I almost forgot to watch the last episode of Dr. Who. At one time I'd have almost been counting the minutes to the next episode.

It isn't just the loss of suspense between episodes now that most programmes show a self contained story, though that is a factor. What spoils the new series for me is mainly a combination of over hasty development, and an excess of what the producers probably call 'human interest'.

Much of the excitement provided by good science fiction comes from following the solution to a puzzle, and one cannot enjoy the solution to a puzzle unless one is first given a chance to be puzzled by it.

Dr Who's adventures used to start with people notiving that something a little odd was happening. As the Doctor probed into events things appeared odder and odder, eventually revealing the, usually malign, source. But even when the culprits were revealed there was still the further puzzle of why they were doing it and whether they were acting on their own account or as agents of some even more sinister power. One used to be kept on tenterhooks for weeks, but no more, alas.

Something else science fiction can do is to show the universe from an unfamiliar, non-human point of view. I'm not sure how realistic it is for we human beings to try to adopt a point of view that can probably never really be ours, but the attempt can at least be thought provoking. Having Dr. Who falling in love makes it harder to develop such point of view, because our thoughts about love are an elaborate ideology of collective self deception.

Human society with its politics and morality is an elaborate mechanism that serves to increase the number of human beings, a sort of epiphenomenon of the reproductive instinct, what F. A. Hayek (Law Legislation and Liberty) would have called a Spontaneous Order. Insofar as love transcends the primal impulse to mate, it is a sort of megalomaniac desire to have descendants, and society is a compromise between the competing reproductive instincts of different people, hence the strange belief in the sanctity of life.

Because we are human we cannot easily escape from this point of view, and possibly cannot escape at all, but it is refreshing sometimes to contemplate the world as it might appear to one whose vision was not obscured by the ideology of love. It seems a pity to miss an opportunity.