10

"We waited here in the dark space," booms the Dalek Emperor, "damaged but rebuilding. Centuries passed, and we quietly infiltrated the systems of Earth, harvesting the waste of humanity. The prisoners, the refugees, the dispossessed. They all came to us. The bodies were filtered, pulped, sifted. The seed of the human race is perverted. Only one cell in a billion was fit to be nurtured."

So, In Russell's rewrite of 'Revelation of the Daleks' (which would be a better title for this story than it was for Saward's script), the Daleks are no longer harvesting the elite.  Brought to the brink of extinction, they have been forced to resurrect themselves from the 'dregs'... which seems to be synonymous with the contestants who lose game shows.  The Daleks take the people who get knocked out before the finale.  Because the Daleks have become TV producers.  They've become the people who run Big Brother and Trinny & Susannah and The Weakest Link.  They've become the bosses of reality TV.  They've become Simon Cowell.  (Which is kind of an insult to the Daleks, if you ask me.)

Big Brother, in our polity, in our system of media signs, is no longer Orwell's omniscient totalitarian leader; he's now the eternal, ever-watching viewer.  He's us.  Just like the Daleks are now us.

"So you created an army of Daleks out of the dead," says the Doctor.

Again, the gothic, the monopoly, and the zombie labour.

"That makes them half human," mutters Rose... as always, she is straight to the quick.

"Those words are blasphemy!" bellows the Dalek Emperor.

The Daleks chant in unison...

"Do not blaspheme!  Do not blaspheme!  Do not blaspheme!"

"Since when did the Daleks have a concept of blasphemy?" asks the Doctor.

"I reached into the dirt and made new life. I am the God of all Daleks!"

The Daleks chant in unison...

"Worship him!  Worship him!  Worship him!"

Bringing back the Daleks in 2005, four years after 9/11 and the start of the 'War on Terror', two years into the conquest and occupation of Iraq, Russell T. Davies makes them religious fundamentalists.  The world is in the middle of an apparent 'clash of civilisations', with religion as the supposed organising logic.  But are these new fundamentalist Daleks - 'Fundamentaleks' - supposed to be Osama and Al Qaeda?  Are they Bush and the neocon Christian crusaders?  Both?  Two sides of the same coin?

To me, they look more like another kind of fundamentalism, a more prevalent and destructive kind.

They run a massive media system based on ruthless competition.  The housemates who lose the battle for popularity get ejected into nothingness.  The Trinny & Susannah bots encourage people to carve into their own flesh in order to look right.  The weakest links get zapped, and the strongest link is the one who most effectively and ruthlessly competes, who must callously fucks over his competitors.  Society has become "a charnel house" in which people compete in competitions of spectacular triviality which are framed as epic battles.  You have to step on the other poor schlubs in order to win.  This system is publically fronted by celebrities reconfigured as hollow, inhuman monsters.  It is run by ordinary people who do evil things not because they're personally evil, but because they are employed by a systemic evil.  And it's all owned and controlled by Daleks who have absorbed a feverish and callous determination that can best be described, at least as far as RTD is concerned, as fanatical religion.

The Daleks have become neoliberals.  Capitalist crusaders, ruling a resurgent yet insane system, presiding over a world divided between the starving and the obese who "just watch telly", absorbing the working body utterly and assimilating it into themselves.  And the logic behind it all has penetrated human culture to the extent that TV runs the world, and relentlessly pushes an ideology of total competition, total dog-eat-dog.  (That this is, essentially, the world we live in is obvious since RTD uses shows of the present day, projected into the future.)  Survival has finally been formally and openly marketised.  The spectacle is omnipresent and it brazenly expresses the relations at the base of society: compete with each other so that your rulers can profit.

The Daleks have become market fundamentalists.

20

For March Against the Mainstream Media Day


The Editor (apparently he edits the whole of human society) has uncovered Suki's true identity.  Instead of being just another inoffensive wannabe employee, she's actually...

"Eva Saint Julienne, last surviving member of the Freedom Fifteen. Hmm, self declared anarchist, is that right?"  His tone is patronising.  Non-mainstream political principles are a quaint and amusing affectation.

"The Freedom Foundation has been monitoring Satellite Five's transmissions," says Suki, pulling a gun on the smug bastard, "We have absolute proof that the facts are being manipulated. You are lying to the people."

"Ooo, I love it," he giggles, still in the same tone of amusement, as though he's listening to hilariously naff dialogue in a period drama, "Say it again."

"This whole system is corrupt. Who do you represent?"

The Editor is self-aware enough to know that, for all his power, he's a slave himself.

"I answer to the Editor in Chief.... If you don't mind, I'm going to have to refer this upwards."

Suki looks up, to see what the Editor is referring to.

"What is that?" she asks.

"Your boss. This has always been your boss, since the day you were born."


Lower down Satellite 5, the Doctor is quizzing Cathica, who has lived all her life on one level.

"I don't know anything," she says proudly.

"Don't you even ask?"

"Why would I?"

"You're a journalist."

"What's that got to do with anything?"

She genuinely doesn't understand him.  She doesn't know what is on the floors above her... except that on the executive level, the place she's been trained to yearn for, "the walls are made of gold".  She doesn't know why "immigration has tightened up".  Forced to guess, she flails around and suggests some vague notions, all based on the random 'shit happens' model, none of which point any blame at anybody powerful or any powerful structures.  And this is a member of society in which people are surrounded by 'News', in which they have holes carved into their own heads so information can be beamed directly into their brains.  For all the 'news' and 'information', they don't know what's going on or why.

"This society's the wrong shape..." says the Doctor.


When the Doctor and Rose reach the top floors, the walls aren't made of gold, they're made of frosted steel, and the workstations are manned by zombies - including Suki.

"I think she's dead," says the Doctor.

"She's working," says Rose.

In capitalism, mindless labour transforms you into the walking dead... or, in this case, the sitting at a desk dead.

"It may interest you to know," smarms the Editor, "that this is not the Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire. In fact, it's not actually human at all. It's merely a place where humans happen to live..."

There is an angry snarl from the ceiling.

"...yeah, sorry..." the Editor corrects himself, jumping at the growl of his boss, "It's a place where humans are allowed to live by kind permission of my client."

His client (he's a banker) is a gigantic slab of meat.  The whole system of Satellite 5 is set up to keep it cool and fresh, to stop it turning and rotting.  The Empire is system of air conditioning; designed to stop zombie meat from spoiling.  But the creature is also a huge, roaring, slavering mouth.  At the centre of the Empire, yet again, there is consumption, insatiable hunger... but this mouth also speaks.  It speaks its version of truth directly into the brains of the human race. 

"Create a climate of fear and it's easy to keep the borders closed,"explains the Editor, "It's just a matter of emphasis. The right word in the right broadcast repeated often enough can destabilise an economy, invent an enemy..." (it seems redundant, but I'll mention the word: Iraq) "... or change a vote."

"So all the people on Earth are like, slaves," says Rose, cutting straight to the quick as usual.

"Well, now, there's an interesting point..." returns the Editor, "Is a slave a slave if he doesn't know he's enslaved?"

"Yes," says the Doctor simply.  He won't debate the issue, despite the Editor's more-grown-up-than-thou goading.  If you just concede that it's even up for debate, the Editors of this world have already won.  It becomes Question Time.  It becomes safe.

Perhaps a slave is even more a slave if he just takes it for granted that he's free.

37

A flying ship has plunged into a tall public building, causing panic.

Outside 10 Downing St., the media have been sat around for hours with their cameras trained on the closed black door, waiting for someone official to come out and hand them their version of events... which will, of course, be repeated verbatim as The Story. 

Luckily for these relentless seekers after truth, a politician comes out to give them a press conference.

"Our inspectors have searched the skies," he tells the journalists, "and they have found massive weapons of destruction, capable of being deployed in 45 seconds.  We face extinction unless we strike first."  He goes on to beg the UN for "an emergency resolution" which will give them permission to launch this pre-emptive strike.  His words are relayed on the TV news without comment... except by the Doctor and the other people watching.

As satire, this isn't subtle.  It's like a sledgehammer to crack a nut... because that's what the WMD story always was: an easily cracked nut.  But in a world in which barely anyone in the global media is capable of cracking nuts even with a nutcracker, maybe it's time to get out the sledgehammers... if only to make a sarcastic point.

As a satire of US/UK foreign policy in the wake of 9/11, it's crude... but then US/UK foreign policy in the wake of 9/11 was crude.  It didn't need to be anything else.  The media could be relied upon to discount the idea that respectable politicians in 'democracies' might have cynical or imperialistic motives.  They could be relied upon to train their cameras at closed doors.  They could be relied upon to accept the contents of press conferences as basic common sense, and then amplify those press conferences and call them The Story.

This is the aspect of RTD's satire that is so often overlooked: what we might call 'the Andrew Marr aspect'.  Marr did a cutesy little cameo in this episode, in which he stands outside 10 Dowing St., wittering about personalities and process, while the government within - which now comprises evil, sniggering babies hidden inside the fleshsuits of respectable, well-groomed, sincere professionals - plots mass murder in order to make a killing on fuel profits.  Again, about as subtle as the truth.

On April 9th 2003, as the invasion of Iraq proceeded, beginning a process which would lead to the takeover of Iraq's economy and perhaps more than a million Iraqi deaths, Andrew Marr stood outside 10 Downing St. and said this:

Well, I think this does one thing - it draws a line under what, before the war, had been a period of... well, a faint air of pointlessness, almost, was hanging over Downing Street. There were all these slightly tawdry arguments and scandals. That is now history. Mr Blair is well aware that all his critics out there in the party and beyond aren't going to thank him - because they're only human - for being right when they've been wrong. And he knows that there might be trouble ahead, as I said. But I think this is very, very important for him. It gives him a new freedom and a new self-confidence. He confronted many critics.

I don't think anybody after this is going to be able to say of Tony Blair that he's somebody who is driven by the drift of public opinion, or focus groups, or opinion polls. He took all of those on. He said that they would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath, and that in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating. And on both of those points he has been proved conclusively right. And it would be entirely ungracious, even for his critics, not to acknowledge that tonight he stands as a larger man and a stronger prime minister as a result.

40

Rose is exploring the space station, waiting for the end of the world.  Suddenly she encounters a young woman with blue skin, wearing overalls and hard at work.

Rose asks if she's allowed to be where she is.  Her automatic response to officialdom of any kind is to question her own status.  For all her confidence, she's a girl who lives on an estate and worked in a shop.

The young woman in overalls looks awkward.

"You have to give us permission to talk," she says, nervously aware of the irony.

Rose is dumbfounded.  She realises that this woman looks upon her - Rose - as a high status person, someone before whom she must be humble.

"Er..." she says, embarassed, "you... have... permission?"  She inflects it as a question.  'Is that the right form of words that I'm using?'  There is embarassment in her voice, and a faint look of nausea on her face.  It makes me love her.

"Thank you," says the woman, who's name turns out to be Raffalo, "And, no, you're not in the way. Guests are allowed anywhere."

Rafallo turns out to be a plumber.  She addresses Rose respectfully as "Miss".  Rose probably feels like a teacher.

"They still have plumbers?" says Rose, stating it to herself as much as asking a question.  Five billion years in the future and there are still grease monkeys in boiler suits, running around backstage, making sure the swells have plenty of hot water.

"I hope so," says Rafallo, "else I'm out of a job."

Just like Rose is out of a job now that, between the Autons and the Doctor, the shop where she worked got blown up.  Rose knows what unemployment means.

Rose says goodbye and, as she leaves, Rafallo thanks her "for the permission".  

Rose has met one of the people in the background.  The people who make everything work.  One of the people the Doctor has never had much to do with until now.  But Rose would, because she was one of those people herself, until recently.  Now she's travelling.  Rafallo will not be as lucky, despite being Rose's mirror image.  Because the universe is shitty and unfair.  Still.  Rafallo is about to die because of the profiteering scheme of a rich, sociopathic bit of skin who also happens to be the last human being alive... if we allow that she's still human at all (and that Rafallo somehow isn't).

It's a shame that Cassandra is the show's first explicitly transgender character.  And it's also a shame that we, the people of the universe, are depicted as still ridden by class in the year 5 Billion.  As Slavoj Žižek said:

Think about the strangeness of today's situation. Thirty, forty years ago, we were still debating about what the future will be: communist, fascist, capitalist, whatever. Today, nobody even debates these issues. We all silently accept global capitalism is here to stay. On the other hand, we are obsessed with cosmic catastrophes: the whole life on earth disintegrating, because of some virus, because of an asteroid hitting the earth, and so on. So the paradox is, that it's much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest radical change in capitalism.

He said that in 2005.

The Third Way

There is, in some quarters, an assumption about alternatives.  There is fannish continuity obsession on the one hand and, on the other hand, there is 'the real story' which tends to be to do with families and relationships.  To an extent, this is a straw man... but it sometimes exists, implicitly, even where it is abjured.  And it's a false dichotomy.

There is a Third Way: the investigation of the relationship between the political implications of monster wars and the lives of ordinary people.

This is a Third Way that the classic series hardly ever engaged with.  In its own more ass-covery, fig-leafy way, this is something that the new series hardly ever engages with either.

Whereas the classic series concentrated on the monstrous, and then later upon the fan view of the monstrous, the new series tends to concentrate upon interpersonal relationships with monstrosity as a pretty backdrop.

The difference is that the classic series' logic was pragmatic (i.e. we are making a show about monsters) whereas the new series' logic is openly ideological (i.e. human family and romantic relationships are THE REAL STORY).  If you doubt that this is ideological, look at how it has been iterated again and again.  Look at 'The Empty Child', at 'Father's Day', at 'School Reunion', at 'Army of Ghosts / Doomsday', at 'Closing Time', at 'Night Terrors'.

Neither view is supportable but the former has at least the virtue of non-didacticism.  It's a contrast to the aggressive apoliticism of so much of the new series, even when the new series dresses itself in the clothes of political engagement.

There is, fascinatingly, a similarity to the simplistic view of Blair as a villain.  It is the difference between a wishy-washy reformist liberal/leftyishism ("Blair has betrayed Labour") and a faux-pragmatic panglossian acceptance ("he's achieved modest things that were, realistically, all he could do"). 

There is a Third Way that is invisible to those leftists who complain either that he did what he could or that he didn't do enough, precisely because it is based on the political relationship between personality and wider monstrosity. 

That, weirdly, is why the more RTD moved into an engagement with the problems of New Labour, the more he moved into an acceptance of its premises.  By the time of the uber-cynicism of 'The Sound of Drums' etc, he'd accepted that people are, essentially, horrible and Blair/Saxon is probably about what they deserve.

Reithian Values Meet 'The 60s'...

The old show was frequently highly reactionary but it also did better than most shows when it came to challenging establishment, bourgeois ideology and/or imperialist assumptions.

This division is the 'ethos'. Frequently reactionary but with a proportionately greater tendency to buck this trend.

The hero of the show is a white male with a professional title, a line in Edwardian clothing (which retains a formality despite veering between scruffy, dandified, bohemian, etc.) and who travels around in a symbol of the British state. The odd Jacobite aside, his companions are usually thoroughly respectable types.

So, even when he takes a moral line against exploitation, it can seem like the civilized Englishman taking it upon himself to explain ethics to the barbarians.

However, while it may be possible to characterise this as an "overall or originating ethos" (as a poster at Gallibase put it) it's one that has also been challenged from within.

At the start of the classic series, the Doctor is adamant that he cannot and must not intervene in history... including the religious practices of the Aztecs, a people destroyed by imperialism.

Then again, in that very same story, we also get a dose of condescension towards the Aztecs, portraying them as generally backward (i.e. "Autloc is the extraordinary man here!") and suggesting that their religious practices will shock Cortés into attacking them. 'The Crusade' attempts a very sincere portrayal of Arabs as human beings... but also includes orientalist stereotypes.

When the first Doctor intervenes in the future history of aliens, etc., he very often takes a stance that seems very anti-imperialist, i.e. in 'The Sensorites'. But, again, in that same story, the aliens are presented as encoded Asian stereotypes, and the human infiltrators are driven mad by their exposure to an inscrutable alien culture... which is pure colonialist self-pity.

But you also have to consider that, in the kind of fiction from which Who springs, the scientist figure, the lone inventor, was an ambiguous and untrustworthy figure who could not always be relied upon to toe the line. In Wells’ The Time Machine, the Time Traveller (clearly a forerunner of the Doctor) is explaining time travel to a group of friends when one of them imagines jumping forward in time to collect massive interest on a long-term investment… “…to arrive in a society run on strictly communistic lines perhaps?” suggests the Time Traveller.

All the same, the Doctor often assumes the right to intervene, which can seem imperialistic… but, having said that, the Doctor’s right to intervene does itself become the subject of some uncertainty within the show itself, several times. The Doctor has to justify himself to the Time Lords, firstly by claiming that power must be used to help those in need (and this in a story that forecloses on an imperialistic interpretation of that remark by being a forthright condemnation of imperialism), then by claiming during his second trial that he usually waits for a request for help from a local authority figure!

Times change and there was a shift in political discourse between the eras of the old and new shows.

Of course, political discourse was shifting - drastically - even during the run of the original series.

In ’63, before what we call “the sixties” got going, the show embraces the ethos of the post-war liberal consensus filtered through the tropes of the fiction which it draws upon. As the decade progresses, we get more attempts to engage with increasing social radicalism… getting more forthrightly radical as they go along, i.e. from the ambivalence of the anti-authority/pro(ish)-colonial ‘Macra Terror’ (there's a valid reading of this story that sees the Doctor as defending colonialism… though I’d point out that there’s no reason to assume that the Macra are the aboriginal inhabitants of the Colony… and that they also assume metaphorical valences that don’t really seem to include race) to the all-out assault on imperialism in ‘The War Games’… though, again, we see the divided ethos in the way even that story collapses into a weak reformism when the Doctor calls in the Time Lords and sends the humans back to their real wars.

The reactionary backlash is seen less than one might expect in the Pertwee era, possibly because of the left/liberal politics of Barry Letts… though he and Dicks inherit a framework in which the Doctor has become an adjunct to the military establishment. They cope with this by making the Doctor an infuriating maverick ecology-buff who scoffs at the Brigadier and assorted government types. Of course, the third Doctor is also very bourgeois in surface appearance. But he’s as likely to claim friendship with Mao (who, aside from his real odious historical character, was the emblem of a sizeable chunk of the European radical left at the time) as he is to claim friendship with Tubby Rowlands.

The show tends to trail behind the times a bit. There’s a time lag. So anti-Vietnam protests only faintly show up in the form of the Doctor’s peace sign in ‘Frontier in Space’. And the crescendo of strike action and union power of the early seventies only shows up in ‘The Sun Makers’ in ’77.

To just jump back a tad, I think it’s important to remember that the left was incomparably more influential in the mainstream during most of the original run than it is now. Thatcher and the rise of neoliberalism, together with the fall of what was called communism, dealt an enormous blow to left-wing politics in the late 80s and early 90s. The left is only really beginning to rally now. For most of the classic series, there was a rough ‘social democratic’ consensus in the country that progress was tied to social liberalization and a certain governmental role in investment and in curbing the power of business. Even the pre-Thatcher Tories accepted a form of this argument. However… and this is the key point… what we might call ‘social democracy’ was never really all the great on race and imperialism. A lot of Labourist thinkers assumed the inherent progressiveness of the spread of Western (white) civilisation. Liberalism was no better; often it was worse. Even Bertrand Russell was terrible on what used to be called ‘coloured people’ and colonization.

So, if the show evinced a divided progressive ethos (which I think it did) then that could be said to have stemmed from the divided, rising and declining social democratic consensus of the society that produced it. (As such, we’d expect it to be frequently reactionary, because social democracy was frequently reactionary on all sorts of issues from unions to race.)

The new show, of course, is a product of the wretched age of New Labour, of the rightward-shifted mainstream left behind by Thatcher, and neoliberalism triumphant… and yet, it produces episodes that are clearly ripostes to, say, ‘humanitarian interventions’… and even manages to correct its own lapses, with ‘Turn Left’ readable as a riposte to ‘The Unquiet Dead’ on the issue of asylum seekers, and ‘Planet of the Ood’ deliberately revisiting a moral lapse on the part of the Doctor regarding slavery and, in the process, becoming a parable about commodified workers that supports violent revolution!

So why the unusual degree of ‘bucking the trend’? Even up to recently, this was still happening (though less often and less reliably). So why?

I think its partly to do with the show’s roots. Take Wells, for example. He was a socialist, by his own definition. By the standards of his time he was a radical progressive. His templates for speculative fiction – The Time Machine and War of the Worlds – are, respectively, an allegory about class exploitation and a through-the-looking-glass parable about imperialism. And yet, he was (by our standards) a racist and a eugenicist (see what I was saying before about ‘social democracy’ being terrible on issues like race).

So, a divided ethos in embryo?

I think the subjective factor becomes important. Robert Holmes seems to have been an instinctive radical, at least in his writing - which is interesting given that his life shares some similarities with that of Orwell (i.e. Orwell was a policeman in Burma, Holmes was in Burma with the Army and then was in the police). RTD is also given to quite strong liberal/lefty critique in his writing... though he also seems influenced by the culturalism of, say, Dawkins and Hitchens and frequently flirts with a view of people that is pessimistic to the point of being reactionary. This is the left in the age of neoliberalism and the 'war on terror'.

These two figures in themselves - both apparently given to lacing their writing with liberal/left critiques but one working in the age of 60s counter-culture, a strong left, union power, etc.; the other working in the age of neoliberal triumph - may account for the different tone of the same 'divided ethos' in the classic and new series': the former leaning towards the left, the latter leaning towards the right.

Moffat, in my opinion, is a de facto reactionary by virtue (if we can use that word) of his sheer political disinterest and complacency, by his ironical raiding of political history for icons and motifs and nothing more. That could be why the show is now getting more and more reactionary, despite the fact that we are now moving - slowly and hesitatingly - into an exciting time of growing struggle.

Asylum, UK

A rejigg of something I wrote for the old site on the subject of 'Turn Left', the best episode of series 4.


The alternate world that Davies conjures up in ‘Turn Left’ is not so far removed from our own. We might not (yet) see British soldiers patrolling our streets and pointing automatic weapons at unarmed women (though the recent behaviour of the police towards student protestors has been pretty savage)... but that sight would not be so unfamiliar to the people of Baghdad. Or Belfast, for that matter.

The nightmarish, decaying, dystopian Britain in this episode reflects aspects of our current social predicament… indeed, as Simon Kinnear pointed out in DWM, the episode seems prescient of the years ahead of it, of (to put it my way) recession/cuts torn Britain.

While it doesn’t get specific, or touch economics much, ‘Turn Left’ seems like the closest thing to a direct political attack on crisis-wracked British society that any mainstream TV show could possibly get away with. Let’s just recap: in an episode of that highly commercial kid’s romp known as Doctor Who, Russell T. Davies suggested that, in a time of crisis, the British state might institute a program of racist slavery, if not extermination. At the very least, we see people herded and treated like animals while patrolled by armed guardians of the state. Moreover, the people being treated that way are the poor, the dispossessed, the helpless. Brits get the kind of treatment meted out to refugees once they too become scapegoatable dependents.

I’m not sure that Davies intended the title as direct political advice (though it wouldn’t be bad advice) but it surely can’t be entirely an accident that Donna’s apocalyptic turn is a turn to the right, a turn that results in “England for the English”.

The Donna in the car at the start of ‘Turn Left’ might vote that way. She’s the same thoughtless, selfish Donna we met at the start of ‘The Runaway Bride’. She’s exactly the kind of self-involved, complacent brat who hardly notices as society crashes around her… until she is touched by it. Davies pulls no punches. We see her obsessing over stationary and offices grudges as the rest of Chowdry’s staff watch the TV, horrified, for news of the hospital. We see her asking “What’s for tea?” as news of Sarah Jane Smith’s death flashes on the screen.

I know people like that. Indeed, speaking as someone who lives in southern England – surely the global epicentre of reactionary complacency - it is very hard indeed not to derive a massive and delicious jolt of schadenfreude from the way Davies manages to turn the (surviving) population of the Sun and Daily Mail reading world into despised, harangued, jobless refugees. “Who’s going to listen to us?” asks Donna’s Mum, “Refugees. We haven’t even got a vote. We’re just no-one Donna. We don’t exist.” To put it another way: seek asylum and you’ll be locked up in one.

It’s ironic that as Donna’s society disintegrates, she suddenly discovers other people. With a little help from Wilf, Donna’s experience of privation brings her closer to society, to her fellow humans. She barges in to tell Rocco to shut up, calling him Mussolini (ironic, given that it’s now her country turning fascist), but ends up singing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ with him. When he and his family are taken away, she needs Wilf to tell her what it really means (is Bernard Cribbins incredible in that scene or what?), but when she realises, she chases the truck and demands to know what’s happening. She has woken up from her isolation and self-involvement.

Also, there is a highly encoded but still discernible protest against Islamophobia in that scene. Rocco and his family are not Muslims or from the Middle East, but it was simply impossible (for me anyway) to watch the rounding-up scene in 2008 without thinking of Guantanamo Bay, Jean Charles de Menezes and Jack Straw’s seeming addiction to demonising Muslims. People might object that this is an arbitrary and subjective reading… but plenty of reviewers were happy to interpret this scene as referencing the holocaust, despite the fact that Rocco and his family are not identified as Jews anymore than they are as Muslims. Given that the episode as a whole seems so determinedly current, I think my reading is more apt.

As for the bug? Well, it looks (when we eventually see it) very much like a rucksack designed by David Cronenberg. But what does it mean?

I think it’s a self-doubt monster. It doesn’t really feed on the changes it causes in history, it really feeds on Donna’s lack of self-worth, on her willingness to believe that her Mother is right about her, that she’s useless and helpless, a disappointment, a failure. The right turn it convinces her to make is a capitulation to her Mum. Donna’s own goals, at this point, might still be selfish, but they are based on confidence. The right turn, the turn to the safe option, is the turn towards her Mum’s view of her, towards the easy assumption that she’s nobody and nothing, that life is an uninspiring chore. “A life never loved,” as Rose puts it. And am I reading too much into the fact that ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ contains the lyrics “Nobody loves me” and “Mamma Mia, let me go”?

When first reviewing ‘Turn Left’ I made some connections between Donna’s self-doubt and the state of the society depicted. Those connections now seem rather tenuous to me. I don’t nowadays feel comfortable asserting that societies round up minorities because they suffer from free-floating neurosis. However, Donna’s fateful moment of self-doubt can be read as a capitulation to power, to the judgements of another who has power over her, as well as to a feeling that her horizons are bound by her background… even, with a little extrapolation, her class.

All in all, I adore this episode. If ‘Midnight’ is the anti-‘Gridlock’, this is ‘Midnight’s redeeming coda. Perhaps just as bleak in its way, but with hope lying in social solidarity and resistance to power.

The sci-fi elements might power the story, but the story is about human choices, personal and political. The kind of enjoyable sledgehammer metaphor underwriting, say, ‘Aliens of London’ can work as critique and/or satire but also, if taken literally, can create a distancing effect. The aliens or the mad computer get the blame for our social failures. This is undermined in ‘Turn Left’. The “Emergency Government” might exist because a Titanic-shaped spaceship fell on London, but there’s no hint that their policy of “England for the English” (and labour camps for the rest) is actually being fed to them by the evil, mind-controlling Zargoids. Moreover, they’re the sort of policies that might yet take hold on British soil in years to come, especially if the current government is allowed to push through its radical programme of neoliberal class-war shock therapy, which is amounting to a wanton and wholesale demolition of much-needed social safety nets.

You can't extrapolate every detail of this into a coherent political thesis (thank goodness) and so it can be subjected to multiple interpretations (much more interesting). The jist is pretty clear though.

Shame about the orientalism on display in the ‘bookend’ sequences, which use ethnic diversity and Eastern ethnicity as semiotic vehicles for the uncanny, the threatening and the predatory. On the whole, though, with its depiction of racial inequality (not least in the sequence where Donna and family are served by a hotel maid who is clearly implied to be a migrant worker) this episode is clearly on the side of the angels, without also indulging in too much liberal sanctimony.

This is Doctor Who's version of The Children of Men (the film).  It's atonement for 'The Unquiet Dead'.  Borderline miraculous.

Veto Axons

This is a round-up of my Timelash II stuff on Series 3... well, those bits of it that I haven't already posted elsewhere.  The 'Smith and Jones' bit is a tweaked version of something from the old site.  There's nothing about Axons in here, I just found myself amused by the anagram.


The Runaway Bride

The Doctor cold-bloodedly kills the Racnoss children... and the episode tries to have its cake and eat it by both giving the Doctor 'no choice' and implying that he 'went too far'. The probably unintentional implication is that neocon logic is unpalatable but inescapable, that we need people who will ruthlessly kill on a massive scale in order to protect us from the forces of unreasoning hostility.

We're a long way from "massive weapons of destruction" being a lie from a politician with an evil, greedy alien baby inside him. 



Smith and Jones

Russell reuses many of the ideas and techniques that made ‘Rose’ work as an introductory tale. There is a frenetic opening scene which introduces Martha, her family situation and her workplace. As in ‘Rose’, the new companion meets the Doctor at work and, as in ‘Rose’ he is already in the middle of an adventure. As in ‘Rose’, the Doctor and his new friend form an instant connection which takes the form of banter, intelligent co-operation in the midst of a crisis, lots of running and lots of holding hands. As in ‘Rose’, the new companion saves the Doctor’s life. As in ‘Rose’ we see her enter the TARDIS at night, in a London backstreet and immediately run out again in surprise (the only naturalistic way to portray a reaction to the TARDIS). Bits of the first Torchwood episode are reused too.

But there's also a lot that's different. Instead of beginning with the Doctor and showing us Martha from his P.O.V. or holding the Doctor in reserve and letting Martha encounter him at a moment of high drama (as in ‘Rose’), the episode instead allows him to pop up both after and before any of us were expecting to see him! Some of us might have thought he’d be in Scene One. Some of us, gulled by the opening scene’s echo of the structure of ‘Rose’, might have expected him to appear only when Martha needs rescuing from the Judoon. But instead he pops up when none of us were expecting him, does something entirely inexplicable, and then walks off.

Of course, it would have made sense to bring the Doctor in as soon as possible because the audience knows him whereas they don’t know Martha. But a pre-title sequence featuring the Doctor would destroy that Year Zero vibe that RTD is going for. For the moment, he wants us to feel like we’re beginning again. This is essential because he’s trying to make Martha - a brand new character in another character’s show - the central audience identification figure. Let’s pause for a moment to consider how incredibly difficult that is.

His strategy is still to ground the series in everyday life before zooming off into space opera. He makes Martha’s life instantly recognisable, introducing a different family member per phone call and allowing each to offer their own perspective on the same event, the brother’s birthday party. The device of the multiple phone calls is zesty, if slightly contrived (though can we really complain about contrivance in a show like Doctor Who?) and the sequence more competently fulfils the same function as the opening montage in ‘Rose’. The opening salvo of ‘Smith and Jones’ is far more confident and it introduces more characters.

By the time the Doctor appears, we already know Martha. She has a fractured family full of inwardly pointed tensions; she seems to be their nexus, their relay and their peacemaker. In the debate about whether Martha’s family is too soapy, its easy to miss just how much information Russell feeds us about these people in such a short space of time. We are told many things about Martha’s family in the space of two minutes, through a combination of snappy dialogue and detailed visual storytelling. We learn that Martha’s parents are acrimoniously separated, that her mother is an intelligent and acerbic professional woman, that her brother is an easygoing guy with a female partner and a baby, that she is very close to her less diplomatic sister, that her father is well-off and undergoing a midlife crisis and that his girlfriend is primarily attracted to him because of his credit card. Soaps are not generally skilful or ambitious enough to pull off such rapid feats of narrative athletics. On the contrary, it is part of the remit of soaps that they should be slow and plodding. This sedate pace is part of the hypnotic effect of soap operas. Even old-fashioned glam soaps like Dynasty unfolded at a pace that is glacial by the standards of modern drama programmes. Moreover, there is little need for soaps to blast their viewers with information because their viewers will already know the backstories of the characters from interminable previous episodes. Soap operas don’t use characterisation as a means to propel or contextualise a wider plot. In soap, the personal problems and domestic conflicts of the characters are the plot (at least until ratings start to fall and, as a result, jumbo jets start doing likewise onto pubs). If they fired information at us as quickly as ‘Smith and Jones’ does soaps would exhaust themselves before getting started. Soaps need to develop their characters slowly because in soap that is the whole show. In Doctor Who you need the characters established quickly so that you can get on with the stuff about space rhinos. Even when a spaceship did show up in Dynasty, it was there to remove a character, not to give a character something to do.

There's a confidence of judgement all through this episode. Russ makes the Plasmavore an internal shape changer and so resists the temptation to let her transform into a Big Impressive CGI Vampire for the hell of it, which would have both deprived the sublimely sinister Anne Reid of screentime and left the audience scratching their heads and wondering why she/it didn’t just morph into a pseudo-Judoon.

The Judoon are great because they're not trying to do anything so tedious and Krillitane-like as take over our planet or suck out our minds… they've been hired to do a job, enforce a law and apprehend a criminal. They had jurisdiction. While it lasted, they did everything they felt was necessary (in their own brutal, unsubtle yet fundamentally non-malicious way) to complete their task. That makes them more than monsters. That gives them a psychology, a mindset. A familiar one too. They are recognisable, like the personality types we meet in Martha’s family. They make aesthetic sense, something best illustrated by the contrast between their paramilitary demeanour and the black markers they use to catalogue you.

I also truly loved the “Ro bo sklo fro mo!” scene and the way in which they then assimilated the English language. I remember being fascinated by just such linguistic playfulness in Doctor Who when I was a kid, revelling in making up my own versions of the Androgum clan names and the bureaucratic serial-number nomenclature of the Caretakers.

Justice isn’t a political ideology for them. They’ve been hired to do justice and woe betide you if you get in the way… and yet they don’t abuse their power. Justice isn’t simply what they say it is. They are clearly following a rule book. Phsyical assault is punishable by death. They didn’t kill that guy because they wanted to. They did it because the rule book stipulated it as the appropriate response. The Judoon are more like a SWAT team with a few rules and regulations. The best bit of the episode was when Lead Judoon (or Big Chief Rhino Boy as the Doctor called him) gave Martha her compensation. They'll execute you on the spot for hitting them with a vase but if they push you up against a wall and it turns out you’re "innocent" they'll give you some vouchers to say sorry!

I’ll finish off by looping back to the central facet of ‘Smith and Jones’, the Doctor’s time travel demonstration for Martha. The Doctor’s “cheap trick” is, in many ways, the cleverest thing in the episode… which is rather clever in itself: pulling off a narrative stunt like that (something that only Doctor Who could do and which, nowadays, it does far too often and to little import) and having your main character, the one who pulls it off, refer to it as a “cheap trick”. But think about it for a moment… in the programme we’re talking about, the main character, at the end of the plot, travels back to the start!

Now, we can look at that in purely literal terms (the Doctor travels in time, big deal) or we can look at it as a vertiginous feat of pure narrative, narrative unbound and free to loop back upon itself, to eat its own tale (if you’ll pardon the shameless pun). In the old days, the revelation of a temporal paradox would be the Big Sinister Episode Three Cliffhanger. In modern Who, it’s a “cheap trick” harnessed to the service of character development. That sounds like a criticism… it even feels like it ought to be a criticism as I write it, but if you’ve seen The Terminator or Twelve Monkeys or even ‘Day of the Daleks’ then you’ve already seen the Big Sinister Time Paradox story! You surely don’t need to see it again! What you haven’t seen before is a moment when a character makes a completely believable decision to accept time travel as a reality before they step out onto Platform One or meet the Tribe of Gum. Well, you’ve seen it now!

Its a significant advance on ‘Rose’ in which our heroine believes the TARDIS can travel in time simply because the Doctor says it can and, by that point, she’s ready to believe anything. But who would believe such a thing until it was proved? Until you saw it work? Someone who just believes in time travel because they are told about it? In my book that’s far more unlikely than the MRI Scanner of Doom. In ‘Smith and Jones’, the proof of time travel is offered to Martha before the assertion is made, before she even knows that the assertion will be made and it’s the proof that starts her on the journey towards the moment when she will ask for proof... which is really the ultimate way to prove time travel, isn’t it! In other scripts, the characters travel in time. In ‘Smith and Jones’, the script itself travels in time, overtaking itself before it starts running. This, in its own quiet and flippant way, is remarkable and mind-bending stuff.

Oh, one last thing... am I only person amused by the idea that if Doctor Who is resurrected for 3D HeadPlug Interactive Cybervision in 2047 and a whole generation of kids, entranced by the new stuff, go back to the scratchy old episodes from 2007, they'll all be wondering what the hell Martha means by "Planet Zovirax"?


I've covered 'The Shakespeare Code' and 'Gridlock' in other posts.  Lets just say that 'Gridlock' is one of the greatest TV shows ever made and 'The Shakespeare Code'... umm... isn't.


Daleks in Manhattan / Evolution of the Daleks

I so want to like this. It's got the right Who vibe within it, unlike so much of, say, Season 2. It's got a sense of politics and myth. It's got characters who vaguely resemble human beings. It attempts to have a sense of history.

There's lots of good stuff. There's a representation of poverty and inequality and injustice. There's an exuberance to the production. There's an attempt to have the Daleks merge with and emerge from the art deco decor of the building, as though they mesh perfectly with the aesthetics of the monstrous, imperial, vainglorious demonstration of wealth and power amidst misery. The musical number is cute. The idea of Daleks meshing with humans has potential.

Sadly, it doesn't really work at all. Tallulah isn't in it for any reason. Racism is glossed over. There is some terrible dialogue (though there is also some great dialogue). There is no interest in the actual mechanics of evolution or mutation or genes... which wouldn't be so bad except that the episode doesn't even attempt to make its own inaccurate version of evolution (which appears to be about mutations of the soul caused by lightning or something) work consistently... Also, the episode once again peddles the idea that personality (Good or Evil) is directly encoded in the genes, which is very reactionary and very simplistic. It would be easy enough to avoid all these nasty subtexts and an incoherent, flailing plot by simply dropping the scientific terminology and using some bit of sci-fi nonsense... which is what David Whitaker did when he did the same story better in the 60s.

And the direction is clumsy in the extreme. Good direction might have been able to make the script work, even when it calls for the Daleks to fail to notice the Doctor though he's standing directly in front of them in plain view... good direction might have been able to make it look less ridiculous when the Daleks crowd around the Doctor screaming "EXTERMINATE!" for the umpteenth time but then don't exterminate him. But, no.


The Lazarus Experiment and 42 were too boring to sit through, let alone write about.


And I shall be addressing Human Nature / The Family of Blood seperately at some point.


Blink

The story that won Timelash II.  The best, apparently.

Well, look... obviously this is overrated... but that's understandable given the immediate effect of its bravura construction and wonderfully gothic monsters.

It's actually not that overrated.

Moffat certainly does take sitcom situations (comedy nakedness) and sitcom characters, some of whom border on social/gender stereotypes... with geeky Lawrence entirely crossing the border.  But he subjects them to narrative contortions and grotesque experiences that characters actually in sitcoms never have to cope with.

In so doing, he manages to turn the episode into a surprisingly careful, sympathetic, compact and poignant study of the passing of time and the achievement of emotional maturity.

Shame about the business whereby a woman ends up marrying a man who just decides to follow her, thus seemingly endorsing stalking as a romantic wooing strategy.

And it's also a shame that the Angels are explained as much as they are.  It overcomplicates them and dullifies them... though nowhere near as much as their follow-up appearance.

Also, why don't the characters just close one eye at a time?

The one thing that no aspect of this should ever have been was any kind of template for the show as a whole.

Oh.


My confused thoughts on the closing trilogy may be trudged through here.

Childhood's End

Shabgraff does Series 1 of the revival.  It's my blather from Timelash II, plus a little new stuff.  (I may do something separate about 'The End of the World' at some point.)  This is about a series which works because its about a young woman growing up.  I feel like I've grown up too, in a sense, since 2005... which is why my opinions about Series 1 have drastically changed since first viewing.



Rose

I have never been able to entirely make up my mind about this.

The characterisation is glib, sneering at ditzy blonde 'chavvy' people who say silly things about making legal claims and flirt with anything in sight, etc (admittedly, this improves later in the series)... not to mention having a LAD character who is OBSESSED WITH FOOTBALL (as are all men, obviously), probably looks at porn on the internet and is stupid (this doesn't improve ever... though, in fairness to RTD's writing, it might've helped if they'd cast somebody who could act, even just a little bit).

There are things about it that are puzzlingly wrong... just off somehow... like the way Rose calls for a lone store caretaker (!) and calls him "Wilson", as though he's an underfootman or something. Huh?

Plus, the music is absolutely awful. And about half the comedy bombs. I know we're all supposed to look down our more-sophisticated-and-ironic-than-thou noses at people who hate the wheelie bin... but it's still stupid.

There are some great things in it, however. They whole idea of the Autons being the first monster in the new series is inspired... and they're quite well done... though, obviously, the priority was to use monsters that were on Earth in the present day, i.e. to make the initial setting as inoffensive to sneery meedja types as possible.

This really is the underlying logic of the whole episode: appease the meedja. Look meedja, it's a "serious" actor... and he's not wearing anything naff, he's wearing a leather jacket, etc. Look meedja, a pop star/lad's mag companion! Look meedja, London (the only place people like you think fucking exists).

Luckily there's enough magic in the TARDIS and the Autons and Chris (who's miscast but good anyway) and the excellent Billie Piper (who will be the unexpected jewel of the first series) to make the whole thing watchable and, often, fun.

Oh, and the ferocious, unrelenting, slavering meedja hype helped too, I imagine.

There's a germ of something interesting in the Doctor's appearance as a lone bomber (soon junked)... and the geeky internet bloke who's somewhere between an obsessed fan, a conspiracy theorist and a cultural dissident.  It suggests a support for the uncool, the obsessional, the underground that strangely belies the meedja-pleasing and brand-resurrecting surface priorities on display.

The Autons retain their original charge as emblems of commodity fetishism... products become autonomous and threatening because they represent alienated labour.  Rose's status as a wage slave only emphasises these undertones, as does the Doctor's reference to a "price war" and the Auton's imperialistic lust for our plastic (oil). Sadly, the Nestene consciousness is now a refugee rather than a imperialist invader, and has lost its old tentacular image.


The Unquiet Dead

They present themselves as peaceful and helpless. They ask for help. The help for which they ask is clearly best characterised as refuge and/or asylum. They are fleeing the devastating effects of a war. The Doctor evidently feels guilty. He helps them. They turn out to be malignant and vicious, plotting theft and murder. They have to be kept out so that our world is not swamped, overrun, devastated and stolen from us. Compassion, trust, openness... are all shown to stem from guilt and to be dangerous emotions which potentially bring ruin.

All this took place in the cultural context of an ongoing reactionary panic about asylum seekers and refugees "swamping" us, getting special care, bringing crime, etc... when in fact they are treated abominably by our system... which is all the more shameful since they are very often fleeing poverty and war created by the very neoliberal system that we, as a nation, have so belligerently promoted. For instance, just googling "asylum seekers iraq" instantly turns up this press release from Human Rights Watch, criticising the British government for plans to return Iraqi asylum seekers to the hellhole that our invasion helped create. The date of the report? About four months after 'Unquiet Dead' made the government's case for it.

This story clearly carries connotations that relate directly to the 'debate' about refugees and asylum seekers. It is, moreover, clearly lending support to an isolationist and xenophobic worldview, pursued as policy by the British government and promulgated with special intensity and racist viciousness by our press.

Moreover, it clearly runs contary to the best spirit of Doctor Who, which has a virtual mission statement to embrace open-mindedness, compassion and acceptance of the different... even if we leave out its venerable habit of criticising imperialism, war and their human costs. As an extra insult, it runs contrary to the spirit of the novel from which it draws inspiration, which was written by the author who it depicts.

In 'A Christmas Carol', a miserable old sourpuss encounters spirits and ends up rejuvenated and happy. In 'The Unquiet Dead', Scrooge's journey becomes Dickens' own journey... except Scrooge learns that empathy and charity towards the desperate are essential, inherently enriching and even morally obligatory, whereas Dickens learns that empathy and charity towards the desperate are dangerous and foolhardy emotions, born of self-pity and guilt, and to be resisted on pain of self destruction.

The fact that its possible to devise tortuous and disingenuous ways of reinterpreting all this away does not dilute the self-evident moral, intellectual and artistic bankruptcy of this episode. Mark Gatiss' intentions are (and this really shouldn't need saying) neither here nor there.

Aliens of London / World War III

Hated this at the time.  Now...

Look, there are all kinds of things wrong with this... but, at the end of the day, it does involve a bunch of vicious, vulgar and venal criminals, hiding under the skins of politicians, generals and senior policemen, who are plotting to start a fake war against a mythical enemy (supposedly capable of launching their "massive weapons of destruction" in "45 seconds"), supposedly in response to a flying ship crashing into a tall public building (a symbol of power and establishment)... and all in a quest to make a massive profit from selling fuel on the intergalactic market.

Meanwhile, the meedja (with whom RTD is clearly obsessed... but in a deeply ambivalent way) loiter around outside Downing St. wittering about process while missing the real story.   Andrew Marr, the quintessential face of 'capitalist realism', makes a cameo as himself... potraying himself as totally failing to pick up on what's happening.  He stands in front of the camera, solemnly discussing the personalities at Number 10, while failing to notice that a massive, murderous, warmongering criminal conspiracy is unfolding before his blinkered eyes. Not the first time.

As in 'Sound of Drums' later, RTD is getting public-faces to appear in shows that critique their own values. In Chris Morris style, he relies upon their tittery vacuousness to do all the deception for him.

Of course, we also have the irritating business with a precision guided missile that solves the problem by hitting its target and killing all the baddies (whereas, in reality, they actually tend to exacerbate problems and kill loads of innocent people when they miss).  And Harriet Jones is a comforting reformist daydream: the decent backbencher who could solve it all if only she could get into power... though this is pleasingly undermined later by the events of 'The Christmas Invasion'.

Beyond this, there is the admirable depiction of the effect of Rose's disappearance with the Doctor.  Rose (and the Doctor too, to an extent) is lovable because she's fundamentally decent, despite being a bit selfish and immature.

Dalek

An efficient action thriller. They do things here with both the physical and psychological Dalek that they will never bother to attempt again. It's all downhill from here, Dalekwise... though RTD's fundamentaleks in 'Bad Wolf' also impress.

Of course, this is greatly inferior to the audio play from which it comes.  Demented and overheated as 'Jubillee' is, it's still a much more interesting tale, seething with violence, madness and rage. 'Dalek' seems somewhat neutered by comparison.

There are some astonishing clunkers. The "if you cannot save the woman you love" bit is an excrutiating non sequitur.

There are some chillingly wonderful moments. Eccleston's spit-flinging rage and "You would make a good Dalek".

Politically, we're mostly in the right zone, while straying from RTD's insouciently brazen satire.  Van Statten's villainy stems from his wealth and his self-involved, fetishistic narcissism. The bit where he decides whether he wants a Democrat or a Republican based on their relative humour value (and no other consideration) is especially good. His torture of the Doctor ties right into the cultural moment... and ours, though people seem to have forgotten that the 'goodies' in the continuing "war on Terror" still have loads of people locked up in torture chambers.

Also, as Richard Pilbeam put it: "GeoComTex keeps going despite Van Statten being ousted, and there's no indication that it's going to be any better under Godard. The system's inherently rotten, it doesn't matter who's nominally in charge. Miles way from the standard 'Things will improve now that the evil CEO is gone' approach."

On the other hand, the depiction of the Dalek as an unreasoningly hostile enemy that wants to destroy civilisation for its own sake, and must consequently be kept locked up, chimes with certain neo-con-friendly ideas.  Is it an image of the unfathomably antagonistic barbarian against which Western culture must defend itself?  Is it, in short, al Qaeda?  If so, surely the dungeons of Western culture are where it must stay?  This could be seen as tying in with the final episodes of the series, where the Daleks explicitly become religious fundamentalists.... though, as we'll see, I think that representation is much more complex than it appears.

The end is curiously mishandled. Shearman's script makes no gesture towards showing the Dalek in a sympathetic light. It is being driven mad by emotions that it hates because they come from beings that it considers inferior and revolting. And yet we get Murray Gold and Joe Ahearne trying to smear on the pathos.

Pretty good... though nowhere near as good as it could've been, if the production team had let Shearman rip with his trademarks: half-crazed satire, fevered and grotesque surrealism, ghoulish blacker-than-black humour and quasi-Pinteresque violent dialogue.

The crushing inevitability of Gatiss one day being the showrunner depresses me. I want Shearman. For me, he's the only one of the various touted candidates who could possibly bring it back up to quality again.  Allow me my fantasy.


The Long Game

I kind of knew in advance that I would like this one. Perhaps it was the fact that the Radio Times was less than enthusiastic. Somehow, I was tipped off to the fact that 'The Long Game' would be a corker. It's still, possibly, my favourite episode from Series 1.

'The Long Game' tackles the issue of media manipulation head on. The Editor's speech about the power of nuance in news reporting may not exactly be subtle (and it may be a bit of an info dump, a recurring problem in the episode) but it is, nevertheless, an intelligent comment on the power of those who control the media to use (and abuse) information for their own ends. The fact that - hooray! - the Editor turns out to represent a consortium of banks, throws in the last missing ingredient: money. Once again, in RTD's universe, money and the rich are the roots of all evil... but here its a systemic diagnosis, albeit illustrated with lurid symbolism.

There is no equivocation in 'The Long Game'. We are seeing a stalled, backward, entropic, corrupt society (the Doctor expressly comments on this, though he is talking about technology). They consume and do not much else (is it a coincidence, I wonder, that the Jagrafess turns out to be little more than a gigantic mouth?). This future society is explicitly described, in caustic tones, as "the Great and Bountiful Empire"... its great bounty consisting (like that of ours) of brain-rot TV, media saturation, junk food and cut-throat battles for promotion.

The people of the Empire aren't stupid, but they are self-obsessed and unable to think clearly, unable to question authority, or even wonder why they should. The connection between these failings and the constant stream of controlled imformation pumped at them is clear.

The technology the people of this Empire use has fused their minds with the media. They are what the consume. The messages are, in some cases, actually beamed straight into their heads. They're jammed in the hyperreal, contextless, flattened, homogenised, cybernetic world of overpowering capitalist realism. Blinded by too much choice and not enough context. They exist in what is obviously an exaggerated version of our own society: a globalised capitalist dystopia of infomercials and credit cards, of feared refugees and all-power bankers, of a great centralised power controlling us via what they let us know.

And Adam makes the episode. Bruno Whatsisface may not be the greatest actor who ever lived, but he copes. And Adam's journey is a superb coup of narrative bifurcation. Adam's characterisation unfolds. He lies to Rose, smiling as he wanders off by himself. He lies easily to the nurse (delightfully portrayed by the wonderful Tamsin Greig). He tries to steal information and technology from the future for personal gain, regardless of possible consequences for the world. Adam suffers from a fundamental weakness of character (already glimpsed in 'Dalek', in which he reacts blithely to the torture of the Dalek and runs ahead of Rose to get to the bulkhead): selfishness. By itself, this isn't so terrible... Rose isn't exactly free of it herself... but the implication is that Adam is ready to submerge himself into the world of the Empire (as he submerged himself in Van Stratten's world before). These worlds - both capitalist worlds where media information is owned, controlled, parcelled and used by unaccountable and impersonal systems of wealth and power - are both willing to offer him the chance to squash others to better himself. He's the entrepreneur. He's the self-interested rational actor that this series keeps coming back to, the utility maximiser.  He's the kind of tick that our society idolises and (hypocritically) despises in equal measure. He'd win The Apprentice... as long as he was trying to be Alan Sugar's apprentice rather than the Doctor's.

The Doctor here is no tedious 'hero'. He's the caustic observer who inspires curiosity and bravery in the previously-vacuous corporate drone. He's a moral force and a political force... without being a god or a saviour or a capeless superhero.

To cap things off, the evil banker (who is just a replaceable tool of the great devouring mouth of consumerism and money and empire... i.e the system itself) gets capped by the determined anarchist. Now we're cooking with gas. Protestor greases CEO. Love it.


Father's Day

Much as I hate to give Paul Cornell any credit, I must say that 'Father's Day' (awful title, by the way) is a pretty wonderful episode.

Cornell smuggles in his usual, obligatory Christian subtext, but we needn't worry about that. Sci-fi constantly reiterates myth and legend; that's arguably what sci-fi is.

Interesting to see a Socialist Worker 'Thatcher Out' poster in the background, used as a period detail like the Acid House image. Both are implicitly presented as things of the past. Well, we're seeing nowadays how quickly things can change.

Billie is wonderful. Chris is great too, especially when he says "I've never had a life like that" to the couple who are supposed to be celebrating their wedding.

It's a story about the end of the world... couched in terms of the loss of people. The gradual, unseen vanishings are incrementally terrifying. They suggest an unravelling of reality, expressed as the loss of people, of society, of community. Cornell presents a Church as the place where society and community can be kept safe. The old walls of tradition (whether we believe or not) shelter people from the silent desolation brought on by an act of love that is also an act of selfishness and utter individualism. Save your Dad, whatever the consequences. There's no such thing as society anymore because of an individual's desire to save her family. An implied critique of the social cost of the rampaging 80s.

And yet there is compassion and understanding. Pete is the harmless, clueless wannabe-entrepreneur who doesn't realise he lives in a society that just pretends to be open to the bloke who keeps trying. And while Pete can be read as Christ (he sacrifices himself to save the world) he can also be read as an ordinary man. In fact, he can be seen as the human part of Christ. The carpenter's son, common as muck, giving himself up to death for a higher ideal.

This is Christianity I can relate to, the Christianity of ordinary people, resisting the emptiness, resisting the scavengers who want to use them as fodder. How ironic that Cornell's chosen party should now be snuggled up to the Tories and helping them recycle the 80s that 'Father's Day' treats as an era from the past, helping them attack ordinary people like... well, like the rapacious, scavenging Reapers.

It's powerful. It prefigures 'Gridlock' as a hymn to the social, albeit from a less caustic and more theistic perspective.

The above seems like an argument for reading this story as a political parable, which isn't necessarily what I'm getting at. The Reapers are, of course, also symbols of time itself ("the devourer of all things" as Ovid put it). Human resistance to anything powerful is beautiful and inspiring to me.

It also works as a moving human drama, despite moments when incipient mawkishness threatens to derail proceedings.

Sad that this story should be so undermined by the subsequent use of the Tyler family as fodder for sentimental season finales... episodes that systematically reverse the deaths and losses and regrets that Rose experiences, thus rendering them less meaningful. The alt-Pete also manages to be a success, thus blunting the pathos of our-Pete's perpetual failure.


The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances

Very good, on the whole. A sort-of first cousin and husband to 'Curse of Fenric'.

‘The Empty Child’ is saturated in sex (from the girl/woman child/mother Nancy to the omnivorous lothario Captain Jack; from the butcher and his other way of trading meat to that whole conversation about “dancing”; from Algy’s cute bum to the “man” that sent an evacuated boy running back to the safer option of nightly bombing raids) but, while it acknowledges that sex is scary and dangerous, it doesn’t seem to despair of the possibility that most options – including promiscuity and teen-parenthood – can bring fulfillment… indeed, if it has a ‘message’, it is that sex is linked to the fulfillment of real humanity, counterpoised against the emptiness of repression and denial.

Interesting to see the absence of any timey-wimey... but the presence of Moffat's incipient preoccupation with the rendering of people as information, their storage as patterns, their meshing with technology and their transmission through machinery.

Sadly, the nanogenes are extremely predictable as a denouement. You don't have to be a geek either. As soon as they're so heavy-handedly mentioned, we know they're going to be behind the gas mask thing.

This story is another that has been unjustly devalued as a result of its strengths being raided and reused. Whereas 'Father's Day' is undermined by the subsequent reuse of the Tylers and 'Dalek' by the subsequent inferior use of the Daleks, 'Empty' is undermined by Moffat's constant recycling of themes, styles and motifs.

Kids, physical transformation, the body as pattern, sexual badinage, sit-com quipocalypse, etc. It suffers less than, say, 'Girl in the Fireplace' though because a) it lacks the time paradox thing that has since become nearly obligatory and b) it is much, much better.

Sadly, there are moments that I absolutely hate. The "Marxism in action" quip is annoying (to me anyway); clearly something written by someone who knows precisely nothing about Marxism. Worse is the "damp little island" speech, which caused me to hurl a coathanger at the TV in disgust the first time I saw this. It's idiotic, conventional, inaccurate jingoism. It reveals the distance between this and its cousin 'Fenric'. In 'Fenric' we got "workers of the world unite" (written by someone who clearly does understand at least something about Marxism) and powerful internationalism. In 'Empty' we get jingoism and a bit of "don't forget the NHS."

But I'm just kvetching now, from my own particular ideological standpoint. Don't mind me.


Boom Town

A real squib. It's supposed by some to be a sophisticated debate about capital punishment, isn't it? Where's that then?

This debate isn't about slow torture versus total freedom.

And besides, 6yr old children were turning to their parents and saying "why doesn't he just take her somewhere where they'll lock her up and not kill her?".

Meanwhile, we get non-hilarious slapstick heist-movie chases and the uninteresting business with Billie Piper doing dreary doomed-romance scenes with someone who can't act.

A rare example of Russell writing a small-scale episode, about people debating values while trapped together, and failing to pull it off.  They're normally his greatest strength.


Bad Wolf / The Parting of the Ways

It starts off with a replay of the sucking-up to da kidz and, far more importantly, the Meedja, with which RTD began the series. The use of current TV shows initially smacks of sycophancy to Heat Magazine, etc. Season 1 is still obviously in mortal terror of words like “corny” or “old-fashioned” or “irrelevant” being used about it in a column written by some vacuous media prick. And, as we all know, the way to be acceptable to such people is to pander to the echo chamber they live in.

Chris seems wonderfully bemused and irritated to find himself in BB. It’s like a refugee from the pop TV of the past (much of which, including much Who, looks like Brecht compared to pop TV now) who has suddenly found himself stranded in the middle of Charlie Brooker’s TV Go Home.

The objectives here seem a tad ambivalent and confused. Big Brother is actually depicted rather sympathetically, with the housemates being a quite personable bunch... as opposed to the malignant cretins, vulgarians and bores who actually featured in the real show. Moreover, these sequences say pretty much nothing about the peculiar hall-of-distorting-mirrors effect which causes people to be famous for not being famous, and makes us identify ‘reality’ as carefully-chosen unlikeable people filmed while boxed up in a completely fake environment and subjected to random, authoritarian commands.

It’s not bad exactly, just awkward, undecided and a bit thin.

Billie carries her sequences brilliantly... with the guy played by Patterson Joseph being the sort of reptile who ought to have been in with Chris. The subplot with the programme makers feels very much like old-fashioned, trad Who, particularly 80s Who, which constantly featured audiences of cynical and powerful and bored voyeurs… which is a narrative device that tends to make you remember that you’re a viewer, watching something made by people behind the scenes… which, in a funny way, is almost a Brechtian effect, thus making it somewhat more sophisticated than just about anything else in the lists of mainstream ratings smashes of 2005. Could do without the tedious office romance but even that has a pleasingly bathetic effect, and also highlights the way perfectly ordinary people can get caught up in the running of staggeringly evil systems.

As the nature of the set-up is revealed, the story becomes much stronger than the rather toothless referencing game with which it seemed to begin. We learn that the Gamestation is a platform that overlooks a world of people who are subject to its impersonal whim, a kind of metal god that picks victims/winners for huge financial reward or gruesome death, based on random chance… with their literal life-and-death stakes resolved via media humiliation (that everyone fears, longs for and watches) and challenges devoid of all proof of merit.  The Bad Wolf corporation hovers over the human race like a whimsical, cruel deity.  As flies to wanton boys are people to the corporate system.

The shows slowly reveal themselves. Trinny and Susannah are utterly inhuman monsters that want to carve you up with knives and saws and re-stitch you in pointlessly ‘designer’ ways if they think you don't look right. Weakest Link becomes a genuinely brutal Darwinian contest in which people compete to stamp on each other in order to survive and profit, all watched over by an inhuman gamesmistress, and with survival resting on arbitrary knowledge (or guesswork) about spectacularly trivial and worthless brainfluff. Big Brother becomes a "charnel house".  'Bad Wolf' simultaneously dwells within and attacks a system of media representations that it essentially predatory and cannibalistic.  It feeds us back to ourselves as product.   

The revelation that the Daleks are behind it all satisfyingly aggravates the implications of the Gamestation system. These Daleks may not be as psychologically interesting as the lone specimen in ‘Dalek’, but they’re easily better than in any of their subsequent appearances. They’ve become TV producers, and manipulators of corporate power from behind the scenes (i.e. installing the Jagrafess). They prey on the people apparently killed after losing the televised Darwinian survival games. They steal the unpeople, the derelicts, the poor. They use them as raw material. And they are now made from that material.  They’ve rebuilt themselves from the wreckage of humanity. The Daleks have always been *us* in a way… now it’s become literal.

This ties into the alienation inherent in the Autons (human labour reified into autonomous products that attack and dominate us), the carnivorous media imperialism of the Jagrafess, the wittering Andrew Marr who fails to notice the predators inside the fat politicos...

It also ties back into 'Dalek', making that into a story about the Dalek and the capitalist (the hostile prisoner and the system that imprisons) being reflections of each other.  They're even linked by the media, when you remember that Van Statten owned the internet before the Dalek ate it.

RTD's signature move is to make these new Daleks into mental religious fundies. Fundamentaleks, you could call them. Cue much chin-scratchy pondering about whether they represent Al-Qaeda or Bush and the Neocons. Or both. Well, they certainly talk more like evangelical Christian extremists than Islamists… and they’re in control of a massively powerful military machine… and they’re behind a massive media corporation... etc. They certainly seem more like the unholy alliance between Fox News, neoconservatism, conservative evangelical christianity and American imperialism than they seem like a network of people in caves…

But I think it’s more interesting to consider these Daleks as reflecting yet another kind of extremist fundamentalism, one which mirrors and allies with the opposed religious fundamentalisms. It's impervious to evidence and is weilded by the powerful. It creates massive imbalances between the obese and the stick-thin. It permeates the values of TV to an extraordinary extent… with its war of self-interested utility-maximisers played out in deliberately nasty game shows where the brutally self-interested individual 'rational actor' is implicitly praised, or exhorted to alter their clothes or hair or bodies in order to succeed over others. Yep, I’m talking about market fundamentalism.

The Doctor’s dilemma here (and here he faces a genuine dilemma, as opposed to a fake one like in ‘Boom Town’) is to be a coward or a killer. Destroy the human race or let them be harvested by the Daleks, who’ve become a distorted mirror held up to humanity, showing us at our modern worst: imperialists, fundamentalists, media-executives… I don’t think you can make the Doctor’s dilemma relate directly and mechanically to anything specific in the real world, though obviously it has a ring of that fake debate that was presented to us before the invasion of Iraq: be a heroic invader for the greater good or a cowardly appeaser. I think the Doctor’s refusal to make the choice for us is the key thing.

He’s lucky that Rose turns up with her floaty-haired, glowing-eyed, posh-voiced, god-like power. She's a deus ex machina… but in this case it’s a deliberate and witty pun, on both a linguistic and story level. She’s the god in the machine… who kills the machine god. And it happens because she’s changed, and because the people around her have changed. The scene in the café could be prefaced with “And the moral of the story is…” but it’s done with such conviction, by the absolutely superb Piper, that they get away with it.

So the Doctor prefers to be labeled a coward by a rampaging imperialist monster than to take millions of lives that aren’t his to take, perhaps remembering acts of war he committed in the past. A human comes to his rescue and puts things to right. In fact, she puts things too right. The Doctor has to stop her from going too far; he has to save her by stopping her from being a god. Godhood has to be sacrificed so humanity can live, as in The Second Coming. That’s a very atheist perspective. But it’s also a very Christian perspective. Jesus had to die so we could go on. Like many religious stories, it resonates powerfully through SF.

Three Act Tragedy

And so it came to pass that Series 3 ended with a trilogy.  And Jack looked upon the trilogy.  And Jack saw that it was... umm... er...


'Utopia'

Good stuff; the Master's return at the end is the least of it.  We have to put up with some of the obligatory "gee, aren't humans just neat?!" stuff from the Doctor, but it passes soon enough. Yana is a touching, melancholic figure. Chantho is one of my favourite characters in all Who. The scene where the Doctor and Jack finally discuss Jack's immortality is beautifully scripted and acted. The desolated conglomeration is beautiful.

The whole set up is pregnant with intricate, sombre, uncomfortable implications. At the end of everything, with even the galaxies disappearing... amidst a wasteland, haunted by a dead city and one lone survivor (who still clings to her obsolete cultural norms)... amidst all these things, there are two groups of humans... the unreasoningly fierce and cruel "futurekind", with their gnashing sharp teeth, their flaming torches and their mindless desire to destroy... and the refugees who huddle together for warmth; who value family and friendship; who have created structure and purpose out of bits of scrap, food and dreams of impossible deliverance... and the Futurekind want to smash these aspirations for no real reason, while the refugees keep building even as they near the point of maximum entropy.

This is 'Gridlock' part II... but it's less comfortable than 'Gridlock'.  More bleak.  More gloomy.  More fully liberal.  Hence, more reactionary.

The faith of the refugees is in a better world, like the faith of the gridlockers... but they refugees have given it a name that has political rather than religious associations. 'Utopia' is usually thought of now as representing some age-old impossible dream of social perfection and total human equality.  In the mainstream discourse, to be Utopian is to share the putative mistakes and delusions of the founders of the 20th century totalitarians. Lenin wanted to make a paradise; that's why he ended up making Hell on Earth. (This isn't my view, by the way. It is as simplistic and ahistorical as it is popular.)

'Utopia' is one of those stories that I love despite the fact that it's highly open to a reactionary reading (like 'Frontios' for example, with which it shares some ideas).

In 'Utopia', the supposed dual nature of humanity is externalised in the form of two seperate tribes (who fight for no reason, as tribes always do in this view of the world), one of which is 'civilised' and one of which is 'barbarous' for no real reason. There is no reconciling this 'clash of civilisations'. The nice people, who are associated in the text with science, technology, modernity, family life, democracy (via the concept of Utopia itself), must fight and/or escape the barbarians (with their medieval ways)... or be destroyed.

In the end, they simply have to leave the Futurekind behind (to die) as they blast off in search of Utopia. At least this story holds out some hope that Utopia (i.e. some form of social/political optimum) might be reachable... an avenue of hope that 'The Last of the Time Lords' closes decisively and brutally.

It isn't hard to see what all this points to. RTD is far too influenced by the Dawkins/Hitchens/Hari axis-of-liberal-culturalism for my liking.

But ambiguity isn't a bad thing per se. This story is very interesting and rich, so (as with 'Midnight' next season) the fact that it carries connotations that I find open to a reactionary political interpretation doesn't spoil my enjoyment.

In the end, the greatness of the story lies in the perfection of its construction. Every time I watch it I find myself wondering how it's possible to create a script that functions with such clockwork perfection without also creating something that ever feels mechanical. It has a organic feel to it. Every event grows from the events before. Every character moment similarly. Casual lines of dialogue kickstart psychological chain reactions that result in major plot eruptions.

It's a thing of beauty. It's very apt (on several levels) that the major emblem of the story should be a watch. A watch symbolises time. And structure. And technology. And the human desire to control the universe into which we're born. And it also stands as a pretty good metaphor (precise yet graceful) for the workings of the plot itself.


'The Sound of Drums' / 'Last of the Time Lords'

I still feel very ambivalent about these episodes. I've never really been able to resolve my feelings about them. This is a deeply mythological story which also expresses a great many political ideas. The Master in ‘Sound of Drums’ / ‘Last of the Time Lords’ is not just the Anti-Christ, bringing the tribulation and controlling mankind through their own follies, he is also a Blairesque opportunist who flashes his fake smile at the TV while using the state apparatus to arrest innocent people and scheme for war.

Trouble is, it's also highly steeped in both genre/cult mediocrity and self-referential/reverential Whoness. And the political notions are incoherent and self-contradictory.

The episodes hint at issues to do with propaganda, media manipulation etc. (even down to the Master commenting approvingly on the Teletubbies having TVs in their bellies). Are we to interpret the Archangel network as an expression of how modern technological media functions as a tool of power? How our media has now burrowed deep into us and become part of our being... this is psychologically true, and is on the brink of becoming physically/biologically true. A meshing of man and media/machine is a future dream/nightmare that many Who monsters express, not least the Toclafane.

Okay... but it essentially boils down to brainwashing, or rather hypnotism... which makes it hard to read the story as being an attack on the system itself, or even a reactionary whinge about stupid, ignorant voters giving their assent to dodgy characters (which would at least link up thematically with the Utopia thing).

But in this story, the system is usurped by a man who murders the real politicians... and he hasn't secured the consent of the electorate, just hypnotised them! Seems to me, everyone is let off the hook... despite some potential which we glimpse in the Cabinet session scene (a scene that seems all the more pointed in these days of the ConDem Coalition). It's all very well for Martha's dad to shout accusations at people on the streets... but even this scene, which potentially could've been extremely powerful and edgey, is rendered essentially meaningless. People voted for the bad guys that take away innocent people in unmarked vans... because they were brainwashed. So... what? This story seems to determined to assert that we're all guilty while also absolving us.

There is a determination in this story to acknowledge that people get deeply hurt by violence, tyranny, etc... there is an attempt at showing emotional trauma... there is an attempt to show people profoundly changed by long, hard struggles... there is a depiction of emotional/physical domination (especially with Lucy)... and an attempt to depict such emotional/physical cruelty as having sources beyond pure evil. However, people also behave in ways that are as convenient in plot terms as they are inexplicable and unbelievable. And there is a great big cheaty Reset button which sets everything right... except that it doesn't because, for some reason, some people don't get time reversed and have to live with their pain. Which seems a bit confused.

The Master is shown as a sort of wounded, vicious, sniggering, narcissistic baby... his triumph is the triumph of madness and delusion superimposed on reality by power. Yet John Simm plays him, at least for large sections of the time, as just an irritating pratt. And much of his immaturity is expressed in pointless villain posturing and/or equally pointless continuity references.

The cliffhanger to 'Sound of Drums' is a summation of the Master's malicious madness, a vision of the apocalypse reiterated in terms of technological alienation, a savage swipe at the dark inner sociopathy of necon messianism, etc... but its also a tired, wheezing genre cliche... not to mention the exact same mechanical-monsters-swoop-down-from-the-skies-and-kill-people-for-no-apparent-reason scenario as we got at the same point in Season 2 (still, at least this is only the second time we get it... I'm looking at you, 'The Stolen Earth').

And the dark heart of the story is the business of the Toclafane being the humans of the future. This continues the pessimistic, arguably reactionary message of 'Utopia'. Attempt to reach Utopia (the word carries unavoidable political connotations, even without the concentration of the rest of the story on politics) and you end up with tyranny, totalitarianism and mass murder under the auspices of a mad, opportunistic demagogue. Humans, in this view, are inherently savage creatures that will become sadistic monsters if just given the right push by the right kind of lunatic... and don't such ruthless loonies always tempt "us" with the promise of Utopia? This is political philosophy as practiced by Andrew Marr or Jeremy Vine. It's a perfect expression of 'original sin' as a political concept, of the idea that "we" are in some way collectively responsible as a species for tyranny and destructiveness.  It's as mainstream as it is cretinous.  As orthodox as it is ahistorical.  As thoroughly a foundation of liberalism as it is of elitism, authoritarianism, neoconism and even fascism.

This is why the sniping at the politicians and the Americans is so unsatisfying... because it's hypocritical.  We're obviously supposed to despise the sharp-suited politicos and the hubristic US Prez for their arrogance and untrustworthiness... and yet the story that lampoons and slaughters them backs a view of people and society (the classical liberal view of individualism = freedom / collectivism = destined to end in tears) that has just as much contempt for ordinary people.  Beneath all the superficial rhapsodising of humanity, the best they can do it find a saviour to pray for. 

Yes, the people of Earth find their 'better' side and express it... through the very technology that enslaved them and turned the future humans into the Toclafane. So, is technology our salvation or our damnation? I suppose it depends what we do with it. But we can't choose what to do with it if we're brainwashed, can we? Is this story about political opportunism and public gullibility (hence Utopia leading to Toclafane evil and the Master's dictatorship)? Then why is the brainwashing needed in the first place? The Archangel network business really does balls things up.  It even ballses up the reactionary interpretation!

Also, the Christianity of the thing becomes smothering. The Master must be defeated, and we get there via prayer, resurrection and forgiveness. It's recast in technobabble... but it's still evidently prayer, resurrection and forgiveness. The Doctor's hubristic and morally meaningless decision to forgive on behalf of others is exactly the same as Christ's. So, pray to the saviour and he will rise to save you from your misery, misery that stems from your own sheeplike haplessness in the face of power... and/or your guilt in bringing that misery upon yourself (we haven't quite worked out if you're guilty or innocent yet - see above)... and he will then make everything better and forgive your oppressor on your behalf, despite himself being deeply culpable in your suffering.

So, we're all guilty... and we're all innocent... collectivism (i.e. Utopia) leads to Hell... but collectivism (i.e. prayer) also leads to salvation... and we're all forgiven, whoever we are and whatever we did...

In the end, this trilogy is cast as a 'three act tragedy'.  The greatest tragedy, however, is that it could've been so good if the writer had only worked out what he was trying to say.