The Time Lord alien who saves many worlds
Doctor Who is a program that needs no introduction, at least in the western hemisphere. The longest running sci-fi series in television history, it chronicles the adventures of The Doctor, an alien Time Lord with two hearts from the planet Gallifrey, who travels through time and space with his trusty companions and solves the problems ranging from universe-destroying to deeply personal. A standard part of BBC, it is now in the tenth year of its revival and one of BBC’s most treasured and profitable properties.
As a deeply science fiction series, Doctor Who generally avoids commenting on contemporary politics, in favour of commenting about the failings of humanity in general. This way, the show avoids dating itself for future audiences or audiences that are not familiar with local issues. That is not to say it doesn’t do politics, but it does it in a general way. For example, in the classic era, it did have an episode touch on the South African Apartheid, but in a very distant way. This has been their standard operating procedure throughout the program’s 52 year history.
This changed significantly over the past two weeks, where a two parter was aired, titled “The Zygon Invasion/The Zygon Inversion” and one that significantly tried to talk about an important issue of the contemporary world, namely ISIS. Predictably, it touched on the issues of radicalisation, but in a rather surprising manner, it did not focus on just the extremist ideologies: It also touched upon the role of alienation and the pressures of assimilation in a foreign society as a part of this radicalisation. Additionally, it talked about the problems with knee-jerk responses that are often considered solutions, but only tend to exacerbate the problems.
For those of us not familiar with the Doctor Who lore, I will be doing a brief recap of the background so we are all on fairly equal footing. Doctor Who chronicles the adventures of an alien, who has taken the alias of “The Doctor”. The Doctor is a Time Lord, an ancient and powerful race that have conquered time and have the ability to travel through Time and Space using their spaceships that are called TARDIS, an initialism formed from Time and Relative Dimension In Space. The Doctor has taken a particular liking for earth and the human race, saving us from countless cases of destruction. Not only that, he also takes a human companion, sometimes more than one, with him for his adventures. These companions often serve as the audience surrogate and the one that the audience can most relate to.
The Doctor can also defy death. The time lords do not die, but regenerate into a new face and a new personality altogether, which still has all the memories and abilities of the previous ones. The Doctor is currently in his twelfth incarnation, played by the amazing Peter Capaldi and is joined by Clara Oswald, a teacher from a small school in London as his companion, played by the beautiful Jenna Coleman. Together, they travel through space and time and fight monsters and save galaxies. This is Doctor Who in essence.
Among The Doctor’s rogues gallery, we can find a multitude of human and alien villains across the length and breadth of time and space. The ones that are the subject of this particular episodes, and the ISIS surrogates, are the Zygons. The Zygons are reptile-like creatures that have the ability to shape-shift into any person. Their own planet was destroyed in a major war, one in which the normally peaceful Doctor participated, which explains their animosity towards him. The Zygons tried to invade earth and take over the world, but The Doctor managed to convince them otherwise. As a result, and after some memory-wiped magic, The Humans and The Zygons Shape Shifted As Humans managed to reach a truce, whereby the Zygons shall be allowed to settle peacefully all over the world, and in return they will stay peaceful and not interfere with humans.
As the episode opens, we are treated to the character of Osgood, one of the people involved in the original truce, as she records a message about an “Osgood Box” that ensures the safety of the peace. There are however, Two Osgoods, one originally human and one a Zygon, shape shifted as a human. This becomes an important metaphor of integration into British society later. As we move away from the recorded video, we see a brutal scene of one Osgood being killed by the Zygons.
Soon after, we see Clara going home as she watches a British-Indian child waiting for his parents and crying. As Clara goes to investigate, the said parents appear out of nowhere and in an almost uncomfortably calm tone tell Clara that nothing is the matter and everything is alright. The next time we see Clara, she is back in the hallway. I do not know why I didn’t pick up on this transformation. As other fans have pointed out, this is a major break from Clara’s usual helpful and passionate character, but it must have been the fact that I am from South Asia myself and that we have certain expectations and perceptions of both ourselves and the “others”, that this did not register with me as odd. To me, this interaction was pretty normal. Effectively how the British may want to leave the “Muslims” to their own culture, not interfering with it.
The central conflict of the episode lies between a radical faction of Zygons, hell bent on exposing every Zygon on earth and causing mass panic, in a bid to start a war. A clear expy of ISIS, this group is repeatedly pointed out as a minority, except this minority now has one of their leaders disguised as Clara, a major character that has access to high level military files, including the location of every Zygon on earth. The voice of militant and knee-jerk response is a general from the Unified Intelligence Taskforce, aka UNIT, Earth’s premier intelligence agency regarding the extraterrestrials and one of the parties that brokered peace. Not just that, but we also see how a significant part of London’s population has been “replaced” (read radicalised) by the Zygon radicals, while the actual population is kept in subterranean pods, sound asleep. You can’t get more blatant symbolism than that.
While the episode twists and turns, we get to see a Zygon “corrupted” by the radicals, who can not stop but electrocute others, turned into a weapon. He pleads to The Doctor that he does not want to kill anyone but he just can’t help it. Eventually, the guilt and his realisation that he has become a danger leads him to kill himself to save everyone else.
The Conflict comes to a head in the denouement of the second part, where the Lead Scientist of UNIT, Kate Stewart, and the Zygon-Clara that prefers to call herself Bonnie, find the Osgood Box, or rather Boxes. We find that there are two boxes, each with two buttons. The box in front of Bonnie has what she wants and a surprise: One button unmasks every Zygon on earth and while the other button will cancel the Zygons’ shape-shifting ability, making their human forms permanent. The other box, where the now-furious Kate Stewart wants to kill all Zygons, has what she wants, with another button that will detonate a nuclear warhead, wiping London off the face of the planet. The buttons in both boxes are conveniently labelled “Truth” and “Consequences”, a major running theme in both parts of the story. As both parties stand there, contemplating the hard choice they are forced to make, The Doctor explains how this is a condensed version of a war. The Doctor’s speech, a passionate plea to the Radicals about how once you start a war, you don’t know how it will end. About how once you achieve your utopia, you will still have your own radicals to deal with and how that problem never has a solution. About how when you start a war, you never know who’s going to die. This speech gets through to Bonnie, and Kate as well.
The arguments that The Doctor gives are not just empty rhetoric. They are actual arguments, not just to the radicalised youth in Britain and world-wide, but to the British government and other governments fighting radicalisation in the west: Knee-jerk responses don’t work and grass-roots problem solving is needed in addition to helping the immigrants and their generations assimilate to fix the problem. The “othering” will only drive them deeper into the radical world. At the end, we see that Bonnie has now taken the shape of Osgood again, so the loss of an Osgood is no longer a loss. Despite repeated questions by The Doctor about whether the Osgood with him is Human or Zygon, Osgood stands her ground, talking about how she is both, part human and part Zygon. This embodiment of peace and reconciliation, and by extension the embodiment of the assimilation of modern Islam and the British identity plays a major role in the episode’s symbolic drama.
All in all, while the political part of the story is quite blatant, it is done so masterfully that you don’t think of it as a problem. For the fans of the series, it is a treat. For people unfamiliar with the series, it can serve as both an introduction to the series and an excellent stand-alone story for them to enjoy and watch how serious BBC can get while still being entertaining and targeted at a wide audience comprising of children and adults. While I do not want to give this review a number, I would give it a 5 out of 5, just for being an amazing story while taking on one of the trickiest subjects in the present world.