Brainwashing
~Lauren Rizzotto

How do you create a TV show that is so popular it has stuck around through at least ten generations without losing popularity? The show I'm thinking about has been around since 1963, and the actor playing the main character - the strange alien who's ship, shaped like an old fashioned police box, lets him travel through time and space - has been changed ten times. And it's all completelty justified, of course.

If you haven't already guessed, I'm talking about Dr. Who, and the police box is, of course, the TARDIS. I've only seen the last two doctors, but I would kill to see the rest of the series - and the movie. It's on my to-do list.

I think it's because the show is, by some twisted logic, believeable. Everyone knows that the scenarios presented to us are ones that could, to some extent, happen some day - and, lets face it, everyone's always loved the "what if"s, that's how everyone in the television business makes their money.

To be fair, how believeable it is depends on your own beliefs about the universe in general. But isn't it plausible that one day some power-crazed government will come up with a better way to brainwash the general population? Or that someone would be so obsessed with being the perfect human, free of pain and disease, that they would turn themselves into a machine - and then try to "help" everyone else in the same way? Or, perhapse the closest in the future, that a hospital would raise humans, all of them unconscious and dying of every disease imagineable, for the sake of having the cure to all the diseases?

Where do we draw the moral line? In each of these situations, the immoral aspects were hidden - they were very obvious to us as we watched, but the people causing them knew they would have to hide them from the public. The people being brainwashed didn't know it was happening - they just thought they had been given a more efficient way to get the news. The guy who made himself into a machine had a ton of diseases and wanted to stop suffering - everyone's suffering - but he didn't give them a choice in the matter. The nurses (they were nuns, actually... and cats... but that's beside the point) who ran the hospital with a basement full of millions of unconscious humans wanted to save the world - they also wanted to convert the world, but that could be considered saving, too. They had all convinced themselves they were doing good, but some small voice in their heads knew it was wrong, because they wouldn't have hidden it otherwise.

It's a dangerous thought. There were people, in each situation, who could have changed everything if they had only taken a moment to think about it. Look around you today. How many of us are followers, accepting boundaries because someone told us to, not wondering why they're doing what they're told to do? How many people go along with fads, not wondering how they might affect their lives? Or dedicate so much of their lives to finding cures that the consequences of those cures become unimportant?

Take a moment, right now, and think. What do you do every day - and why do you do it? How many times does someone tell you to do something and you just get up and do what you're told - at home, at work, at school - without wondering why you're doing it?

In the TV show, there's always the Doctor, who comes in and asks himself the necessary questions - and then saves everyone. In the real world there's only us. Everyone on this planet needs to have a mind of their own. When people stop thinking for themselves, we're all in trouble - and you know it's already started.