by Ryan Britt
Plus, I was still two seasons behind, and everyone knows binge-watching anything awesome coupled with a new sense of purpose is like having a placebo-epiphany every forty-five minutes. I’m not sure if therapists should prescribe binge-watching, but in this case, it worked for me.
Where there had been angst with Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor, it felt unearned, because the new audience hadn’t been through anything with him, as we didn’t see his home planet Gallifrey destroyed in a giant war.* But if you became a convert to Doctor Who just before the David Tennant era, then you felt like you’d already suffered something with him: you remembered when he was Eccleston! And you got to mourn the loss of that identity with him because in Tennant’s first proper episode, “The Christmas Invasion,” he has to convince British prime minister Harriet Jones (Penelope Wilton)* that he is the same man as Christopher Eccleston, and it’s mad painful, because you both love this new Doctor and, weirdly, miss the older, grumpier one. And by the end of his first season, the brilliant showrunner Russell T. Davies hit his stride of tugging on your heartstrings* by banishing the Doctor’s girlfriend/best friend Rose Tyler to an alternate dimension, reminding all of us that just because you get a new lease on life and intentionally become happier, bad stuff (Cybermen) can still happen.
The next two and a half seasons of David Tennant’s tenure find him perpetrating unrequited love by ignoring the eye-batting of poor Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman), as well as meeting old enemies and making a new BFF in the form of Donna Noble, played wonderfully by Catherine Tate.* Doctor Who’s formula almost always has included a “companion” in the form of a woman who hangs out with the Doctor for reasons that are often dubious, confusing, and, occasionally, offensive. Tate’s Donna Noble remains, to this day, Who’s masterstroke of how you can invert expectations and create a lasting and interesting character dynamic. Donna and the Doctor don’t have romantic tension and are in essence a comedy duo.* I watched Donna’s season (season four) in real time in 2008, because I was caught up by that point, and it is still my personal favorite run of all of Doctor Who. The message to me was simple: you might change your whole life and lose love, but real good friends are REALLY fucking hard to come by, specifically if you live a life of intergalactic adventure.
There have been two Doctors since David Tennant: Matt Smith and the current guy, Peter Capaldi. The regeneration of the Doctor into a new person every few years is brilliant primarily because it removes a sense of ego from the character and the show. Sure, we’ve had a lot of guys play Batman over the years, but that’s a character hiding behind a mask. Plus, with TV shows it’s different. A sitcom called Frasier wouldn’t work if suddenly a new person showed up to play Frasier or if Frasier regenerated into a new radio shrink, who is now inexplicably played by Gilbert Gottfried. Yet, this is exactly what Doctor Who does; it shakes things up often, and adapts and evolves and changes each time it does so. Sometimes these changes are slight and safe. (The Doctors played by David Tennant and his successor, Matt Smith, aren’t that different.) And sometimes they’re very different. (Incumbent Doctor Peter Capaldi is waaaay different from anyone they’ve had since 2005.) Still, because it’s a different actor, the change is radical, and yet, the audience is supposed to believe this is the same person, even though he looks and acts totally different.
I think this gives me and other Doctor Who fans strong feelings, because it’s the opposite of real life. In real life, we change, but we essentially look the same. The Doctor is the reverse because he “stays the same,” but looks and acts differently. His soul is saved, and his memories of a past life are intact, but he can move on from the baggage of that past life, totally forgiven and literally reborn. The Christ metaphors here are a bit obvious, because the Doctor often “dies” in saving everyone and, in Tennant’s case, holds his arms out like he’s being crucified in “The End of Time.”
And yet, I think the regeneration process is more interesting if we think of it like the end of a relationship. Like a breakup. You don’t die in a breakup, but it certainly feels that way. You have good memories of the other person, but also of who you were in that relationship. The Doctor, in essence, breaks up with himself every time he regenerates, and as our hearts are broken by his departure, he immediately rebounds with a new person, who is also him. It’s no wonder that in the fictional reality of Doctor Who, his alien anatomy includes two hearts: one for now, one for later.
Right before his regeneration scene in 2013’s “The Time of the Doctor,” Matt Smith’s bow-tie-wearing Doctor (an even bigger hipster than David Tennant) says, “We all change. When you think about it, we’re all different people, all through our lives. But that’s okay, you gotta keep moving, so long as you remember all the people that you used to be.” This is a mirror of how we actually live our lives, how we actually let go of our past selves, by paradoxically always honoring them by talking about our past constantly. In this way, Doctor Who’s regeneration process should be required viewing for anyone trying to write a memoir. Or at the very least, anyone who writes about writing about memoir. David Shields, I’m waiting by my phone(box): have you seen Doctor Who?
Over the years, since becoming a more “professional” Doctor Who fan, I’ve been crankier about the specific ins and outs of the show than I was after I experienced that first regeneration. At any comic con, you’ll see hundreds of people wearing a popular T-shirt that declares “You Never Forget Your First Doctor,” and I think I’ll amend that to say, “You never forget the first Doctor whom you regenerated with.” Even though he wasn’t Tennant, I grew to love Tennant’s younger (my exact age) successor, Matt Smith, but maybe not because of anything Smith did specifically. In 2010, during another moment of change and reinvention in my life—this time the end of a relationship and the start of a new job—Matt Smith’s Doctor presented me with a kind of emotional ultimatum: Are you going to let go of David Tennant or not? Are you so committed to the past that you can’t move forward?
I’ve never owned a bow tie, but at the time, PRIOR to the commencement of the Matt Smith era, I was regularly rocking his signature tweed jacket with elbow patches. It goes without saying that people have assumed I wear Chuck Taylors or tweed jackets because I’m a Doctor Who fan, and though I used to correct them, pointing out that I was into Chucks and tweed before Matt Smith and Tennant, I don’t anymore. One of the nice things about Doctor Who is that it makes sneakers into space shoes, bow ties into a badge of heroism, and fairly ordinary jackets into the costume of a superhero. In the season eight finale, “Death in Heaven,” in-universe Doctor Who fandom representative Osgood (Ingrid Oliver) mashes up Smith and Tennant by rocking both a bow tie and red Chucks, reminding me, like a good memoir, of who the Doctor used to be, this time reflected in the face of a fan. Fans of Doctor Who are often quite different from fans of any other big geeky thing, and that’s because the pain of constant change is woven into a zany science fiction epic starring a person who wears clothes just like yours.
If Doctor Who were a real-life memoir, we’d maybe be members of the Doctor’s faux family, who also don’t know if we are the Doctor himself. Will we become our parents and mentors? Will they become us? Have they already?
No, Luke, Captain Kirk Is Your Father
Asking me if I like Star Trek is like asking a Muslim if it’s fun to celebrate Ramadan. I can’t remember a time when Star Trek wasn’t in my vocabulary, and in discussing favorite TV shows on the playground in 1991 I’d always say “Star Trek is my favorite, but not the new one.” Why was I snobby about The Next Generation? As a ten-year-old no less! It wasn’t that I didn’t like and respect The Next Generation; it just wasn’t the exact religion I belonged to. There are a lot of different kinds of Christians, and there are lots of different kinds of Star Trek people.
This isn’t to say that there was any kind of obsessive trekkie mania in my house. My father’s La-Z-Boy wasn’t converted to resemble Captain Kirk’s command chair, and my parent
s didn’t dress up me and my sister in Klingon costumes. And even though I was alone in being into the toys and collectibles for a little bit, like everybody else I wasn’t that devout. Star Trek was like a religion in my house, but not because of rituals or beliefs. Instead, knowledge of classic Star Trek was just a given. If my Catholic friends knew how to cross themselves after saying grace through sheer instinct, my sister and I knew to give the Vulcan “Live Long and Prosper” hand gesture as a quick sign of friendship. It was natural in my family to mention the term “mind-meld” at the dinner table, and after a long day teaching elementary school children it wasn’t uncommon for my mom to say that she was “on impulse power” while flopping onto the couch and further explaining that her “dilithium crystals were running low.” Real religion is about jargon and comfort, which is what it’s like to really love Star Trek.
Looking at Star Trek as a half-assed religion makes it easier for me to justify why I often feel like I’m the only person I know who “gets it.” Even in geek circles, there’s an annoyingly disproportionate amount of attention paid to the 1979–91 classic Star Trek films, specifically to 1982’s The Wrath of Khan. Everyone will tell you it’s the best Star Trek movie, and they are correct. However, The Wrath doesn’t achieve this status simply because there’s lots of shooting or things blowing up or Kirk yelling “KHAAANNN!!!!” or even because Spock gets fake killed. The real reason why The Wrath is so baller is because it incorporates classic literature into the basic themes of the story.
Kirk and Spock are quoting Dickens—specifically A Tale of Two Cities—throughout this movie, and Khan is quoting Melville’s Moby-Dick. Every two years in New York City, there’s a Moby-Dick Marathon I attend (and once read in), and I swear to God, someone always turns to me and silently mouths the word “Khan!” during the “From Hell’s Heart I Stab at Thee!” chase section of the book. Star Trek loves Moby-Dick so much that the only good Next Generation movie—1996’s First Contact—even made Captain Picard more legit by having him do an Ahab speech and asserting the whole movie, like Wrath of Khan, as a sci-fi Moby-Dick homage. Captain Janeway, of the super-underrated Star Trek: Voyager, dons shades of Ahab on more than one occasion. In “Equinox,” Janeway is so pissed at an immoral fellow Starfleet captain that she nearly gets her whole crew turned against her in her quest for quasi revenge. In the finale to the entire series, “Endgame,” Janeway pulls a sort of time-travel Ahab thing by attempting to rewrite her own history by destroying her own White Whale, the Borg Queen.
Moby-Dick connections in Star Trek probably come from the episode “The Doomsday Machine,” in which the Enterprise encounters Captain Matt Decker, whose entire crew was killed by a humongous space critter that looked like a cornucopia. This guy goes from being a crying mess to taking over the Enterprise in a psychopathic minute. Star Trek has a lot of captains and a lot of ships, so the nautical connections and essential roles of the characters naturally allow for Ahab to surface constantly. Writer/director Nicholas Meyer was smart enough not only to inject Herman Melville stuff into The Wrath of Khan, but also to loosely base the whole naval tone of that film on C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower novels. This is also why the J. J. Abrams–directed 2013 film, Star Trek into Darkness, sucks. There’s no literature in it! From naming one of its goofiest episodes, “This Side of Paradise,” after F. Scott Fitzgerald, to quoting Shakespeare constantly, even bad Star Trek is elevated by its use of classic literature. Like his successor Captain Picard, Captain Kirk has also been into the classics and specifically Shakespeare since way back. The original series episode “The Conscience of the King” arguably kicks off the whole Star Trek tradition of hitting the books and being obsessed with showing you how much everyone on the show cares about reading.* It would be a little reductive to say good Star Trek only works when it’s got old-school Western literature cropping up, and that’s not really what I mean. Instead, this sort of literary stuff is a positive symptom of when Star Trek is at its best self. Good Star Trek equals soul-searching about the basic nature of humanity, which occasionally means the writing will stray toward famous literature.
In a terrible episode of The Next Generation called “Hide and Q,” a pre-bearded Commander Riker is tempted with godlike powers by the flippantly omnipotent multidimensional being known only as “Q.” Q jerkily taunts Captain Picard about the fragility and pointlessness of human beings, which gives Picard the opportunity to do his favorite thing when someone disagrees with him: channel Shakespeare. Picard delivers the “what a piece of work is man?” speech from Hamlet and turns it into a heroic rebuttal. In the Hamlet context, “what a piece of work is man?” and its following lines aren’t necessarily heroic, but with Picard, the speech becomes something different. This is at the core of Star Trek’s successful relationship with literature; even in a bad Star Trek thing, it doesn’t copy or pay homage poorly; it translates the themes and references creatively. The spin Star Trek puts on literature is inherently a pop one and not entirely dissimilar from a rapper “sampling” a line from another (usually older) artist. When Puff Daddy appropriated the melody of the Police’s “I’ll Be Watching You” for “I’ll Be Missing You,” the meaning of the original song was changed. While this is a fairly radical change, I don’t think it’s that different from Picard turning Hamlet’s sad-sack speech into something of a galvanizing cry for why humans rock.
Khan is initially a huge fan of Milton’s Paradise Lost in “Space Seed,” but he switches to Melville in The Wrath of Khan. As Khan dies he recites a version of Ahab’s “From hell’s heart, I stab at thee!” speech. But instead of the tragic aspect of the original text, the sideways appropriation of Melville is what makes Khan more delusional and sympathetic. And that’s because Kirk is not the White Whale, and he did not wound Khan specifically the way Moby-Dick wounded Ahab. By making “the White Whale” a person, and “Ahab” even more delusional, these words from Moby-Dick take on a mixed-analogous meaning from their source. Ditto for The Wrath’s use of A Tale of Two Cities throughout. If Dickens’s Sydney Carton is a stand-in for Kirk at the beginning of the film—asshole-ish and confused—then Spock is Carton at the end: heroic, humble, and dead. Just in case you missed all of this, The Wrath of Khan practically begins with Kirk fumbling through “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” and ends with him doing the trademark halted William Shatner I’m-just-discovering-these-words-as-they’re-coming-to-me rendition of “It is a far, far better thing THAT I do than I have ever done before. A far better resting place . . . that I go to . . . than . . . I have ever known.”*
We already know Star Trek’s main competitor, Star Wars, doesn’t have any of its characters reading or talking about books,* but how does Star Wars do in terms of books being referenced or paid homage? Well, we’re pretty much stuck with stuff like Homer, the Bible, and—all together now—anything Joseph Campbell talks about in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Fans and scholars of Star Wars have for decades now loved to point out that Jungian archetypes present in Star Wars are right in line with Joseph Campbell’s theories about the hero’s journey. This is why Star Wars is genius and prophetic and why we’re in love with it. Everyone is right about this, but because it’s so obvious and can be explained so quickly—we’re predisposed psychologically to like Star Wars—it’s no longer profound or interesting. It’s a self-fulfilling statement that ends a conversation instead of beginning one. Because what gets missed in noticing the Jungian stuff in Star Wars is the conclusion that Star Wars films (at least the classic films) are easy to like. We tend to all say we like The Empire Strikes Back best of all the Star Wars films because, as smarty-pants readers, we know that it’s uncool to like a piece of narrative art that has a happy ending. This argument falls apart pretty quickly if we consider all the Star Wars prequels are total downers, but they’re downers for different reasons: they’re bad movies.*
The religious lip service in Star Wars is so obvious that it really indicates that there’s not
a real religion there. The spirituality of Star Wars is a stand-in for whatever you feel like inserting into it. The Force is a catchall New Age Spiritualism, made vague enough to make you feel good about it, and cool enough to be an awesome plot device allowing the main characters to perform bona fide feats of full-on magic. The vagueness and generalness of Star Wars is its primary strength, and if you think I’m wrong, consider this: the prequels are regarded as bad for a lot of reasons, but one reason everyone agrees on is that “explaining” a technical aspect of the Force almost ruins it. The details of Star Wars—both moral and technical—are not as important as the broad strokes or swipes of the lightsaber. Star Wars presents simple answers—or at the very least allegories—to the problems of life. I’m not saying Star Wars is dumbed-down storytelling, but if Star Wars is like Homer—epic, moving, and distant—then Star Trek is more like Dickens. In short, Star Trek is about flawed humans while Star Wars is about gods.
The stories of Star Trek are never focused on trying to permanently rid you of being a bad person in favor of being a good one. Meanwhile, Star Wars is almost totally black-and-white with its moral compass.* Luke Skywalker turns away from the Dark Side of the Force by sheer strength of will, but in real life, leaving our negative tendencies behind isn’t that easy. Who’s to say the day after Return of the Jedi, Luke didn’t fall off the Dark Side wagon right away?*
