Doctor Who Series 12: Ten Huge Questions After Nikola Tesla’s Night Of Terror

9. Did Tesla Really Think He Had Heard From Mars?

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We see Tesla ridiculed and discredited for claiming to have heard messages from Mars. This has some historical basis too, making Tesla perfectly suited to the Doctor Who treatment. In 1899 Tesla boldly claimed he had detected a signal from Mars after hearing faint rhythmic sounds though his radio receiver on a hillside in Colorado.

Tesla was convinced there was life on Mars and therefore other planets too. He spoke about such matters with a religious zeal, proclaiming that one day humans of Earth will turn to the skies with love and reverence, knowing that we are not alone in the universe.

The journalist Julian Hawthrone wrote a deeply poetic account of Tesla’s experiences that night, but the assumption was that these messages came from other human beings who lived on the red planet. He called them our terrestrial neighbours and said that the next step was for Tesla to find a way of communicating back to them.

Tesla would not have been surprised to learn that there are humans of superior intellect and technology living on other planets, but an alien race, such as the Scorpion-like Skithra? Such an encounter would have forced a serious rethink of his humanist philosophy. In the episode, Tesla unrealistically takes his ‘night of terror’ in his stride.

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Paul Driscoll is a freelance writer and author across a range of subjects from Cult TV to religion and social policy. He is a passionate Doctor Who fan and January 2017 will see the publication of his first extended study of the series (based on Toby Whithouse's series six episode, The God Complex) in the critically acclaimed Black Archive range by Obverse Books. He is a regular writer for the fan site Doctor Who Worldwide and has contributed several essays to Watching Books' You and Who range. Recently he has branched out into fiction writing, with two short stories in the charity Doctor Who anthology Seasons of War (Chinbeard Books). Paul's work will also feature in the forthcoming Iris Wildthyme collection (A Clockwork Iris, Obverse Books) and Chinbeard Books' collection of drabbles, A Time Lord for Change.