The Ambiguous Themes of Series Eight

Guest contributor Michael Rolls interprets some of the key themes of Series 8.

With Series Eight ended we can now look back and recognise how each episode contributed, in its own way, to the overriding themes brought up. The main two themes, I’d suggest, were soldiers and military service, and religion and the afterlife. Some episodes dealt with these themes more than others but all touched on them in one way or another. Even Robot of Sherwood, which at first glance may not appear to have anything to say about soldiers or religion, could be interpreted as drawing parallels between communist and religious utopias.

Both themes were most interestingly approached in Listen in which fear is shown to be the motivation for both military service and religious belief. The possible presence of ‘unknown agents’, perhaps under the bed or at the end of the universe, is believed by some psychologists and anthropologists to explain the evolution of early religion. The idea being that those early humans who feared something that may or may not have been there were more cautious than those who were fearless. The early humans who feared there was something in the dark, those who were sensitive to rustles in the bushes or to movement in the night, survived over those who fearlessly went to their deaths. Because, sometimes, there was something there. It served them well to be fearful. The theory says that evolution selected for this fearfulness and that this sensitivity to ‘unknown agents’ developed into early religion, animism; the belief that there are spirits in the world.

Of course, in Listen, we see how fear of something in the dark motivates Rupert Pink’s desire to be a soldier. It is soldiers who protect us from the enemy; it is they who, in Danny Pink’s words, allow us to sleep at night. Whether the enemy exists or not doesn’t matter: it’s better to be protected against an enemy that doesn’t exist than to be prey to one that does. That Rupert Pink’s soldiers are talismanic is interesting: they are toys and the lead soldier doesn’t have a gun. But in this case it is the feeling of being protected that matters. Perhaps both the threat, from the creature beneath the bed sheets; and the protection, from the toy soldiers, are born of an over-active imagination.

The idea of soldiers continuing to live after death recurred a few times in the series. Whether it was Gretchen from Into the Dalek arriving at Missy’s Promised Land, the Soldier mummy from Mummy on the Orient Express being forced to continue his service by technology long after his death, or, ultimately, Danny Pink and Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart being reincarnated as Cybermen. Whether this literal persistence of soldiers after death through the series had some connection to the final episode being broadcast the day before Remembrance Sunday, I’ll leave for you to decide.

Sometimes the religious themes were indirectly considered. Take Kill the Moon, for example. Through its strange parallels with the abortion debate, that we’ll not consider here, the episode seems to take the position of life being sacred (though the word ‘special’ is preferred to ‘sacred’). When Clara ignores the mandate of Earth and allows the creature to live she’s implicitly acting on the idea that respect for life, its being sacred, overrides the corporeal, logical, and political considerations of those who voted in favour of killing the moon. That, ultimately, in the episode none of the main characters actually did anything to alter the course of events implies human insignificance. An insignificance that, by the end of the episode, has inspired the human race to explore the universe. Just as fear inspires the Doctor.

Human insignificance returns in In the Forest of the Night in which, once again, human and Doctor actions are irrelevant. The world and nature go through their cycles of being dangerous and protective while the woodland spirits responsible don’t even know who the Doctor is.

The big recurring religious idea was the afterlife, or the Promised Land. That it turned out to be a Matrix Dataslice does not detract from its significance. It appeared that Missy had been harvesting the souls of the dead from all of time and this is why every culture has a concept of the afterlife. The interesting thing about this afterlife, and most religious conceptions of the afterlife, is that it split each person into their soul and their body. Their souls were uploaded in the Nethersphere while their bodies were left behind (to be later upgraded to Cybermen). The division is a fairly standard thing. In most Christian denominations, for example, upon death the soul is judged and then goes to heaven or hell and the body is left behind. There is, later on, a Final Judgement wherein the soul and body are reunited again. In Death in Heaven, too, the souls and bodies of the dead were reunited. I feel like it’s too much of a stretch to regard each soul’s decision to delete or not delete their emotions as akin to Final Judgement. However, it’s not irrelevant, because, finally, it brings us to the issue of atonement.

Danny Pink, we may fairly assume, has been trying to atone for his accidentally killing a child ever since it happened. Becoming a teacher is probably an attempt at atonement. As is protecting the children under his care in In the Forest of the Night. When he considers deleting his emotions; his guilt for the death of the child may well be the one he’d like to be most rid of. The idea of guilt and its being wiped away had already appeared in Time Heist in which the characters had to have their memories wiped to eliminate any feelings of guilt that would alert the Teller to their presence. In that episode the character Psi had wiped away his entire identity to protect his loved ones and, later, literally redeemed himself. Danny’s position was a variant on that: he didn’t wipe away his guilt or his identity, but as a Cyberman even after his identity should have been deleted he retains his feelings and, in one final act as a soldier, he saves the world. This redeems the soldier: he is a protector not a killer. Finally, he receives his atonement when he sacrifices his chance to live in favour of the child he once killed.

I realise I haven’t mentioned the Doctor himself very much and I apologise for that. However, when it comes to him and his new face we may have to throw in a third major theme: the theme of identity. Perhaps next time…