Adam Graham's Blog: Christians and Superheroes - Posts Tagged "death-in-heaven"

Science Fiction often tries to teach lessons…Give a hoot, don’t pollute and be kind and unbigoted. Lessons on hot topic issues are fired at the audience with all the subtlety of a “This is Your Brain on drugs” ad. For Series 8 of Doctor Who, show runner Stephen Moffat took a different tact in talking about the military and along the way was criticized by fans for having the Doctor be anti-military, while the World Socialists organization has accused the show of being jingoistic and militaristic.

The Doctor’s relationship with the military is often complex. The Doctor, more often than not, ends up butting heads with military authorities. At the same time, he’s often found military allies. Most famously, the Doctor served as a scientific advisor to U.N.I.T. during the 1970s and is technically still on their payroll. He formed an occasionally contentious friendship with Brigadier Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart, Captain Yates, and Sergeant Benton. Other times, he’d have random military allies such a group of soldiers who volunteered to fight Cybermen in Earthshock. The Eighth Doctor asked to be a warrior in “Night of the Doctor.” Originally, the Doctor ended the Time War by wiping out his own people as well as the Daleks.

***Spoilers for Series 8 ahead***

However, after “Day of the Doctor,” the destruction of Gallifrey was done away with and from episode two it became clear the twelfth Doctor had a distinct dislike for soldiers. In his second episode, “Into the Dalek,” he meets a brave female soldier named Journey Blue who is fighting the Daleks. After the adventure, she asks to join the Doctor and the Doctor rejects her outright, saying, “I think you're probably nice. Underneath it all, I think you're kind. You're definitely brave. I just wish you hadn't been a soldier.”

In that episode, we also met Danny Pink, who teaches math at Cole Hill School. He was a former soldier and gets questions about it. One student asks whether he killed anyone. The students have an excuse, being kids. However, adults can be cloddish, too. Danny says there’s a moral component to modern soldiering, and it just wasn’t about shooting people. Clara says, “Ah. You shoot people and then you cry about it afterwards.” This is very unkind as Danny is shown to suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome

After the Doctor’s unkind dismissal of Journey Blue, Clara decides to date Danny, saying she has no rule against soldiers. Yet she manages to be amazingly insensitive in “Listen,” when they joke about a flighty student and Clara says she could kill that girl some days. Danny agrees and Clara says, “From you, that means something.” He explains in utter exasperation that in the Army, he dug twenty-three wells that saved whole villages of people that he didn’t kill. Clara still doesn’t get it and ends up walking out of the date in total cluelessness. We later learn that episode the whole reason Danny became a soldier was to keep people safe.

Throughout this season, we’re shown even out of the military, protecting people is what Danny does. At the same time, it becomes clear, though he was a soldier, he was no fan of war or every aspect of military culture. He and the Doctor meet half way through the season in, “Caretaker,” where the Doctor continually mistakes Danny for a PE teacher despite Danny explaining multiple times he teaches math. Danny throws back the Doctor’s attitude against Danny as a soldier by identifying him with nobility and officers who push people around and give people orders but then claim to have clean hands.

He warned Clara the Doctor was someone who pushed Clara to her limits to be better, but would someday push her too far, and made her promise to come to him when that happened and warned they would be through if she broke that promise. “If you don't tell me the truth I can't help you. And I could never stand not being able to help you.”

She does tell Danny when it happens in, “Kill the Moon,” and plans to leave the Doctor after one last trip in the TARDS but changes her mind while hiding the change from Danny, lying to him until the penultimate story of Series Eight, “In the Forest of Night” when it’s revealed she’s still been traveling with the Doctor behind his back.

Throughout the series, Danny is rock solid but quiet. When Clara is in danger, he fights a robot to save Clara in, “The Caretaker.” “In the Forest of Night,” Danny saves the Doctor and Clara from a tiger. When the Earth appears to be doomed, Clara knows Danny would never leave the children to save himself. Danny is a grounded hero. He doesn’t want to go on adventures in the TARDIS. “I don't want to see more things. I want to see the things in front of me more clearly. There are wonders here, Clara Oswald…One person is more amazing, harder to understand, but more amazing than universes.”

Danny dies at the start of “Dark Waters” and we eventually learn Missy has been using Time Lord technology to capture the souls of the deceased for quite a long time. So he finds himself inside a cloud server “afterlife” where we learn what traumatized him so. While overseas in a war zone, he accidentally killed a child while searching for terrorists. The scene where he meets the child and tries to talk with him is heartbreaking.

Then in “Death in Heaven,” Missy’s insane plan plays out and the dead turn into Cybermen, including Danny. His emotions aren’t deactivated, but as a Cyberman he can never be with Clara and Clara’s words wound him further. (yes, this was a pattern for this relationship.) So he asks Clara to turn on the inhibitor to deactivate his emotions. The Doctor fears if she does, Danny will kill her immediately. However, Clara gets her way.

Missy has the Cybermen do aerobics then gives the Cybermen to the Doctor by handing him a controller to prove that they aren’t that different. A cloud will turn everyone on Earth into Cybermen which will be under the Doctor’s command. The Doctor sees what Missy doesn’t. Danny isn’t obeying. He realizes that while Danny’s emotions have been deactivated, some things hasn’t. “Because love, it's not an emotion. Love is a promise. And he will never hurt her.”

The Doctor throws the controller to Danny, who realizes the cloud threatening to convert the living, too, can be destroyed by the converted dead blowing themselves up. Danny speaks to his troops, “This is Earth's darkest hour. And look at you miserable lot. We are the Fallen. But today, we shall rise. The army of the dead will save the land of the living. This is not the order of a general, nor the whim of a lunatic… This is a promise. The promise of a soldier!” And he turns to Clara and tells her, “You’ll sleep safe tonight.”

So he dies saving the Earth, and its people, along with the woman he loved. The episode aired November 8, 2014, just days before Remembrance Day in the U.K. (known as Veteran’s Day in the U.S.). Danny’s speech was a tribute to the fact it was because of the fallen that the land of the living had been saved. It was the promise of soldiers who had gone to their deaths to save wives, sweethearts, and children from evil by which free peoples sleep each tonight.

However, as fans of Doctor Who will tell you, ever since Moffat took over in 2010, one death or even two deaths is not enough to be final. The control device’s magic offers Danny has one more chance to return to life. Instead he sends back the boy he’d accidentally shot.

The entire Eighth Series of Doctor Who had been set up to lead to this moment, to this tribute to the fallen warriors of the First World War right down to its scheduling. The series finale had to be on the date it was to really carry the weight Moffat wanted it to. It’s perhaps one of the most strategically planned messages ever. It’s easy to write a song or insert some random patriotism, but the planning on this showed dedication.

At the same time, it made some people who had been comfortable uncomfortable. Many people who will loudly trumpet themselves totally unbigoted and rail against racism, sexism, etc. Yet, they will often make judgments of people who serve or have served in the military as a bunch of bloodthirsty nut jobs who slaughter civilians and treat the streets of foreign nations like Warcraft and are unthinking killing machines.

Danny Pink is closer to what most actual soldiers are like. The whole of Series 8 had a lot to say about how the people often treat soldiers and the unfair assumptions made about them. Most soldiers serve to protect people, not to kill them. If they know some innocent died as a result of their actions, most would gladly trade their own lives if they had the chance to do over again.

The story shows the great love of a good soldier who lays down his life for his friends. it paints a picture of a love that has more in common with the Biblical concept of love rather than the “you make me feel good” love that’s so exalted in our culture.

This doesn’t deny the reality that many wars are unjust or ill-advised. At times, negotiations make more sense than war. It also doesn’t deny that there are some bad soldiers. However the take away from Series 8 if you have a problem with a conflict, contact the White House, Downing Street, or whatever address you have in your country. Don’t disrespect the people who wear the uniform.