The episode of Dr Who in series 8 (reduced price DVDs at the ABC shop) "Listen" is probably the best Dr Who episode that I've seen.
It doesn't have in it creepy robots, historical figures, spooky aliens or the such. It has just three characters, or four if you count the time traveller who really is an echo of character number 3: Dan Pink.
The episode is an existential confrontation with our end-state as had by materialism: there is nothing. Ironically it starts with the Doctor musing on the evolution of hunters, and reflecting on how an organism would have evolved to be always hidden; its end objective? To listen.
Dr and his girl-pet travel to the end of time and the edge of the universe (both metaphysically interesting concepts) where there is no one. All life gone, all is but matter and about to vanish. The aching alone-ness is courted in the script, but tantalizingly avoided in the question that the one that listens may be there. This theme is played with in a run through the time travel paradox loved of science fiction writers. That the characters confront the question raises the great materialist promise: one has finally no significance and is not distinguishable from the mute matter of the universe. But no one lives this way: the characters cannot live as though this is true; they live as though there is final significance; that the personal is above matter and history.
Modern materialism has at its heart a confusion: it relies on the Christian significance of the person and the basic underpinning of the personal, but cannot deliver this in its dogma.
