A little while back, I looked at the theological aspects of how Ashes to Ashes, Lost, and Battlestar Galactica wrapped up. Now, with the conclusion of Matt Smith’s first season as the Gallifreyan gadabout, it’s worth having a look at how Dr Who functions — and its resonance with one of my favourite films, Donnie Darko.

Under Stephen Moffat’s stewardship, Dr Who has been a more successfully integrated series than it was under the guidance of Russell T Davies. Where Russell unified the show was in its themes, and particularly its vision of a future in which polychromatic polymorphous perversity would hold sway over the universe like a camp tentacled version of a Benetton ad. Evil was narrow minded, fearful of diversity, and good would triumph through the power of love.

All lovely stuff, but it got a bit repetitious, and there was rather a lot of handwaving at the expense of credible story detail. Which is what makes Moffat’s approach so interesting, and different. Admittedly, some of the individual episodes — Moffat’s in particular — weren’t as strong as they could have been. But the threads connecting them have really demonstrated the time and space spanning nature of the Doctor’s adventures in a way that the series hasn’t seen before.

As with RTD’s use of Rose Tyler, Moffat’s championing of new companion Amy Pond has been at the heart of the show. More than was the case in days of old, companions provide the critical human dimension to stories that could otherwise be abstract, especially for a show that is — let us remember — rightly aimed at a family audience.

Interesting that there’s been a tonal shift too: under RTD, there was quite a bit of playing to the gallery in the form of farting monsters and other playground-friendly stuff. With Moffat, the connection with children is at the heart of the series in a fundamentally serious way, through the business of why exactly young Amy Pond was living in a house on her own when the Doctor first encountered her. And ultimately it’s through the imagination, memory, and stubbornness of Amy that the series reaches its triumphant conclusion.

What connects Donnie Darko with this series of Dr Who is none other than Jesus Christ. All three sacrifice their lives that we may progress in our own. Which is pretty big stuff for stories aimed at young people, and appropriately so. Kids have a natural fascination with matters of philosophy, and when they’re captured in story form the effect can be very powerful indeed.

There’s even more similarity between Donnie and the Doctor at first glance, when you realise that both intend to sacrifice themselves with the world being none the wiser. Both are more than willing to make that sacrifice, but the distinction between the two is that while Donnie fills that Christ template pretty well, the Doctor has more than a little of the trickster about his make-up.

That trickster element is why the Doctor’s enemies line up to have him incarcerated in the Pandorica — the Doctor not recognising in the description of its captive as the most dangerous being in the universe a description of himself. And it’s that same trickster pluck which gives him the solution to the apocalyptic conundrum that results: he knows that Amy has the capacity to will him back into existence through the elaborate thread that he weaves through her life.

And really, that’s the difference between Donnie and the Doctor — the teenager has humility, where the old man from Gallifrey has the desire to see even more of space and time as he adventures another day, setting off in the TARDIS on another madcap quest like nothing has happened as he whisks Amy and her beau away from their wedding and into the beyond…