Donna Noble has been saved
Thank goodness Doctor Who is not an evangelical!
A warning: this post contains …
In the excellent two-parter Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead the Doctor hits the solution to a puzzle by reflecting on the English language. Donna Noble and 4022 people before her “have been saved”. But who, wonders the Doctor, talks like that. We might say someone is safe, but not that someone is saved. No … There’s a dead giveaway there: “saved” is computer speak. They’ve been virtualised onto the biggest hard-drive in the universe. But just think, if the Doctor had been an evangelical Christian, he’d never have thought it weird to say “Donna Noble has been saved.”
Given that this is a fairly major plot point, it seems like a fairly stark reminder that if Christians want to be understood, they should learn to speak the language as everyone else does. And maybe not sound quite so weird.
June 9th, 2008 at 12:13 am
Moffat hit a home run again, as expected. Here’s how I rank his stories from the past four seasons:
1. Blink
2. The Girl in the Fireplace
3. Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead
4. The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances
Silence/Forest could have been second place if not for the last-minute miracle in which River Song “gets saved”. Death and sacrifice used to have more meaning in Who. But in this season both the Doctor’s daughter and (future) wife’s sacrifices are undermined with happy-ever endings — too comic-bookish and boring. I much prefer the tragic ending of Girl in the Fireplace, not the “everyone lives” business copied from The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances (where it worked okay the first time for feeling exceptional).
But aside from the very end, the story is a masterpiece. And I work in a library, so I’ll be counting the shadows…
June 9th, 2008 at 6:10 pm
Hmm. I actually thought the happy side of the ending made good narrative sense of the significance of the screwdriver theme. I agree that Blink has been the best episode so far, but I think I would rate this two-parter slightly above The Girl in the Fireplace.
June 10th, 2008 at 4:13 pm
Good point about “saved”, Doug. That part of the story was a bit too rushed for me; couldn’t catch what David Tennant was on about re the unusualness of the phrase; perhaps that’s because of familiarity with the evangelical usage, which comes to mind immediately! I’ll post my comments on this story in due course. I was a little disappointed with the second part of this two-parter. It was very, very good, but not quite brilliant. Part of the problem is that Moffat sets himself such a high standard — and a two-parter suffers as a result. I think Moffat was just a bit too ambitious in this story — too convoluted, not scary enough, too derivative of other sci-fi imagery, themes, etc. I agree with you about the ending, though. I loved that — and especially the idea of the future doctor communicating with his past self and saving River Song — perfect ending. I agree with Loren, though, about the oddity of the repeat of “everyone lives” — that didn’t work for me. I agree with you both re. Blink; I too would put this two-parter above The Girl in the Fireplace. I felt that that story was a little at odds with the developing Rose romance, which made the doctor look like too much of a casanova.
June 10th, 2008 at 5:34 pm
OK, I largely agree with that. I think the first episode was so strong that it would have been almost impossible for Forest of the Dead to live up to it. (I felt the same about the Doctor Dances) The thing is, we’d had a whole week to imagine what could happen, and you know it’s not going to be as good when they get out of the cliff-hanging crisis by using a sonic screwdriver to open a door / blast a hole in the bulkhead. I didn’t have the same problem with the happy ending that you and Loren had, precisely because I thought the “unreality” of the matrix had been stressed. Did the appearance that Evangelina’s transcription errors had been repaired indicate that this was as much the Doctor’s imagination as the world of the hard drive? Just a thought.