The weekly what-if machine

Britain’s own contribution has been running, on and off, since 1963 — three years ahead of Star Trek, and born out of the same postwar optimism about science. Doctor Who built its hero as a wandering scientist who, in script editor Terrance Dicks’s defining phrase, is ‘never cruel or cowardly’, and whose signature instrument is a screwdriver that pointedly cannot function as a gun. As comedian Craig Ferguson once summarised, the programme is the triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism, which is hard to improve on. Like all good sci-fi, the show leaned into political and social commentary. Terry Nation built the Daleks as fascism in absurd miniature: hatred literalised as the extermination of difference.

Freethinking fingerprints appear throughout its history. Douglas Adams served as script editor at the end of the 1970s, and the show’s 2005 revival was led by Russell T Davies, a gay atheist writer whose era repeatedly staged secular epiphanies at Saturday teatime. Under his successor Steven Moffat the programme went further, and kept picking arguments with religion. His recurring antagonists included the Church of the Papal Mainframe, a militarised futuristic papacy whose clerics carry guns, whose Mother Superious blesses armies, and whose priests seal confession by wiping memories. Toby Whithouse’s ‘The God Complex’ (2011) trapped the Doctor in a hotel where a minotaur feeds on its victims’ faith — neither the Doctor nor either of his companions had any faith in gods to exploit, save for Amy’s devotion to the Doctor himself. And for the show’s 50th anniversary special, Moffat wrote ‘The Day of the Doctor’ (2013), which settled a human–Zygon war over the possession of Earth by wiping the negotiators’ memories so that none of them knew which side they were on, obliging them to write a treaty fair to both: the philosopher John Rawls’s veil of ignorance, played out at Saturday teatime.

The animated inheritors sharpened the format’s philosophical edge. Futurama, which David X. Cohen developed with help from The Simpsons’ creator Matt Groening, had a writers’ room so stocked with advanced degrees that one episode required a new mathematical theorem, which they successfully proved. The show’s 2002 episode ‘Godfellas’ is a twenty-two-minute treatment of theodicy. Bender the robot, adrift in space, becomes god to a tiny civilisation. Intervening kills his worshippers; so does leaving them alone. He finally meets a vast entity that has concluded a light touch is best. The show touches frequently on mortality, deep time, and grief, with episodes like ‘The Late Philip J. Fry’ and ‘Jurassic Bark’ routinely named among the most affecting things American animation has ever made.

Rick and Morty runs the what-if-machine experiment with the polarity reversed, handing infinite universes to the smartest being alive and showing that intelligence without compassion curdles into misery. The show borrows freely, taking its scientist-and-sidekick structure from Back to the Future, its anthology-series cruelty from The Twilight Zone, its cosmic indifference from Futurama, and, from Doctor Who, both its portable-universe format and a lead whose sheer genius gives him godlike power over mortals.

Amid the dark humour and the nihilism, the show keeps returning to the idea that in a world without given meaning, the job of making meaning falls to us through the relationships we keep and the care we take with other people. In ‘Pickle Rick’ (2017), after an episode spent demonstrating just how brilliant he is, Rick is schooled by a therapist who tells him that no one is clever enough to be excused from working on themselves. The show’s most-quoted moment belongs not to Rick but to Morty, who in ‘Rixty Minutes’ (2014) consoles his sister with the observation that ‘nobody exists on purpose’ and then suggests they watch television together. Camus would have recognised the move: no meaning is given, so meaning gets chosen, and it tends to look like company.

One admission is due here. Much of this popular tradition uses ‘science fiction’ loosely, and the genre’s greatest influence in recent decades may be on modern fantasy, which has adopted its structures and its methods of asking questions. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) is the clearest case. Its demons are folklore, but its method is Star Trek’s: a crew rather than a lone hero, a problem of the week to be researched, argued over, and solved, a library in place of a bridge, and a young woman who saves the world with friendship, training, and stubborn moral choice in a universe conspicuously empty of any saving god. Its creator Joss Whedon was, whatever later reassessments of the man himself, honoured for cultural humanism by Harvard’s humanist chaplaincy in 2009.

Other fantasy series have followed a similar path to explore humanist ideas. Michael Schur’s The Good Place (2016–20) put a moral philosophy syllabus — Scanlon, Kant, and trolley problems included — into a network sitcom, and concluded, despite being set in an afterlife, that finitude is what makes anything matter. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett’s collaboration with Neil Gaiman, plays the apparatus of Revelation for comedy and averts Armageddon through an ordinary boy’s preference for the world as it is. In children’s fantasy, Diana Wynne Jones spent a career quietly dismantling the machinery of destiny and chosen ones, insisting that her young heroes save themselves by wit, honesty, and effort, a move Sir Philip Pullman, a patron of Humanists UK, later made operatic in His Dark Materials. Fantasy of this kind has borrowed science fiction’s experiment: change the premise, hold human nature constant, and see what we learn.