I recently re-watched Horns of the Nimon, a Doctor Who serial from the 1970s, starring Tom Baker. The story is a sci-fi update of Theseus and The Minotaur. Rearrange the first two syllables of Minotaur, mangle them a bit, and you get the crosswalk. Like most Doctor Who monsters, the Nimon is pure camp nonsense. Somebody wears an oversize buffalo head on his shoulders, walks with a wide stance and wobble, and catches the eye with a sparkly red sash around a waist that intends no genitals to cover up. To really top the presentation, the Nimon’s dialogue is always accompanied by this loopy-odd feedback noise, some track the sound guys nicked from a discarded Yoko Ono demo tape.
“You think you can stop the Great Journey of Life?!” says the Nimon to the Yoko Ono back-up, to which our hero, the Doctor, flashes his bright teeth and curly hair and replies with some cheeky riposte, fresh from the script writer.
So today I imagine meeting Donald Trump, our newly-inaugurated President, and he’s wearing this self-important buffalo costume, or perhaps made up like the shaman rioter of 2020. And Trump says to me, “You think you can stop the Great Journey of the Billionaires?!”
My answer is that I have no idea, but I sure do want to try.
Coincidentally, today is also the birthday of Tom Baker. The great actor is now 91 years old, which means he would be the same age as my father, had my father been able to keep going. Back in the 1970s, Tom Baker as the fictional Doctor Who was pretending to vanquish evil-doers and rescue humanity on a weekly basis, aided by a series of lovely and talented companions apart from Adric, who couldn’t act and was mostly useless. My father was a real-life doctor who vanquished diseases and rescued his patients on a daily basis, aided by many lovely and talented nurses and colleagues with no exceptions that I know of.
Both of these men were influences on me.
Tom Baker now looks like a man who is 91 years old, and only his voice bears a resemblance to the character he made famous. My father, as I had implied, departed the world a couple years ago, and is remembered fondly by his family. I am not a doctor, nor do I play one on television, but I do what I think I can, which is never enough.
A moral of adventure fiction is that you, the hero, should keep going and never give up, whatever the odds, whatever the advantage the villains may appear to enjoy. Doctor Who, Frodo Baggins, Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter, and I’m sure many female characters in the literature with whom I may or may not be familiar—they all triumph by the final scene and/or last page, because otherwise it’s not much of a story.
Real life isn’t organized the same way. Anyone who cares to cast Mr. Trump in the role of story villain—and I count myself in this group—needs to remember that 77 million Americans would seem to think otherwise, or at least held that opinion two months ago in the voting booth. However, my suspicion is that the glow may fade for at least a portion of the man’s supporters. I hear tell of no plan to reduce the price of groceries or health care or housing or child care, just a lot of noise about annexing Greenland, cutting taxes for the wealthy, and banishing the immigrants who pick all the fruit.
Scrape the silliness and cheap production and stilted dialogue from old Doctor Who, and revealed would be a well-constructed plot, generally combining a variety of science fiction tropes into something new and unexpected. The evil plot of the monsters and/or villains—and there always was an evil plot, couldn’t be Doctor Who without an evil plot—was typically revealed in pieces, both to the main characters and the viewers at home. In the Horns of the Nimon, we learn that the Nimon send a scout to a target planet, the scout coerces the local authorities, and then the whole population invades and pillages and rampages. Cycle repeats. They build black holes and travel through them in pods. They can fire energy beams out of their heads. Of course, the Doctor defeats them. That’s what the show is about, and that’s why we watch it.
If your kid comes across the name “Nimon” in a science assessment question, that’s purely a coincidence. I had nothing to do with it.
Oddly enough, in my publishing job today, I was editing a lesson for fifth graders on the U.S. system of government. The lesson covered the Constitution, separation of powers and checks and balances, and the nation’s founding principles of liberty, civil rights, and the right to vote in free elections of leaders.
I mark today’s date: January 20, 2025. I feel we have passed from one era into another, and the new era seems to promise Terrible Crap that certain yahoos will proclaim as Great Victories. If the oceans become too acidic for shellfish and phytoplankton—a real possibility, in fact; go look it up—then I can’t imagine anyone spinning that loss as positive. But I thought Kamala was going to win by 5 points, so what do I know?
Today is not a happy day, not for me. Mourning in America, as the headlines stated. But mourning has to end. A new episode begins. We keep going, because we must.
