A couple of comments on Harry’s article about Who. First, all Whovians owe Davies a massive debt of gratitude, as Andrew Harrison says. But I’m not sorry that Moffat is taking over, and I think he might take the show to an even higher level. This is because the Moffat episodes I’ve seen have something important in common: they aren’t cheap. That is, it has been a bad habit of Who to generate cheap drama by upping the body count. There were always lots of deaths in Who, going back to the ‘60s, but in some episodes there were just too many – ‘out of ideas? Kill off three-quarters of the cast’ – to the point where it left one viewer, at least, wondering why he was watching. Moffat doesn’t do this. The three Moffat stories I’ve seen – the gas mask zombies story, Blink, and the Library – have very few deaths, or (arguably) none at all. Perhaps I’m misreading, but I think Moffat dislikes massive body counts as much as I do, and makes a conscious effort to generate drama by other means. Good luck to him.
Second, Andrew refers to Who as ‘a programme which leaves reality miserably wanting’. That was my first reaction after Saturday’s episode, I must admit. Then… If religious arguments aren’t your thing, feel free to stop reading.
The Gospels and Acts make it quite clear that the resurrected Christ was not bound by time and space. His repeated sudden appearances, including two appearances to the disciples when they were in a locked room, suggest that he was able to move in space quite freely, and appear at any point he chose, without the usual limitations. Since we know, following Einstein, that instantaneous travel in space is essentially the same thing as travel in time, it follows that the resurrection-body has the same abilities as the TARDIS, without any of the inconveniences which the Doctor occasionally suffers.
Furthermore, Revelations strongly implies that this resurrection-body is the one we will all have one day, when human evolution has progressed far enough. It refers to the humanity of the far future as clothed in white robes, which in symbolic language is a reference, I think, to the white robe of the Risen One. That in its turn should be seen as an echo of the (linen, therefore white) shroud he wore in the tomb: the off-white shroud, symbolic of death, becomes the brilliant-white robe, symbolic of the new body and the new life.
Reality, that is capital-R-Reality in the sense Eliot meant in the Four Quartets, leaves TV wanting.
