Kid stuff

So I’d probably seen about twenty or so Dr. Who episodes before I found out that the British consider this a children’s program. While Buffy was a teen-oriented show, it wasn’t for children, and we wouldn’t let the girls watch it when they were younger. Dr. Who is for children? Have I already entered my second youth then, that I find it engrossing and even scary at times? I wouldn’t even have known it was considered a children’s show if I hadn’t watched some of the supplemental material on the DVD and heard the actor speak of it that way. When I started watching, I did tell my husband he’d probably like it, because there wasn’t graphic violence (the fight scenes on Buffy used to bother him). But that didn’t detract from the fact that one usually gets caught up in the real possibility that the universe might be extinguished, or all human life made into stew for the delectation of some alien species. The suspense feels real, though one knows that the doctor, in some incarnation or other, will survive. His survival is pretty much the only thing one can count on.

I remember railing against the crap the girls used to watch on Disney or the other kids’ channels. They all told the same message: kids are powerful; kids know best; kids will fix the world. (It’s no wonder they voted for the big kid who promised to do so.) So I guess that’s the pabulum I expect from children’s programming. The kind of stuff that moves product!

Children in the US were not to be told that the universe is a deeply mysterious and deeply dangerous place, full of aliens that are basically the same as Buffy’s demons, only with pseudo-scientific explanations. They should never be told the truth about human loneliness and fragility. So what makes the British consider it reasonable to reveal it to the young ones? Well, the answer is clear, and was made so in the third episode of the new series, “The Empty Child” which takes us back to England’s primal trauma: World War II. Homeless children fend for themselves, and one in particular who wanders around asking “are you my mummy” haunts the city, spreads like an infection (due to some nanobots, of course).

English children experienced conditions that Americans never have and they have grown up and passed to their children an awareness of the darkness and fragility. Americans still believe they are Superman or at least Mighty Mouse come “to save the day.” I have to say that I find the British view far truer and more compelling. We do need a doctor, because we are very sick.