13

"All the resting ones I have used were people of status, ambition," says Davros.

The quintessential 80s heroes.  They had themselves brought to his business, Tranquil Repose, when they wanted to pay to cheat the ultimate human frailty.  Death was a weakness they felt they had a right to buy off.  They paid to rest until they could be awoken and cured.  They would then resume their positions of power.  Money would conquer death.  Just as Timon and Marx knew, as the ultra-commodity in a system of total commodification, money has a fantastic and phantasmic power.  It can dissolve even the most drastic boundaries and oppositions.  It can even make the dead into the living.

Davros' clients had the same dream as all ruling classes.  Their ancient forebears had themselves buried in their finery, surrounded by their treasure, expecting to take it with them.  If they couldn't take it with them, they weren't going.  That was the logic behind the pyramids...  and those monuments to dead pharoahs helped bolster the power of the living ones.  They were a unified statement of divine and material power. 

When Jobel and Takis prepare the body of the President's wife, it looks as though they have put her in an Egyptian sarcophagus.  In the long shots of Tranquil Repose, the facility is made of pyramids.

But Davros has been harvesting the bodies of all these thrusting executives, billionaires and society ladies (the only people that are considered of any value by people like him) and turning them into Daleks. In this story, the Daleks have become Cybermen: zombies constructed from bodies eviscerated and infibulated by technology... except that Cybermen are labour power reduced to pure meat, whereas the Daleks are the rulers refined and rendered into fascist tanks.  Capital is still gothic.  'Dead labour' as Marx called it.  Zombie labour.  Undead labour.  The property created by past work, accreted and collected and owned, towering over the living labourer and sucking on his or her blood.  In Doctor Who, such dead labour, alienated from people until it becomes literally alien, fetishised until it comes alive, constantly meshes with the human body.  The Daleks are another expression of this.  In this story, this vampire capital feeds even on the bodies of the rich... but, for them, this is an opportunity for expansion.  It salvages them, the way fascism always salvages capitalism when it comes under existential threat.  It opens up new vistas and markets, the way imperialism always does.

Like Milo Minderbinder in the movie, Davros thinks the rich will get how this works.

"They would understand," he claims blithely, "especially as I have given them the opportunity to become masters of the universe!"

Masters of the Universe was a range of mega-successful toys in the 80s, one of the quintessential commodities of the decade.  Tom Wolfe would adapt the phrase to describe the new bucaneers of Wall Street in his satire The Bonfire of the Vanities.  Those people made money even more phantasmic, floating it around the world in clouds of information, making it a spirit... but one that still commanded material things and living bodies.

The Doctor wonders what will happen to those deemed unworthy of promotion to the top level of Davros' new corporate/fascist regime.  The non-Masters of the Universe; those bodies who fail in the marketplace of Dalek ideas.

"Will they be left to rot?"

No such luck.

"You should know me better than that, Doctor," says Davros, "I never waste a valuable commodity."

Again, human bodies as commodities.

"The humanoid form makes an excellent concentrated protein," he continues, "This part of the galaxy is developing quickly. Famine was one of its major problems."

Needless to say, this wasn't because there was not enough food.  Under global capitalism, famines are allowed to happen essentially because the market is a shitty way to distribute resources.  You can make more profit selling too much food to a few than you can selling enough food to a lot.

"You've turned them into food?" splutters the Doctor, "Did you bother to tell anyone they might be eating their own relatives?"

"Certainly not," replies Davros, "That would have created what I believe is termed consumer resistance."

He learns the rules of business fast, this parochial fascist scientist.  His background allows him to mesh himself seamlessly into the pyramidal structure of the corporation, with its absolute apex and its total lack of accountability.  Chomsky says that corporations are "pure tyrannies", among the most 'totalitarian' organisations ever devised.  I might quibble with his analysis here and there, but he describes something utterly real.  Davros knows how the propaganda model works too: the provenance of commodities, and the brute pragmatism of power, needs to stay behind closed doors.  Davros keeps himself hidden behind a decoy, in a cellar, at the centre of a labyrith, under the presentable foyer and the marble corridors of his going concern.  He hides himself and his name behind his connections and deals.

In his crude way, Davros has literalised something about the nature of capitalist relations in the age of consumerism.  Consumerism, in its material form as advertising and branding, is cannibalistic.  It feeds us back to ourselves as images.  We consume the human form - suitably treated and cooked-up and filled with unnatural additives - all the time, in advertising, fashion, celebrity culture, dolls in shop windows, TV, movies, pornography.  We consume media ideas about how to look, how to dress, how to eat, how to speak.  We eat ourselves all the time, every day, as a meal prepared for us by the hidden and the powerful

Davros has adapted to capitalism so well that he has realised one of its strategies into real, literal, material terms.  He has fed us to ourselves.

14

"I've known many times," says the Doctor, "some of them much more pleasant than others."

"Well, I quite like it here, I must say," interjects Jo to cover the awkward moment, "Everyone's been most kind."

The Controller (what a giveaway that title is) nods in appreciation of her remark.

The Doctor, however, is unimpressed.  He swills more wine.  He looks like an sozzled, opinionated guy at an unsuccessful party, spoiling for a fight.

"Well, I met some people today who were far from kind," he says.  He spent the earlier part of the day taking a forced tour of the Controller's utopia, being subjected to the tender mercies of a surprisingly well-sketched terror state.

"That was a simple mistake, Doctor, I assure you," says the Controller, his voice as smooth and silvery as his strange, quasi-robotic face, "You must not jump to conclusions."

"Better than jumping from the crack of a whip from some security guard," snaps the Doctor, "Do you run all your factories like that, Controller?"

We have been granted an unusual thing earlier in this episode: a glimpse into the productive centres of a Dalek-ruled regime.  It looked like a gulag.  People in rags lugged grain while being monitored at every moment.  At one point, we cut straight from that to the Controller handing Jo a plate full of grapes.

Grapes make wine, of course.  Wine is strangely present in this story.  Back at the start, the Doctor raided Sir Reginald Styles' wine cellar.

"That was not a factory, Doctor," returns the Controller mechanically.

"Oh? Then what was it?"  The Doctor looks still more like a half-cut guy, up for some aggro.

 "A rehabilitation centre.  A rehabilitation centre for hardened criminals."

"Including old men and women, even children?"

"There will always be people who need discipline, Doctor," says the Controller, as though the point is beyond debate... but then, to people like him, it always is.

"Now that's an old fashioned point of view," says the Doctor "even from my standards."

I love that line, but it makes me feel sad.  It dates this story far more than the mullets and flares and glam rock facepaint.  I mourn a long lost time, before neoliberalism got to work on popular culture, when it was a mainstream assumption that we could dispense with crusty, reactionary stuff about some people basically being indolent animals who needed to be forced to work... so much so that even the Third Doctor could come out with it.

"I can assure you that this planet has never been more efficiently, more economically run," says the controller.

Note that.  It's never been more efficient and more "economically run" than when the bloody Daleks are in control.

"People have never been happier or more prosperous," he continues.

"Then why," asks the Doctor, "do you need so many people to keep them under control? Don't they like being happy and prosperous?"

This cuts right to the quick.  It cuts to the delusion - still widespread on the left at that time - that 'really existing socialism' was in some meaningful way an improvement.  But if it was so great, why was there a dirty big wall keeping people in East Germany?  As Mark Steel once put it:

If you had a party, and discovered some of the guests secretly building a hot air balloon in an effort to escape, you wouldn't say, "Well that was a successful night."

In many ways, 'Day of the Daleks' is a story about the failure of socialism or communism in the 20th century, and it confines itself to the predictable liberal assumptions.  The Dalek economy looks like a gulag system.  The terrible new world was brought about by the Chinese and Russians starting World War Three.  Some revolutionary guerillas in fatigues try to change history with bullets and bombs and just make things worse (natch).  Some of these "fanatics" (as the Doctor calls them) even have Che moustaches.  (And let's not even get started on the racefails and politicsfails that come with having stupid, grunting, dark-skinned, low-browed aliens recycled from Planet of the Apes.)

And yet... as has been mentioned on this blog before, 'really existing socialism' or 'communism' were actually authoritarian and bureaucratic variants of state capitalism that arose for complex and contingent historical reasons.  So you can ask the Doctor's question about social control in our society too.

I'm not an anarchist, though I have much sympathy with many anarchist ideas.  One of the founding fathers of anarchism was Joseph Proudhon.  I have my issues with him, but he did say something I love:

To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonoured. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.

This is all still pretty much true where I am.  I dunno about you.  I expect the NSA knows you're reading this.  The British government is currently engaged in a concerted effort to make public protest effectively illegal.  And yet we live under capitalism, which we are constantly told is the best of all possible worlds.  Even the recession is getting better, we're told.

What's the matter with us?  Don't we like being happy and prosperous?

Fearful Symmetry

There are several answers to the question "who originally created the Daleks?"  You could say "Davros" with geeky fidelity.  You could say "Terry Nation", as many people have (Trivial Pursuit used to also credit him with creating Doctor Who itself).  One could even start listing the people who actually constructed the props (wasn't the job outsourced to a company called Shawcross or something?).  As is usually the case, the most accurate answer is probably the most complex and contingent, i.e. "A consortium of people including, most prominently but to various degrees of importance, Terry Nation, Verity Lambert, David Whitaker, Raymond Cusick, Peter Hawkins, David Graham..." etc.  Without a doubt, however, the individual who did more than any other to make them a huge success was an in-house designer employed by the BBC called Raymond Cusick.  Cusick died a little while ago, widely recognised for his role by fans.

I'm a great advocate of 'ignoring the rat' or, as I prefer to put it, 'seeing past the bubblewrap', i.e. of giving weak aesthetics a pass if the story beneath them is interesting enough.  You shouldn't let the rubbishness of the big snakes detract from 'Kinda' and 'Snakedance', etc.  Indeed, those very stories are examples of when aesthetic 'failures' can actually make things more interesting.  However, there are times when aesthetic 'success' is absolutely crucial, when the way things sound and look really matters... and, for a show so widely considered to be cheap and shonky, aesthetics played a surprisingly big part in getting Doctor Who off and running.  The original opening titles, the TARDIS interior, etc.

Undoubtedly, the single biggest aesthetic factor in the early success of Doctor Who was Ray Cusick's designs for the Daleks.  Lots of people played a part in making the Daleks' first story such a big aesthetic success.  Tristram Carey's music, Christopher Barry's direction, etc., all made that story impressive, a strange and new kind of televisual experience.  But it was the Daleks that were the icing on the cake.

Oddly enough, the first bit of a Dalek we ever see, the bit which had the BBC switchboard jammed after the cliffhanger, was the bit most widely derided: the plunger.  It isn't until the next episode that we see the Daleks fully.  Their tanklike bulkiness, their strange mixture of sharp angles and curves, the obscure functionalism that makes them look almost like pieces of kinetic art, their shortness and wideness and sheer non-humanoidiness... and yet with enough that is intelligible about their shape (they have a eye which is part of something vaguely head-like) that they can be understood as sentient, intelligent, alive.

They are, undoubtedly, one of the design classics of the 20th century.  Distinctly 'of their time' and yet sufficiently detached from anything recognisably particular that they will translate.  Unlike the Cybermen or the Silurians, the Daleks remained the same - albeit with a few new little details - upon their return.  They didn't need changing.

If Cusick had done a bad job, if he'd bungled it (as, let's be honest, so many other designers would bungle in subsequent stories), not only would Doctor Who never have taken off the way it did (leading us all here, for better or worse) but Terry Nation would probably never have become the kind of person that Alan Whicker would want to interview.

The immediate success of the Daleks shows that, from the first, Doctor Who's success was built upon an aesthetic factor.  In this case, that factor was almost immediately translated into mass-produced merchandising.  The Daleks sold.  Big time.

Like all robotic monsters, the Daleks partly stem from anxieties about the autonomous product, which is what the fetishised commodity looks like to SF.  The Daleks are designed to look both inhuman and alive, mechanical and sentient.  They are, partly, one visual expression of anxieties about industrial production.  That's also why their appearance recalls the tank, a manufactured monster that, after two world wars, had probably become the quintessential image of the dangerous industrial product, overtaking even the steam train (which, in its early days, was likened to Frankenstein - the first fictional product monster).

There's a way in which the Dalek is a connective image between the anxiety about the product which centres upon its dangerousness (i.e. the tank), and the anxiety which centres upon its autonomy, the anxiety which centres upon its capacity to merge with us and contain us.  The Dalek is a war machine, a killing machine out of control that also threatens to be our eventual post-atomic shell... but by its very enigmatic attractiveness (all that suggestive-but-obscure symmetry, slightly disrupted by the clashing 'arms' which are obviously 'for' something even if its hard to guess quite what) also makes itself into a top-selling product.  This is commonplace now, with endless representations of film/TV monsters sold as toys or models.  At the time, however, the Dalek was quite new in this respect too.  (In some ways, they set the stage for the coming of the Kenner Star Wars toys and other such model/toys based on fantastic narratives.)  Those anxieties about the product already mentioned get immediately connected to the nature of the Dalek (in the real world that is, rather than in-story) as a commodity.  And, while this isn't conscious, it seems more liminal than the same set of connections implicit in, say, toy tanks or cap guns.  The Daleks were, after all, written to be a commentary on one trajectory of mankind, leading to eliminationist chauvinism and industrial/technological barbarism.  When you play with a Dalek, you're playing with something consciously created as a signifier for various political nightmares.  I don't say that this is terribly socially significant.  It's just another one of those interesting ironies of consumerism and its relationship with the wider culture.  I certainly don't think it's 'subversive' when embedded anxieties about capitalist modernity help to sell a product.  It's too commonplace.

There are all kinds of problems with Nation's original script (for instance, it's peculiar that his anti-Nazi parable has blonde, athletic, volkisch farmers as a physical and ethical ideal) but he deserves credit for providing a context against which Cusick's design can take on potent associations.  I'm quite happy to say that Cusick did more to 'create' the Daleks as we know them (their visual impact being so crucial to their success) but, on the other hand, Nation did (albeit using lots of cliches) give Cusick an idea with more potential resonance than just 'big, bad evil robot' to play with.  Cusick's acuteness (in making the Daleks both strange and familiar, robotic and alive) works with Nation's selection of certain tropes (the mutant, the cyborg, the post-Atomic, the Nazi) to create something that still seems to 'work' fifty years later.

Plus, when we were kids... we all wanted to get inside a Dalek and exterminate the kids at school we didn't like.

Or was that just me?

Out of Eden

From the October 2011 issue of Panic Moon.  As ever, lightly edited and titivated... 'cos I just can't help tinkering.

When Doctor Who talks about evolution, it doesn’t usually bother getting the facts right.  'Evolution of the Daleks', for instance, seems to think species change when genes mutate morally because of lightning bolts.  Such ideas go right back to 'The Daleks', in which the two races on Skaro have changed totally in mere “hundreds of years” of mutation, with the warrior Thals becoming natural pacifists in the process.  (Incidentally, it’s ironic that this supposedly anti-Nazi parable speaks of blonde, blue-eyed, athletic specimens as “refined” and “perfect”.)

Real evolution does involve mutations, but they’re not sudden and drastic as depicted in, to pick another example, 'The Mutants'.  Instead we’re talking about tiny replication errors in genetic code which are preserved or rejected by natural selection, leading to big changes over very long periods.  This creates staggering variety on our planet alone.  However, most aliens in the Doctor Who universe look like British actors, which (accidentally) implies that the humanoid shape is a universal pinnacle or goal of evolution.  Again, real evolution teaches us the opposite.  There’s nothing “perfect” about humans.  We’re no ‘better evolved’ than worms.  Species succeed when they fit their niches.  'Full Circle' alone understands this.  The Alzarians are humanoid only because they evolved to fit inside the Starliner.

Doctor Who has sometimes been sceptical of such human hubris.  In 'Doctor Who and the Silurians', humans encounter ‘advanced’ reptiles who see them as errant apes.  'Inferno' implies that snarling beasts lurk beneath the lab coat or uniform.  'The Invisible Enemy' equates the “Great Break Out” of humanity with a viral epidemic.  In 'The Ark in Space', the Doctor praises humans as “indomitable”, but the Wirrn confront humanity with a lethal reflection of the same evolutionary urge to survive and inherit the Earth.

'The Ark in Space' retells the Old Testament myth of the flood.  'Genesis of the Daleks' also adapts the book of… well, Genesis.  Both stories are about species changing, about them subsuming and defeating other species.  But 'Genesis of the Daleks' is also fundamentally about creations disobeying their creator.  Hence the lack of scientific accuracy: the science isn’t the real interest of the storytellers.  Instead, evolution takes on religious connotations.  This is understandable.  Evolution, as a scientific origin story, thrives in the gap in the cultural ecology left by the decline of religion.  And, like much science-fiction, Doctor Who uses scientific and technological idioms to retell myths and legends.

'Genesis of the Daleks' also reiterates original sin: the Daleks are cursed by their genes to be bad.  Mutations of morality again!  This sort of thing mirrors tabloid stories about ‘genes for crime’, but Doctor Who has also tackled reactionary appropriations of evolution.  'Survival' critiqued Thatcherism by exploring what happens when the values of ruthless Darwinian competition are applied to society.  The term ‘survival of the fittest’ was coined by Herbert Spencer, a 19th century pioneer of libertarianism.  Natural selection was taken up by such philosophers of Victorian free market capitalism and made into a ‘natural’ explanation of inequality (though the much-traduced Spencer himself was actually a fair bit subtler than that).  This is partly what 'Ghost Light' is about.  As well as satirising “homo victorianus ineptus” who rails against Darwin on religious grounds, the story also swipes at Josiah, the newly-rising “man of property” who climbs the social ladder (explicitly linked with the “evolutionary ladder”) and keeps the deprived locked in squalor.

Josiah may be evil but at least he’s changing, unlike the archangel of stasis in his cellar.  Evolution keeps bringing the show back to angels and demons, as in 'Image of the Fendahl'.  But 'Image', unusually, really is about evolution.  Instead of using evolution to talk about myth, this tale uses myth to talk about evolution.  It shows the theory seemingly undermined by anomalous evidence and superstition, but the problem isn’t that evolution is untrue, leaving us at the mercy of the demonic.  The problem, rather, is that evolution is demonic.  As metaphor, this hits on something true: natural selection works by predation and extinction, i.e. by death.  The Fendahl is death, so the Fendahl is evolution.  And so are we, hence the "dark side of Man's nature" (those moral mutations again).  That's why the story has all those references to human paleontology, its central motif being an ancient human skull.  That's why the story has its rather oblique title: because, like God, the Fendahl shaped us.  It created us in its own image.  That’s probably also why Colby’s Christian name is Adam.

What's in a Name?

Why do some monsters have names while others don't?

The best place to start may be with the Cybermen.  After all, they went from having names to not having names.  Moreover, they did it more or less within one particular story, 'The Moonbase' (if I remember rightly, they had names in the script but these were not mentioned on screen).

The first thing to mention is that this is the story in which they went from being threatening because they are emotionless and logical to being threatening because they're one of those "terrible things" bred in those "corners of the universe" that "we" have to fight, when they were no longer fighting to save their planet but to steal ours, when they lost their human hands, when they started (so early!) saying things like "Clever, clever, clever!", i.e. when they became overtly and deliberately evil.  But there has to be more to it than that.  After all, vampires keep their names.  Loss of humanity and the acquisition of evil intent are not enough to strip them of their names.

Moreover, the Cybermen are not the only Doctor Who monsters to lose their names.  There's also the Daleks, who lost their names when they stopped being Kaleds (or Dals).

This loss of name is very important.  In the 'Moonbase' Cybermen, it seems more like the final stripping away of individual identity.  It works similarly for the Daleks as for the Cybermen, and has similar wider connotations when it comes to both these races.

(Notice, by the way, how blithely one talks about 'races' in this sci-fi context... a way of putting things that would be wholly unacceptable in Western liberal discourse nowadays if applied to, say, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians... which isn't to say that the racialist patterns of thought don't still pertain in the attitudes of many, just that they are not usually openly stateable anymore.  This is an example of an entire cultural discourse - in this case, that of racialism - taking refuge in a 'pocket universe' within culture once the wider culture has largely rejected and banished it, or at least talk of it.  The discourse of racialism hides out, in disguise, in the SF 'Recycle Bin' once it has been guiltily deleted from the cultural 'Desktop'.  Sometimes such things even get deleted from the Recycle Bin but, as we know, they remain on the hard drive, waiting to be forensically recovered.) 

Veering back to the point... notice how the conversion of Lytton or Stengos into Cyberman or Dalek involves the loss of identity, thus the loss of name.  When Stengos sees his daughter, his first word is her name.  He remembers her name, and hence his own, which is what launches his psychological struggle against his Dalek conditioning.

The named/nameless distinction maps roughly onto the biological/robot-or-cyborg distinction, and both are really about individuality vs. the loss of individuality.  The Daleks and Cybermen act far more on a kind of groupthink than, say, the Silurians.  The mechanically-augmented Rutans too seem like a hive mind (the individual Rutan refers to itself as "we").  The robot or cyborg is the expression of the non-individual, the impersonal, the standardised.

At one end (the Left end, one could say), this horror of the artificial as bringing the destruction of individuality is connected with the capitalist productive mode, with mass-production, industrialism, alienation of humanity through commodification and the menacing autonomy of the product (i.e. the Autons as gothic emblems of commodity fetishism).  At the other end (the Right end) it is connected with collectivism (i.e. the groupthink mentioned above).  (By the way, this also seeps into the Left end, with the Nestenes being a group entity... though, to me, this seems connected to the way in which 'Spearhead from Space' recuperates its incipient critical convergence upon capitalism by introducing the Weird at the last moment as a scrambling effect, see here.)

The critique of collectivism implied by these monsters of conformity, mechanisation, organisation, groupthink, lack of individuality, etc., connects with the prevailing conception of collectivism as being inextricably bound up with authoritarian statist government, an absence of formal democracy, an official political ideology, regimentation of the individual, the destruction of privacy, the imposition of conformity, etc.  This conception lumps together those two bogus-collectivisms, fascism and communism, in the manner of the influential theory of totalitarianism.

The Daleks and Cybermen are the two great monsters of Doctor Who, a product of the liberal capitalist culture industry in the aftermath of World War II and during the Cold War, and they actualise this set of notions almost too specifically.  Akin but seperate and ultimately opposed, not from moral imbalance but because of their essential similarity, both emerging from differentiated but kindred forms of anti-individualist state control, the Daleks and Cybermen are differentiated but kindred forms of the dehumanised, collectivised, technologised totalitarian robot/cyborg monster. They are the Nazi and Soviet forms of the same totalitarian species.

I guess this is the place for the inevitable 'Cyberia' pun, yes?

The Daleks emerge from a fascist collectivism: the regimented, indoctrinated, Nazi-esque Kaleds in 'Genesis of the Daleks'.  The Cybermen eventually find their own genesis (courtesy of Big Finish) in a snowbound revolutionary emergency government: the policed and surveilled Mondasians in 'Spare Parts' live in a mirror version of the '50s (the high point of the Cold War), ruled by the "champions of the proletariat" who are suppressing private enterprise.  Even the critical nature of life on Mondas, and the Cybermen's onscreen tendency to find themselves fighting for survival as well as attacking people, seems like a haunting half-memory of the fact that the Soviet regime was under external attack for much of its existence (the Russian Civil War and, later, Operation Barbarossa).  The two 'big' monsters of the show seem like echoes of the two great 'cousin' totalitarianisms (as they were seen by people like Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski).

In this light, the confused similarity and interpenetration of these monsters seems as salient as the fact that, until long after the end of the Cold War, they never met.  The Daleks and Cybermen are both races of robots with flesh hidden within them, i.e. bodies augmented and changed by technology.  They are both said, at various times, to be emotionless, dependant upon rationality and logic.  Both have absolute leaders which function like centralised brains (the Cyber Controller, the Dalek Emperor... with Davros, all his Hitlerian attributes notwithstanding, something of an outlier... though, of course, he eventually merges with the Emperor in 'Remembrance of the Daleks').  They both recruit by forcible conversion.  They both employ (body snatcher paranoia style) covert infiltration, brainwashing, mind control and/or replacement of people by 'duplicates'.  They are both aggressive imperialisms that attack secure, human (implicitly Western) structures (the Moobase, the colony on Vulcan, etc.).  They are both defined by regimentation, conformity, unanimity, groupthink, ideology.  They both have absolute political philosophies that motivate them: racial chauvinism (Nazism) in the case of the Daleks, ruthless utopian utilitarianism (Communism, as it was percieved) for the Cybermen... so it's not hard to see the differentiation amidst the similarities, or their referants.  Both alter the mind of the human as conversion takes place (c.f. Lytton and Stengos).  The Daleks are even said to be played "indoctrination tapes" in their infancy according to Ben Aaronovitch's novelisation of 'Remembrance of the Daleks'.

It's surely not hard to see how all this echoes the perceived features of 'totalitarianism': regimentation, conformity, thought control, leader cults, ruthlessly mechanised military utilitarianism, state ideologies, the destruction of individuality and personal freedom, insidious encroachment upon the freedom of others, etc.

So, Daleks and Cybermen are different iterations of the same thing, or at least of intimately similar things.  (Which isn't to say that either always mean exactly the same thing from story to story over their long histories.)  And yet they never meet.  They remain divided from each other by an absence, a gap, a field of silence.  There is a peculiar frisson whenever this silent field is almost breached, as when both races are mentioned and shown in succession at the end of 'The War Games', or when a Cyberman briefly appears on Vorg's Miniscope shortly after he mentions Daleks.

(Interesting, by the way, that near-breachings of the silence occur in those two stories.  The former is about humans as fodder for regimented imperialism.  The latter features a grey-faced, bureaucratic, statist nomenklatura.  And, once again, neither story will permit a qualitative distinction between Right and Left totalitarianism.  The War Lords could be Soviets as much as Nazis.  The Inter-Minorans look like bigoted slavers as well as censorious commissars.  And, being very interesting stories, both can also be read as harbouring some implied criticisms of British imperialist behaviour.)

Of course, when they eventually do meet, the Daleks and the Cybermen come into immediate conflict... just as Nazi Germany and Stalin's Russia ended up at war.  There is even a moment before this happens when the Cybermen moot the idea of a pact - "Together we could convert the universe!" - mirroring the Nazi-Soviet deal often referred to as the 'midnight of the century' (though it is less widely recalled that the Russian willingness to deal with the Nazis stemmed at least partly from a desire to protect themselves from attack by a fascist power that the European democracies were appeasing... interesting, isn't it, that Molotov-Ribbentrop is always called a "pact" while Munich was an "agreement".) 

The story that best expresses the widespread cultural notion of totalitarianism, with its lack of qualitative differentiation between fascism and communism, is 'Inferno', which - irritatingly - has biological monsters (albeit ones which are inextricably linked to machinery because of their origins).  On the whole, however, the totalitarian idea is expressed in Doctor Who via the robot/cyborg monster that has lost its name, and hence its individuality.

Daleks and Cybermen are embedded in the basic assumption - implicit in 'totalitarian theory' and its colloquial and/or revisionist variants - that political forms other than bourgeois liberal capitalist democracy are pretty-much-inherently tyrannical and destructive to the freedom of the individual (the implicit flipside being that liberal capitalism offers the only opposite path and that all challenges to it run the inevitable course into tyranny).

The basic circular chain of associations that mirrors this within the semiotic system of Doctor Who runs like this: robotic/cybernetic = anti-individualist = totalitarian = robotic/cybernetic.  In a superb example of the promulgation of ideology through the culture industries, freedom is thus assumed and asserted to be the freedom of the individual, apparently exemplified by the fundamentally Western 'humanity' of, say, the crew of the Wheel.

Notice how hierarchy, rank, patriarchy, white supremacy, etc., are all essentially supported via the implicit comparison with the featureless Cybermen, i.e. the comparison of the nameless and un-individual with human diversity.  The liberal celebration of gendered, multi-racial and multi-cultural humanity is bounded tacitly by the fact that the white guys remain in charge, high-status professional females remain adjuncts and romantic interests, Oirish people remain comically pugilistic and loquacious, other ethnicities stay down the pecking order and act in stereotypical ways even as they enjoy their place in a fundamentally Westernised (i.e. business-like) power structure, etc.  The humans, with their hierarchical and utilitarian military/scientific structure of position and value, weather the internal challenge of the unstable commander and emerge with their system bolstered by contact with the totalitarian cyborgs.  And bear in mind... I could've used 'Tomb of the Cybermen' to illustrate how this works, so I'm actually pulling my punches here.  The point being that there's no need for a story to be as offensively reactionary as 'Tomb' for it to be promulgating capitalist ideology.  It works with stories that seem to celebrate ethnic diversity (though, to be fair to 'Wheel', it's got nothing on Star Trek when it comes to pushing a bourgeois ideological agenda via lip-service to liberal multi-ethnic casting.)

Between them, the Daleks and Cybermen represent the two flavours of 'totalitarianism' that menaced the free West (i.e. the liberal capitalist order), their innermost and most essential evil being the suppression of individual liberty.

Individualism and liberty are cornerstones of bourgeois democratic ideology.  They are the quasi-truths upon which capitalism has based its prevailing 'optimum mode', i.e. electoral democracy (which leaves the basic class structure intact and untouched by genuine popular sovereignty), property rights, free trade (at least in appearance), a free media (at least in appearance) and the ethical ideology of human rights.  While undoubtedly a great advance on feudalism, or upon capitalism as it originally developed, or upon capitalism as it is still practiced sucessfully in many parts of the world, the above features of the Western capitalist order are all based on a fundamentally 'market' idea of social life, with all of us confronting each other as competitors and dealers, seeking our greatest advantage, freedom, etc.  The individual as the focus of human life (rather than the social) is an expression of bourgeois property relations but presents itself (partly truthfully) as an ideal of freedom, the fruit of progress.  (Of course, such freedom as exists is largely the result not of 'History' or 'Progress' or enlightened leaders or the free market, but of organised popular struggle... but that truth is largely suppressed.)

None of this is to say, by the way, that individual freedom is actually 'bad' or unimportant... on the contrary.  But the best expression of how our culture really views individual freedom is the fact that corporations are legally classed as people, thus entitling them to many personal liberties, while real people are usually far more circumscribed and punished by the law than the corporations they work for or buy from.  As usual, capitalism's boasts are lies.  It is actually a very bad system when it comes to the individual liberty of most people (who have to spend most of their lives working for others just in order to live) while there is nothing inherently destructive of personal freedom and individual liberty in the idea of social collectivism.

Nevertheless, these ideas are cornerstones of liberal capitalist democratic ideology in the 20th and 21st centuries.  Capitalism IS democracy and democracy IS an aggregation of individual liberty... meanwhile, collectivism is inherently undemocratic and will always destroy personal freedom and self-determination.  To be fair, the great self-trumpeting collectivisms of the 20th century were destructive of personal freedom in many ways, but the idea that they were 'socialist' may be evaluated by remembering that 'Nazi' actually stands for 'National Socialist', and the Nazis' favourite early slogan was "Death to Marxism", their central idea being the Bolshevism was a Jewish conspiracy to conquer the world. To think that their (or Stalin's) authoritarian statisms were collectivist or socialist is to fundamentally misunderstand collectivism or socialism... indeed, it is to misunderstand these ideas in the exactly the way that Hitler and other capitalist leaders wanted people to misunderstand them.  The Nazi hatred of Bolshevism, the American anti-communist rhetoric, the banalities and misprisions of 'totalitarian theory', the hollow impostures of the nouveau philosophes and the revisionist historians of revolution, the tendency of the modern U.S. looney-right to call Barack Obama a socialist, the assumption of those in favour of humanitarian interventionism that - unlike Ba'athist bullets - bombs from liberal capitalist countries are somehow humane, the widespread feeling (evinced in 'Inferno' for example) that fascism and communism were so alike in their opposition to individual freedom as not to need differentiation.... these are all (amongst other things) expressions of that over-arching ideological notion: the liberty of the individual is essential to capitalism (which is thus inherently democratic) and inimical to collectivism (which is thus inherently totalitarian).

That, essentially, is what's in a name: the individual human right... to live under capitalism forever.

*

NOTE: There's a lot more to be said about this.  The Cybermen, for example, may stem partly from reactionary conceptions of totalitarianism as the only possible alternative to capitalism... but they also sometimes work as an unflatteringly honest mirror to capitalism.  They are, initially, the dark side of Wilson's "white heat of technology".  As Simon Kinnear once pointed out in Doctor Who Magazine, they can sometimes look and act and think like the psychopathic corporation... indeed, this thought leads to all sorts of other issues.  The extent to which corporations work like authoritarian states, for instance.  It's no accident that the Cybermen have frequently meshed with and emerged from capitalist concerns, from International Electromatics to Cybus Industries.  But going into this would mean going into how the Cybermen (and, incidentally, their cousins the Borg) reflect the ethic of the self-interested rational actor of the mythology of mainstream economics: the unicorn-like utility maximiser of the theoretical equibalanced market, always perfectly well-informed and logical... and, in some versions, morally obliged to be utterly ruthless.  It would also involve going into the way that Communism (as it actually existed after the decline of real revolution) was actualy a form of bureaucratic state capitalism.  All of which would take us well away from our brief for this post.  But don't worry, I'm obsessive enough to write it one day.  Meanwhile... happy new year!

Private Ownership of the Means of Inhumation

or 

Sex, Death and Rock 'n' Roll - Part 2

(Part 1 can be found here.)


Some disjointed observations about 'Revelation of the Daleks'; fragments of a larger and uncompleted essay that's been in the draft drawer for ages... just so that I can say I've served up more this month than an off-the-cuff whinge about how much I hated P.E. lessons.


Hang the D.J.

He skulks in his private studio. He almost prefigures RTD’s quasi-fan characters. He’s a geek, a dweeby enthusiast. He sits alone, watches TV, greets a visitor very shyly and comes alive when given a chance to enthuse about his pet obsession: the old style D.J.s and music of America. When he learns that Peri is really American, he reacts like… well, like a Who fan meeting Nicola Bryant. You get the feeling that he might ask for her autograph. He’s almost a parody of the nerdacious loner. He has little or no direct contact with any of the other characters. Apart from Peri, he’s only ever seen with Jobel – and they don’t speak to each other. One gets the sense of someone asocial and detached, always watching the goings on around him but never getting personally involved. In a way, he’s like an anti-Davros. Both are holed up in their personal hideaways, watching everything via cameras, commenting on the action like choruses… but from different perspectives. Where Davros schemes and snarls and giggles at the suffering of others, the D.J. takes the piss out of his place of employment and plays around with words, songs and personas.

(There are a lot of these chorus/voyeur characters in 80s Who, from Arak and Etta in ‘Varos’ up to the culmination of the trend in ‘The Trial of a Time Lord’, which sees the Doctor himself become a member of the audience watching his own adventures on television!)

The other thing the D.J. does is play. He plays records, plays at disguise, plays at dressing up, plays at accents and attitudes and styles. This seems to be partly for his audience and partly for his own amusement. He comes over as a childman, an innocent. He’s not unaware of “the humanoid female form” but mentions it to “those of you who appreciate” it. He’s not personally interested, or his desire is submerged, or he’s too shy. His reaction to Peri is appreciative, but the oily, wandering-handed, heavy-breathing, harassing lust of Jobel is a counterpoint that throws the D.J.’s childish reaction into sharp relief.

Mind you, he’s not so innocent that he doesn’t know what’s going on and he clearly has no vociferous loyalty to his employers. He finds the notion of bodysnatchers making away with a cadaver rather funny and makes no effort to report them to his superiors. His off-mic comments to himself about George’s wife show that he’s savvy about the kinds of people his workplace caters for. To him, Tranquil Repose is a job. Okay, it’s a job that he has somehow managed to warp around his own personality and in which he plainly finds some pleasure, but essentially this guy is a working stiff.

In fact, this story is full of working stiffs (who work with stiffs). Almost all the relationships are economic. They are relationships between business partners, between boss and secretary, knight and squire, hitman and client, owner and manager, manager and staff. Even the relationships that are not blatantly exploitative are still tainted by their economic nature. Vogel plainly performs more than secretarial duties for his Sunset Boulevardy dominatrix boss, but her reaction to his death is to complain – albeit sounding shocked - about the difficulty in finding such good help. Apart from Peri and the Doctor, and the friendship that Peri strikes up with the D.J., the only entirely non-economic relationships are between Natasha and Gregory (they talk like dissidents or rebels) and between Natasha and her father.


The Capitalist Way of Death

All these economic relationships (with the exception of Orcini and Bostock, who seem like relics of a feudal order) look like they’re based on wages. Wages are never specifically mentioned (unless you count Orcini’s fees... which I don't because they're payment for services) but it is implicit that Takis, Lilt, Vogel, etc., are all being paid for turning up in the morning. Even Jobel is clearly a senior employee rather than the proprietor. These employment relations, along with the fact that Kara and Davros are both clearly in private business, place the story in a highly capitalist world.

Doctor Who doesn’t always depict the future as capitalistic. Many Who stories set in the future (or on other planets) seem to show a post-economic world in which people just exist in societies which lack forces of production, distribution and exchange (Marinus, Atrios, Karfel); or which achieve such things by a kind of tacit, quasi-magical, hyper-technological advancement (Gallifrey... unless, as I suspect, the unseen Shabogans do all the actual work); or through some dastardly trick which becomes the focus of the plot (Zanak, the Elders); or through the providence of some hidden exploiters (the Krotons, the Macra); or the dirty work is done by a slave class (Inter-Minor, Thoros-Beta, Kaldor City). Of course, this is because the writers are less interested in intricate worldbuilding than in creating drama or developing their big concepts. Who comes from myth, children’s fiction and B-movies: nobody is interested in who manufactures the stirrups for the horses in Narnia, or how much they get paid for doing it. In historicals and present-day stories we occasionally get some sense of economic relationships. We are, at least, more likely to meet characters with jobs (like Anne Chaplet) or with executive positions (Hibbert of Auton Plastics for example).

But sometimes, Doctor Who takes us to future societies with recognisable forms of economic organisation. Sometimes it is feudalism, as on Tara and the planet in E-Space where the Three Who Rule lord it over their peasants. But occasionally we encounter some of the recognisable hallmarks of capitalism: wage labour, industrialised or technological capital in private hands, large scale financial transactions, mass media and conspicuous consumption. Every one of these markers is to be found in 'Revelation of the Daleks'.

Necros is obviously part of a wider interplanetary economy which is based on the capitalist mode. Davros appears to have somehow bought-out the old management of Tranquil Repose. He owns (or at least controls) the means of inhumation. He presumably pays the wages of the people that work and train there, including the D.J. who represents the media, supposedly relays news and current events to his 'listeners' and appears as a selling point in the advert that is played for the Doctor and Peri. Davros is involved in a direct financial partnership with another firm, Kara's food producing company. He funds his work (R&D, one might call it) with investments from Kara alongside the profits that TR presumably makes from selling funerary services. The death business is big money for him, just as it is in our society. Anyone who has read Jessica Mitford's classic The American Way of Death will know that the funeral industry was (and is) rife with abuses and swindling; moreover, it is a mass service industry (no pun intended). It is an emblem of the capitalistic way in which our basic needs and feelings are appropriated by business, reconstituted and then sold back to us. It is thoroughly consumerist. Your average grieving consumer gets stung, in their most desperate and vulnerable hour, for spurious extras like airtight coffins (which often explode owing to a build up of gas within) or velvet pillows upon which the oblivious dead can eternally lay their unfeeling heads. Meanwhile, the financially overloaded - remembering, perhaps, the old dictum "if I can't take it with me, I don't want to go" - can (theoretically) stump up for any bizarre posthumous luxury that their hearts desire. You can have your ashes shot into orbit. You can pay of a private mausoleum. Wanna be frozen in the hope of one day being defrosted, cured and welcomed back to the head of the boardroom table? There are companies that claim to be able to provide this service... well, they can freeze you after you're dead anyway. The rest of it... well, you're gambling on future technology that can both thaw you out and then cure death... and on anybody in the future thinking it would be a good idea to bring back someone stupid and narcissistic enough to have themselves frozen in the first place. And then there's the concern raised in 'Revelation': would the living want their dead/frozen rivals to be resurrected? There's an urban legend that Walt Disney was frozen and stored under Disney World. Imagine how the current President and CEO of the Walt Disney Company would feel if told that Uncle Walt was ready to be defrosted and resume his old position. I imagine he or she'd be quite keen to keep the old man on ice.


Consumer Resistance is Useless

One of the wider points here is to do with the consumerist cycle of representation, which latches on to human needs, commodifies them, rebrands them, turns them into images and ideology, and then feeds them back to the consumer via the media. The strange thing is that, in the process, the needs themselves are lost in all sorts of ways. The human need to take in liquids, the human desire to take in pleasant-tasting liquids... this is the basis of soft drink adverts, but what are soft drink adverts really selling? Anyone who has read Naomi Klein's No Logo - and the literature that followed in its wake - will be familiar with the fact that many corporations do little actual production. The dirty task of actually producing the commodities is farmed out to other companies, often based in Third World countries with no pesky labour regulations, where they can work the local paupers longer and for less money, often at the sharp end of vicious bullying, sometimes corralled in virtual concentration camps. The corporations then buy the products that are produced under conditions of virtual slavery and flog them on the Western market for inflated prices. The process has many advantages for capitalists. The less they personally spend on production, the more surplus value they pocket when their products are sold... the more domestic jobs they destroy (or threaten to destroy) the more they can blackmail their remaining domestic workers to accept lower pay, longer hours, harder work and lower job security... and they can carry on selling their primary product: brand images. That's what corporations tend to produce and market now: brand images and identities. They market the idea that certain brands (and their products) embody and thus confer certain values and philosophies. This is why adverts try to associate their products with desires, aspirations, trends and ideas that are seen as popular. One of the ironies here is that, while the images in adverts are often designed to appeal to our basest urges or our prejudices, they can also reflect values diametrically opposed to the values actually practiced and pursued by the corporations that produce them. Clothes manufactured under ghastly conditions by bullied, repressed, half-starved, overworked, brown-skinned unpeople are marketed to the Western consumer with inspirational images that reflect public concerns like anti-racism, egalitarianism and rebellion against authority. Gorgeous models throw molotov cocktails at menacing riot police while backed by 60s tunes about revolution; hunks rescue innocent Asian children from oncoming fascist tanks... be like these inspiring (sexy) heroes, the ads imply, by wearing the same mass-produced, overpriced jeans.

Okay, I've galloped off on a hobby horse... but there is a point here. In the age of the mass media and branding, consumerism is cannibalistic. It makes us consumers not only of products, but of our own images. It feeds us images of ourselves, altered and doctored to fit a certain agenda, but recognisable as us, or as the kind of people we want to be, or as the kind of people that they want us to think of as normal. They sell us images of beauty and we consume them, internalise them and they become irrational yardsticks by which we measure each other. They sell us ourselves to consume.  Even our anti-corporate sentiments are sold back to us.  Our green sentiments are sold back to us by BP.  And all too often, we gobble them up with relish.  It should not be hard to see where 'Revelation of the Daleks' hooks into this.

Skulltopus 4: Attack of the Plot-Device Monster

The tentacle was already well established as a staple of monsterology long before Doctor Who was even a glint in Sydney Newman's eye.  When Who selected the tentacle as its semiotic method of evading/signifying capitalism  - as I'm going to argue that it did in the 70s - it selected it from a pre-existing toolbox full of potential signifiers.  But it didn't suddenly stumble upon the octopoidal.  It had encountered tentacles before, albeit only occasionally.

On the whole, the show's early years are pretty thin on tentacles... but there are quasi-tentacular manifestations in 'The Keys of Marinus' (the Brains of Morphoton have stubby little almost-tentacles), 'The Dalek Invasion of Earth' (the Slyther) and 'The Web Planet' (the Animus).  The only proper octopus monster in this era is the Mire Beast from 'The Chase'.  It lives underground and exists solely to provide a way for our heroes to escape from the Aridians without deliberately sentencing them all to Dalek-death.

Oh look... bar the Animus, those were all written by Terry Nation.  Hmmm...

By this point (the early 60s), the 'novum' of the tentacle had passed, but it had entrenched itself in the grammar of Western teratology.  In the process, it had been greatly sheared of its original strategic meaninglessness.  Even so, the Mire Beast doesn't even try to mean anything.  It's almost as though a plot device monster so arbitrary and irrelevant had to be an octopus because the octopus still carries the Weird connotations of meaning meaninglessness.  It means nothing, so what do we make it?  An octopus.  They mean nothing.  Perfect.

I'm simplifying.  And I'm making it sound conscious... which it almost certainly wasn't.  But I'm kind of thinking aloud here.  Give me a break, can't you?  These things become less conscious and more consistent the more deeply the semiotic connections bury themselves into culture.  They become like syntax.  We don't usually use syntax consciously.

Of course, 'meaning nothing' and 'having no meaning' are not necessarily the same thing.  The symbol '0' means nothing... but it doesn't have no meaning.  Indeed, it's meaning is nothing.  (This point is hard to get across in text... it's one of those occasions when, to be absolutely clear, you really need to use vocal inflection.)  This may be the same binary inherent in any sign that is adopted to evade meaning.  It may be inherent in the Weird use of the tentacular.  By trying to use the meaningless to mean meaninglessness, meaning is assigned.  This is as much a dialectic as it is a paradox.  The internal contradiction drives the change from the haute Weird tentacle to the tentacle as a standard monstrous limb-type throughout Western fiction.  The tentacle initially emerges as the perfect way for the Weird to express what it feels to be the incomprehensible and meaningless horror of modernity via its 'novum', its unprecedentedness in Western literature, its semiotic emptiness.  However, the meaninglessness of the tentacle becomes its meaning... or rather, it's most prominent feature.  Its very arbitrariness allows it unfettered entry into almost any context, sometimes even conferring an advantage upon it when someone like Terry Nation is looking for a default monster that will have nothing to do but get the writer out of a plot cul-de-sac, or look cool.

It sounds like I'm having a go at Nation... but, actually, I think his selection of the octopus, his insertion of it into such an inappropriate context (an octopus that lives underground on a desert planet... I mean, what the fuck?), and for such a menial narrative task, actually redounds to his credit.

Pastiche is essential to Nation's method (and to Who's in general).  Nation tends to get a bad rap these days and.... weeeeell, yeah, okay, he's a very inconsistent writer.  But, he could be very canny, especially about how exactly to mix 'n' match the stuff he... *ahem*... utilised. And he's by no means as constantly derivative as some might claim.  He can sometimes work magical feats of selection and synthesis. It shows in his selection of the octopus as a creature of incoherence and meaninglessness, fit to appear in such an inappropriate context and for such an empty reason.  Like the original Weird tentacles - H. G. Wells' giant squid monsters in The Sea Raiders... which just appear, wreak havoc and bugger off again without any explanation - Nation's Mire Beast just eats, shrieks and leaves... as does his Slyther.

'The Chase' features a section which parodies hauntology in the form of robot versions of Dracula and Frankenstein in an amusement park.  In that section of the story, Ian even perfectly expresses the essential nature of the hauntological: "it's uncanny, strange and weird... but it is familiar".  As noted, the tentacle is also pretty "familiar" in Western monsterology by the early 60s, but nowhere near as familiar as Dracula.  The tentacle still looks incoherent and evasive compared to the monsters in the haunted fun house, which are revealed to be nothing but exhibits.  The Doctor seems wedded to an old idea of the hauntological.  He thinks the fun house was a kind of materialised 'collective unconcious'.  Actually, it was a closed repository of dead and obsolete gothic figures.  Next to the craptastically 'old skool' gothic robots in the amusement park, even the Mire Beast looks vital, scary, menacing. I don't think the implicit comparison is insignificant.

The next thing that occurs to me - and I'm as surprised to find myself going this way as you probably are - is that maybe, when he was casting about for a plot-device monster, Terry Nation not only adroitly selected the tentacular (with its blank function inherited from Weird meaninglessness) but also laid the groundwork for the connection that I think Doctor Who (via Robert Holmes) made in the 70s: the tentacular as an evasion of - and, paradoxically/dialectically, a symbol of - capitalism as a system.  He found, in the tentacular, a kind of 'blank sign' which he could press into service... and then something else happened.  His (admittedly injudicious) semiotic literarcy started to lead him places...

Look... even I am not prepared to argue that 'The Chase' contains the basis for a systemic critique of capitalism, except perhaps as an illustration of the idiocy that capitalist culture can produce... however, it is interesting to note that the very first Doctor Who story to feature an actual octopus monster also features depictions of Western rulers (i.e. Elizabeth I and Abe Lincoln, who also appeared in Madame Tussauds in 'Spearhead from Space'), has a section set in New York (the financial hub of Western capitalism) and specifically atop the Empire State Building, and has another section aboard the Mary Celeste (a merchant ship carrying cargo for international trade).

We might also note the section in which we see mini-tentacles in 'The Keys of Marinus' also features a world of luxury and plenty which, seen without brainwashing, is a tatty world of exploitation and lies.  The gorgeous fabrics turn out to be "dirty rags", the amazing scientific instruments are actually chipped old cups, etc.  The very first intrusion of the weird tentacle, in only this very minor way, is conjoined with a story about people being mentally influenced (to live in luxury or to be handmaidens, etc.), about people being controlled by unseen forces, about people being tricked into viewing their austere world as a paradise of freedom, leisure and plenty, about a wealth of commodities (food, clothes, equipment) that is actually illusory.

Nation's noticeable personal lack of aversion to capitalism notwithstanding, it's extremely tempting to connect Morphoton to Western capitalism, given that, when this story was made, the long post-war boom was just starting to decline, the struggles of what would come to be called 'the 60s' were just beginning, etc.

Even the Slyther in 'The Dalek Invasion of Earth' turns up at the point in the story (geographical point and narrative point) where we start to see people's labour being exploited by Daleks who suddenly look like colonial masters of a subdued native population.  The Slyther appears at roughly the same time we encounter the two women in the shack and Ashton... all of whom are engaged in trade, exchange in commodities for profit.

*

The Animus in 'The Web Planet' is a little more complex.  This entity has looked very Lovecraftian to some, to the point that it has been identified as Llogior from the Cthulu Mythos in various New/Missing Adventures novels.  I'll (hopefully) be looking more closely at the Animus - as it relates to the Weird - in another post.

Behind the Times

Doctor Who was (and is) frequently racist in its representations.  Probably no more or less than most other cultural products of our society, but nonetheless...

Now, to deal with the banalities first, I don't accuse anybody involved in making the show of being deliberately racist.  I don't generally know much about their opinions.  When you hear about their views, you tend to hear that they were liberals or soft-lefties.  People reminiscing about working with Hartnell tend to raise his right-wing opinions on race (and other things) as though they were considered unusual.  And that's not the issue anyway.  I'm not interested in making personal attacks on this or that writer or producer. 

The show started nearly 50 years ago... so a lot of it is old, dated, the product of vanished days.  This is often raised by fans who see the problems in certain Who stories but, understandably, are eager to defend them.  Nobody wants to feel that something they love is tainted by racism - that terrible bogey word that stops people thinking clearly because, like so many important words, it's been systematically stripped of its context and has become a Bad Thing that menaces society from without.

I 'get' this desire to explain away racist representations in stories we love.  I get it totally... but I'm against the giving out of passes on the grounds that something is 'of its time'.

E. P. Thompson - in a very different context... in his book The Making of the English Working Class - coined the phrase "the enormous condescension of posterity", to refer to the oblivion into which the struggles of ordinary people get consigned by bourgeois history.  It's a great phrase (which I have previously and idiotically attributed to Christopher Hill!) which expresses something about what is arrogantly forgotten when you invoke 'the times' to excuse reactionary representations.


Cyber-Race

In the Hammer film, The Mummy, George Pastell plays the sinister Egyptian who brings the Mummy back to life, which chimes with his role in 'Tomb' (and also with the character Namin in 'Pyramids of Mars', another story in which genre semiotics transmit a representation of 'foreign' cultures as sources or vehicles of sinister, uncanny forces which threaten white Westerners).  As I've argued elsewhere, 'Tomb' is racist largely because it is a reworking of the 'Curse of the Mummy's Tomb' type story.  Klieg is the guy who tries to resurrect the Mummy in order to use it.

Those kinds of stories - gothic colonialist fiction of the 19th century which found its way into 20th century pop-culture via movies - carry certain kinds of baggage with them because they stem from British imperial engagement in Egypt. They're about Brits breaking into Egyptian tombs, finding Egyptian mummies, being cursed by Egyptian curses as punishment. They express - quite unconsciously I'm sure - a certain anxiety about colonialism. Beneath the surface they seem to whisper 'we're barging around where we shouldn't be and we're gonna pay for it'. But inherent in such anxiety is fear of the colonised people and their culture. They and their culture becomes a vehicle for the uncanny, the inexplicable, the terrifying, the punishing. As in so much hauntology, it's 'the return of the repressed', repressed guilt in this case, transfered or projected onto the victims. This is the essence of imperialist fiction. Blame the victims. The Indians attack the wagon train, etc.

Now, if you give 'Tomb' a pass for its implicit racism, how then do you praise 'The Tenth Planet' for having an entirely competent, senior, unstereotyped character who just happens to be black? You have to keep 'the times' in mind, but they don't negate contemporary judgements.

Secondly, the usual assumption is that the "times" in which we need to judge things were worse than ours, less enlightened, etc... which is pretty tricky. True in some ways, unwarrantably self-congratulatory in others. And much of the radical struggle of the past is forgotten (or subjected to something like that "enormous condescension" that Thompson was talking about). So, we should be wary of assuming that 'the times' would provide an excuse anyway.

'Tomb' was broadcast in 1967.  To give it a pass on the racism charge because it's 'of its time' is to make the assumption that people in the past were less morally or intellectually sophisticated than us... that you can characterise 'the times' as (ha!) 'dark ages' compared to ours. When you consider the huge strides being made, through the struggles and protests of millions of ordinary people, in 1967, the idea that we have to make allowances for 'the time' starts looking pretty arrogant of us.  We have to effectively cede 'the times' to people like Enoch Powell, whose 'Rivers of Blood' speech was made the following year, rather than claiming 'the times' for the people fighting bigots like him.

There was lots of casual racist stereotyping when 'Tomb' was made, but there was also the civil rights movement, Black Power, Martin Luther King Jnr., Malcolm X.  There were also millions of people fighting racism, protesting against various forms of institutionalised discrimination, struggling for equality and dignity.  So maybe, looked at another way, 'Tenth Planet' was a little more "of its time" than 'Tomb'! We should give 'the times' their full credit, which is to say that we should give the people of 'the times' their full credit.  This also helps us avoid the smugness inherent in shows like Mad Men, which looks upon the past as a time of crude backwardness compared to our auto-putative present-day olympian liberal enlightenment (while also, by the way, hypocritically sniping at old-style sexism while constantly using its actresses to titilate the audience).

'The Tomb of the Cybermen' is a cultural artifact from a declining imperialist society which represents vaguely-defined Eastern and/or dark-skinned generic 'foreigners' in a negative way (i.e. as fanatical, calculating, deceptive, callous, megalomaniacal, violent, ruthless and/or stupid) in contrast to a host of Brits and Americans who are depicted as essentially well-meaning and some of whom end up the victims of the foreign baddies.  But, just as we'd be wrong to glibly label the 'time' which produced it as backward, we'd also be very wrong to think that our own 'time' is that superior.  Britain is still, after all, a declining imperialist culture with a society massively deformed by racism of various kinds.


Disliking the Unlike

Who frequently challenged - or thought it challenged... or set itself the task of challenging - racism.  It first explicitly set itself such a task in only its very second story, 1963's 'The Daleks'.

Now, 'The Daleks' is a weird one. Looked at one way, the Daleks are Nazis (as externally crippled as they are internally), irrationally trying to destroy the Thals simply because they're different. This is very simplistic. We can't, for instance, equate the Thals with the Jews because the Thals really were the armed and violent enemies of the Daleks, whereas the idea of Jews as hostile persecutors of Germans existed only in the febrile Nazi fantasy world.

Also, as a diagnosis of racism it is very stupid. Racism isn't just fear of the different or the stranger. Indeed, 'The Daleks' makes it clear that it's more than that, despite Ian's speechifying. For instance, as well as making the Daleks and Thals opposing sides in a war that virtually destroyed the planet, the story also has their mutual welfare impossible because of the Daleks' need for radiation.

Besides, the deeper causes of racism (i.e. slavery, imperialism, social inequality, divide-and-conquer policies by elites) remain untouched by the story.

On the other hand, you can look at 'The Daleks' as a story about the evil troglodytes (the Daleks are very deliberately made into diminutive underground dwellers) who persecute the virtuous, noble, enlightened, tall, Nordic types.. i.e. as the Wagnerian, anti-semitic version of Norse mythology. Unpleasant as it may be, the story makes much more sense that way (purely as a text, I mean).

How did this happen? Perhaps because the story is so indebted to Wells' The Time Machine, which is itself indebted to this fusion of Norse myth and Wagnerian opera. (Well, I think the story is more indebted to the George Pal movie than to the actual book... but the movie carefully removes Wells' subtext about the class struggle, thus making the Blondes-persecuted-by-evil-trogs side of things even more obvious.) 'The Daleks' even makes the nasty underworlders into scientists and technicians, which is an Age-of-the-Atom/B-movie reiteration of the Niebelungen/Morlocks as industrious villains, working at fiery forges.

I think it's rather telling that an attempt at a moralistic allegory about racism, from a liberal perspective, degenerates into (at best) a silly parable about inherent xenophobia or (at worst) an accidental social-Darwinist tale with quasi-fascist undertones.


Sacred Bob, 'Talons' and Fish

It's essential to understand that a story can be racist in its representations without either containing any explicit, ideological racism, or being deliberately written with a racist message. Hence, 'Talons' and 'Two Doctors', both of which are problematic texts for anyone bothered by racist cultural representations.  (Parenthetically, I've recently encountered someone who manages to remain unconcerned by racist cultural representations via the simple expedient of disbelieving in their existence... which would be admirably bold if it weren't so obnoxious and idiotic.)

I don't think Bob Holmes set out to do anything but play around with genres, stock characters and familiar associations... but the fact that he could play around with stock characters and familiar associations that carry racist implications (from things like Fu Manchu and Bulldog Drummond and popular stereotypes), possibly without ever realising how some of this stuff could be interpreted, says something about the culture that he was living in, and in which we still live. The stuff we take for granted and see as harmless can be as revealing as the stuff we revile.

We simply take it for granted when evil is depicted as emanating from Asian or African culture in 'Talons' or 'Pyramids of Mars'. We simply take it for granted that the base, impulsive, cruel, primitive Androgums are depicted in terms of racist stereotypes about heavy-browed, big-nosed, red-haired people. I don't think it means that Holmes was a racist, or that we are... but it does mean that we live in a culture that propagates and implicitly tolerates racist representations. But then, this is an imperialistic society, with a cultural inheritance from colonialism. What else can we expect?

I don't think the team who made 'Talons' deliberately sat down to take the piss out of the Chinese. Nor do I think they were ignorant. These are self-evident trivialities and one shouldn't have to even bother to say them.

I think the production team created a story that, like many stories during their era, was a reiteration/adaptation of classic, gothic genre fiction. They'd done Mary Shelley and Rider Haggard (via Hammer) and now they were doing Sax Rohmer/Conan Doyle (again, via Hammer). Thing is, the Fu Manchu novels are racist in their depiction of Chinese culture as a source of criminality, fanaticism, the uncanny, the decadent, the perverse, the sensual, etc. Orientalism; the cultural interpretation and representation of the East as defined by such alien traits, as antithetical to the West in sinister or enigmatic ways. This is a cultural facet of imperialism (and we are still an imperialistic culture... albeit not one generally involved in direct colonialism anymore). And you don't have to be a racist in a straightforward, ideological, explicit way in order to have imbibed some of these assumptions.

In fact, Holmes seems aware that he is skirting around racism in 'Talons'.

Chang is a 'yellow peril' villain, an embodiment of the guilty transference which leads to white colonial cultures creating nightmares about being preyed upon by evil orientals.  Chang abducts loads of young white women and takes them to be murdered, never expressing any remorse.  Moreover, Chang's abductions carry hints of the sexual.  There seems to be no reason, on the face of it, why he and Greel must acquire girls, still less "plump, high-spirited" ones.  Chang abducts a woman who is clearly implied to be a prostitute.  And so on.

But Chang  at least seems like a proper character, which is more than can be said for any of the 'foreign' villains in 'Tomb', or Namin in 'Pyramids'.  Chang is a man of personal dignity and great intelligence who plays the stereotypical 'Chinaman' and replaces his 'r's with 'l's for the delectation of an audience who are enjoying exactly the same 'othering' of the Chinese that the story trades in, with Chang's own collusion. Unlike Kaftan (Kaftan!) and Klieg, Chang has an origin, a context, a background, an identity. His racial predicament is contextualised within the British imperial system, with all the references to "punitive expeditions" and his veneration of "the Queen-Empress".

Holmes makes Chang decidedly more intelligent than many of the Westerners, uses talk of the Chinese being "mysterious" and "enigmatic" as a sign of Lightfoot's silliness, has an explicitly racist policeman, has Chang knowingly and covertly mock the racism of the music hall audience, has the Doctor asking if Chang is Chinese a few moments after Chang has said, drily, "I understand we all look the same", etc.

Also, the central evil in the story is a Westerner, a war criminal from an imperialist European power defeated by "the Filipino Army". The Filipinos are a people devastated by almost forgotten Western imperialist aggression. And Greel is implicated in war crimes common to both European and Asian variants of fascism.

It's a complex matter in 'Talons', unlike 'Tomb' which is really quite crude; but there are similar background reasons for the racism in both stories. Racial tropes piggyback their way in on the backs of the literary and cinema sources being raided and pastiched. In 'Talons' its largely 19th/20th century gothic/colonialist pop fiction, as in 'Tomb'.  But still, the story has no Chinese character who isn't a nunchuk-weilding thug, a snivelling dupe or a white girl-abducting svengali.  And the (very inauthentic) representations of Chinese culture make it clear that it's a source (or at least a vehicle) of the alien, the perverse, the cruel and the vicious. This isn't because Holmes was a racist but because he is creating a pastiche out of genre fiction that was written in the context of racist, imperialist cultural assumptions.

A lot of perfectly nice, liberal/lefty people can be found doing the same thing. Monty Python end The Meaning of Life with a legend asking for all "fish" to live together in tolerance, peace and harmony. The Pythons are/were all nice guys, liberals, etc. Yet take a look at some of the representations of black people in the TV series. There's one sketch in which the 'Batsmen' of the Kalahari play cricket against England and massacre the entire English team. Now, the actual 'Bushmen' are not murdering savages who slaughter white men with spears. The Pythons created that sketch out of racist associations (i.e. black tribesmen are primitive cannibals, etc) that they probably imbibed with the kind of fiction that they all grew up with, and which Palin and Jones later mercilessly parodied in Ripping Yarns.


Barabbas and Bananas; Shockeye and Shylock

In 'The Two Doctors', the Androgums are depicted as an irredeemably inferior and savage people. And this is also represented in racist terms.

For a start, there's the line about monkeys.  This is probably intended to tie in with the story's evidently-deliberate subtext about animals and meat; more broadly, the control of species for use by other species.  However, the line takes on different valences in a tale that slides into saying something about more or less 'advanced' races.  The intent is to push an anti-meat message - one could hardly call it a 'subtext' - by making the Androgums into the embodiment of that aspect of humanity that preys upon other living things.  But, as with 'The Daleks', while the intention is to create a finger-wagging moralistic message, the effect is reactionary.  The business with the monkeys is very clumsy, since it evokes very well-established and hugely unsavoury racist slurs.  The wider implication of the story is to imply that the Androgums are, by their very nature, incapable of moral or intellectual equality with superior peoples like Third Zoners, Time Lords, or even humans.

In light of the way they are characterised, it's all the more unfortunate that the Androgums are depicted as impulsive, base, reflexively cruel, red-haired, heavy-browed, big-nosed, warty, etc. These are racial stereotypes that have been used against many groups, most especially the Irish and the Jews.

Marlowe's Barabbas, for example (the well-poisoning, nun-slaughtering, machaivellian Jew from The Jew of Malta), would probably have been depicted on stage with a big, comedy false nose and a ginger fright wig... as would Shakespeare's considerably more complex and sympathetic Shylock, disconcertingly enough.

Interestingly, Marlowe's play can also be read as an incipient critique of the new, emergent capitalist society... and, in the course of the story, Barabbas' villainy lays bare the hypocrisy of the Christians around him... which chimes with 'The Two Doctors', in which the behaviour of the Androgums has the effect of highlighting the cynicism of the Third Zoners and the Sontarans... and even of the Time Lords!

So, do we see in Shockeye the re-encoding of the stage 'machiavel' of the English Renaissance theatre?  The 'Vice' who is relished for his own villainy but is also a kind of dramatic highlighter, showing up the (often less than pure) moral condition of the other characters?  Is, then, the unfortunate hint of partly-archaic anti-semitic stereotypes a kind of echo of Barabbas and Shylock?  I can't help noticing that 'Shockeye' does actually sound a bit like 'Shylock'.

Nobody seems willing to defend 'The Two Doctors' on the grounds that it's 'of its time'.  No racist TV conventions in the 80s then?  I think you'll find otherwise.  However, what's potentially more interesting is that one might be able to mount a 'defence' on the ground that, rather than being 'of its time', it's actually sorta 'of another time', namely the time of Shakespeare and Marlowe.  Of course, this doesn't ultimately excuse the production team of clumsiness in not noticing what they were saying, but it might just contextualise Shockeye enough to make him interesting again.

The Big Squib

Acres of irrelevant grumbling about the Series 5 finale.


Oh great.  River's back.  Again.  Un-yippee and un-hurrah.  Still, Moffat must have his opportunity to present female characters as self-involved, smug enigmas who lead men around by their noses, put them through hell for the sake of hapless devotion, boss them about and remain pretty little puzzleboxes that men have to try and solve.  In these episodes, he does this with no less than two man/woman couples.

The first episode is just loads of portentous narrative procrastination, albeit to a less egregious extent than 'End of Time' Part 1.  There is some pleasure to be taken in the cobwebby, Indiana Jones-film look of the underground chamber, and River's pleasantly spooky trip to Amy's empty house... but, really, how generic is all this?  A secret chamber under Stonehenge?  An ancient artefact that has something scary inside it? 

Mind you, they could've turned it around if the contents/purpose of the Pandorica hadn't been so obvious right from the start.  I can honestly say that I knew, ages before we were told, that the Pandorica would either have the Doctor inside it, or would be empty and waiting for him (especially since this story seems to owe so much to Alien Bodies).  The only thing worse than what we got would've been a gateway into another universe (a universe of evil, natch), which lets loose unspeakable 'Old Ones' or some other 'horror from before time' when opened.  So it could've been worse.  But could also have been much better.

Sadly, we are soon confronted with a huge alliance of returning monsters who, in line with Moffat's usual disinterest in evil, are trying to save the universe... by locking the Doctor up in a box rather than just killing him.  For some reason.

The Doctor indulges in his now customary bit of ludicrous, embarassing and deeply inappropriate macho posturing.  What a bad-ass I am, he essentially shouts to a sky full of heavily armed battle cruisers.  Laughably, they bottle it rather than just zapping him.  This is so dumb it defies description.  I mean, I know the Doctor always wins... but surely they don't need to be scared of him when he's standing in plain view under their laser beams, waggling his weaponless hands?  Just zap the silly sod!  You don't even have to go anywhere near him!

On the subject of that speech... really, when did the character turn into this kind of person?  When did this become the point of him?  I hate this depiction of the Doctor as a bumptious, boastful, mouthy, showoff incredibly aware of himself as a Hero. I realise the scene in question is meant to show him bluffing, but still...

The Doctor always used to occasionally be a bit big headed (i.e. "he's almost as clever as I am" etc) but it always seemed like self-mockery or good humour. These days the Doctor seems to seek out opportunities to talk like a lame-ass 'tough cop' cypher (i.e. "there's something you never put in a trap if you want to live - ME!").

For a start, is it really supposed to be a good thing that loads of people are scared of him, or think of him as a destroyer. Should he really revel in it?

It's all part of the abandonment of the amateur virtues for the professional vices. The Doctor should be a dilletante, a fartaround, a bimbler... who stands and fights (with his intellect first and foremost) against injustice... not a semi-professional capeless superhero who, when he's not ostentatiously displaying his jumble of contrived synth-eccentricities, is delivering long sermons about how dangerous he is.

Oh, and why don't the assembled monsters listen when the Doctor explains that the TARDIS will cause the cracks - and so, since he's not in it, trapping him will achieve nothing?  I mean, that seems like a very, VERY important and plausible remark.  At least worth investigating, no?  But the Dalek says that only the Doctor can pilot the TARDIS (which they just MUST know isn't even close to being true), so... so what?  Even if it were true, why does it mean that the TARDIS couldn't cause the cracks by itself?  Still, just go ahead and trust to luck... I mean, it's only the possible universal armageddon we're risking... and it's not like we've invested much time and effort in this massive conspiracy, is it? 

Head, meet desk.  Desk, this is head.  Oh.  You've met before.

Weirdly, the alien hoardes seem less scared of him when they are personally right up close to him; when, in other words, he's in a better position to do them serious, personal damage.  But they manage to get him into the box, which makes you wonder... oh never mind.  Said terrible, portentous, powerful, inescapable box turns out to be easily escapable almost immediately, natch.  How many times is it possible for a show to relentlessly undercut its own openly daft logic before viewers start feeling insulted?  Quite a few times, it seems.

The second episode is an improvement on the first.  Actually, the recap of 'Pandorica Opens' at the start of 'Big Bang' is better than the actual episode it recaps - all the essential plot points and none of the procrasto-padding.

I theoretically admire the idea of having a final episode which largely consists of people fighting the slow death of time and history in an echoey, empty museum... but, really, we are just watching corridor athletics, aren't we?... just set amidst exhibits of old tombs and stalked by stone Daleks... which, again, sounds great until you realise that none of these potentially potent signs and symbols add up to anything.

It kind of reminded me of 'The Creature from the Pit'. I'm not flinging cheap insults. 'Creature' is another story rich with signs and symbols and themes... none of which really connect with each other. They're just sort of there.

The first episode, for all that it was was garbled and naff and empty, did hint at possible developments. The business with the Roman soldiers emerging from a book in Amy's room, etc., hinted that we might be in for some voyage into metafiction... but, of course, nothing of the kind arrived.  It's just that the Autons raided Amy's memories.  Er, when?  And how?  And... umm... why?  As a trap, it's overcomplicated, random, and works only by sheer chance!

I suppose, if you peer at 'The Big Bang' intently, you can discern some themes about memory and loss... but was anything really done with them beyond playfully batting them around the place and then using them as the basis for a cutesy resolution?  A resolution which, ironically enough, was more like Four Weddings than anything in the Richard Curtis episode.

What does it actually say?  That remembering things can bring them back from oblivion?  Well, I hate to point this out, but... it doesn't.  It really doesn't.

Sure, remembering things can keep them alive in some form, i.e. myths and legends... but this story actually undercuts and undermines myths and legends by making them literal.  The ancient guardian stops being so potent an idea the moment you find out there actually is an ancient guardian... who is guarding the impregnable box which is keeping his girlfriend alive... for no reason at all.  Once you do that, it just becomes plot... and silly plot to boot.  As for the characterisation?  Rory appears unchanged after his millenia long vigil, even down to resuming conversations he had before it began.  Is this satisfactory?  Not to me.  But it does provide 'romance' of a kind so ridiculously over the top that it actually makes the Amy/Rory relationship less believable, hence less touching.

Oh, and how can Rory wait for thousands of years of history... if history's been erased?  Oh yeah, eye of the storm.  Like all the other things that need to be saved for the plot to work.  I mean, they really are just making this shit up as they go along, aren't they?  The stone Daleks are "afterimages" of erased timelines (umm... why weren't they preserved in the "eye of the storm"?  ...I mean, they were standing right next to the bleedin' Pandorica, much closer than AutonRory and Amy's corpse!) until they need to come to life, whereupon some Pandorica light can resuscitate them... which kind of works... until you ask why the Pandorica needs to be a life-support system at all!

I can't help but sigh with relief that we're no longer getting the kind of embarassingly hammy, OTT, semi-crazed, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink emo-porn that RTD used to serve up at the end of a season... but, for all that, RTD's better season finales had some semi-coherent Stuff To Say.

'Bad Wolf'/'Parting' (clearly the best) has the Daleks as religious (market) fundies, lurking behind a twisted, but scarily believable, depiction of Western media culture as a giant machine for the grinding up of people into raw material. 'Sound of Drums'/'Last of the Time Lords' has a real New Testament vibe going on and, much as it might personally revolt me to see the Doctor behaving like the resurrected Christ, it packs a genuine emotional punch underneath all the histrionics... and manages to be heavily political in a decidedly unstraightforward way.

Sadly, 'The Big Bang', for all the convoluted mytho-fairytale stuff and self-consciously clever plot dynamics, says zilch to me.  Which is quite an achievement.  I can hardly believe that somebody made a Who story about the erasure of time closing in on an empty museum, about stone Daleks, about ancient myths coming to life and convergences between story, myth and memory... and I don't like it.  How did they manage that? 

'Big Bang' is a Rubik's Cube.  You work at it, solve it, look at it and think... is that it?  Why did I bother?
There's a theme in there about the power of storytelling; about myths and fairytales and the dreams of children, and how they can represent deeper truths...but it doesn't amount to anything more than banalities and stylistic borrowings. And showoffish tricksy plot gymnastics.  And, after all that, it still basically relied on a great big cheaty Reset Button, didn't it? As bloody usual.

And how does Amy remember the Doctor back into existence/reality anyway?  She hasn't done that with anything before!  She says she brought Rory back but she didn't - AutonRory was created by the monster alliance and newlywed Rory is part of the cosmic reboot!

And why does Moffat always try to make wonderful places like museums and libraries sinister and scary? 

And I really don't know why Moffat insists on making the Doctor so matey with authority figures (i.e. "your majesty" on the phone). I just hate that.  I shall be accused of being ideological again... as though having the children's hero on friendly terms with loads of powerful establishment figures is somehow neutral, apolitical and non-ideological!