Blog on the Lillypad
Sunday, November 02, 2003
 | Doctor Who Fiction
I'm tired of arguing with dull, corrupt, unimaginative pastors and deacons. Let's switch channels to my favorite television hero, Doctor Who. Hey, maybe you didn't know this, but my Doctor Who fiction on the web gets hit about 1000 - 1500 times per month. (And it is recommended by browsing of the FFF!) The Doctor, as he is called, is a timelord who starts the series exiled to earth because he stole a time machine from his superiors. He stole it because the universe was in need of direct intervention to right some wrongs. But his superiors caught him and exiled him to earth. |
 | So while on earth he helps Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart and UNIT (a United Nations military police force) battle alien invasions and other high-tech (for the 1970's) dangers to the human race. During his stay, the Doctor ends up with three different companions who assist him, guide him, and at times scold him. He also rescues them---about once or twice in each story. But sometimes, they rescue him. The Doctor's first companion during his exile on earth is the brilliant, skeptical, and at times cuttingly sarcastic Professor Liz Shaw, followed by the perfectly ordinary, youthful and enthusiastic Jo Grant. |
 | Jo Grant: Birth of a Soul
"Poor Jo!" That's the common cry of my readers. Jo really does get it in my stories: guts pulled out, poisons injected in, not to mention all the ropes, chains, manacles, and other restraints that show up to do their duty. Finger-breaking torture, deadly virus, even seduction from a homicidal duplicate of the Doctor. It's enough to bring Mary Whitehouse back from the dead. But the truth is, Jo suffers as a part of her enlightenment. She enters the series as a giddy teeny-bopper and is greeted by the Doctor's immediate disdain. Taking my cue from the television series, I wrote short, light stories at first for Jo. In the series, the Doctor changes his opinion about Jo entirely when she stuns him by stepping in the way of an energy bolt to save his life (The Daemons). From that point on, their friendship begins, and likewise I write the last two thirds of my stories with Jo on a more serious footing. |
| I always expected Jo to grow with the Doctor. People grow by what they suffer. It was clear to me when I started writing Doctor Who as an adult that Jo would suffer in the course of the stories, and she would be rescued, and her experiences would deepen her relationship with the Doctor. I also intended that at times he would suffer, and there would be stories in which they suffer together. All the same, every story would end with them together, safe, and reaffirmed in their teacher-student relationship. So it was a big surprise to me when I learned from other fanfic writers that my stories were considered "dark" fanfic. But increasingly in my stories, Jo gains a wisdom that the Doctor eventually finds he cannot do without. |  |
Saving the universe is costly. One thing I love about the Third Doctor, in spite of his atheism, is that he completely understands that to rescue a person or a team or a planet, you have to roll up your sleeves and plunge in. If they have been bleeding, you will bleed. If the oppressed suffer whippings, you'll be whipped too. Knowing how costly it is to save those who are suffering, the Doctor still rushes in to save them.
| The Doctor has his soul in full possession. He suffers hard, lives large, loves his friends, and enjoys a roaring good time. When Jo first meets him, she's just a giddy little rich kid who wants a job with a lot of thrills. Of course he disdains her at first. But Jo grows on him, and the big change in their relationship occurs when she interposes herself between him and Azal to physically shield him from a deadly energy bolt. Thus, her soul is born. |  |
Following this event, Jo witnesses the struggle of good and evil in the universe and suffers as her part in the battle for good. These struggles, I believe, turn Jo's thoughts to more serious topics, such as God, sin, and salvation. But her education in enlightenment is influenced by the Doctor. She reaches a spiritual friendship and altruistic relationship with him because she suffers for him and with him. Jo, in fact, redeems the Doctor from his caustic bitterness. The egotistical blowhard that Liz knew gentles down under Jo's influence to a delightful hearthside cat who simply arches his back from time to time and can be soothed.
| In Blood-Dimmed Tide Jo and the Doctor and UNIT battle a creature that lives on subtle harmonics of energy produced in the human brain, an unstoppable creator of terror that uses frequencies of energy too high for human technology to duplicate or jam them. The Doctor has to become far more innovative to find the means to counter attack such a creature. He thinks he is succeeding all the way up until the moment that the creature completely takes over his more sophisticated mind and bends him to its will. The Brigadier comes into his own in this story, relying on resourcefulness and courage to find the means to at least reach a stalemate with the creature and then work on gaining victories against it. A full length novel, Blood-Dimmed Tide is the best story in my set. Jo realizes that this really is a war against evil--an evil that wants to create mayhem and catastrophe and kill human beings gradually in order to strengthen itself. Even the Doctor, warned by the alien Ootuk about his pride, misses a lot of the meaning of this story, though he bravely fights to the end and suffers cruelly from his adversary, all the way to the last battle. |  |
 | To depict Jo as a more mature companion than the giddy girl who started at UNIT, I wrote Strange Darkness and The Revengers. The first story is a brief five-episoder focused on a police mystery. Loving and devoted husbands are murdering their wives. The men are all remorseful, distraught, and immediately confess what they have done. Two of them go insane and one attempts suicide. Baffled, the police go to UNIT for help, and the Brigadier calls in the Doctor. In this story, Jo intuitively figures out the motive behind the killings but is largely ignored (though not rudely) by the Doctor and the Brig. However, she does find aid, sympathy, and information with the tenacious Detective Inspector Jules. Her relationship with him brings up hints of what is to come in later stories---a more mature Jo who can go off on her own. This time, however, the friendship is temporary. Similarly, The Revengers sets up a possible love interest for Jo, in the heart of a series of bizarre deaths from blindness and insanity. This story shows Jo's day-to-day world of her own flat, the gym she visits, local pubs and restaurants, far more than the Doctor's world of the lab and his TARDIS. It also depicts a rival nearly as intelligent as the Doctor, and it is one of the few stories where the Doctor's protectiveness of Jo gets personal. I still get the occasional e-mail about the ending of this story: Did the Doctor do it deliberately, or was it an accident? |
For Jo, the expression of goodness is in undergoing what others undergo, uniting with them in their labors and sufferings. And she learns that by the power of goodness she can unite to others. I suspect that Jo was raised in fairly conservative surroundings, so I expect that she would revert to the teachings of the Church of England and begin any spiritual journey there.
In my canon, I depict Jo and Mike Yates ultimately returning to Christianity to give it a serious investigation. As with Liz, I do not show Jo experiencing a heartfelt conversion to Christ as her Saviour. I simply show that she might. But Jo would be the sort of Christian who is able to know and be known, a person delighted by the tremendous diversity of all that God has bestowed on people. Where Liz finds meaning in the concrete doing of good works based on ethical perfection, Jo would find it in giving of herself to assist others: a deeply personal surrender.
