The Doctor: And she left you all alone?
Amelia: I'm not scared.
The Doctor: Of course you're not scared, you're not scared of anything. Box falls out of the sky, man falls out of the box, man eats fish custard, and look at you...just sitting there. So you know what I think?
Amelia: What…
The Doctor: Must be a hell of a scary crack in your bedroom wall.
Doctor Who, The Eleventh Hour
The awful truth about
Doctor Who has finally been revealed, and by no less a personage than the
eminence grise of British fantasy, Sir Terry Pratchett. In his recent stint as guest editor of British science fiction magazine
SFX, Pratchett announces in
his editorial that, although entertaining, light-hearted, and capable of wonderful moments,
Doctor Who is not science fiction.
He goes on to make an acceptable case for his announcement, based on "pixel-thin" science and the Doctor as a
deus ex machina figure, but he commits an odd oversight, especially for someone as sharp as Pratchett. If it's not science fiction, what is it?
Fortunately, chief writer and executive producer Stephen Moffat had already addressed this question for the first post-episode
Doctor Who Confidential of the new season, when he commented:
Fairy tales are the way we tell our children that there are people out there who might want to eat them. They are warnings, in fantasy form, of the reality and the dangers of the world.
When I say Doctor Who is a fairy tale, I don't mean it's like a fairy tale, I mean it literally is - far more than it's a science fiction show, far more than it's an adventure show, it's a fairy tale.
Due to the unfortunate influence of the Walt Disney Corporation, fairy tales have become light-hearted musical experiences that last about two hours and are available on DVD by the end of the year. However, the traditional fairy tale is a far darker experience, where Hansel and Gretel kill the witch by pushing her into her own oven, and the queen eats the heart brought to her by the huntsman, thinking that it belongs to Snow White.
Viewed as cautionary tales for children, the new season of
Doctor Who has, for the most part, fulfilled its role admirably. We first meet Amy, the new companion, as a child who has asked in her nightly prayers for help with the frightening crack in her bedroom wall, and later in the episode, the adult Amy experiences that awful moment of wondering (and discovering) what's hiding behind her back, just in the corner of her eye.
The second episode starts with a child failing a test and being cast into a monstrous pit by the frowning robots who run the classes, and in a later episode Amy has to walk through a horde of deadly statues with her eyes closed. The most recent episodes featured a boy whose father is taken from him, and then he himself is captured by the same monsters. All very simple things, horrifyingly simple - cracks in the wall, the places you don't want to look, the fear of failing adult expectations, walking blindly through nightmares, or the loss of a parent.
When I was a child, I was terrified of the basement in our house. It was a dank, dark, moldy hole, an unfinished repository for junk and bit of lumber. Only part of it was full height - the portion underneath the front of the house was an unlit crawlspace, and I did not spend a moment in the cellar without being aware of the horrible potential of the square black entrance to that area.
Some of my childhood chores required me to go down into the cellar, and my mother always seemed to think that I was trying to shirk my duties when I delayed those chores as long as possible. However, it was fear rather than laziness that was behind my reluctance, something that I could never have explained.
I think that adults too easily lose track of that part of childhood: the fear of dark openings, the certain knowledge that there are monsters under the bed and boogeymen in the closet, and that things going bump in the night is not a cliché but an awful precursor of approaching horror. And that adult blindness is a huge part of childhood fears, the inexplicable lack of understanding on the part of the grownups who turn out lights, close doors, and dismiss nightmares as "only a dream".
On that basis,
Doctor Who doesn't
need to be science fiction if it can be a good fairy tale. I congratulate the scriptwriters for successfully attempting to evoke the basic fears of childhood - the elemental fear of so simple a thing as a crack in a bedroom wall.
