orthogeeks

You’re traveling through the wastes, and you come to a massive, rocky canyon that was once spanned by a great bridge, but now lies in ruins and fragments. Ahead of you is the face of the other side, and as you stumble down a dirty slope to the floor of the canyon, you catch a glimpse of greenery ahead.

As you’re searching for a path upwards, you wonder if your eyes are playing tricks on you. But soon you find a small gulch running perpendicular to the canyon: looking left and right you see that it is a hidden road, starting hidden at the base of the canyon, and running up into what seems to be a jungle.

Making your way blearily up the path, what starts as a small tree here and there, becomes quickly the jungle you saw; and as the path bends off to your right, you see a wooden wall with a gate. Two men – a man and woman on closer inspection, guard the way in hoods and robes. The man motions for you to come forward.

“He knew you were coming. Welcome! Please, He would like to meet you.”
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I remember when I was much younger; somewhere between 8 and 10 years old.  I was at church listening in on a conversation between my mother and an older female parishioner.  The woman was saying to my mother, “I think it’s necessary for children to be exposed to evil.”  I suppose her point was that it may do more harm than good to shelter a child from certain realities that he must surely one day face.  I remember that at the time that seemed rather foolish to me.

But of course, it tends to happen anyway.  And what important and interesting happenings those are!

The first time you get picked on by a bully.  The day you realized you would one day die.  The first time you are used by another human being.

How important, in those contexts, are our introductions to terror?  How much did we learn from them; their initial impact, but also the way in which the terror is dealt with by our hero?

So we return to the Doctor, and to the Theme.

We should regard Theme in both senses;  the musical as well as the literary.

I offer this quote from the Wikipedia article on the subject:

“The theme has been often called both memorable and frightening, priming the viewer for what was to follow. During the 1970s, the Radio Times, the BBC’s own listings magazine, announced that a child’s mother said the theme music terrified her son. The Radio Times was apologetic, but the theme music remained.”

Yes it did.

There’s an important segment of the theme music, known as the “bridge” or the “middle eight”, which “is an uplifting interlude in a major key that usually features in the closing credits or the full version of the theme.”

These two elements of the theme combine to create a complete picture of the soul of the show.  At the beginning we have darkness and a fear of the unknown.  The darkness is dispelled by a stab of light: in the music the middle eight; in the show itself, the Doctor.

In answer to the woman who gave that advice to my mom all those years ago: All people will, at one time or another, encounter evil; hatred, fear, injustice.  The important thing is not that we stress the fact that these exist; this will become abundantly clear to them as they grow up.

The important thing is that we discover good ways in which their minds can be excited by the possibility of hope offered by such characters as the Doctor.  That possibility is made manifest for Christians by the Lord Himself, to whom we attribute the title Our Sure Hope.  We’re responsible for tilling the soil, making sure that our offspring become the “good ground”; ready for the Sower.

Say!  That gives me an idea for another essay!  Garth!  Rejoice!

When I was doing research about one of my essays, I talked to someone kind of randomly – a game reviewer who was  rather astute – about choice in games. He pointed out that in most games, freedom is not genuine. If you do believe in free will but not in providence, you may feel chafed as you ‘kick against the goads’ in some more story or movie-like games. You would like to be able to really shape the future of that virtual world; after all, the point of being the hero is being the decider, the turner of tides and the shaper of futures.

I once pointed out to my roommate that games – most anyway – offer you the freedom to fail. That is to say, situations arise where the player can make choices that will cause the game to end in loss. Because we’re ‘in’ the world, we tacitly assume for the sake of playing the game, that it is, if not real, a kind of consistent reality. We use our imagination to fill in the gaps. When playing a role playing game, for instance, the player only has ‘freedom to fail’ (apart from turning off the game system) during combat, or at particular crisis points outside of it. Normally you are not given the freedom to fail; you are restricted, like bumpers on a bowling alley.

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I must have been 4 or 5 years old.  All I remember is a flash: a green tentacle wraps around the throat of an unsuspecting man and tightens.  The man chokes out a terrified scream.  A younger man in odd tan clothing grabs the tentacled creature and throws it to the ground.  He has a gun.  He shoots the creature until it stops moving.

On the strength of this horrible moment, I didn’t watch Doctor Who again for years.  If I even heard the unmistakable strains of the theme music floating through the house, I would demand with tears that my parents turn it off.

And yet, even then, I loved it.  I never admitted my fear to my friend James, who can truly be credited with introducing me to the show.  We went right on playing Doctor Who in the quite awesome cardboard TARDIS his father made for him.

But from that point on, our games had a different taste to them.  When I finally did come back to the show in my early teens, it was with a certain degree of wariness; at any moment something horrifying could occur.

Of course, a rather sad sort of teenage cynicism and jadedness came over me for a few years, and I would only see the cheesiness of the monsters and the cheapness of the effects.  For some reason I kept watching.

It was the theme song.  It lived in my head and my heart, and does up to this day.  What it says is the essence of the show for viewers young and old, fans of 4th, 7th, 10th, or 11th doctors:  prepare for an adventure through time and space, and prepare to be afraid.

It was during this period of viewing (spoilers ahead) that I witnessed one of the most shocking events in Doctor Who history; the death of his companion Adric, in the 5th Doctor Episode “Earthshock”.  A new reality settled in.

Characters that I knew, people that I cared about, could be in serious danger, and their survival was not guaranteed.

Life would later remind me of this lesson, but it was one for which the Doctor had prepared the ground.