Every time I meet someone in academic Biblical studies I get so jealous because it’s the exact same kind of theorizing and analysis I love to do with Doctor Who, but they have thousands of people doing it full-time all around the world and they have giant conferences to chat about fan theories. Guess I was just born 2000 years too early?
I actually feel like there is a very real and relevant comparison to make here. I’ve written previously about the almost anarchic creativity of Doctor Who’s early years, but there’s a lot more to it than that. Would the wildness of that period even stand out if it wasn’t followed by a recentralization of vision? Once you start looking for it, this cycle of “original vision → creative diaspora → recentralized orthodoxy” pops up everywhere throughout history.
I’m not the first one to feel tempted to map Doctor Who onto religion. Russell T Davies used enough “Doctor as Jesus” imagery for that to be the obvious metaphor: the television show is Christianity of the orthodox strain. All the crazy 60s EU stuff is the Gnostic gospels. Cancellation was a Great Schism; Big Finish’s ranges are an ongoing Protestant Reformation; Loom fans are subject to a Diocletian Persecution. I guess that means Outlander is Islam.
Or maybe NuWho is Christianity, Classic Who is Judaism, the Wilderness Years are the 2nd Temple period, and Faction Paradox is Mandaeism. Are the showrunners Popes or Emperors?
Or maybe I’m going about this all wrong, and Jesus himself is televised Doctor Who. Russell T Davies immanentized the eschaton, and Eccleston defeated the antichrist (as played by Richard E Grant) in 2005. History has ended; now we’re just living in the Kingdom of Heaven.
No, that can't be it.
This is all awfully silly. Why am I focusing on religion in particular? Just as similar a pattern happened in Star Wars: as @perfectcromulence pointed out, after the original movie, there was an identical period of early creativity (eg the infamous Christmas special, or early alternate depictions of the Clone Wars and Jabba the Hut [sic] that that were completely overwritten by later media). And then we had the highly-regulated “Expanded Universe” under Lucasfilm’s close watch, stratified into no fewer than five tiers of canon – but even that was too wild for Disney, who tossed it all into the wastebin! (Hilariously, some inconsistencies have already bubbled up inside their new Canon...)
But when it comes to the pattern, there’s one aspect that Doctor Who and Christianity have that Star Wars and other franchises simply lack. For the 9 years after the Eighth Doctor movie, there were three equally-valid Doctor Who continuities at war with each other. A full-on schism, uncoordinated by any central authority. It only ended in 2005 with the airing of Rose. Sure, this is something we might see in any franchise: Star Wars EU writers certainly preferred to ignore the Jedi Prince series!
But uniquely, when this recentralizing event happened and some of the branches found themselves cut off, rather than dying, they grew. They developed independently of their original property, like we’ve seen in Doctor Who’s universe with Bernice Summerfield, Faction Paradox, and even K9. And sometimes, after developing separately for a while, these spin-offs have actually re-merged with the orthodox “main stream”: looking at you, Eastern Catholic churches, or should I say The New Adventures of Bernice Summerfield?
Don’t get me wrong, Thrawn definitely jumped from “canon” to “legends” and back again, but he didn't have a non-Star Wars spinoff series in between. The independent spinoff is a beautiful idea, one that allows for nearly unlimited creativity, and one that I wish we saw in far more franchises than we do. The fact that the BBC has since tightened their grip on their television writers – their agreements now specify that writers’ Doctor Who creations may only be reused with BBC permission – makes me infinitely more pessimistic about the inevitable next Wilderness, whenever it may strike.
Of course, the real reason I’m writing this post is that I’m studying ancient Near East religion and the parallels are obvious. Arguably the most interesting debate in the academic Biblical studies field last year was the back-and-forth between Mark Goodacre and Alan Garrow about whether Luke’s Gospel or Matthew’s Gospel was written first. It began in late 2017 with a dramatic $1000 Challenge, and it’s spilled over into several conferences since then.
And (surprise!) both scholars are fans of Doctor Who! Alan Garrow wrote a whole book explaining the structure of the Book of Revelation through comparison with Classic Who serials, and Goodacre is a self-described “rabid Doctor Who fan” who has appeared on the Two Minute Timelord podcast to discuss “What IS Doctor Who Canon Anyway???” Imagine my surprise and delight to find those pages on their websites!
Maybe one day, in two thousand years or so, long after Doctor Who has entered the public domain, there will be whole university degrees dedicated to reconstructing missing episodes and dissecting the evolution of popular perception of the TARDIS console color. One can only hope!