Forever is a horrible word. It’s wrong. Nothing lasts forever.
But what if something did? And what if that something was a person?
Spoiler Warning for Torchwood and Doctor Who
Torchwood is a spin-off TV show from the long running sci-fi series, Doctor Who. It’s a show that really goes out of its way to assert itself as an adult programme. So much so that the villain of its second ever episode was an alien which worked in the same way as an STD.
With its more liberal potential for storyline exploration than its parent show came a series that often showcased the dark repercussions of its sci-fi concepts. This post will focus upon the differing ideas of immortality that are presented to us in the Doctor Who universe. Namely Torchwood’s representations of the concept will be explored here but some of Doctor Who’s takes on immortality will feature here as well.
A.I. Artificial Intelligence
Before I get into the Torchwood/Doctor Who aspect of this post, I just wanted to give a mention to the Stephen Spielberg movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence. (Spoiler warning for the film’s ending here).
A.I. Artificial Intelligence follows a robot boy, called David, who is very close to being a human but his none-human qualities become his downfall. Ultimately, David outlives humanity and is doomed to an eternity of loneliness. His “mother” gets revived during this eternity but is only able to return for a day & never again. That ending terrified me growing up. I think it was intended to be bittersweet but, to young me, was an existential nightmare.
Honestly, I can think of nothing worse than being immortal because of the repercussions that would entail. (Last spoiler here: This blog post is about to explore those repercussions!).
Captain Jack Harkness- Tortured Immortal
When Rose Tyler absorbed the heart of the time vortex, she brought Captain Jack Harkness back to life after a Dalek had exterminated him. 
But she didn’t just bring him back to life, she brought him back to life forever. Living forever sounds great at a glance but leads to so much agony and heartbreak.
Captain Jack’s immortality is similar to that of Marvel superhero Deadpool in his ability to feel pain but with a body that fixes itself. Due to this, Jack Harkness has been: shot, electrocuted, had his life absorbed by the devil’s son, killed repeatedly whilst imprisoned for a year, pushed off a building, killed by “death”, killed by a broken bottle, blown up, stabbed and suffocated in a concreate prison.
I don’t know about you but that sounds like a lot of pain for one man to endure! And that’s just physical pain. Captain Jack has to bare witness to outliving every single person he cares about, alongside outliving every other person too for that matter! What a horrendous existence! He endures heartbreak after heartbreak though watching everyone he knows grow old and die; losing lovers, teams and even his grandson (who has to know Jack as an uncle due to Jack’s youthful appearance.)
Though his body reforms after anything, it also ages (incredibly slowly). As a result, there’s strong evidence to suggest that Jack will eventually become another popular Doctor Who character called The Face of Boe- after billions of years.
I mean no disrespect to The Face of Boe when saying this but, imagine the process of turning into that thing in the gif! No thank you!
If he is The Face of Boe, that means that Jack will one day die as The Face of Boe dies in Gridlock. I take solace in that for his character.
Owen Harper- Breakable Immortal
Owen Harper being resurrected into a living corpse is the epitome of body horror. Once brought back to life after being shot, Owen is incapable of many bodily functions. No more can he sleep, breathe, swallow, digest, bleed or heal from wounds.
The danger of losing an irreplaceable part of your body becomes so much more horrifying when every part of your body becomes irreplaceable, coupled with the fact that you may have to deal with that loss forever. There’s an intense permanency to Owen’s fragile, undead state. Upon accidently cutting his hand with a scalpel, he has to stitch it back together…every week! He also breaks a finger which becomes bandaged up and unusable ever again.
Gore never really frightens me anywhere near as much as the implications of Owen’s decaying body does. The Santa Carlita Diet explores similar repercussions of being in an undead state when its zombie protagonist, Sheila, loses her finger. This concept sends shivers down my spine. I’m sure there’s probably a complicated word for this phobia.
Eventually, Owen does die (again!) after being incinerated in a nuclear meltdown. Now I’m not going to ponder the real life understanding of the soul or consciousness but my understanding is that Owen’s immortal (but not invulnerable) state existed, incapable of doing anything without a body…forever. Eerie.
Ashildr- Forgetful Immortal
Captain Jack Harkness was a human from the 51st Century before being made immortal. Therefore, he is presumably more evolved than you and I (Unless you’re living 3000 years in the future).
But what if a 9th Century Viking became immortal?
This is exactly what happened to Ashildr when the Doctor resurrected her at the cost of her ability to die. She also does not age at all and would heal from injuries and illnesses which should kill a mortal being.
Ashildr’s fatal flaw is her memory. As she was born with a body that expected to have lifespan of a typical 9th Century person, the memory aspect of her brain is not capable of remembering events that happened centuries before. This gets to the point where she no longer remembers her birthname and refers to herself as “Me” as it’s easier to remember. To combat this, Ashildr journals her experiences into books and rips out pages which are to painful to read.
Like Jack, Ashildr outlives all of her loved ones. Ultimately, she swears off being emotionally attached to anyone after centuries of heartache. This results in her losing sympathy for other people which is fundamental to understanding human emotions, including your own.
In the final 5 minutes of the universe, she is shown to be the only being alive and remarks that watching stars die is a beautiful sight. Before the universe ends completely, she boards the Doctor’s TARDIS to travel back in time and ultimately receives her own time machine.
This almost addressed a fundamental question I have about immortality. What happens when an immortal person outlives the universe? Doctor Who’s cop-out of “she gets a time machine and flies back in time” is the closest I’ve ever seen to an answer.
Miracle Day- Everybody’s Immortal
The premise for the 4th series of Torchwood, or Torchwood: Miracle Day, is that all human beings stop dying and this series of television shows the most harrowing repercussions of immortality within the Doctor Who universe.
It begins with a murderous peadophile, Oswald Danes, who is facing the death sentence by lethal injection on live television for his crimes, but he survives. Oswald then argues that this meant he’d served his punishment and legally wins his freedom with a force majeure argument that his survival is an act of God. Though Miracle Day was a 2011 serial, I remember a similar incident happened in real life in 2019 when a murderer serving a life sentence had died and came back to life. He tried arguing that this meant he’d served it yet didn’t win his case.
Unlike Jack Harkness these humans are not invulnerable. As a result, bodies can be completely destroyed yet still be alive and are capable of feeling pain. They also age normally. This, already nightmarish concept, peaks when the governments begin burning injured people to control the enormous population that the immortality “miracle” has caused.
Many issues arise in regards to the societal function of mass immortality such as hospitals filling as people who should have died become antibiotic resistant incubators of bacteria, dwindling resources. Alongside this, a global depression hits. Imagine how horrible it’d be to live through one of those! (To any future people reading, this post is being written during that corona thing all your history teachers go on about. Also, its just a recession here in 2020 at the moment, here’s to hoping that it doesn’t become a depression).
The Doctor- Lonely Immortal
Perhaps the most immortal (and therefore the most tragic immortal) is Doctor Who’s titular character, the Doctor.
From a real world perspective is impossible for the character of the Doctor to die and stay dead. The Doctor is the least likely to die out of anyone else in the franchise. I’ll go on record here and say that no writer has the power to kill off the Doctor permanently.
Modern franchises don’t seem to have conclusions. Even when they seem to end, they’ll be rebooted or revived 20 years down the line. Look at Star Wars, Marvel or Star Trek. Do you think their stories are finishing up anytime soon? But the difference is, none of those follow a singular protagonist like Doctor Who does. Luke Skywalker and Tony Stark can die but there will still be instalments after those characters pass on. This can’t happen when the Doctor’s “name” is in the title. The franchise would end at the Doctor’s death but the franchise can’t end because another writer would undoubtedly write him/her, and the franchise, back to life. It has been passed on through generations of showrunners and lead actors due to the revolutionary idea of the Doctor’s ability to regenerate. You can cancel the show and people will rely on novels or comics with the Doctor in, like during Doctor Who’s wilderness years
The character was initially recast into Patrick Troughton due to William Hartnell’s health under the notion that the Doctor is an alien who can reconstruct his body into an entirely new one upon death. To give stakes to the show, a 13 regeneration limit was imposed. However, this had to be extended from a narrative standpoint once the Doctor neared the limit in order to keep the show running. As of The Timeless Child episode, one can assume that the Doctor has countless regenerations.
His/her immortality is coupled with a police box-time machine to make life more bearable and exciting but even with the ability to experience everything that ever has been, or ever will be, what happens when the Doctor’s done all of that?
Like with the other immortal characters in the whoniverse, the Doctor struggles with the notion that their own lifespan supersedes all of their friends and that they watch people grow old before them whilst they, themselves, are free of such a concept. A real world explanation for the revolving door of side-kick companions is both down to actors leaving the show or for storytelling reasons.
The Doctor has experienced trauma unlike any other. They’ve been trapped alone for 4 billion years, lived with the guilt of destroying their own race for the sake of the universe and countless other scarring incidences of which I’d be here listing for a lifetime. It’s regularly reiterated that the Doctor “needs someone” by their side during adventures and mostly has a companion to accompany them. I believe this is to combat the intense loneliness the character feels (as the most immortal being). But he is doomed to certainly be parted from each of them in due course.
When one becomes immortal, it is a loss rather than a gain. I think that the loss of death must be the greatest loss one could ever suffer. Our time limit makes our lives worthwhile. To paraphrase Ashildr, life and the universe are beautiful because they are not forever. Live in the moment and be sure to enjoy your life, time goes fast and it’s the only one you’ll get…unless you’re a Time Lord or a Buddhist.
I’ll leave you with a final spine-chilling thought. It is possible that you could be immortal. You can never be 100% certain that you’re not the one anomaly of the human race who will walk the universe forever. Your strong estimation that you will one day die is based on the evidence of every human before you, but not actually based on yourself. You’re assuming rather than knowing unquestionably. (Please don’t test this out, statistically your strong estimation will turn out to be completely correct!)
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