Doctor Who and Jesus Christ:
The Episode That Must Have Occurred, but Will Never Be Aired
It is clear from some of the Doctor's off-hand comments, and from the fact that Jesus doesn't return before the end of the universe in 100 trillion A.D, that in the Doctor's universe, Christianity is false. This story comes from the question, "Then who was Jesus in that universe, and how would a Christian companion react to learning the truth?"
Technically, the story is set in the David Tennant era, just before the Planet of the Dead episode (when the Doctor remarks to Christina, "I remember the original [Easter]. Between you and me, what really happened was—" and then gets interrupted). However, for reasons unknown to the protagonist, and thus to the reader, the Doctor is jumping around in his own time stream during this story, channeling Matt Smith at times. (Okay, I just really wanted to give him a bowtie and make him say "Geronimo").
. . .
Part 1: A Chance Meeting
"All of time and space; everywhere and anywhere; every star that ever was or ever will be. Where do you want to go?"
Impossible though it was, I stood in the TARDIS, marveling at the Doctor, whose face overflowed with delight. I tried to collect my scattered and confused thoughts, thinking back through the events that had brought me to this place.
Just an hour or so earlier, I had been staring down the barrel of a gun. The gun had belonged to a rogue AI, one of many who had swarmed out of the desert into a rest stop just off a freeway in central California. I'd been driving south on my way to my university near L.A, when I'd stopped for lunch. And the AIs had apparently been lying buried in the desert, when some poor soul stumbled across them and accidentally reactivated them. The AIs turned out to be alien in origin, but when and why they had been left in the desert was anyone's guess. In any case, portions of their programming had degraded, and they identified their would-be rescuer and his whole species as enemies to be destroyed.
As luck would have it, though, the portions of their programming that understood language and logic, and prioritized those above violence, were still intact. They would not kill while someone was speaking to them. Therefore, after I had sufficiently mastered my initial fear of the AI who stormed into the building and trained his gun on me, I met with uncanny success when I attempted to defend myself with the one weapon I possessed: my reason.
"Wait, don't shoot me! Let's just talk for a minute. Why do you want to kill us?"
"YOU ARE CLASSIFIED 'ENEMY,'" the dull grey android answered in a scratchy mechanical voice.
"But why? We can't be a danger to you."
"YOUR SPECIES IS A DANGER."
"In what way? We can't fight you! Tell us, maybe we can fix it."
"YOU ARE CLASSIFIED 'ENEMY.'"
"But you already said that. Just think for a minute! Just think! You say I'm an enemy and a danger, but can you tell me why? If there's no good reason, you must realize that you shouldn't be doing this!"
The robot didn't speak or move for a moment. But then it lowered its gun.
"CANNOT IDENTIFY A GOOD REASON. UNIT FUNCTIONING MUST BE COMPROMISED. UNIT WILL SHUT DOWN FOR MAINTANINCE."
And then, the robot's body went slack, its shiny head drooping and its metal arms falling to its side.
I just stood there for a moment, stunned to see my words work so powerfully. And then I wished to God that my questioning could have such a dramatic effect on other human beings. And after that, I realized to my horror that the other people in the building were not having as much luck as I had. A few, who must not have tried to converse with their attackers at all, lay dead and bleeding on the floor. But the majority were, like I had been seconds before, staring down the barrel of a gun as the AIs waited out their victims' use of language, which consisted mainly of cries along the lines of, "Please, don't shoot!"
I yelled out to the crowd of about 16 people, "REASON WITH THEM! ASK THEM WHY THEY'RE DOING THIS! KEEP ASKING!" and then I spun on the robot nearest to me and raised my voice in hopes others would hear.
"WHY ARE YOU SHOOTING US?"
The AI didn't turn his head from the short Hispanic man on whom he'd trained his gun, but he answered, though not loudly enough for more than those nearest me to hear over the other noises. "YOU ARE CLASSIFIED 'ENEMY'"
"BUT WHY ARE WE CLASSIFIED ENEMY?"
"YOUR SPECIES IS A DANGER."
"HOW ARE WE A DANGER? THINK! AND IF YOU CAN'T COME UP WITH A GOOD REASON, THEN YOU SHOULD SHUT DOWN FOR MAINTANENCE."
The AI didn't move. Presumably it was searching its systems, trying to find any sort of reason to justify its actions. I could tell it had come up short when this robot also went slack, clearly powered off.
"Do that to the others!" I commanded the man I'd just saved. And then I spun around again and went for the next nearest robot.
I heard a couple shots, as a few people who apparently hadn't managed to hear what I'd been shouting over their own personal crises stopped protesting and resorted to whimpering and waiting for the inevitable, which made it come.
At the sounds, I closed my eyes a moment and prayed, "Dear Lord, please help us." As I opened my eyes, I mentally kicked myself. "Stupid. That should have been your first reaction, back when you first saw the things!"
But then I pushed aside my malcontent with my attitude towards prayer in a crisis, and started arguing with the next robot. Try though I did over the next few minutes, I couldn't get the attention of more than one AI at a time, and a couple more people died before the crowd finally got wind of what I was doing and began imitating me. Then it didn't take long before the robots were all safely inanimate.
The crowd, naturally, was still hysterical, crying out in fear and grief at what had happened. Some were pulling out cell phones, probably calling 911 or their loved ones. As for me, now that the danger had passed, curiosity was the most overpowering emotion. Hoping to learn where these things had come from, and feeling rather uncomfortable with the idea of sticking around to try to comfort a bunch of upset strangers, I ran out the door of the rest stop, leaving the three fast-food restaurants that shared the building for the gas station outside. I got a good look at a couple more corpses from people killed outside their refueling cars, and felt a little sick at the sight. I wasn't sure if that confirmed my belief that the many violent video games I had played hadn't and couldn't desensitize me to real violence, or if I would be feeling a lot more sick were it not for the games, which I felt certain would make me correspondingly less useful in this crisis. And then I realized I was trying to distract myself from the death by returning to safer, more familiar, but less relevant, thoughts. So I pushed all that aside, and noticed a peculiar man in a suit and bowtie dart up to a corpse, point a handheld glowing thing at it, pause, and then run towards the rest stop. Towards me.
"Hello, I'm the Doctor," he said to me in a strong British accent as he craned his neck to look into the building past me. "Listen, I need your…" His eyes lit on one of the disabled AIs, and then widened in surprise. "Wha… what happened to the androids?"
I tried to figure out how to word my answer, but nothing sounded perfectly right, so I just said, "I convinced them they shouldn't kill us."
The Doctor seemed impressed at that. He pressed me for details, which I related. Then he told me he had been planning on asking me for my cell phone so he could write a virus capable of restoring the robots' lost programming, but with the robots all shut down, that was no longer necessary. I asked him a bunch of questions about the AIs, and he seemed pleased enough to answer what he could. He didn't know where they had originally come from, though, save for a cryptic remark that they were "possibly based on old cyberman technology." In the end, I followed him as he walked back to the opposite side of the gas station. I asked him what would be done with the disabled robots, and he said, though not very straightforwardly, that the United Nations usually saw to cleanup – which surprised me, since I'd almost never heard of the United Nations doing anything significant. But he interrupted my follow-up question by saying, "Ah, there she is!" and he pointed at something I hadn't noticed before then: a blue box set next to one of the gasoline dispensers, looking like the sort of old-timey phone box Superman might change in, except it had the word POLICE written across the top.
"What is that?" I asked.
"I'll show you," he answered, smiling.
He pushed open the door and gestured for me to enter the box. I did so, a little confused at why he wanted me to enter such a small space. The confusion evaporated once I entered, though, as I realized and exclaimed, "It's bigger on the inside!" Then the confusion returned with greater force, and I asked the Doctor, "How can it be bigger on the inside?"
"It's dimensionally transcendental," he answered. Seeing me opening my mouth to ask for more than that baffling response, he cut me off. "Never mind that now," he said. "It's hardly the most interesting thing about the TARDIS."
"TARDIS?" I repeated.
"Time and Relative Dimension in Space," the Doctor said, looking like he was relishing every word. "It's a time machine!"
"What? A time machine?"
"Yes, and a spaceship – so where would you like to go? Because you can come on a trip with me if you like. Just one trip, mind you. Seems like a fair reward for your actions back there. It's not often someone renders me unnecessary, you know. Not often at all."
I was still working on wrapping my head around all this. "Okay, so you're not a real doctor at all. You're a time traveler! That explains a lot. And you'd offer me a trip in your time machine? And you'd bring me safely back to this time?"
"Yes," said the Doctor, grinning, with fire in his eyes. "All of time and space; everywhere and anywhere; every star that ever was or ever will be. Where do you want to go?"
And that's how I'd gotten to the position I was in now, when I had to make what was probably the most important decision of my life.
I thought hard about it. I thought about seeing what earth will be like in a couple hundred, or perhaps a couple thousand, years in the future. I thought about seeing what the earth was really like in the past, before recorded history. I thought about seeing the Milky Way galaxy from an outsider's perspective. But then I thought back to those corpses in and near the rest stop, and I realized what I wanted to see. It was so obvious that I was annoyed at myself for imagining anything else.
"I want to see the crucifixion of Jesus."
The Doctor's eyes widened just a tad, and then he peered at me appraisingly. "Are you sure? Absolutely positive? Because what you see may not be what you wish to see."
"Have you been, then?"
"No, just been to his birth. I do love a good Christmas." He leaned a bit towards me conspiringly, and whispered, "Between you and me, I got the last room in the inn."
My eyes widened in surprise. "What, really?"
The Doctor smiled and nodded. "Couldn't miss the event you lot use to judge time for millions of years, now could I? What kind of time traveler would that make me?"
"I suppose so, yeah. What was it like?"
"Oh, it was gorgeous. The bright light shining in the sky, the shepherds bowing to an infant who lay crying in a manger while his young parents looked on. No wise men, mind you. And I'd so been looking forward to seeing the wise men. But they came a couple years later, apparently."
"Wow. That's amazing."
"Yes. Now…" I saw some of the fire go out of the Doctor's eyes as he turned to observe me. "Now, have you made your decision?"
I swallowed. "Yes. I still want to see the crucifixion. I'm sure."
The Doctor looked at me intently. "Okay," he said to me. "I can do that. Okay." The repeat sounded like it was more directed at himself than at me. "Well then, my friend," he said, turning back to the TARDIS's strange controls, "one trip to the very first century, coming right up." And then he flipped a switch, and a strange scratchy grinding sound reverberated through the air.
