Alien iconography in Doctor Who (2005-present):
a matter of fears and likes
Doctor Who is well known for being one
of the longest TV series broadcasted. Even after a break, it restarted in 2005
and kept being one of the greatest hits on the English television; its episodes
always develop unpredictable plots and have shown us all kind of creatures
through time and space. We might think this is a question of imagination and
luck, but we would be simplifying the scriptwriter job; if we keep on watching
it and it’s still able to make us feel anything (fun, love, fear, sorrow) it’s
because its writers know very well how to play with our minds. I don’t mean
they are trying to drive us crazy (although sometimes it looks like that), but
they certainly know well how to make the crowd sympathize or fear somebody.
In the
first place, we have the Doctor, the main character that defines himself as a mad man with a box. He is a time lord,
an alien race that looks completely human, feels like a human and, in fact, as
far as we know, has a life circle quite similar to humans in the beginning: through
many episodes, the Doctor gives hints about how Gallyfreyan kids are born and
raised, quite similarly to us. A time lord seems to be pretty normal to us,
they are made time lords by spending a huge time looking into the Untempered
Schism, which shows the entirety of the Time Vortex and the power that time
lords have and that’s the point in which they differ from humans. They have
achieved immortality by regenerating themselves when their bodies are too
damaged, and immortality has always been one of the greatest ambitions for
Humanity, so even that makes him attractive for us.
He has a thing for the Earth
and humans in general (“Oh, humans, I thought I’d never get done saving you.”)
and carries a human or at least half-human companion with him. He’s the last
one of his species, completely free to come and go, but he still keeps a clear
moral that pictures the virtues our society defends: kindness, peace, knowledge,
courage, love... The only thing that can put him away from actual humans is the
fact that he has two hearts and is about one thousand years old; he is
eccentric and childish, indeed none of this makes him disgusting to any human
he meets; instead, it makes the public feel some kind of tenderness because in
so many aspects he is like a child: innocent, and innocence is something that
must be protected. Here we can see the clearest example of how well
scriptwriters know the public. It is always easier to make us sympathize with
an alien creature as long as it is friendly and human-like.
Then we have the other main
alien races: daleks, cybermen, weeping angels, silences, oods and silurians
represent a wide range of possibilities, from fears to social conflicts, and
their physical forms help to deepen into them. It’s not only about if they are
ugly or nice (though this is important), but also about how sometimes something
that looks harmless can become quite dangerous and take us unaware. Is it a
metaphor of life? Maybe.
We could talk about daleks
and cybermen jointly, as far as both of them represent different forms of the
cyborg idea: daleks are a super intelligent alien race set into machines that
make them letal, cybermen are steel men created by a human mind that use the
heads of people as their organic component. Both of them have faced the Doctor
a few times (daleks are, in fact, time lords’ biggest enemies and responsible for
time lord’s extinction), always trying to take over the Earth and use humans to
create more of them (cybermen) or destroy Humanity to get a new place to live
in (daleks). Daleks seem to be way more dangerous because of their intelligence
and lack of feelings. They are cold hyperrational creatures, unable of any
empathy, although they haven’t always been like that; we know they were better
once and compare it to what they’ve become and maybe spot our own future. If we
only observe their appearance, we have to admit they don’t really look
terrifying (“Without your gun you're a tricycle with a roof.” says the Doctor
in episode 7x01) and they continuously claim they want to “Exterminate!” so
there’s no possible doubt about their intentions. What makes them terrifying? Their
history. They were like us once, but their whishes of improving themselves
drove them into the complete loss of any kind of feeling, turning them into
heartless brains. On the other hand, we have the cybermen, whose only interest
is multiply their number so they can take over the Earth because their creator
(originally human) compelled them to do so. Here we can see both sides of the
same coin: with our continue struggle to be better, stronger, cleverer, we may
end up being like daleks or cybermen (that depends on if we keep on thinking by
ourselves or if we let someone else, more powerful or smarter, manipulate us).
Will we go as far as this? Are we already going by developing things like
eugenics, bionic devices, robots or even Google glasses? Those two aliens
symbolize (very extreme) possibilities of future for us and are supposed to
make us wonder about the morals that should be developed beside scientific
achievements.
The weeping angels have
turned out to be one of the creepiest aliens created by the Doctor Who scriptwriters. Opposed to
daleks and cybermen, weeping angels appear for the first time on season 3 of
the modern series and their origin is still uncertain. Many theories develop
the idea of them being time lords that have fallen in disgrace, but their
creator (Steven Moffat) hasn’t agreed with that. The only thing we know about
their origin is that they are old, really old, older than our world, and that
they definitely come from another part of the Universe. If we judge by their
looks, we might think they are not very scary: weeping angels seem to be
statues portraying angels with their eyes covered as if they were crying (in
following episodes we find out that almost any statue can be one of them,
regardless of their form), though later we discover the real reason why they
don’t look straight: as long as somebody is looking at them, they cannot move,
so they don’t risk to look into each other because that would doom them
forever. The problem is that they are quick, very quick, and blinking may mean
your death, because their touch will send you backwards in time to let them
feed on your temporal energy. The only way to keep them from attacking you is
to stare constantly at them, otherwise they’ll send you back in time again and
again until no temporal energy is left in you and you die. The motto “Don’t
blink” the Doctor repeats in every weeping angel episode has become one of the
scariest sentences according to the fans.
The weeping angels represent
psychological fears, much more personal than the previous ones. Scriptwriters
are now playing with a few different fears: on one hand, fear of wasting time
and dying without living at all, on the other hand, fear of the possibility of
living creatures among us and being observed without us knowing it (they are literally
living stone). The last one could be included in the list of paranoids that we
can find among science fiction works. Besides, weeping angels in all kind of
variations have always being a symbol of death, a very common one during World
War I, when they got very popular to decorate the tombs of the fallen ones.
Right
next to the weeping angels, we may analyze silences. Again we find a new alien
race that appears for the first time in the modern series and that plays with
our minds in a very similar way. Silences’ main characteristic is that you only
remember them as long as you are looking at them. How can humans possibly fight
invaders that cannot even be remembered? And it’s not only them what you
forget, but also anything that might be said or done while you’re seeing them,
although it leaves traces in your mind that might let you remind the shadow of
an idea, as if it were your own (a very subtle way of brainwashing, so to call
it). Without our memories, we are in constant danger and don’t know it and they
are stealing little parts of ourselves. They confess to have been ruling the
world for centuries, manipulating and controlling people into their whishes.
Right next to this kind of behavior, another question is raised: are we still ourselves
without our memories or induced into somebody else’s wishes? Leaving aside the
fact of the alien invasion, here the show plays with another fear that has
become very common in the last twenty years because of the increase of
Alzheimer disease; how can we fight an invisible enemy?
Oods
raise a very different situation. They are not enemies of the human race (or
time lords), they a pacific and kind of child-like alien race who’s been born
to serve. They need to have somebody telling them what to do, otherwise they
pine away and die; they are also born with their brains out of their heads, so
they must be pacific. They are one of the most confusing races in the show,
because their exterior look is humanoid but they have tentacles on their faces
and that, most of the times, bring the Doctor’s companions to mistake when they
thing oods are dangerous. Oods also possess a high sensibility, they have a
telepathic bound among their race and can express their pity by singing. Are
they really inferior to human or equal but have developed their capabilities in
a different way? I mean, humans develop intelligence and rationality more than
anything else, but oods may have done the same with their empathy: they feel
happy when the people around is happy, so they want to help and that is
translated for humans as a way of servilism. Do we have the right to treat them
as slaves?
Here
we can see a parallelism with most of the colonizations in History, like when
Spanish people arrived to America
Finally,
we have the silurians. Silurians set a very different situation: they are not
aliens, we are. They are a race that was habiting the Earth years and years
before humans appeared and when we did, they found themselves forced to go into
the planet to be able to keep on living. That’s why they start being really
aggressive when we first meet them and then turn out to be a very human-like
race willing to negotiate with us about the possibility of going back to the
Earth surface. I think the circumstances around this encounter are quite
interesting for us, because they are represented as humanoid lizards and that’s
supposed to creep us, but when you really come to think about it, they are
nothing but the previous step right before us. We are creepy for them too (one
of them openly says so) because we are for them the same as some posthuman
possibilities are for us. Both races are just two different steps of Evolution
and, in this case, we are the
invaders, we are the aliens and it’s our iconography the one that is
disgusting.
Apart
from these main cases, there are a few more I’d like to talk about too. In
first instance, Cassandra[1].
Cassandra is, at some point of the future, the last human being, although
there’s almost nothing about her that we could recognize as human; her vanity has
made her put herself through so many different types of plastic surgery that
the only remaining part of her is a piece of plain skin with eyes and mouth.
This could be considered as a posthuman possibility: no improvement that we can
recognize, just the (very extreme) result of a very common obsession nowadays.
Right next to her, and as
another way of going for humans, we have the Nestene duplicate[2]
of Rory (one of the Doctor’s companion): it’s a plastic version of a human
whose personality stays just like the original one and doesn’t know that it’s a
robot, but finds out when the main software makes all the duplicates start to
kill and he accidentally shoots his girlfriend Amy. It’s such a perfect copy
that nobody around him knows he isn’t real, not even himself, and this could
fit the paranoia theme of classic science fiction.
Sontarans[3]
are a very clear (and critic) representation of another popular fact of
scientific progress: eugenics and cloning. This race is meant to be warriors,
pure warriors: they are born with the fighting desire inside and it’s not
specifically said how they reproduce, but since they do it by millions with the
only intention of being part of a huge army and they are “born” directly as
grownups, we can imagine that they don’t do it the traditional way.
Vashta
Nerada[4]
is a very different type of alien race. They look like dust particles when you
see them floating around in the air thanks to sunshine, but they usually gather
compounding huge shadows to attack people. They are also known as air piranhas,
because they eat any kind of flesh just like the marabunta would. Actually, I
see them more like marabunta than piranhas (here we have another buglike type
of alien, but also some kind of psychological fear representation: shadows, the
darkness and what is in there that we can’t see). The only way of staying safe
from them is always to keep an eye on the shadows. The second scariest motto
created by Doctor Who is “Count the
shadows”, referring to this alien.
Human
perspective could be our conclusion since we are all human (or so I hope). Generally
speaking, the first reaction of humans (unless you’ve already travelled with the
Doctor for so long that very few things can really impress you) is to feel
scared. That’s a very normal reaction when you’re facing something unknown and
that doesn’t look like anything you’ve seen before, but most of the times if we
still feel scared after a while is because we can recognize a part of humanity
in it, usually the worst part. If we watch alien invasions, wars or behaviors
we can conclude that they do not look so different from us, although it looked
like that at the beginning. Playing with the looks is the simplest way of scaring
the audience and it may work on a concrete group (like the youngest
spectators), but what scriptwriters do to really frighten grownups is to go one
step beyond and create aliens that represent deeper fears or possible
evolutions, those which are terrifying because they attack directly the most
basic instinct: survival, by not letting us perceive reality as it is actually,
or because they show how we are developing a hyper rational way of thinking and
taking advance on whatever surrounds us.
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