In one of today’s news items on the Doctor Who News Page comes this:

The Doctor Who episode “Gridlock” has been nominated for the Epiphany Prize, an award given by the conservative Christian media organization Movieguide. The Epiphany Prizes “seek to create a deeper spiritual awareness in mankind and increase man’s love and understanding of God” and are awarded to “popular, entertaining movies and television programs which are wholesome, uplifting, inspirational, redemptive, and moral.” “Gridlock” is up against the TV movies “Lost Holiday: The Jim & Suzanne Shemwell Story”, “Saving Sarah Cain” and “The Valley of Light”, and an episode of the animated Christian children’s series “Friends and Heroes”. Variety has a story about the nomination.

Obviously I have my own opinions on Gridlock’s message, but I actually found myself thinking more about a funny and brilliant article I read in Movement, a magazine about current issues in theology, politics, student life, the arts and popular culture published by the Student Christian Movement in the UK (a magazine that I, in fact, edited a decade ago). It’s an article about Series 3 in issue 127 written by the editor Wood Ingham. He writes:

Take Gridlock, the third episode. So you have these people trapped beneath the beautiful city of New New York, and they’re on the motorway, and they’re going round and round and round in this eternal traffic jam, hoping that one day they’ll find the exit, except there isn’t one. The police can be called, but never answer. The people sing hymns (sentimental favourite ‘The Old Rugged Cross’) and live for the hope that the authorities above are looking out for them. The Doctor realizes that they aren’t. There’s just the motorway.

Tell me that isn’t a metaphor for the apparent pointlessness of religion.

Except it turns out that up above, those people are being watched by the ‘textbook enigmatic’ Face of Boe, a big inscrutable, er, face with awesome powers, a wholly benevolent attitude and billions of years of unexplored backstory. And the Face of Boe, at the end, sacrifices himself Christ-like to give the people access to the wonderful world of promise above.

Except that the Face of Boe doesn’t remotely resemble the benevolent overseeing force the people believe in, because the authorities everyone thinks are there are in fact all dead.

And then there’s that whole issue of the Face of Boe turning out to be pansexual action man Captain Jack in a few million years’ time. I don’t know what they were thinking there.

He could have also added that help comes from the Doctor essentially doing nothing more than a re-wiring job but I suspect Wood had an upper-word limit to consider. The rest of the article goes through the sheer futility of trying to derive any religious meaning from Doctor Who: Just when you think you have something, it doesn’t quite work. It’s well worth a read.