Bad Guys Who Care

There used to be a time, not so many years ago, when the most exciting thing about Christmas TV was the Only Fools and Horses Christmas special. It was always funny and if you disagree, you're wrong. Those days are sadly now seemingly behind us. OF&H has run its course and left the arena clear for new challengers to the Christmas TV throne.

Nowadays, the most exciting thing about Christmas TV (and possibly Christmas full stop) is the Doctor Who Christmas special. Whilst being in pretty much every way, daft, it is nevertheless damn good fun and the perfect thing to watch whilst very slightly sozzled after a hard day building a ridiculous jigsaw.

We were discussing Doctor Who (old and new) in the pub on Christmas Eve. For a slightly longer time than would considered healthy by most people. Talk turned to The Doctor's old enemy, The Rani (as played (twice?) by Kate O'Mara (off Dynasty?)). I got topically thinking then about whether she was the only baddy in Doctor Who that could be considered carbon neutral. Or the closest thing to it.

Why would I have that thought, I can hear you cry? Why, because in The Mark of the Rani she had these cool mines that turned you into a tree if you stepped on them. She may be an evil Timelord but at least she's planting trees.

I had a quick think through some of the other main baddies to check whether they had similar credentials, but came up blanks. The Cybermen build big Cyberman producing factories (and probably don't pay pollution taxes cos they are evil). The Daleks are only interested in taking over worlds not saving them (and I seem to remember they f***ed up their own planet with nuclear weapons). The Master was interested only in conserving his facial hair. The Sontarans, the Yeti, the Autons, the whatever other obscure baddies I could think of, none had any green credentials (apart from the ones that were coloured green but that doesn't count). It was only The Rani who was close.

But then I started thinking further about what it means to be carbon neutral. Here on Earth, we broadly mean that if you do things that absorb/use at least as much CO2 as you produce by driving, consuming and watching Doctor Who on telly then you are carbon neutral. ie you have not increased the amount of free CO2 in the planet. That's how I understand it anyway.

But for a larger, non-closed system like say The Universe, is the question relevant? Is it ok for The Rani to create trees on one planet but then also conduct nefarious carbon dioxide producing activities on other planets? What happens if on some planets, carbon dioxide is good and (say) cheese is the equivalent bad substance?

And how does the time travel element affect things? If an evil Timelord travels back into the past and evilly creates a lot of CO2, and then plants a whole forest 2000 years later, is that ok? What if it was the other way round?

And is it ethically ok to kill someone if you make them into a nice green tree rather than just a corpse?

There are clearly a lot of questions that I don't have answers for, but I'm hoping that these will be maybe tackled by the writers of the next series. In the meantime, I'd be interested to hear any of your views on which Doctor Who baddy is the most environmentally friendly.