SPOILER ALERT! This discussion contains spoilers for the 'Doctor Who' episode "Into the Dalek".

I began my journey with the Doctor at the Eleventh Hour. The show is goofy, and fun, and a delightful ride, but at times, and this is what makes me love the show rather than merely enjoy it, it is achingly poignant and you catch glimpses of the transcendent.

There is a tendency in science fiction for the universe portrayed to be, whether implicitly or explicitly, scientistic. By this I mean that the show implies or insists that this is all that we are. Material beings in a material universe.

For example, the Star Trek universe teems with life, but not with soul. There is no sense at any point that there is more to it than physics and biology. And when the show introduces characters with god-like status, the writers make them petulant (Q), or else some wonderful alien beyond our comprehension. Gas clouds that are smarter than us. Even when the creative team had the courage to re-introduce religion in 'Deep Space Nine', they made sure that the gods worshiped were "wormhole aliens" who derived all their mystery and godliness from happening to live inside an unusual but decidedly natural phenomenon. All of this is unsurprising given that the Trek universe is explicitly atheistic.

I still enjoy the show, but even if it were excellent in writing, acting, and directing, which it certainly is not, it would still, for me, fail to ascend to true greatness for its failure to acknowledge the transcendent.

But with 'Doctor Who', despite the fact that the Doctor, the show's creator, and probably most of the past and present writing staff appear to be agnostics or atheists of one sort or another, they cannot help but put in moments of contact with transcendence. Truth, Beauty, and Goodness somehow find their way into things. Especially in the Moffat era, there are often hints of this deeper and higher reality. (The Russell T. Davies days were at times hostile toward religion, and often leaned more toward nihilism. That incarnation of the show I love less.)

For instance, the second episode of the new series, which is shaping up to be quite a good brand of 'Doctor Who' with the fantastic and hilarious Peter Capaldi at the controls of the TARDIS. This episode, "Into the Dalek," features a Good Dalek who has seemingly found religion because his cracked power source is irradiating his internal control mechanisms and causing him to malfunction. But it is not this, not really, that made him good. The damaged hardware merely allowed him to perceive something he could not while operating normally: beauty.

His explanation for his change of heart (interlocutors' responses omitted):

I saw beauty. The silence and the cold. I saw worlds burning. I saw more! The birth of a star. Daleks have destroyed a million stars. And yet new stars are born. Resistance is futile. Life returns, life remains, resistance is futile.

After being miniaturized and sent into the Dalek in order to fix it, the Doctor repairs the damaged power source, causing the Dalek to revert to his mass-homicidal ways. In a scramble, with Clara stimulating the Dalek's suppressed memory storage, the Doctor tries to convince him to hold on to his insight:

Doctor: I saved your life, Rusty, and now I'm going to go one better. I'm going to save you're soul.
Dalek: Daleks do not have souls.
Doctor: Oh no? But imagine if you did. What then, Rusty? What would happen then?

Doctor: You saw the truth, Rusty.... Remember how you felt. You saw a star being born! The endless rebirth of the universe.... Let me show you the truth. I've opened your mind and now I'm coming in.
Dalek: I see your mind Doctor. I see your universe.
Doctor: And isn't the universe beautiful?
Dalek: I see beauty. I see endless divine perfection. I see into your soul doctor. I see beauty, I see divinity.

The scene takes a somewhat darker turn immediately after these words as the Dalek witnesses in the Doctor's mind not just the beauty the Doctor sees in the universe, but also the hate he bears toward the Daleks.

But my point is that we can see here the Transcendentals at work: Life, Being, Beauty, Goodness, Truth, Divinity, Perfection. The Dalek's soul is changed not by morally relativistic arguments emphatically pronounced by a politically correct Starfleet captain (looking directly at you, Picard) but by an irrefutable experience of the transcendent.

What is more, it all rests on the insight that beauty and goodness are of a piece. They are not distinct psychological and behavioral phenomena, but one reality that is accessible to us and efficacious in affecting our souls. The Medievals called this the convertibility of the transcendentals. The ancient notion is that transcendentals are predicates beyond categories, that is, they are applicable to all beings and to being itself and indeed the transcendentals like "one" and "true" and "good" all refer, in different modes, to the same thing: Being.

"Beautiful" is not always included among the transcendentals, but that it is also a transcendental is clear. Indeed, the beauty that makes our Dalek good is the birth of a star that brought with it the forceful realization of the persistence and immutability of Life, which is here an analogue for Being. The beauty that transforms the Dalek's soul is therefore an aesthetic experience of the ultimate referent of all the transcendentals: Being itself.

In the Christian and ancient philosophical* traditions we go one step further in regard to the convertibility of the transcendentals when we understand that God is not a being, but Being Itself. Thus, ultimately this convertibility rests on the identity of the transcendentals with God.

God is Being is Truth is Goodness is Beauty.

Even this last step toward the divine, which we would not expect a TV show to join us in taking, is expressed in the Dalek's conversion: as we saw, the Dalek identifies beauty with perfection and divinity. Divinity! In a universe ostensibly Godless.

This is why I love the Doctor: he has not merely the narrow vision of the physician, but that of the metaphysician who sees beyond time and space to the wonder and beauty and divinity of existence itself. Thus, though I cannot claim him as a theist, I am not convinced it would be proper to call him an atheist either.

I have come to expect this from 'Doctor Who', these flashes of transcendence. Still, it remains surprising and altogether wonderful that the climax of a science fiction TV episode in the 21st century, an age when "religious" is a synonym for "irrational" and the belief in the transcendent is belittled as unscientific and immature fairy-tale neurosis, can hinge upon identifying divinity in the beauty of life.

It was a good episode.

* The fact that the episode takes place on a ship called the Aristotle makes me wonder if the writers didn't have some of these philosophical notions in mind while penning the episode.