Punishing Viewing

Something I wrote a while ago, somewhat rewritten.  I'm re-posting it to mark the release of 'The Mind of Evil' on DVD.  In brief, being in colour doesn't make it any better.

There is a very old idea about ‘human nature’, that we are born with certain social characteristics already implanted or programmed in our brains, usually inherited from our parents and ancestors. You will find this idea laced throughout the whole of modern Western culture. Ruffians and villains in Conan Doyle are often said to have "vile antecedents". Oliver Twist is incapable of being a pickpocket because, despite being raised in a pauper's orphanage, he is a middle class child displaced amongst the scum classes. Similarly (because J.K. Rowling is nothing if not studiedly unoriginal) Harry Potter is filled with love just like his late mum, despite being systematically emotionally and psychologically abused up to the age of 11.  I could go on at great length.

This conception of human nature (please take the quote marks as read whenever I use that phrase) is directly and inextricably linked to class, and to questions of social role, crime, etc. It is still claimed today that people end up in prison because they have inborn tendencies which lead them there. These days we use the language of genetics. Before genes, people used the language of blood. Before that, people used the language of the Bible. The medieval church claimed that drastic and dreadful social divisions were justified because people were born into one category or the other, based on their bloodline. They were the descendents of Cain or Seth, and thus carried the blood of a vile murderer or a goody-two-shoes. Of course, the idea that the peasants were peasants because they had murderer's blood doesn't account for the massive amount of warmongering and killing and torturing and executing done by the supposed descendents of Seth (i.e the Kings and Dukes and whathaveyou). Of course, even today a great deal of chin-scratching cogitation goes into deciding what genetic factors might be causing black urban gun crime... while nobody wonders if the carpet-bombing Prime Minister must have killer genes. And, as John Ball pointed out, if we're all descended from Cain or Seth, that also means we're all descended from (non-murdering) Adam and Eve... so how does that work?

As many thinkers have pointed out, being in prison isn't necessarily a mark of violence or evil (or even, in many cases, actual criminality) so much as a mark of refusing to play your assigned social role. It starts in childhood, with kids medicated for personality disorders for such heinous sins as "disrespecting authority" etc. Also, prisons are a massive system of social control and punitive reinforcement. Vast numbers of people in the American prison system today (which increasingly resembles a kind of privatised system of gulags) are there for non-violent drug crimes. There are many examples of, for instance, disabled people sent away for life because they were caught with a few ounces of weed that they obtained to use personally as a palliative. Meanwhile, the captains of finance who devastate our world and societies, or the politicians who demolish populations in the Middle East, somehow mysteriously avoid trial and incarceration.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I don't like 'The Mind of Evil'.

Of course, it would be ridiculous to say that we're born without any innate characteristics. We're all born with the grabbing reflex, with "face recognition software", possibly with syntax (if you believe some people), etc... and we're probably capable of being born with the innate set of mental aptitudes that can lead to, say, musical ability, etc. But the tendency - even amongst people who, for instance, edit the journal Science or flog lots of popular science books - is to talk about "genes for homelessness" (which wouldn't be the only silly thing that Matt Ridley believes) or "genes for crime". "Crime" is artificially essentialized into something called, say, "aggression" or "anti-social behaviour" and all sorts of varied and contingent social behaviours are artificially lumped together under this term, while others (the warmongering of leaders, for instance, or the drug dealing of big tobacco firms) are mysteriously ignored, presumably because they are seen as inherently non-criminal.

There's a very interesting (and largely amicable) discussion about this stuff between Richard Dawkins and Steven Rose, here. I particularly like the fact that Rose is wearing a long, multi-coloured scarf.

It’s been pointed out to me that there’s nothing in the story that directly implies that the prisoners are ‘born bad’. They might, it is suggested, just as well contract the evil via their experiences. Well, okay, but that is still hugely reductionist. I’m no fonder of environmental or social or economic determinism than I am of genetic determinism. And the serial depicts prison simplistically as a place where violent, selfish, ruthless, brutal thugs go. No other perspective is even nodded at. We have to confront the text as it stands, and that is where it stands.

Plus, in a story that features an American ambassador during the time of the Vietnam war... well, the show seems completely unaware of any idea that an American ambassador during the Vietnam war (or a Chinese ambassador during the reign of Mao, for that matter) would probably be directly or indirectly complicit in more murder, destruction, violence, rape and torture than all the crims in Stangmore combined. Imperialism is even namechecked at one point... as a bit of rhetorical Maoist flim-flam for the Brigadier to smirk at.

None of this would be quite so bad if the story didn't also revolve around a dirty big nuclear missile. The cumulative impression is the standard bit of wishy-washy liberal twaddle about "oooh, the darkness of mankind... oooh, there's violence in us and that's why we have nukes and stuff...". Crime can't possibly stem from alienation caused by hierarchical and unjust societies, nor is it something that leaders do too... these notions are completely beyond the story's ken.  Crime is something that people with Evil in their heads do, and people like that go to prison. If you're in prison, you're Bad. It's that simple. This is implicit. Also implicit is the assumption that humans are clockwork oranges.  Use technology to remove the Evil from the brain and the brain will function properly again.  A 'properly' functioning brain, at least for the working class, seems to be a brain that makes you mild, quiet, childlike and inclined to doglike obedience.

If the story was intended as a 'homage' to A Clockwork Orange, it seriously misunderstood that text.  Whatever its faults, Burgess' story understands that behaviour is more than just mechanistic conditioning.

Also implicit is the notion that the weapons of mass destruction with which imperialists threaten the planet are not economic phenomena, or chips in a power play, or actualisations of the conflict inherent in capitalist competition between states, but expressions of our collective guilt, our original sin as a species. My question, as ever, is: who's "we"? 

Judging by the story's racial and gender politics, 'we' are the Westerners, lead by proper male, ruling-class authority.  Chin-Lee, being both Chinese and a woman, is a puppet.  Meanwhile, the ultimate horror - at least as far as the American Senator Alcott is concerned - is that this deadly combination of sneaky otherness - the Eastern, the Communist, the woman - will bare its fangs and burn 'us' all with its breath.  If 'we' have to worry about the working class getting uppitty as well, 'we' are in serious trouble. 

In other words, this is a classic bit of reactionary Cold War ideology, albeit mediated through the Doctor's occasional bouts of scepticism. 

Still, at least it looks colourful now.

Independence Day

This is a slightly-expanded/tweaked version of something originally published in the January 2011 edition of Panic Moon.  Back issues of this excellent fanzine (now, sadly, on hiatus) are still available, here.


In 'The Mutants', Earth’s empire is the British Empire in decline, as it disassembles itself out of economic necessity (true in general terms but misleading in particular; the British were usually savage in their resistance to independence). The Marshall echoes Ian Smith, who ran the racist apartheid state of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and tried to hang on after the British cut him loose.

We get a positive view of a national liberation movement. Ky is clearly the figurehead of a powerful anti-Overlord groundswell; they’re called “terrorists” naturally, and maybe they are, but they’re fighting for their freedom. We get no patronising sermons to oppressed people about non-violence.

The system is depicted as inherently racist, featuring a version of apartheid. The Solonians are not black, but then neither were the Irish… and they were the first to come under the British heel. 'The Mutants' shows racism, quite rightly, as the ideology of empire, not the cause.

There is an apologia for empire that stresses the “progress” it can bring to its subjects. The concept of “progress” is really what this story interrogates. Earth hasn’t brought much to Solos, whatever the Administrator’s ceremonial bromides. Of course, Solos only seemed in need of 'progress' to the humans. It suited the Solonians just fine, as you’d expect. This expresses something very true about colonialism: that what the colonisers see as raw material needing to be shaped, the colonised often see as shaped just fine already thank you very much. To the Overlords, what they’d call “progress” (uniforms, racism and technology that destroys ecosystems) is all up on Skybase, their celestial seat. Understandably, Ky rejects it. The script backs him up with the descriptions of Earth as worn out, a wasteland of ash, slag and clinker: “the fruits of technology” as the Doctor says. This is the real reason for the humans’ presence on Solos. This is fairly accurate as a picture of a declining empire. An empire that, say, runs on fossil fuels that are gradually running out might be keen to control other people’s oil. Of course, you can’t really understand modern imperialism without understanding capitalism, which doesn’t appear in 'The Mutants', not even by implication.

Imperial “progress” often means people like Jaeger using their advanced technology to customize colonies for their needs in ways that will decimate the natives. This is pretty much what happened when the white man arrived in Africa and America. The Doctor is there to personify the other possibility; the humanistic, ethical science that we’d all like to believe in. There is no idiotic blanket condemnation of science, just recognition that it can be a weapon in the hands of power. We are also invited to condition science with an awareness that older forms of discourse might have objective validity. The Doctor brings the ancient artefacts of the Solonians to the attention of hippy-anthropologist Sondergaard and they find accurate accounts of history and biology in the native culture.

I used to think that this story represented evolution (inaccurately) as an upward progress from brutish animalism to enlightened and “higher” forms… but that doesn’t hold. The Solonians, it transpires, are involved in a process of biological change that is not linear but elliptical. The Mutt stage comes between the humanoid and angelic phases. The process presumably reverses itself when the Solonian climate shifts back. The angelic (i.e. glam-rock) Ky isn’t a Christ-like moraliser. He kills the Marshall quite happily.

Meanwhile, the Mutts are not good or evil; they’re no lower than the angels, though they are more vulnerable. This rubbishes the idea that 'The Mutants' is about a mistaken teleological view of evolution (or any racially-loaded cultural condescension like that seen in it by Salman Rushdie). The Mutts are just people undergoing change. That’s why the reactionary Overlords (and Varan, their
comprador) hate and fear them. Irrational prejudice, yes, but also terror of change.  Imperial “progress” is thus revealed as nervous stasis... or perhaps an entropic winding-down to those "grey landscapes" that the Doctor mentions.  Solos certainly seems to be headed this way under human domination.  As in later stories which tackle similar themes - 'Warriors' Gate' for example - this story depicts 'progress' as a flying-apart which creates a vast accretion of rubble in its wake.

The consciousness of Ky certainly changes, but not because he becomes “higher”.  Both his biological and political evolution comes from the struggle against imperialism, in which he joins with Stubbs and Cotton. They too join in the struggle alongside the people they were employed to oppress and kill. They come to reject the ideology of the empire that used them just as it crushed the Solonians. There is progress here, but it is the progress of the exploited united in search of liberation.

Of course, in the end, the Marshall gets blamed more than the imperial system and the legal bigwigs of the empire see the light... but all the same, 'The Mutants' asks big questions and offers genuinely progressive answers.

BBC Wales

The patronizing use of Welsh stereotypes in 'The Green Death' is evidence of the employment of centuries-old imperial condecenscion.  However, Welshness alone does not straightforwardly equal idiocy in this story.  Rather, it is the conjunction of Welshness with membership of the proletariat which produces characters who don't really have a clue what's going and need everything explained to them.

Clifford Jones and 'Nancy' (note how she doesn't need a surname) are allowed to be efficient and useful only because their Welshness (which entails them using cute provincialisms galore) is offset by their educated, middle-class boffinity and right-onitude.  Meanwhile, Jo marvels openly at her own foolishness in caring so much about the death of a "funny little Welshman" (who kept her alive).  The difference between these Welsh characters - i.e. between the ones who qualify as people and those who don't - is down to class.

The workers in this story are belittled, peripheral figures.  They are profoundly out of touch and their Welshness is but a conduit by which they can be further quaintified.  They miss the big picture, even when the hippy scientists try to explain everything to them. They side with Stevens when he tries to bribe them with promises of the trickle-down effect... indeed, the validity of Stevens's claims that profits for Global will also mean prosperity for the workers is never challenged, only qualified by the criticism that pollution will be a side-effect.  There is hardly a hint of class struggle here, besides the opening scene... and even here the struggle is portrayed as over.  The mine is closed, the miners all but absent.  Their status seems unclear... some of them seem to still have access to the mine despite its apparent closure.  The mine itself seems not to be owned by the government but by Global Chemicals.

Now, in its haphazard and accidental way, some of this is actually prescient.  The UNIT stories were supposed to be 'five minutes into the future' (we're not getting into UNIT dating controversies - I couldn't care less) and, of course, by the late-90s, British mining - together with so much manufacturing industry - had been deliberately destroyed by the Tories.  Huge numbers of traditional working class jobs had been annihilated.  Working class communities were wrecked in the process.  In many ways, the sight of a crowd of workers, made redundant, closed out of their sold-off and shut-down workplace, listening to speeches about how coal is dead, being fraudulently told that their future lies in the trickle-down effect of private profit, is a sight that predicts the result of Thatcherism (which, of course, had already begun under Heath, albeit in a less aggressive form).

Thing is, viewed in the context of the times in which it was made, this is as puzzlingly skewiff as it is prescient.  'Anachronistic' is the only way to properly describe it.

You see... miners were powerful in 1973, having struck in 1972 for the first time since the 20s - and won!  Miners all over the country came out over piffling proposed pay rises, proposed by the Tory government in the midst of declining living standards and working conditions.  Miners in South Wales made a particularly good showing in the nationwide strike.  135 pits were shut down by industrial action in South Wales alone (the national total was 285), with dockers in Cardiff and Newport refusing to unload imported coal from ships in solidarity.  Miners picketed power stations of all kinds and shut down transport of fuel supplies.  Welsh miners joined a picket outside the Saltley works in Brimingham, which had been undermining the strike by continuing to send out coke.  The miners alone were unable to force the gates of the depot to close, so Arthur Scargill - the trade unionist and activist leading the picketing - appealed for help to the shop stewards of the huge engineering industries in Birmingham.  At least thirty thousand workers walked out of factories in the Birmingham area, with at least a third marching to help the miners at Saltley.

I got this image from the BBC site.  You can tell.  They chose it because
it's taken from such a distance that you can't make out what's happening.

In one of the greatest working class victories of the post-war period (the 40th anniversary has just been celebrated), thousands of workers forced police to close the gates of the depot.  A rattled Tory administration instituted a 'state of emergency' and a three day week in an effort to conserve energy supplies.  The miners returned to work, after much negotiation and a ballot, as the highest paid industrial workers in the country - and the strongest and most unified.  Their achievements were chipped-away in the context of the Middle East oil crisis and soon their pay began to slip back down the scale, so they struck again in 1974.  This time, hapless Heath called a general election and appealed to the country to decide: who runs Britain, the miners or the Tory government?  The country made its choice and the Tories were booted from office, to seethe and fester over their resounding defeat at the hands of the unionized and militant miners.

(It's worth noting that the current state of affairs I described earlier - with the British mining industry, like so many other manufacturing industries, lying in wrecked ruins alongside the devastated working class communities that revolved around it - came about as a result of the policies of the Thatcher government.  Thatcher - recently portrayed as an inspirational force for change in that movie - came to power in 1979, sworn to inflict ruinous vengeance upon the miners for daring to bring down Heath.  Her gang of class-warriors were, as Arthur Scargill rightly asserted, planning to shut down pit after pit, thus punishing and breaking the most militant and class conscious section of the British working class.  The Tories made it necessary and unavoidable for the miners to fight to protect their livelihoods and communities.  Meanwhile, they (the Tories) plotted and schemed to ensure that they could hold out against the strike they were deliberately provoking.  Scargill - a courageous and incorruptible fighter for the working class, whatever his flaws - was not the cause of the miners' defeat in 1984-5.  Indeed, he is to be credited with bringing the strike closer to victory than anyone could have expected, given the level of government premeditation, preparation, conspiracy, dishonesty, violence and spite.  Crushing defeat though it eventually was, the great miner's strike of 1984-5 is also a heroic page in working class history... and the dire results of government victory would have happened anyway, even if there'd been no Scargill and no strike.  The only difference would have been that, had the miners acquiesced without a struggle, the subsequent demoralization would have been even worse and would have left the working class with no inspiring memory of resistance.  Just thought I'd mention all this.)

'The Green Death' was broadcast almost right smack inbetween the two massive and inspiring demonstrations of working class power by the miners in 1972 and 1974.  It was aired at a time when the miners were by far the most advanced and powerful section of the British working class.  And yet, the story depicts miners as sacked, powerless, disunited, grumbling, incompetent, reactionary yokels in the background, to be patronized at best.  They play no part in resolving the issues or jeopardy in the story.  Indeed, they just get in the way.  The only political demo or march in the story is the one organized and attended by the nice, middle-class, hippy boffins.

The workers don't demonstrate, they just stand around outside the gates and grumble before they disperse back to the pub.  They are implied to be politically shortsighted and selfish.  They don't notice or care much about the environmental destruction, which is implicitly assumed to be a more important problem than their jobs and lives and livings. They are gormless, horny-handed, provincial nincompoops.  Some are nice enough but others are openly depicted as rash and violent or nosey and insinuating.  The Doctor openly becomes an authority figure when ordering flat-cap-wearing miners around (who need him to tell them how to operate the machinery in their own workplace).  Moreover, the Doctor twice assumes disguises in which he plays at being comedy working-class stereotypes.

The working class identity becomes a shell of parody, cliche and ridicule, to be used by the plummy scientist hero before being thrown off.

It seems only fair to admit that I've altered this image a tad.

By contrast, all the suited businessmen inside Global - including Stevens, the main human villain - get to have their moments of conscience or indecision or remorse or redemption.  No working class character gets anything like that much flesh on their bones.  The death of Fell is implicitly meant to be more of a big deal than the deaths of either of the miners.  Indeed, even inside Global Chemicals, the workers continue to be depicted as less human than the corporate suits.  While Stevens is shown to be conflicted, his driver/henchman is just a glib, brutal thug.

In its terribly liberal-moralistic way, this attempt at an angry, political story misses the chance to engage with what unscrupulous businesses do to ordinary, working people, and also misses a chance to depict those people as a force for change.  It completely fails to notice that miners in South Wales are, at the time the story was written, powerful and successful fighters for their own interests and the interests of their class.  More, it largely misses the chance to depict working people as fully human.

Skulltopus 9: Signs of Progress and the Progress of the Sign

You can rifle the Pertwee era for tentacles and find relatively few.  They only crop up in stories in which capital looms.  They only fully-materialize as a major threat where capitalism is a systemic presence, threatening - even if only obliquely - to connect up various social and political nightmares.

That isn't to say that social and political nightmares are thin on the ground.  Far from it.  But it's only when those problems are connected to capital, commodification and trade as exploitative or destructive, that they sprout tentacles.


Evidence of Absence

The reason why 'Spearhead from Space' builds to an unexpectedly tentacular conclusion is because all sorts of things within it hint obliquely and elliptically at deep problems in the Britain of the late twentieth century, problems which seem to build towards a connection that must be occluded: namely the connection of all these problems at the economic base of society, the productive forces, the capitalist factory, the commodity form itself.  'Spearhead' is saturated in depictions of hierarchy, domination and class.  The story hints - albeit very quietly - at imperialism, and at racial and gender hierarchies.  The monsters are stalking emblems of alienation and commodity fetishism, manufactured things, products, hostile commodities in the estranged human form of consumerism.  The tentacles appear to obscure the hub of the story.  We don't even see the hub of the creature within the tank, only its flailing limbs.

'Spearhead' is, however, unusually potent, oneiric, suggestive and loaded.  That said, many of its preoccupations recur throughout the Pertween era... just not together, not in such a 'joined-up' way and not in stories that even notice capitalism, let alone suggest that evil emanates from capitalist alienation of labour.

For instance, in 'The Silurians', social hierarchy is definitely in evidence but it doesn't reach deeply into everyday normal life as in 'Spearhead'.  Work is in evidence, but almost all of it takes place in a state-owned research centre and all the main characters are professionals who are, apparently, dedicated scientists rather than, say, factory drudges.  The monetary value of the facility is mentioned but not in terms of profitability.  There isn't any poverty to be seen, or much in the way of class.  There are certainly no drastic social divisions.  There is xenophobia and prejudice but these are treated as human traits - related, if anything, to our biology - rather than social phenomena.  Capitalism is hardly hinted at, economically or culturally.  There is simply the world as it stands, as a backdrop to events.  All of this broadly holds true for 'Ambassadors of Death' too.  There are no tentacles in either story, though there is some mildly Weird inflection detectable in 'Ambassadors', in the appearance of the aliens and their peculiar ship.  It's worth noting, in this connection, that an attempt is made to commodify the alien ambassadors, whereas this is not the case with the Silurians.

In 'Inferno', fascism (or some form of totalitarianism at any rate) is a major theme, but there's no hint in the text that it's linked to economics.  This is not fascism as a form of ultra-statist reactionary capitalism, nor is it communism in the economic sense either!  There are slaves in the alt world but slaves are not proletarians.  Hierarchy is in evidence, even in the non-totalitarian version of reality, but strict adherence to hierarchies is made a pathology of Stahlman's own.  Beyond the government's stated desire for a cheap new energy source, there's hardly a hint of economics.  No capitalism to speak of.  And no tentacles.

In 'Mind of Evil', people in prison are bad because they've got badness in their brains.  The implications are, on the face of it, as biologically determinist as those hinted at in 'The Silurians'.  Nuclear weapons are simply an expression of this badness in a generalized form.  In its concentrated form (i.e. in working class thugs) it manifests as violent crime.  Crime is disobedience to the 'law and order' of the apparently functionalist 'honest broker' state.  In its general form, as it lurks in the heart of man, this innate darkness takes the form of warheads, which seem to be emblems of human 'folly' rather than of imperialism.  Indeed, the American Ambassador is an innocent victim of the Red Menace and any mention of imperialism is mere Stalinist flim-flam for the Brigadier to smirk at knowingly.  No private companies, no profits, no interest in commodification.  And no tentacles.

In 'The Sea Devils', there's a cowardly, xenophobic and bellicose parliamentary private secretary (the show seems to find it particularly sinister that he eats toast as he orders bombardments) but he's clearly the exception to the rule.  Every other establishment figure in this is either a stiff-upper-lipped straight-arrow or a well-meaning dupe.  Hierarchy seems to function beautifully for everyone in this story.  There's hardly a whisper about imperialism or capitalism.  The Weird is often very maritime in its concerns (i.e. tentacles, crabs, etc.) but this story just looks like a Navy Recruitment film.  No tentacles.

'Day of the Daleks' is a densely political text that needs a lot of unpacking... which I'll probably get around to one of these days.  This is a story unusually aware of economics in the broad sense (i.e. how society is reproduced through production) and is certainly aware of the exploitation of labour... but the society of the future looks like Stalinism.  Now... I'm personally persuaded that Stalinism (or 'really existing socialism' or 'communism', whatever...) was actually a bureaucratic form of state capitalism (I'm not in the SWP but I'm convinced they're broadly right on this).  However, that idea was even less well known in 1972 than it is now, and a large majority of even the radical left at the time thought Russia and China were in some way socialist.  Pertwee's barbed comments - particularly "Then why do they need so many people to keep them under control?  Don't they like being happy and prosperous?" - seem to tally with the idea that this story is critiqueing 'communism', as does the concentration upon needing the cooperation of "the Chinese delegates".

Of course, we also have the guerillas who look like left-wing 'freedom fighters' - Shura seems to have deliberately styled himself after Che - and who are described as "fanatics" but who end up portrayed as (broadly) in the right.  Even their assassination plan is not fully disdained in principle.  But, the "third world war" seems to be something that nobody is responsible for, certainly not the well-meaning politicians.  Imperialism hardly registers (except as Dalek conquest and as a clash between rival communist states, i.e. "troops are massing along the Russian and Chinese frontiers") and neither does capitalism.  There are, you'll recall, no tentacles.  Indeed, the story explicitly talks the talk of the gothic and hauntological.  (All the stuff about ghosts.)

The Earth Empire in 'The Mutants' is only very distantly capitalist.  There is some talk about exploitation (of Solonians and their minerals) but there's no indication that this is anything but straightforward military theft, as in ancient Rome.  No tentacles.

And so on.  You get the idea, I'm sure.


What's Good For IMC...

"Ah ha!" I hear you cry, "there should be tentacles in 'Colony in Space', surely - if his bullshit theory is correct!"

Well, firstly, remember that I've never claimed that tentacles appear every time capitalism comes up, only that they tend to when the show veers towards potential systemic critique of capitalism.  But doesn't 'Colony in Space' qualify?  Not really, because the story is essentially a liberal complaint about corporations, not capitalism as a system.  IMC is strongly implied to be acting illegally and most of the colonists are surprised by their out-and-out gangsterism.  The law is also implied to be relatively impartial, with most of the colonists seemingly having realistic hopes that the state will act for the best and arbitrate between competing claims.

More broadly, 'Colony' embraces certain bourgeois ideas about individual freedom and the 'progress' of Western civilization.  It subjects the notion of technological and social progress to some sceptical questioning, but ultimately its qualms seem to be about 'technology' and warlike aims rather than capitalist industry per se.  The commodity sought by IMC - duralinium - has none of the qualities that marked out Nestene plastic or Axonite as representing the commodity form as a concept or as capital itself.

Also, the story completely fails to notice that the colonists are encroaching upon a world that is already inhabited.  In all the bickering between them and IMC, nobody stops to question that one or other group has the right to appropriate the planet and expropriate the 'primitives'.  This is a liberal whinge about unscrupulous corporations bullying petit bourgeois small-holding colonials.  It assumes the possibility of a just settlement between the claims of business and the rights of individuals.  Law and order can be achieved when the excesses of one rogue corporation are curtailed.  The right of colonists to impose colonialism upon natives is left unquestioned.

There is no more threat of a systemic critique of capitalism here than there is in your average Bond film.


The Quasi-Skulltopus and the Road Away from Serfdom (Not)

This is also true of  'The Curse of Peladon', and yet that has tentacles in it (sort of)... which demands explanation.

As in 'The Creature from the Pit' much later, the decidedly feudal nature of Peladon implies that the new system brought by the alien vistors is probably going to be, in some sense, capitalism.  Sure enough, the entry of Peladon into the Federation will entail Federation exploitation of Peladon for minerals... i.e. industrial exploitation, mining, refining, export, etc.  Arcturus makes a deal for Peladon's minerals with Hepesh because his own planet lacks them, and, in so doing, makes the minerals into commodities, although money is not mentioned (not even obliquely) so it's still only an implication.  Guess what... Arcturus is a bit tentacular.  Of course, so is Centauri... but then we all know the 'Federation' is meant to represent the Common Market.  To put it crudely: s/he's got the good tentacles of free trade and he (Arcturus) has the bad tentacles of restricted markets.

Thing is... Arcturus is also a bit like a skull.

He's actually very nearly a skulltopus.

I suppose this is allowed because, in 'Curse', the tentacular has lost all traces of its old Weird charge, its unprecedented, meaningless incomprehensibility.  It's become a sign detached from its previous associations outside Who.  Even Terry Nation's plot-device monster, the Mire Beast, is more related to the Weird via its incongruousness and arbitrariness.

What we're seeing in 'Curse' is the first evidence that the show has started to habitually associate tentacles with capitalism, even though it originally invoked them in order to obscure it.  What started as an evasion is becoming an established signifier, to be used even when capitalism is implied and characterized as bringing progress, cultural advancement, cosmopolitanism and liberalization.  In 'Curse', the tentacular is reappearing because capitalism is heralded, even if only by heavy implication.  Arcturus and Centauri represent the Federation, and the Federation is the onrush of trade and modernization and 'development' that is coming to disrupt the old ways and - we are asked to take this on faith - remake Peladon for the better.

There is no need to obfuscate the point at which the story's themes converge upon heavily-implied capitalism because capitalism is here heavily-implied to be the solution rather than the problem.  The whole point of the story is to point out that silly, old-fashioned, class-ridden Britain, littered with the relics of a feudal past, should and must embrace the free trade future.  The new system is better for all, except when it is hijacked by a corrupt, warlike, criminal reactionary like Arcturus.  This is essentially the exact same bourgeois liberal message offered by the sequel, 'Monster of Peladon': sort out the reactionary isolationist clock-stoppers and any conspiratorial protectionists (and, in 'Monster', the loony left who incite the idiotic workers) and capitalism works like a charm.

In the 'Peladon' stories, the tentacles straightforwardly ride in on the back of their past association with capitalism.  They do not obscure, they signify.  Arcturus has them because he is part of the system.  But he is also very-nearly a skull because, in 'Curse', the overtly gothic is being used to represent the old ways, and Arcturus is a drag factor - a protectionist, market-cornering, monopolist reactionary - who might threaten to pull Peladon back into hopeless feudalism.  Indeed, he is directly conspiring with Hepesh to achieve just this aim.  Arcturus and Hepesh want the same thing.  They want Peladon to stay an undeveloped backwater.  What Hepesh does not see - and Arcturus does - is that keeping Peladon out of the galactic Common Market is only possible by keeping it as a powerless and exploited client state to a foreign monopolist.

In the semiotic schema of the Peladon tales, the gothic is used to express everything that is abhorrent or pitiful under the liberal free-trade ideological assumptions.  Aggedor haunts a torch-lit castle because we are being asked to contemplate a society stuck in the past.  Arcturus is a quasi-skull because he too is a force of reaction, a block to progress.  He has tentacles because Doctor Who is starting to associate tentacles with what, in this story, is the system of the future.  This is not the Weird fused with the gothic.  This is the gothic, fused into Doctor Who's emergent internal system of signs, juggling different forms of capitalism.