altariel | Your childhood stories will come true

Your childhood stories will come true

If any question why we died,
Tell them – because our fathers lied.

I went to see The Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer yesterday, and when the planet-devouring cloud finally arrived at Earth, the little girl sitting next to me – she looked about seven or eight – had her whole body screwed up in fear, knees to chest, knuckles in mouth. Of course it was put right at the end, thanks to an act of kindness – and, along the way, the film also suggested to her that she shouldn’t accept that military solutions are always the best solutions, and that torture doesn’t work, and that geeks who are brave and play to their strengths might just one day get to boss the jocks around. All this, and the fact that people were commenting on the Peter Pan allusions in ‘Last of the Time Lords’, set me thinking about the resources we provide children through the stories we tell them, and particularly about this in connection to the most recent season of Doctor Who. (I missed all the Peter Pan stuff in ‘Last of the Time Lords’, even with, you know, ALL THE CLUES, which shows exactly how much I know about anything. Oh the uncleverness of me!)

I think we can take it as read (from ‘Last of the Time Lords’ and ‘The Shakespeare Code’) that ‘power of storytelling’ is a major theme of this season, not to mention ‘will you use your powers for good or evil?’. And I think this season of Doctor Who has been extremely conscious of its status as the top-rating British family drama, and its resulting responsibilities. I think the writing asks itself about whether or not to use its powers for good or evil, and what both of those might involve.

I wrote in this post that Martha leaving the TARDIS is meant to show that she has grown up in some way (or was grown-up already), but – if I wasn’t sufficiently clear – I didn’t mean by this that Martha has put away childish things. Because that’s a daft thing to do, not to mention unlikely coming from a bunch of people producing the most successful family drama on British television. Like the angels and the demons in ‘The Girl in the Fireplace’, like the drawings in ‘Fear Her’, like the Toclafane coming true for the Doctor (a childhood bogeyman – something that can break all your hearts), Doctor Who expressly says to us: “Those childhood stories? They’re true. They contain truth.”

What does this mean? Well, first of all, it means the emotional reality of childhood experience is affirmed. It’s not silliness, or something to be grown out of – it’s real, and it matters. And so, at various places throughout this season, we are asked to consider what a responsibility this is. Whether or not we will use this power for evil. Whether or not we will tell lies [1].

Which casts a new light on the Time Lords’ spectacularly irresponsible Saturday teatime viewing: “Hey, kids, let’s peer at the infinite!” (Or did they just make them watch ‘Blake’?) So what did that produce? Well, the Master for one. And the Doctor too – we can’t have the angels without the demons, or vice versa. I also think that when we look at the Time Lord Academy (an educational institution to which children are sent at a very young age), we are meant to be reminded of the boarding school in ‘Human Nature’/‘Family of Blood’. And so we are meant to be reminded of the spectacularly irresponsible Edwardian storytelling that culminated in a generation of young men being sent to slaughter each other [2]. However, there is a difference, perhaps, between the kinds of stories these two schools are telling their students. What the teachers are telling at the boarding school is the Old Lie (dulce et decorum est...). What the Time Lords tell is the unleavened truth. Through which some are inspired, some go mad, and some run like hell and keep on running.

Doctor Who itself, going out on Saturday night on the BBC, is not unleavened truth. It’s mediated, through the telly (which we should also be wary of, see ‘The Idiot’s Lantern’), and through the watershed, and so on. Discussing ‘Last of the Time Lords’ over the weekend with Mr A., he remarked that it was about as unpleasant as you could get away with in a children’s programme. Some of the images are very disturbing: the Doctor on his hands and knees crawling out of a doghouse; Lucy Saxon the battered wife with the bruise on her cheek, fearfully alert to the Master’s every move, clutching herself for safety. And some of the ideas are terrible too: the end of the universe and the death of hope. Enslavement, treachery, tyranny, sadism. All presided over by the Master, who torments an old man in a wheelchair while singing along to the Scissor Sisters. Heavy stuff. Of course, it is put right at the end – by Martha’s stories, and people choosing to act on them (including Lucy Saxon). But I don’t think that Doctor Who is telling us that everything will naturally turn out for the best (the death of the universe and obliteration of humankind are still coming, for one thing). In other words, I don’t think it’s telling another kind of untruth, that it’s better to stay safe.

If ‘Blink’ and Elton’s speech at the end of ‘Love and Monsters’ don’t make this clear enough, I think we can see it in this season if we compare Francine Jones to Jackie Tyler. Both these mothers want to keep their daughters safe. Jackie (god, I love Jackie!) forces a promise out of the Doctor about Rose’s safety. A promise he keeps – twice, in fact: first during ‘The Parting of the Ways’ and then in ‘Doomsday’, even though Rose doesn’t want to be kept safe either time. Francine is also terrified about her daughter travelling around with this dangerous stranger, and chooses another way to try to protect her – enlisting Mr Saxon’s help. It’s a bad move, and one Francine comes very much to regret. But the Doctor, when he sends Martha away, doesn’t send her into safety, like he does with Rose. He sends her away on a very desperate, dangerous, and uncertain quest. Martha is capable and resourceful. And she is the emotional adult in that relationship: one of the first things she does in ‘Smith and Jones’ is assume responsibility and tell the Doctor not to worry about being on the moon. Pretty much the last thing she does is give him her phone and say, “You’d better come when I call you.” Not: “Call me and I’ll come running.” Martha does not need her mother’s or the Doctor’s protection, but neither does she need the Doctor’s constant companionship. She still has a hotline to the Doctor, but he is only one of her many intellectual and emotional resources. Martha is grown-up, but without making the mistake of putting away childhood things such as fantasy and story. She is the counterpoint to poor Lucy Saxon, cruelly shown the unmediated truth of our ultimate annihilation, with nothing to leaven it. And humankind, after all, cannot bear very much reality.

This is why the programme makers are so careful to make the season endings upbeat or, at least, to make them transitions into something new. I thought the extra eight minutes in ‘Last of the Time Lords’ gave the space for this transition to be much more successful than at the end of ‘Doomsday’; there were more emotional beats between the loss and the starting over. It’s not anything like seeing all of your heroes gunned down three days before Christmas. And yet I don’t think Rusty has ever lied, and certainly not by saying, “It’s OK – they’re just stories.” All of which, I think, adds up to some spectacularly responsible storytelling.

***

[1] Part of why I am taking this so seriously is because of this report I read over the weekend about a Palestinian children’s programme. I know very little about the detail about this beyond what I read on the BBC website, and have no desire to get into a sectarian discussion about it, but it made my blood boil. This is at least in part because of some of the more preposterous lies that I was told as a child; about the omniscient figure who was judging my every thought, for example, or why to hate the British. A version of the infinite that has certainly been enough to keep me running like hell.

[2] I wrote here what I thought the season as a whole might be saying about the common ground that might exist between secular hope-in-people and religious belief. I think ‘Human Nature’/‘Family of Blood’ might be engaged in a similar intellectual debate with patriotism, only it’s putting its case much more strongly: “Keep the blood sacrifice, and the propaganda (the lies), but we will stake our own claim to things like courage, loyalty, friendship. They are not your sole ideological property.” And hang on a minute because I have to go and CRY again at the thought of Tim-the-old-man being saluted by his unchanged, unaged childhood companions – and what an awful lot of old men and old women there were in this season, because that’s something else children need to think about too, isn’t it? That one day they will not be physically young any more, they will be old, and yet still they can be loving and crying and laughing and desperate and flawed and excellent. Or, you know, human.