“Watch the Blood-Soaked Old General in Action”: Blochian Atheism, Exodus, and Utopia in <i>Doctor Who</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article reads the eighth series of modern Doctor Who alongside Ernst Bloch's Atheism in Christianity. Applying Bloch's motifs of utopianism, God on High, and God of Exodus, it suggests that Doctor Who—and, to a lesser degree, Torchwood: Children of the Earth—presents a narrative that is at once deeply formed by atheist materialism and Christian messianism. Through the character analysis of the Doctor as well as secondary and tertiary characters, this article posits that both the atheist–Christian theology of Bloch and recent turns in Doctor Who fundamentally require the dissolution of all polity and ethical dimensions within religion. Whereas most analyses of the Doctor as a Christ figure examine Doctor Who's third series, this article does so with a focus on the tendencies toward exodus and liberation present in the eighth series. In doing so, it aims to challenge the assumptions of previous studies that have placed Doctor Who's atheism in tension with its Christian imagery and to suggest Bloch's model as a more helpful tool for thinking about the Doctor as a deified protagonist with both atheist and Christian characteristics. This work seeks to consider atheism and theism as forces that can and do exist concurrently in science fiction and Marxist theory, taking shape in a terrain that is neither exclusively Christian nor exclusively atheist and which is made possible through the theoretical vehicles of deification and theodicy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Other About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Not applicable | low |
| gpt | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Theoretical or conceptual | low |
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedLabeled directly by 2 models reading the full record.
The models disagree on parts of this classification; every voice is preserved in the section at the end of the page.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".