Explanations to Follow
I am a fan of Dr. Who. I confess I enjoy the old Doctor programs a bit more than the current ones. That may have something to do with the fact that when I saw the first ones on PBS back in the early 80's, I was much younger and could more easily suspend disbelief and enter the more imaginative world of the programs than I can now.
Yet even in the new version of Dr. Who, there is a trend that is almost jokingly a part of the mythology of the series. That trend is that the Doctor always seems to find time to say to whomever he is with that he will "explain later." That later may be the end of the episode or, in some cases, never. The Doctor figures it out but can't take the time to explain what he figured our or how. Sometimes it is a plot device - time is against the Doctor and he has to move quickly. Other times it has to do with the process of editing. Taking time to explain doesn't always work well on television or in movies.
Take the movie The Firm. In it Tom Cruise figures out what is going on with the company as he makes photo copies of a few tax returns. In the book, though, there are pages and pages of exposition as the main character painstakingly copies mounds of files. It works in the book because the narrator can take the time to clarify the story. That doesn't work so well on screen.
Or in life, it seems.
We have become a nation of sound bites. The belief that things will be explained later often leads to not worrying about the facts at hand. That, in turn, leads us to conveniently forget that we needed more information about an issue to begin with. We are so caught up in instant messages and instant gratification that detailed explanations are almost frowned upon. Too boring.
So it is with studying the Bible or the Torah or any religious text. For that matter, history takes quite a blow when a generation doesn't want to be bothered with the long, drawn out litany of actions, reactions, consequences and causalities of the past that have created the present. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Those who are not even interested in it are doomed either to repeat it far more quickly or to be engulfed by it without ever knowing what was happening.
So as fun as it might be to lampoon the Doctor and his inability to explain things on the fly, it points to a trend that is disturbing: we don't hear the explanations because we aren't ever really expecting them. If it all works out, all the better. If it doesn't, then we don't want explanations, we just want someone or something to blame such as the professor who wasted our time trying to offer a boring lecture that could have given us enough information to avoid the pitfalls of unexamined and uneducated lives.
Yet even in the new version of Dr. Who, there is a trend that is almost jokingly a part of the mythology of the series. That trend is that the Doctor always seems to find time to say to whomever he is with that he will "explain later." That later may be the end of the episode or, in some cases, never. The Doctor figures it out but can't take the time to explain what he figured our or how. Sometimes it is a plot device - time is against the Doctor and he has to move quickly. Other times it has to do with the process of editing. Taking time to explain doesn't always work well on television or in movies.
Take the movie The Firm. In it Tom Cruise figures out what is going on with the company as he makes photo copies of a few tax returns. In the book, though, there are pages and pages of exposition as the main character painstakingly copies mounds of files. It works in the book because the narrator can take the time to clarify the story. That doesn't work so well on screen.
Or in life, it seems.
We have become a nation of sound bites. The belief that things will be explained later often leads to not worrying about the facts at hand. That, in turn, leads us to conveniently forget that we needed more information about an issue to begin with. We are so caught up in instant messages and instant gratification that detailed explanations are almost frowned upon. Too boring.
So it is with studying the Bible or the Torah or any religious text. For that matter, history takes quite a blow when a generation doesn't want to be bothered with the long, drawn out litany of actions, reactions, consequences and causalities of the past that have created the present. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Those who are not even interested in it are doomed either to repeat it far more quickly or to be engulfed by it without ever knowing what was happening.
So as fun as it might be to lampoon the Doctor and his inability to explain things on the fly, it points to a trend that is disturbing: we don't hear the explanations because we aren't ever really expecting them. If it all works out, all the better. If it doesn't, then we don't want explanations, we just want someone or something to blame such as the professor who wasted our time trying to offer a boring lecture that could have given us enough information to avoid the pitfalls of unexamined and uneducated lives.
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