It used to be that when an arch-villain wanted to decimate a community, he’d put something in the water. Now, it’s something in the wi-fi. In the new Dr Who, the Time Lord battles a baddie who runs a group called the Spoonheads, whose mission is to upload and download stuff from the wireless internet. A bit like what I do all day, then. But wait — the Spoonheads are uploading people’s minds, to access all of human intelligence. Then they download them again, for their own evil purposes, while their victims languish in a mindless warp.
The episode is called ‘The Bells of Saint John’ (BBC1, Saturday) and plays cleverly on our fascination at and fears about a technology that we cannot touch or see but is all around us. What lurks in the wi-fi, waiting to pounce? These clouds of data swimming around us can’t be good. There are lots of whizz-bang special effects and the storyline swooshes along, with Matt Smith’s Doctor meeting up again with his new companion, the fast-talking Clara Oswald.
But things must needs be speedy, once the internet becomes the centre of a plot. If we mull on the Tardis for too long, for instance, we’ll realise that it’s a strangely quaint device for our times. Sure, the machine is wondrously bigger on the inside than on the outside, but what about wi-fi? Wi-fi is almost infinite in capacity, and it’s invisible to boot. The Time Lord uses his blue police box to move forward in time, but only by a minuscule amount, in the end. Why? Because if he were to travel even a couple of years into the future, everyone may already have moved on to Google glasses or some other gizmo.
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