BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Doctor Who takes anti-war stance

For those of you living under a rock for the past several months, Doctor Who is back on TV and what was Nine is now Ten, ominously replaced in a big explosion of light and promptly followed by the message that the Doctor would return "in 'The Christmas Invasion'".

So, y'know, you could kind of extrapolate that the next episode would air in December and involve an invasion of some sort. The episode, according to the Beeb, bears a strong anti-war message.

No duh.

I mean honestly, is there anyone out there who is pro-war? I don't mean pro-"Iraqi Occupation". I mean pro-"all war everywhere". Perhaps, but no one's going to say so. The Doctor is anti-war because producer Russell T. Davies is anti-war. And that's OK. I support this decision. Of course, I predict that the Doctor is going to be anti-war in his own unique way.

For instance, in the 2005 series the Doctor prevented one invasion by killing the Nestene Consciousness with a test tube full of anti-plastic serum. That was pretty peaceful of you, Doc. Then in "World War Three" he prevented the nuclear destruction of Earth by launching a missile at Number Ten Downing Street and killing an entire family of Slitheen. In "The Unquiet Dead", our beloved Time Lord has no problem whatsoever with the plan to turn human corpses over for occupation by the Gelth...until the Gelth decide that they need to start making corpses, then he blows them up but good.

So we see that the Doctor has a pretty simple litmus test for deciding about mass extinction events: they're bad — unless they foil beings who are attempting to kill all humans. So as long as killing all humans isn't your goal, the Doctor is not going to kill you, and will in fact make extreme, dramatic attempts to keep you from coming to harm.

That's great! But wait. There are these things called Daleks, and the Doctor hates them. Like hates them hates them. Sure, they want to kill all humans, but the Doctor has a much stronger reaction to them, even when they are not ipso facto actively trying to kill all humans. The Slitheen, for instance, got blown up because they very nearly succeeded in killing all humans. The survivor who shows up in "Boom Town" gets, I kid you not, a dinner date and a complementary look into the Time Vortex. She was actively trying to kill all humans but, singularly, the Doctor took pity on her. In a manner of speaking.

A lone Dalek, for instance, makes D.W. steaming mad and you pretty much have to work to stop him from taking a fully automatic assault rifle to it at his first convenience. Someone tell me what part of "Then why don't you do us all a favor and JUST DIE?!" is so resoundingly anti-war?

That was the great thing about the 2005 Doctor Who series. Previous versions of the Doctor were keen and goofy. Fighting robots with his left hand and offering you a jelly baby with the other. It was hard to really ruffle his feathers because he was such a superhero. The only difference was that he was on PBS and not the comic book stand. (In fact, the only time I ever really saw the Doctor look devastated was when Leela said her good-bye. The Doctor's had numerous companions before and since, and has probably choked up at some point for all of them, but this is the only one I've seen.)

In contrast, Davies specifically worked to make the 2005 Doctor a battle-scarred veteran, and Christopher Eccleston played it very, very well in "Dalek". He's not as chummy anymore. At times he's downright dark. Details are sketchy, but The Doctor was apparently involved in "The Time Lords' Master Plan", which involved annihilating every known Dalek in the Universe in one second. This likely involved blowing up Gallifrey and every Time Lord save for one. Who knows? Since the Doctor is the one that threw the switch, he is simultaneously the one who destroyed all Daleks and the one who destroyed all Time Lords. Bummer. Either way you look at it, I'm amazed the man can sleep at night after all that.

I'll have to go back and review the 2005 series after seeing just how peaceful the new doctor gets in "The Christmas Invasion". Odds are he's not going to be John Lennon-ing around or anything, and will very likely keep making things die and explode to keep us humans from getting knackered up the jacksie.