Doctor Who Rewatch: Father’s Day (S1:E8)
There is value in the ordinary and time brings strength.
As a brief introduction, if you are new to Who: Doctor Who is a classic British sci-fi series that ran from 1963-1989, before being restarted in 2005.1 To differentiate between the older and newer runs, classic Doctor Who is categorized by seasons while the reboot seasons are called series. Season 1 aired in 1963, while series 1 aired in 2005.
The show follows the Doctor, a member of a humanoid alien race known as the Time Lords. Instead of dying, they regenerate with a new appearance and personality, while retaining all of their memories. The Doctor lives and travels in the TARDIS, a blue British police box famously bigger on the inside that can go anywhere in time and space.2 Usually, the Doctor travels with a human companion and gets into various adventures along the way.
Doctor Who is an uneven show, in almost every sense. Sometimes the CGI distracts more than it enhances the action.3 Some episodes have weaker stories or less interesting villains. And while “Father’s Day,” the episode we’re discussing today, has Christian ideals at the center of the narrative — the importance of the ordinary person, value in ancient truths, and the necessity of sacrificial deaths — other episodes with different writers have a more materialistic foundation.
High-profile atheist Richard Dawkins has made multiple cameos, and the show often assumes a skeptical perspective on the supernatural. Yet Anthony Coburn, the writer of the first episode (An Unearthly Child, 1963) and devout Catholic,4 based the character of the Doctor on Paul the Apostle.5 In other words, Doctor Who and Christianity have a complicated relationship.6
Doctor Who Series 1
The relaunched version cast Christopher Eccleston as the ninth version of the Doctor. In the first episode, he saves Rose Tyler, a young woman working at a department store. She agrees to travel with him. In subsequent episodes, the pair go to the far future where the long-abandoned planet Earth is about to be destroyed and into the past to save Charles Dickens from alien ghosts. The first series also spends way too much time, three of the 13 episodes, with gassy aliens inside of human costumes trying to take over Earth.
In “The Empty Child,” the Doctor and Rose first cross paths with Captain Jack Harkness, a former Time Agent, who frequently returns as a short-term companion in future series. In the two-part, finale Rose absorbs the power of the TARDIS to save the Doctor from his mortal enemy, the Daleks. To guide herself back to the Doctor, she spreads the words “Bad Wolf” throughout time and space. If you pay attention during the season, you will see those words in random spots during earlier episodes. The TARDIS’ energy is killing Rose, however, so the Doctor saves her by absorbing it himself. This causes him to regenerate into the Tenth Doctor.
“Father’s Day”
In “Father’s Day,” episode 8 in the first series, Rose asks the Doctor to go to the moment her father was killed. That story elevates two key themes of Doctor Who — there is value in the ordinary and time brings strength. Watching this episode almost a decade ago made me want to begin writing about how the story of faith intersects with the stories of film and TV. In a very real sense, “Father’s Day” is why I’m writing today.
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