The Curse of the Black Spot

I enjoyed last night's Dr Who, and I've found myself musing over a couple of aspects of it. Check out here (at least for the time being) for some further info or reminders: BBC - BBC One Programmes - Doctor Who, Series 6, The Curse of the Black Spot: "Beset by terror and cabin fever, the pirates have numerous superstitious explanations for the appearance of a mysterious Siren."
So, what I found intriguing having slept on it is the plot structure. A lot of popular viewing, and indeed literature, employs a plot line which is basically 'heroes and others are threatened by some malevolent force (whether a thing, a population or something more amorphous) and the goodies work together using their resources (usually cunningly) deployed to destroy, neutralise or rout the malevolents'.
Of course, that kind of plot arc is basically reinforcing, normally, the myth of redemptive violence (MoRV) which is arguably a key mythic pattern in our culture (I happen to concur with Walter Wink that it actually is). What I enjoyed about this plot is that it opened up the imagination to other ways of plotting the things we face.

In the classic MoRV take, the scenario that the episode opens with would be resolved by either leaving things with the discovery of how the Siren accessed their ship or hiding places and closing it off and getting away or, more usually, discovering something that enabled them to destroy or 'neutralise' the monster. What happened here was the discovery that the 'monster' isn't really but is actually an intelligent programme (an emergency medical hologram -borrowed from Star Trek Voyager?) whose mission is to save the injured and ill by taking them to a life-support unit and keeping them alive albeit comotose pending a visit by real medics. In this case, because the crew of the space vessel the Siren is from, have died from an earth virus (shades of War of the Worlds?), the medics are never going to come and, unlike Voyager, this holographic medic hasn't evolved beyond 'her' programming. So the EHM paramedic simply snatches anyone injured or ill and warehouses them. The resolution here is not from the MoRV script but by understanding the 'enemy', trusting their intelligence and working with their beneficent desires for an outcome of win-win. MoRV, of course is not about win-win but a zero sum 'game'.

I salute the win-win storyline. What this also tells me is that in the struggle for a more peaceful, safer and more just world a big part of it is to expand the moral imagination. Part of our problem as a global society is, I would contend, that our ability to think (collectively) about how to resolve conflict, differing aims and objectives etc is infested by MoRv in such a way that it disables possible win-win plotting. We need to big up stories of win-win plotting (and other kinds of non-MoRV) so that the resources that we have, collectively, to put ourselves into plot-lines-in-life that enable human flourishing for all. So let's have more of these win-win plots and let's celebrate them and encourage them to fill our hearts and minds and so drive from our real-life plotting the automatic recourse to win-lose and MoRV which, I think, made the mistakes of responding to the Twin Towers attack by going into Iraq.

The second thing I've been musing is much less cosmic but nevertheless still intrigues me.
The Siren (whom we discover is an emergency holographic paramedic) looks remarkably like the stowaway lad who we discover to be the captain's son. Maybe this was a co-incidence or merely a resemblance in my own mind, but maybe it has further significance. Within the information from within the story, it could be that the lad was the basis for the programme's choice of form to appear in (the alien skeletons were clearly not human and probably, in our eyes, properly monstrous -big teeth, bony crest on the skull). But then, if this was the case, how did it know (a) to put clothes on and (b) to put female garb on given that all the models it had on the ship were male?