Reading Diary A: Saints and Animals

While reading this unit, all I could think about was the Doctor, the titular character from Doctor Who.  Doctor Who is a British television show that ran during the sixties to late eighties before being rebooted in 2005, and is still running today. 

It follows the story of a Time Lord, an alien species from Gallifrey.  The Doctor is able to regenerate – change forms – if he is severely injured, so there have been several actors who have portrayed him in in the series.  The Doctor can travel throughout time and space in his TARDIS (Time and Relative Dimension in Space), which due to a malfunction, looks like a blue police box (but don’t worry, it’s bigger on the inside).  The Doctor usually travels with companions – usually women who he has no romantic inclinations towards (though there have been exceptions to this).

All of the Doctors.  The bottom row is from the reboot, sometimes called New Who.

Since the series’ reboot, there have been four new Doctors – in fandom they are referenced by their regeneration number as Nine, Ten, Eleven, and Twelve.  In the 50^th anniversary special, The War Doctor was introduced as the Doctor between Eight and Nine, who fought during the Time War.  The War was between the Daleks and the Time Lords over control of the universe or time itself, I’m not sure.

Though the Doctor isn’t a saint by any stretch of the imagination – he is still a good person, he still wants to help people, but he would still never see himself as such.  And it takes a lot to get him angry – something his antagonists soon come to realize was a horrible idea.

All four of the saints in the first half of the unit show flashes of anger after varying levels of abuse, particularly Saint Comgall.  There’s a line in the Doctor Who episode “A Good Man Goes to War” when the big bad says that “the anger of a good man is not a problem.  Good men have too many rules.”  Eleven had simply responded with, “Good men don’t need rules.  Today is not the day to find out why I have so many.”

Eleven, portrayed by Matt Smith. [x]

So while the Doctor doesn’t seem himself as a good man, he has proven throughout the series that he will go out of his way to help – not only people he cares about – but also total strangers, often changing lives wherever he goes.

   

Twelve (Peter Capaldi) and his companion, Clara (Jenna Coleman)