When I was watching ‘Hell Bent’, the finale of the latest series of Doctor Who, I found that Clara’s return from the dead really annoyed me, and upon looking back I came to the conclusion that it has almost always irritated me when characters keep cheating death on Doctor Who, especially since Moffat took over. I then realised that another of my favourite shows, Xena, contains its fair share of resurrection, but it had never bothered me. I asked my brain why that was, and here’s what it said.

To start with, I don’t think that Steven Moffat is capable of killing characters. I mean, if you count the number of times Rory died you almost need two hands. And now Clara has “died” at least two times over in the space of about three episodes. And it’s not just main characters, hardly any secondary characters or even extras appear to die in MoffatWho. In the Russell T. Davies era it was clear that a lot of people died in the conflicts and battles that were depicted, but despite Moffat ratcheting up the skates with every goddamn double part “timey wimey” finale there don’t seem to be too many casualties. Obviously I don’t expect him to show every civilian death on screen but to not show that war and fighting has consequences of a fatal kind is just plain unrealistic.

On the other hand, considering the level of 90s campiness often present in Xena, particularly in the first and second series, it does a surprisingly good job of showing that fighting actually leads to people getting injured and sometimes killed. If you watch Xena episodes such as ‘Is There a Doctor in the House?’ or ‘The Price’ you’ll notice something distinctly lacking from Moffat’s melodramatic, apocalyptic, legendary, “end of the universe…again” battles. You’ll notice people actually, shock horror, suffering and expiring. This means that in Xena death is established as something that is generally permanent. However, in Doctor Who only main characters ever die, and you know that they won’t be gone forever, so the only death you see is of an impermanent kind, which means that the audience can’t relate and therefore often don’t care.

Also in Xena there are some set rules regarding death. Namely that there are lots of afterlives (Heaven and Hell, Elysian Fields and Tartarus, Amazon Land of the Dead, etc.) and which one you go to depends on your affiliations and beliefs. On the contrary Doctor Who has the opposite of rules, in fact I’m beginning to think that Moffat cannot have an idea without contradicting it within a series at best. For example, when people die in the ‘Forest of the Dead/Silence in the Library’ double parter they get uploaded to some kind of cutesy field, but when the Daleks die they get dumped in the sewers of Skaro to stew in their resentment and definitely never rise up against their brethren who so kindly abandoned them in poop. Oh wait, that did happen…

Anyway now that I’ve addressed the representation of death in both shows I’ll move on to characters coming back from the dead. In the recent series of Doctor Who characters seem to be able to return to life with alarming regularity and ease. It got to the point when the Doctor seemed to be capable of bringing Rory back just by waving his sonic screwdriver, which doesn’t do wood, but apparently does death. So maybe I’m exaggerating slightly, but what about the time when the Doctor just stuck Amy in the Pandorica and it saved her from a fatal gun shot wound. Or how about the Time Lords conveniently having the ability to bring people back using the Extraction Chamber. That definitely wasn’t there just so that Clara could come back. Nope, not at all. The problem is that Moffat tries to show that the Doctor cares about people by having him do everything he can to save them, but he’s made the Doctor so over-powered that he is always capable of saving them or resurrecting them and it is so boring.

On the contrary, on Xena it takes a whole lot of effort and luck for someone to return from the dead, and getting more than one chance at life isn’t portrayed as normal. Instead, just as they would be in real life, everyone (including the main characters) is helpless in the face of death, and it takes exceptional circumstances for anyone to get another life. For example, when Gabrielle dies for several minutes in ‘Is There a Doctor…’ Xena uses every method she can think of, even inventing CPR on the spot, to bring her back but none of them work and it’s almost by chance that she eventually restarts Gabrielle’s heart. Then in ‘The Quest’ Gabrielle has to simultaneously defend her position as Amazon Queen against Velasca and try to get ambrosia, the food of the gods, which can bring Xena back from the dead, and she has to do both quickly as even ambrosia can’t revive people if they’ve been dead for too long. Basically, my point is that in Xena it is difficult to return people to life, and sometimes it just can’t be done, such as when Xena dies for good in the last episode of the show.

In conclusion, although in both shows the main characters seem to die and come back rather a lot of times, the difference is that in Xena you really don’t know if some one will return to life because none of the characters have the power to just decide they won’t be dead anymore so the only way they can be resurrected is if something out of the ordinary happens, whereas in Doctor Who if the Doctor doesn’t want someone to die then they don’t die, no matter how contrived Moffat has to make the plot to bring them back, and so gradually people just coming back to life has become so ordinary that it’s mundane.