor might well be called a “Messiah” in some circumstances. Any character, of course, can be shown as saving the world just as the true God-Man Hero, Christ Jesus, is truly saving it. Yet the Doctor often does so in a manner that tributes — imitates, though not in a blasphemous way — the real Lord of Time, Who not only travels within the vortex of eternity, but created Time itself and dwells infinitely beyond its limitations.

Perhaps the most poignant portrayal I recently saw was in the third-season episode The Family of Blood, part 2 of a 2-part adventure. The Doctor and his human colleague, Martha Jones, have hidden away in 1913 England to avoid the titular Family, a group of aliens who want to kill him. Because this species can detect his presence by smell, the Doctor has temporarily transformed himself into a human, storing all his Time Lord characteristics and memories in a special fob watch that can only be opened at the proper time.

A boy at the school at which the Doctor (in his human incarnation as a professor) teaches, takes the watch and discovers its secret. While the aliens finally do invade and wreak their carnage, the boy keeps the watch to himself, until finally he gives it to the Doctor.

He did not want to give up the watch at first, he explains, because he found that at first, the Doctor was a terror to behold. “He’s like fire and ice and rage,” Tim explains in quiet awe, tinged with lingering fear. “He’s like the night and the storm in the heart of the sun. . . . He’s ancient and forever. He burns at the center of time and can see the turn of the universe. . . . And — and he’s wonderful.”

If that wasn’t enough for a terrible-and-yet-beautiful Messianic meme, the manner in which the Doctor finally returns to his true form and dispatches the evil alien Family is even more so.

After the Family’s spaceship is destroyed and the Doctor stands tall and angry over the hunters who are now the hunted, the son of the Family — “Son of Mine” — unexpectedly enters the story for a voiced-over summary of what happened next.

He never raised his voice. That was the worst thing — the fury of the Time Lord. And then we discovered why: why this Doctor, who had fought with gods and demons, why he had run away from us and hidden. He was being kind.

He wrapped my father in unbreakable chains forged in the heart of a dwarf star. He tricked my mother into the event horizon of a collapsing galaxy to be imprisoned there, forever. He still visits my sister, once a year, every year. I wonder if one day he might forgive her, but there she is. Can you see? He trapped her inside a mirror. Every mirror. If ever you look at your reflection and see something move behind you just for a second, that’s her. That’s always her.

As for me, I was suspended in time and the Doctor put me to work standing over the fields of England, as their protector.

We wanted to live forever. So the Doctor made sure we did.

And that — reflecting and portraying the truth of God’s wrath and eternal punishment of evildoers — is something more intentionally “Christian” fiction would do well to emulate.

Messages like these are happening even while Davies and others are trying to push a gay-rights agenda or de facto evolutionary propaganda. It’s not just religious symbolism — a hymn sung in the episode Gridlock, or a cross-shaped space station or angelic figures — that makes the program convey Biblical truth. It’s incidental portrayals of God Himself, in the most surprising ways — and in fantastic, awesome ways that Christians can appreciate.

So bring on your gay-rights not-so-subtext Russell T. Davies, and fall down along with others and “worship” professional God-hater Richard Dawkins if you wish to. I don’t mind at all; with the true Time Lord’s help, I can see Him there, and avoid the junk.

However, hmm, perhaps Dawkins could be cast as a villain, or at least a victim who’s among the first to go during another alien invasion. I wouldn’t mind, in the slightest, seeing a Dalek “ex-terrrrr-min-ate!” his character. Yes. In slow motion. Because the fury of the real Time Lord is indeed unmatched against rebels who defy Him — yet He can be kind, and even the rebels can reflect His truths in epic storytelling, whether they want to or not.

E. Stephen Burnett
E. Stephen Burnett creates sci-fi and fantasy novels as well as nonfiction, exploring fantastical stories for God’s glory as publisher of Lorehaven.com and cohost of the Fantastical Truth podcast. As the oldest of six, he enjoys connecting with his homeschool roots by speaking at conferences for Christian families and creators. Stephen is coauthor of The Pop Culture Parent: Helping Kids Engage Their World for Christ from New Growth Press (2020, with Ted Turnau and Dr. Jared Moore). Stephen and his wife, Lacy, live in the Austin area, where they help with foster parenting and serve as members of Southern Hills Baptist Church.
Website · Facebook · Instagram · Twitter
  1. Galadriel says:
    April 13, 2011 at 4:47 pm

    Amen!

    Reply

What do you think? Cancel reply

  • Honest Sci-Fi Honors LifeHonest Sci-Fi Honors Life
  • Fourth ‘Doctor’ Season Brings New Alien Agendas, Part 1Fourth ‘Doctor’ Season Brings New Alien Agendas, Part 1
  • Entering The ‘Asylum’Entering The ‘Asylum’
  • Doctor Who: the lonely godAbandoned By The Lonely God
Lorehaven magazine, spring 2020

Wear the wonder:
Get exclusive shirts and beyond

Listen to Lorehaven’s podcast

Authors and publishers:
Reach new fans with Lorehaven

Lorehaven helps Christian fans explore fantastical stories for Christ’s glory: fantasy, science fiction, and beyond. Articles, the library, reviews, podcasts, gifts, and the Lorehaven Guild community help fans discern and enjoy the best Christian-made fantastical stories, applying their meanings to the real world Jesus Christ calls us to serve. Subscribe free to get any updates you choose and to access the Lorehaven Guild.
Website · Facebook · Instagram · Twitter