Mastery or madness?

 
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The third series of Doctor Who since it was regenerated by Russell T. Davies has now drawn to a close. And what an extremely good series it was, with none of the utter drivel that characterised ‘Love and Monsters’ in the 2006 series. The quality of writing seems, on the whole, to be progressively ratcheted up. ‘Blink’ is one of the finest, creepiest episodes ever written (can’t Sally Sparrow be the new companion instead of Donna?), and the ending of ‘The Family of Blood’ was profoundly moving. The broken-hearted desolation of the Doctor (David Tennant) at losing Rose matched that of many viewers, but Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman) soon made her mark and finally won a place in our hearts, as in his. He has faced threats as great as, or possibly greater than, any he has encountered before, frequently being trapped without his TARDIS and no obvious hope of getting to it.

The 2007 series raised, again, the question of who is the Doctor’s greatest enemy. The obvious answer is the Daleks, who turned up again in 1930s Manhattan. But notwithstanding the ninth Doctor’s panic when locked in Van Statten’s vaults with one, his problem with them is primarily the threat they represent to other life, rather than the threat to him personally. The Family of Blood seemed to put the wind up the Doctor in a way we’ve never seen before, forcing him to hide his Time Lord nature in a watch while internally metamorphosing into a human until the threat was past. As with many Doctor Who plots, its basic premise doesn’t bear close scrutiny, but that’s beside the point. What matters is that our hero is in a situation of unprecedented peril. Does that make the Family his greatest enemy? Momentarily, maybe, but there perhaps ought to be some long-term aspect to qualifying for this title. He and the Master certainly have a very long personal history –around 900 years of it, though how far back their animosity reaches is less clear. Not for the first time, the Master has the Doctor in his clutches, and given that the Master is also a Time Lord, we know that they are too evenly matched for the Doctor to have an easy time of it. The Master, surely, is the one enemy who has the potential to outwit as well as outgun our hero.

Russell T. Davies has said in the past that he would not bring the Master back to our screens unless there was a sufficiently good story for him. He told Radio Times, ‘The moment I thought of having an evil Prime Minister, I thought, “That's the key to it!” How much fun would The Master have in that role?’ The three-parter which brought the 2007 series to a spectacular close by pitching the old foes against one another was both spellbinding and somewhat anti-climactic. The moment of revelation when we realise that Derek Jacobi’s Professor Yana is really the Master was a stunning piece of writing, but the newly energised hyper-Doctor hovering into control of the crisis was a deus ex machina – an all-powerful rabbit pulled out of a convenient hat. Thankfully, the story was rescued in short order by a scene of extraordinary pathos: a confrontation between the Doctor and his nemesis that goes right against the grain of such confrontations.

In many ways, it is a classic scenario: the hero has failed in his attempt to defeat his adversary’s evil plan, and is now trapped, along with most of his allies. Everything seems doomed, but a final twist brings about a great reversal. But Davies seems to have put the Doctor in an utterly impossible situation: not only is he captured by the Master, he is humiliated and mistreated – and not just for a few brief moments in which the Master can exult, but for a year. Yes, earlier in the series (In ‘Blink’) we had the Doctor and Martha caught in the sixties for quite some time, but they seemed to be enjoying themselves. And in ‘Human Nature’ they seemed to have been hiding out in Edwardian England for a long time. But these situations aren’t the same as the Doctor being instantly aged and kept as the Master’s pet for a year. This is the Doctor staring defeat in the face. The attempt at overpowering the guards and the Master himself appears to be opening the way to resolution, but that hope is soon dashed. And then the one who has become humanity’s only hope, Martha Jones who has spent the year walking the earth in order to find and assemble the one weapon which will work, gives herself up to the Master. It’s a moment when we perhaps wish that the Doctor’s pacifist convictions were not so strong, or had not rubbed off on Martha quite so well. Once she too is snared and the Doctor (bizarrely) aged another few hundred years we seem to have run out of sleeves, never mind aces to hide up them. The hero seems utterly defeated.

The basic idea for the change in fortunes – telepathic waves somehow reverse broadcast through the satellite network into the Doctor’s psyche – was OK (if full of logical problems), but the way it was actually handled on screen was dire. Nevertheless, Davies took us into territory that drew on some of the depths of the Doctor’s character, not least those pacifist convictions, and on Christian theology. Given that Davies is a self-professed atheist who killed God off in The Second Coming (2003), that is a little surprising. But then, as Rob Buckley points out, new Who has made the Doctor into a very god-like being. He describes the conflict between the Master and the Doctor as ‘a battle between two gods’.

In fact, that commitment to using non-violent means to defeat evil if at all possible is something which is grounded in the Christian faith. It comes from the example of our (entirely benevolent!) Master, Jesus Christ, who said that his followers should turn the other cheek if someone strikes them on one, and who set an incredible example by not resisting those who wanted to arrest and kill him. But what we see from the Doctor in these final scenes is not simply non-violence; it’s mercy and grace. The Master does not warrant it – he’s been a tyrant for a long time and has, just a year before, ordered the killing of a tenth of the world’s population – but the Doctor offers him forgiveness. It’s extraordinarily powerful. We realise that the Doctor has wanted to say ‘I forgive you’ to the Master for some time, and that the Master has refused to hear it. The Doctor is showing almost unbelievable grace and mercy: mercy because he will not punish the Master as he deserves, and grace because he offers the forgiveness that he does not deserve. It seems that the Doctor knows that this unconditional acceptance is something that the Master has always been starved of; he certainly knows that this is what he most needs.

This idea is straight from the Christian good news of a God who is prepared to accept us and forgive us when we don’t deserve it, rather than punish us for our rebellion (whether conscious and active or merely apathetic) against him. Martha has played the part of an evangelist, walking the earth proclaiming the good news of a saviour who comes to heal and forgive, not to destroy and oppress like his enemy has. She has told stories of what he has done in history, for others and in her own life, showing them that their only hope lies in believing in him.

And yet the Master refuses this astonishing offer. He rejects this grace because he does not want to face up to its implications: when one accepts forgiveness like this, the only proper response is a life lived in gratitude, a life which seeks to live out the example that has been shown. To accept would mean humility, and the Master cannot humble himself to accept that he has always been wrong and the Doctor has always been right. To accept would mean to trust the Doctor absolutely, and he cannot bring himself to honour the Doctor in that way. So he would rather die than accept grace.

Tragically, the Christian message of God rescuing us in the person of his son, the saviour Jesus Christ, meets with exactly the same response. It, too, requires us to admit that we are wrong and God is right, to trust him completely and to follow him in gratitude all our days. But so many – Russell T. Davies included – would rather dismiss it as a manipulative delusion and carry on imagining that they are the masters of their soul, captains of their own destiny.

This isn’t the first time that the Doctor has echoed Jesus Christ in some way, but he has never done so more clearly or more powerfully. It’s worth reflecting on the folly of the Master’s choice and looking in our hearts to see if it isn’t the same choice that we are making in response to Jesus. But be careful: it has implications.

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