Doctor Who and the Genre of Satan

     Recently, I’ve been rewatching Doctor Who. Since I was a kid, it’s always been one of my favorite TV shows, and viewing it again as a more media-savvy adult hasn’t lowered my opinion at all. It’s just so endearing, its premise is endlessly enjoyable — and, as it happens, it contains one of my favorite fictional portrayals of the Devil.

     If you aren’t familiar, Doctor Who is a British sci-fi series that follows a charming but mysterious time traveller known as the Doctor as he takes various human companions on adventures throughout time and space. The show ran for 25 years beginning in 1963 before it was cancelled by the BBC. But then, in 2005, it was revived for a modern audience and has been airing to great popular success ever since.

     Series 1 of the revival streamlined the often complex, experimental storytelling of the classic run into a more digestible formula. In a typical episode or multi-part story: 1) the Doctor and his assistant(s) find themselves in a new historical or futuristic setting, 2) they discover some great danger to themselves and other innocent people, usually in the form of an evil space alien monster, 3) at great cost, the Doctor implements a clever or daring solution, eliminating the threat and saving the day.

     In this way, Doctor Who is both infinitely mutable and strictly limited. The possibilities for different settings, characters and situations are almost endless, but the show does tend to stick very closely to its formula for episode plots. And, crucially, it always adheres to the foundational genre of science fiction, even when it ventures into other aesthetics.

     For instance, when the Doctor encounters what appear to be ghosts in Series 1, at the end of the episode they turn out to be a species of gaseous aliens that merely inhabit dead bodies. When he fights what looks like a werewolf in Series 2, it’s actually a lycanthropic alien from outer space. Every seemingly supernatural monster the Doctor comes across is eventually explained away with a feasible sci-fi justification.

     But then, in the middle of Series 2, the Doctor meets Satan. In a two-part story, The Impossible Planet and The Satan Pit, he faces a giant horned monster called “the Beast,” who claims to be the original, biblical Devil — not just an alien that resembles Satan, but the genuine article.

The Beast in The Satan Pit

     The Beast, as we learn, is trapped at the bottom of a sealed pit in a cave far below the surface of a barren planet orbiting a black hole. In this far remote corner of the universe, the only other life is a human research base oblivious to the horror that lies beneath. And unfortunately for them, the Beast is able to psychically control the base’s crew, preying on their worst fears and insecurities to incite them to release him from the pit.

     The Doctor, who enters the story as a skeptic and an atheist, doubts the Beast’s authenticity until the very end. And yet, there’s never any big reveal that proves the Doctor right. Although he outsmarts the Beast and saves the day, the Doctor and the audience alike are left in the dark at the conclusion of The Satan Pit as to the villain’s true nature.

     But is a supernatural Satan even allowed to appear in Doctor Who? Until this point, the basic rules of the show’s world have seemed crystal clear. Just as, for instance, it would be out of place for Buffy the Vampire Slayer to deal with an alien from outer space, it just doesn’t make sense for the Doctor to end up in a genuinely mystical situation.

After all, if the supernatural exists in Doctor Who’s universe, surely this fact would have come up before. The Doctor is supposed to be privy to extraordinary knowledge that normal human beings aren’t aware of — he knows about the future, the past, the secret aliens hiding among us — so surely there isn’t some additional, double-secret layer of reality that’s only now being exposed. The Devil doesn’t have a place in this scheme of things. But sure enough, at the bottom of the titular Satan Pit, there is a huge red guy with magical powers and seeming omniscience, and there’s no evidence that he’s anything but what he claims.

     The Doctor himself acknowledges this problem in the episode. When the Beast says he is an evil from before the beginning of time, the Doctor rejects this as a possibility. Nothing could have existed before time, he says. He’s been traveling the universe for hundreds of years, and he’s never encountered anything which breaks that rule. The audience is in the exact same position — in all the time we’ve been watching the show, we haven't seen anything like this before.

     The Beast rebukes the Doctor by reframing his refusal to believe in entities beyond his scientific worldview as a form of blind faith in itself. Neither we nor the Doctor have any material reason to discount the possibility of Satan’s existence; we both just have to trust in what we’ve assumed the laws of this reality to be. But the presence of the Beast forces us to reckon with the limits of our own faith as TV viewers — is it possible that the subversive power of Satan is somehow greater than the rules of the sci-fi genre?

     The Doctor has a great monologue where he wrestles with this crisis of faith as he stands before the Beast. In the end, he reaches a pretty cheesy romantic conclusion: the only thing in which he has pure and unquestioning faith is his current companion, Rose. This kind of grand declaration feels great in the moment and is undeniably heartwarming, but it doesn’t really solve the problem, does it?

     Are we as viewers just supposed to take comfort in the stability of the characters and accept that the nature of Doctor Who’s universe is unknowable? That doesn’t seem particularly wise, especially since Rose will be exiting as the Doctor’s companion at the end of Series 2, and the Doctor himself will be recast before Series 5. Is everything entirely mutable? Can we safely place our faith in anything?

     That’s why this is one of my favorite depictions of Satan in fiction. He creeps in uninvited through the cracks in genre, and leaves both the characters and the audience feeling a little less assured than before. If the Devil can enter this hitherto strictly sci-fi story, is there any story he can’t infiltrate?

     It takes a real special story and a real special monster to successfully accomplish this sort of generic coup. But, at least in my opinion, Doctor Who and Satan managed to pull it off, in an exciting, thought-provoking way.