SHABCAST L15TEN

Shabcast 15 is up, and features myself in conversation with Daniel Harper, one half of Oi! Spaceman, on the subject of Steven Moffat's 'Listen' from series 8... which we both like a lot. 

Essential Problems and Dialectical Solutions ('Deep Breath' 5)

Many people have already commented on the expansion of Clara's character in 'Deep Breath'.  I think there's something to this... in that Clara now appears to have a character, now that she's been freed from her tedious and contentless mystery-arc.  Those impatient with the right-on critique of Moffat will respond with all sorts of examples of brave, complex things she did in Series 7, and some of those examples will be right, but still... she really did look like a characterless blur across the screen, a sort of jumble of traits, a Rubik's Cube with a face drawn on it.  There's no denying, she looked better in 'Deep Breath'.  It's possible that, as with so much else that seems better about 'Deep Breath', I may just be perceiving an improvement because the episode is largely free from the dominating and infuriating presence of a certain actor who will not be missed at all by me.  But then, such things do make a difference.  One performance in an 'actually existing' production of a written text can change the meaning.

Clara's monologue rebuke to Vastra is part of her apparent improvement... though I have to say (in my complainey way) that the monologue contains yet another example of Moffat fetishizing the powerful, with Clara saying that Marcus Aurelius was her only pin-up.  Of all the philosophers she could have idolised, Moffat chooses the one who was also a Roman Emperor!  I also noticed an implied contempt towards teenage girls who like boy bands, as if that makes them inherently trivial people.  Clara gets to angrily reject the notion that she is unwilling to accept an older man, but the idea is expressed in terms that imply contempt for young women who who don't reject young hot guys for old, establishment figures.  To be painstakingly fair, I'm sure this is not what was intended.  It's one of those examples of a writer being unable to fully win no matter what he does.  Which happens.  Sometimes writers can't win.  Sometimes they're damned if they do and damned if they don't.  It's not about their flaws so much as the social context in which they write.  That's not an excuse, but it is a thing.  The solution to this, as I've said before, is not to find better writers, or better ways of writing which square such circles away nicely and neatly so we can all watch in perfect comfort, but rather to change society so that massive imbalances of power don't keep setting off these little textual mines.  Sounds like I'm demanding a lot, doesn't it?  Well, I am.  Deal with it.  That's just how I roll.  Etcetera.

At first, the whole business with Clara's difficulty accepting the new Doctor reminded of the nasty reaction towards 'fangirls' that was unleashed by the news of Capaldi's casting, with all those memes about the shallow, hormonal girlies, supposedly devastated by the news that the new Doctor was someone old and wrinkly.  Just another manifestation of the 'fake geekgirl', a chimeric invention of a closed shop full of males objecting to the scary presence of women in 'their' fandom.  At one point it looks as though Clara is being likened to those allegedly inconsolable fangirls.  After all, Moffat makes Clara - the girl who, according to him, saw and knew every single one of the Doctor's incarnations - struggle with the concept of a new Doctor.  The episode is erasing a huge chunk of her experience, a huge chunk of all the stuff she did last year (stuff that is, by the way, also proffered as evidence of what a nuanced character she always was). Though, as I say, the jettisoning of all that baggage from Series 7 may not be a bad thing, given that it was a way for Moffat to insert his character (in both senses) into every previous bit of Doctor Who ever and rewrite it in the image of his own laughing face.

Clara herself rejects the idea that she resembles the sexist stereotype of the fake fangirl who only likes Who for the hottie menz (though why it should be so terrible for girls to watch the show to leer at Matt Smith escapes me, given the volume of comment from male fans about how much they fancy Jenna-Louise Coleman).  Moffat actually goes to some lengths to raise this accusation against Clara so it can be knocked down... which is why a simple reading of the episode which sees Moffat as endorsing this view of Clara is not really adequate.  The Doctor even implies that the fault was the other way, with him mistaking Clara for a girlfriend.  (And, it's true: the 11th Doctor spent far too much time treating Clara like his property girlfriend.)  Pushing aside the self-pity of the older man looking at the young girl he can't have, the "I never said it was my mistake" bit is actually rather a good moment.  The Doctor accepts that Clara wasn't the one who was actually confused about what was what and what wasn't.

But... and I'm sure you all knew there was a but coming... there are still problems here.  For a start, the Doctor is once again the pole around which the women revolve.  He is fetishised, once again, in Vastra's speech about how old and powerful he is.  And he takes on the contours of the complex and tormented man whose complexity and pain are something for the women to work through.  I've complained in the past about Moffat's female companions being puzzle boxes for the Doctor to figure out.  In 'Deep Breath', in some ways, the Doctor becomes the puzzle for the ladies to figure out.  It doesn't help matters much.  (I know, I know - I'm never happy.)  If you insist upon writing friendships as battles of wits, you're going to end up with implied winners and losers.  Though, once again, it doesn't really get us anywhere to do what I've done in the past, and just talk about these issues as though Moffat is alone in falling foul of them.  The battle of wits between the sexes is embedded in our narrative culture, and is a cultural expression of sexism in the form of gender essentialism.

Moffat is rather big on gender essentialism. This is partly to do with the genre he seems most happy writing in, the style of which he retains and adapts to other projects: sitcom.  Even the dinosaur in 'Deep Breath' is as much from Red Dwarf VIII as it is from 'Invasion of the Dinosaurs' (though, as I say, I rather like the melancholy way he ends up using the dinosaur).  Sitcoms are steeped in gender essentialism.  Sticking with Red Dwarf as an example, just look at the jaw-breakingly tedious stretches of Red Dwarf VII which concern themselves with 'jokes' about Kochanski being clean and tidy and liking salad and ballet, as opposed to the scuzzy boys.

Sitcom gender-essentialism revolves upon the ostensible 'war of the sexes'.  The boys behave badly, the women complain about the toilet seat being left up.  The boys make offensive remarks about periods when the girls are not happy about something.  And so on.  (To be clear, I'm not putting this forward as a description of Moffat's work but as a generalisation.)  Very often, in this sort of thing, the silly old men come off worst, as do the comedy hapless pratt Dads in assorted adverts... you know, the ones that privileged manchildren put forward as evidence of 'misandry' (a functionally meaningless word).  In this version of the relationship between the sexes, the men are overgrown little boys, helplessly entranced by breasts and bottles.  The women are long-suffering witnesses to the long childhood of these slow developers.  Basically, as someone once said, the women are better and the men belong in the fields.  Ho ho ho.

But pedestals are a way of controlling somebody, if you make them high enough.

The basic claims of gender essentialism are determinist, which is why it so often gets reiterated by various forms of reductionist science like evolutionary psychology, and why it has a conservative social effect.  It runs thus: men and women are fundamentally different at some irreducible level (i.e. brain chemistry, genes, whatever) and thus will always retain certain essential traits, some of which entail imbalances in attitude and capability.  We've all seen the titles infesting the bookshelves.  Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus (and books like this are from Uranus).   Why Men Can't Talk and Women Can't Read Maps.  Why Men Don't Like Quiche and No Woman Has Ever Learned the Bagpipes.  Etc etc et-fucking-c.  The gender essentialism industry is massive, hyper-profitable, retrograde and deeply reactionary.

No matter what its smiley, jokey surface message may be, this kind of pop-gender-wars stuff always peddles the idea that equality is impossible... or, at least, that further equalisation is impossible and we've already reached the functional optimum.  It peddles the idea that we already live in as equal a society as we can, and all we need to do is understand each other better.  Basically, it peddles the idea that our prejudices about gender are well-founded.  Even if you take the ostensibly pro-woman version of this that gets repeated in all those sitcoms about the ladies vs the manchildren, the message is still conservative and reactionary, a message of permanent and chronic and unimproveable imbalance.

One extension of this idea of built-in characteristics is the idea that, for instance, girls will naturally want to play with dolls and like the colour pink even if subjected to no social conditioning.  Indeed, one of the most pernicious aspects of gender essentialism is the way it peddles the idea that it's even possible to raise kids without socialising them into gender roles.  By over-emphasizing innate gender differences it obscures the forces of social conditioning.  One side-effect is that well-meaning, right-on parents make efforts to keep gender roles out of their kids' life, only to find their kids drifting into toys guns or Disney princess outfits, and then rather than think 'maybe I have unconscious assumptions which also influence my kids... and maybe my kids are also raised by a society which teaches and reinforces gender roles from day one', the parents instead take their failure to mean that it's all the the genes after all.  They then shake their heads at their own foolish idealism, and start being 'hard-headed' and 'realistic' instead, accepting consciously the very assumptions about innate gender differences which were trained into them in their own childhood, and which they have unconsciously been acting on all along.

(On this subject and other related ones, I implore everyone to read the superb Delusions of Gender by the amazingly brilliantly fantastically excellent Cordelia Fine, who is very good indeed.  And great.)

Gender essentialism doesn't challenge male privilege.  It shores it up.  It obscures systemic sexism, taking imbalances out of the realm of the social and into the realm of the universally biological - like all forms of sociobiology.  It acts as an excuse and an alibi for men, and for the system they dominate and which privileges them.  It relieves them of responsibility.  If they can't help staring at boobs that walk by, or leave the toilet seat up, and all those other things that all men supposedly do, that's just because they're blokes and blokes are like that.  Nothing to be done about it.  Some gender essentialist observations may take the form of criticism, but it is criticism which instantly supplies a get-out clause.

The "I never said it was your mistake" scene is a good scene.  A great moment.  But the episode as a whole sends mixed signals, just like the Doctor does.  That scene coexists with scenes in which Clara is described as a control freak and a narcissist and needy gameplayer, and all as part of the sitcom 'war of the sexes' sniping that constitutes Moffat's default mode of writing male/female interaction.  "5'1 and crying - you never had a chance!" thus tends to undercut the brilliance of the scene where Clara, looking truly human (both terrified and heroic simultaneously, with the two being inextricable) faces down the droid.  Yes, we are supposed to frown at this kind of gender-essentialist stuff coming from the Doctor… we’re supposed to think he’s being a prick… yet we’re also clearly supposed to find it funny.  As so often with Moffat, we're told to think one thing while being tacitly invited to enjoy something contrary in the text.

I wrote about 'A Good Man Goes to War' with reference to this.  The whole idea that there is any critique of the Doctor in that episode relies upon us taking River's rebuke seriously, which itself depends upon us taking seriously the notion that there is something shameful in being a warrior... and yet the entire episode is about noble, heroic warriors fighting and dying for a wonderful, moral cause... and about how exciting the Doctor and Rory are when they go all badass (i.e. genocidal) on Cybermen.  (It's only fair to point out that RTD was guilty of just this sort of inconsistency too, perhaps most evidently in 'The Stolen Earth' / 'Whatever the Other Episode Was Called' in which the Doctor is critiqued by Davros while viewing an internal clipshow which proves him innocent.)

We’re also clearly supposed to find the Doctor funny when he displays all the characteristics he charges against Clara and which she charges against him (he said, she said - har de har).  It doesn’t really matter if the writer has strong women declaring “men are monkeys” if the text ultimately and implicitly invites us to find the monkeyish behaviour vastly charming.

We're meant to like it when men behave badly, you see.  And then we like it when the woman puts him in his place.  And then we like it again when he does it again.

And so on and so on and so on forever.

I don't want to imply that any of the problems I raise in this post are unique to Moffat.  On the contrary, they're widespread... and often such problems are unavoidable when anyone writes about things like, say, gender in the context of a society that is deeply sexist.

Remember, the solution to the problem of such textual timebombs is a dialectical one.  So, basically, all we need for Doctor Who to be perfect is a full scale socialist-feminist revolution.

Now, tell me... is that really too much to ask?

Bits and Bobs ('Deep Breath' 4)

It ends with another mysterious woman, another predatory dominatrix older female.  She represents another story arc which we, the viewers, have no possibility of guessing or understanding until the inevitable 'twist' becomes self-evident just before being served up to you on a plate several episodes later than it could've been.

She speaks as if she is one of the audience and saw what we saw.  Like us, she couldn't see if the Doctor persuaded Half-Face to commit suicide or if he pushed him to his death.  Again, a metatextual trick is used as a signifier of the enemy.

Another physical endurance test or test of skill becomes part of the nature of the monster-of-the-week.  The Weeping Angels were based on how long you could go without blinking.  The Sredni Vashtar (or whatever they were called) were based on how long you could go without touching a shadow with your own shadow.  The droids in 'Deep Breath' were based on how long you can hold your breath (a slightly dodgy thing to encourage in the playground possibly).

How much you like all this probably depends on how much you like repetition.

I said:  how much you like all this probably depends on how much you like repetition.

(To be fair, RTD was hardly unrepetitious - how many eleventh episodes ended with robotic things swarming in the sky and swooping down to shoot milling people?  Quite a few, as I recall.)

The business with the droids stealing bodies hooks into the corpse economy of Victorian London, but strips it of class significance.  Rich and poor alike get predated upon.  It's not like in 'Bad Wolf' in which the Daleks harvest the tramps and the sick and the outcasts... and then start feeding on the TV audience which tunes in to watch bodies punished.

The episode has lots to say about faces, and how we acquire them.  The Doctor chooses (unconsciously, presumably) his new face as a way of being honest with Clara and trusting her.  He initially finds it hard to recognise as himself.  Vastra's face is also the key to understanding and accepting her.  You perceive a veil if you are unprepared to see and accept who she is.  The droid has half a face (why couldn't he have become a Springheel Jack-style urban legend called Jack Half-a-Face? - that would've been awesome) because he unconsciously recognises that it is not his own.  He is contrasted with the Doctor and Vastra in that his face is a lie that he essentially rejects despite his attempts to accept it, whereas they performatively reject their own faces as a way of making others accept their honesty.

Vastra's larder mirrors the larder of the droids, their store cupboard of human bits and bobs.  It also mirrors the remark the Doctor makes to Clara about all restaurants being slaughterhouses, and his not remembering her becoming a vegetarian.  (As a longstanding veggie myself, I liked that bit - though his attitude was condescending... but then, let's face it, the Doctor is often morally condescending, and so are vegetarians.)  Vastra's larder is full of human bits and bobs too (its implied) and may even double as her slaughterhouse for killing murderers and harvesting their haunches and sirloin, so to speak.  In this she is quite well assimilated into Victorian society, which totally recognised the supposed propriety of slaughtering those found guilty of crimes and then re-using their bodies.

All this business of dismembered bodies, harvesting, cannibalism, absorbtion and the salvaging of human detritus yet again raises the issue of the rendering of humans as mere meat - a perenniel obsession of Doctor Who.  And also, the intrusion of the machine into the human body, of the product into the producer, of the fetishized commodity back into the human food chain as both child and dominator.

People really don't understand this show at all.  It's like when Shakespeare gets called a 'national poet' or 'sweet swan of Avon' of 'honey-tongued Shakespeare' etc.  He's supposedy a poet of love, romance, patriotism, etc... if you read him, he's actually a poet obsessed with hate, cruelty, evil, cynicism, hypocrisy, bombast, bullshit, selfishness, malignant narcissism, internalised self-loathing and failure.  Doctor Who is supposed by some to be the 'triumph of romance and intellect over brute force and cynicism'.  Wrong.  Firstly, much of Doctor Who doesn't even recognise a contradiction between romance and intellect on the one hand, and brute force and cynicism on the other.  Secondly, the show is absolutely obsessed with entropy, commodification, fetishism, cannibalism, humans as meat, etc... and that's without getting into even more overt obsessions like class, sadism and tyranny.

The droids in 'Deep Breath' are reverse Cybermen.  They are robots harvesting human meat to make themselves human rather than humans creating bionic bits to make themselves robots.  This suggests a echoing universal lack of any Aristotelian perfect mean, a correct middle ground.  There are only equally horrific extremes which converge from opposite directions... at least when you factor in the conflict between the meat that produces (humans) and the metal they produce.  Also implied is a sort of universally unsatisfiable yearning for transfiguration and transcendence.  Everyone everywhere wants to be something else, something better.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.  This is standard liberal hand-wringing, especially when you factor in the soft-Dawkinsian stuff about there being no promised land.  This is partly a new-Atheist-style rejection of religion (with Missy the evil woman claiming to represent paradise) but also a regulation liberal rejection of the utopian as a form of dangerous extremism.  Of course, the utopianism of Jack Half-a-Face is situated within the semiotic scheme of Victoriana and doggerel-Steampunk, so it could be seen as a rejection of the Victorian high-industrial dream of a perfect society acheieved through industry, empire and officially-overseen progress, with morality instilled in thrifty workers and natives via the go-getting top hat brigade.

But he gets impaled on Big Ben... hoist with his own petard?  Confronted by his own values?  Or skewered by the triumphant expression of human (i.e. British and imperial) superiority?

The Veil ('Deep Breath' 3)

The veil.  A politically loaded symbol.  It carries all sorts of old semiotic baggage, of course.  Weddings.  Widowhood.  Ladies in Conan Doyle who want to hide their identities (thus it has a trajectory into the figure of Madame Vastra via Victoriana).  In genre TV these days, a woman wearing a veil is likely to be a tragic or vengeful figure, hiding a facial scar of some kind.  (See 'Silence in the Library' / 'Forest of the Dead'.)

The veil is thus something that implies a particular set of social situations for women.  The connection appears to be the concept of separation.  The veil is a boundary between the woman and society.  It creates a space in which she can hide her unsightliness, either disfiguring grief or grievous disfigurement, from those who don't want to have to see it.  The wedding veil is lifted as the woman is taken possession of in the marriage ceremony; thus it is there to emphasize her acceptability by temporarily putting it in doubt.  It is, of course, the symbolic tearing of the hymen.  The man takes possession and breaks through the barrier.  All very nasty. Not to mention anatomically inaccurate.

Vastra's veil takes on enormous significance in 'Deep Breath'.  Indeed, the whole episode is full of talk about faces, with them being stolen, exchanged, worn, hidden, changed... with them contemplated in mirrors.

Vastra is married to Jenny (by Silurian law perhaps?), and yet this marriage hardly seems to have anything to do with Vastra's veil (unsurprising, given that it is black rather than white), since Vastra and Jenny's relationship fails to fit easily into any patriarchal schema.  There is no sense in which Jenny owns Vastra.  Indeed, the power relationship appears to go the other way (with implied consent).

There is a sense in which Vastra could be said to be mourning.  She is an isolated figure in some ways, cut off from her lost people.  But this is hardly emphasised at all.  She doesn't seem tragic, and her complete lack of vengefulness is so complete as to be worrying (to me anyway).

As mentioned, she reiterates - in some ways - the figure of the veiled lady from Victorian popular fiction, via her place in the regurgitated Victoria trope pyramid.  But she inverts this, to some degree, by being the detective.  Her veil isn't to hide her secrets from the investigator, rather it is to hide the secrets of the investigator from the client - as long as is necessary.

There is another significance to the veil in our culture at this time: the immensely freighted issue of the hijab... or perhaps I should say, the immensely freighted issue of Western ideas about the hijab.  I've likened the Silurians to the Palestinians before now, which would obviously chime... especially when you remember that Vastra has plonked herself down at the hub of the British Empire as a kind of refugee, and the British Empire was mucking around with the area that became Palestine from the 1830s onwards (though Victoriana places Vastra well before the disastrous British interventions of the early 20th century).  

Vastra's choice to wear the veil makes her a better representation of this issue than we tend to get from the culture industries.  It's a widespread prejudice in Western culture (which imagines itself to be post-sexist) that all or most Muslim women wear the hijab and other such articles of clothing because they're forced to by Muslim men.  If Vastra's veil can be tied into our wider 'debate' about this (with 'debate' here meaning the sickening display of Islamophobia dressed up as liberal concern for women's rights) then it looks quite good.

We're onto something with the issue of disfigurement too.  The figure of the disfigured woman hiding herself (and thus also her identity and vengeful agenda) is overused and overfamiliar, and laced with some quite nasty assumptions... but Vastra isn't disfigured.  Rather, as she herself says, it is Victorian society that considers her disfigured.  This is a more-or-less direct connection between race and social exclusion (with race filtered through the SF concept of the alien), and also connects with a critique of attitudes towards women who don't fit the sexist concept of acceptable female appearance.  (Slightly undermined by Vastra's fixation on Jenny's prettiness.)

At first sight, this reading also seems undermined somewhat by the way in which Vastra can walk around on the banks of the Thames, surrounded by people, without wearing her veil, attracting no attention.  On the other hand, maybe those people do see the veil even if we, the viewers, don't.  Because - and this is the really interesting thing - Steven Moffat now seems to be implying that the veil is only visible to people who feel some need to see it because they are unprepared to look the facts about Vastra in the face, as it were... and, by implication, to see past their own prejudices.  This, I suppose, is how to read Vastra's comment that she wears the veil as a judgement on others.

Read this way, the veil is a way for the viewer to judge themselves.  That's actually quite good, and more pleasant than my initial thought, which was that the "judgement" comment was a rather weasily way of making the need to escape the consequences of social marginalisation into an empowered choice made by the victim.

If the veil is a property of the viewer's perception, that would fit into Moffat's established habit of treating the camera as a diegetic eye (see Phil Sandifer on the Weeping Angels and the Silence for some interesting thoughts on this).  It is also, I suppose, the reason why Clara suddenly starts seeing Vastra's veil when she is having problems accepting the new Doctor, and confronting Vastra's support of him.  By that logic, it is also why the veil vanishes when she gets her talking to from Vastra.  The thing that makes this work is the way Clara's acceptance of the Doctor and Vastra comes via her giving Vastra a severe and confrontational talking-to, which concedes Vastra's basic point while also objecting to her arrogant way of making it.

Das Kapaldi ('Deep Breath' 2)

Okay, so, Capaldi.  Well, he's great, of course.  He's one of the best actors around - I've loved him ever since I saw him as Uncle Rory in The Crow Road.  (Yes, I know, most of you don't even know what I'm talking about.  I may as well mention, at this point, that I've never seen an episode of Skins or Children of Earth.  I've never even seen In The Thick of It, which surprises even me, given that its written by another of my favourite Scotsmen with an Italian surname.  I do, however, have Capaldi reading an audiobook of A Song of Stone.)  So he's a predictably good Doctor... though it is possible that I'm just perceiving him to be so good because...

A LARGE SECTION OF THE ORIGINAL VERSION OF THIS POST HAS BEEN REMOVED BY THE AUTHOR, PRIOR TO PUBLICATION, FOR REASONS OF POLITENESS

...of course, Capaldi gets plenty of typically groanworthy and arrogant stuff to say and do.  His Doctor calls Clara "the asking questions one" and an "egomaniac needy gameplayer", plays that horrific trick on her where he pretends to abandon her (the much-trumpeted 'darkness' of the new Doctor seems to consist of his bouts of callous selfishness being even more egregious, if shorter in length), etc.

But he also gets some good dialogue to play with, and he pounces on it.  Some of the mad stuff at the start is well written.  It has a genuine edge of mania.  The stuff about misunderstanding the concept of the bedroom, and the business with the mirror being furious... this has a really dangerous edge to it, as anyone who has heard genuine delirium will recognise.  It isn't 'realistic', but it feels like an indication of real disorientation.  It has that funny, disorganised, slightly menacing sound that someone's words have when they're halfway out of a nightmare.  And I liked the bit where he interprets the words - or perhaps we should say the feelings - of the lonely dinosaur. 

(I liked the dinosaur generally, by the way.  I liked that it was played as a victim, a tragic figure, misused and betrayed.  Of course, the juxtaposition of the dinosaur with Victorian London has something of that same "I'm mad me!" self-conscious faux-zaniness that creeps into so many Moffat scripts... but it turned out better than that in the end.  We didn't even get much in the way of the Doctor being compared to it - the lonely, last survivor, etc - except as a comparatively quiet implication.  Based on past excesses, that could've turned far more maudlin and sentimental.)

The best bit is probably the bit with the broom.  That felt like something the Doctor would say.  I struggle to think of anything Matt Smith was ever given to say that faintly resembles it... so I suppose I should give Moffat credit for changing his style (eventually) to suit a different actor... though I also have to admit the possibility that Smith did get some dialogue that good and I simply don't remember it, or didn't notice it at the time.

Pyramids of London ('Deep Breath' 1)

I've realised who Strax reminds me of: the policeman from 'Allo 'Allo.  But not as good.  That's a cheap shot, but I do have a serious point to make.

Strax, you see, is essentially a funny foreigner.  You know, with his allegedly hilarious misunderstandings and all that stuff.  Moffat evidently imagines that Strax's misunderstandings are a rich and continuing source of humour, since he stops the plot of 'Deep Breath' for a few minutes so that he can (once again) run through all the same Strax jokes he's already done several hundred times in other episodes.  (This, by the way, is another way in which Strax resembles a character from 'Allo 'Allo - he is the same joke, repeated endlessly, over and over again, with the laugh demanded - upon recitation of a well-known catchphrase - from an audience supposedly trained via pavlovian technique.  If you object to my singling out 'Allo 'Allo here then, really, I agree with you.  How about we use Little Britain as our example instead?)

Of course, the funny foreigner - with all the imperial contempt and jingoistic chauvinism that is built in to it - is a very old, traditional, endlessly recurring character in British comedy.  Shakespeare, for instance, relied upon it heavily, with his nebbishy Welshmen Fluellen and Dr Evans, his amusingly touchy Irishman MacMorris, and his randy preening French vanitycase Dr Caius, etc etc etc.  So we can't be too hard on Moffat here.  He is, after all, simply doing (yet again) something very old, venerable and respected, despite it being unfunny and based in national chauvinism.  Can't really blame him, can you?

As I say, however, Strax isn't as good as the policeman in 'Allo 'Allo... because the policeman in 'Allo 'Allo (you remember, he used to come in and mispronounce his words - it was terribly amusing) is actually a jab at the English, at the English habit of imagining that, rather than bother to learn foreign languages, all you have to do is speak English at foreigners, but with an attempt at their accent, and in a loud voice, and they'll get it... because English is the only proper language, and people who don't speak it are thus functionally the same as the mentally disabled, and everyone knows that people with mental illness just need to try harder.

I don't mean to attribute attitudes like that to Moffat.  But its a shame that he falls back on a comedy trope that is so incredibly dodgy.  Though, in fairness, the employment of dodgy foreigner stereotypes (comic or otherwise) is not exactly unknown to pre-Moffat Doctor Who.  And Strax isn't overtly supposed to represent any particular non-British nationality.  He's supposed to be an alien.  And here we stumble across another complicating factor: the alien in Doctor Who has always been based on a kind of racial essentialism, a fear of the other, etc etc etc.  Strax could arguably be said to be considerably less dodgy than, say, Linx, because he represents a condition of mutual acceptance.  He is the other, sure, but the other muddling along amongst us and basically on our side.

But here we run into yet another twist in the story... because this alignment of the other with 'us' is worrying in itself.  This recurring team - Vastra, Jenny and Strax - worries me.  It represents the reconciliation of the antagonist with 'us'.  They don't just live with humans, they live in Victorian London, and this seems to me to be the most blatant possible way of integrating them into a kind of aggressively middle-class, twee, cutesy, ostensibly lovable, yet aggressive and insular and ressentimental Britishness, a Britishness at its most iconically imperialistic and hierarchical.  Victoriana is the heavy drapes and elaborate dresses and cravats and top hats of the middle-classes.  Victoriana is the coughing, shivering, gin-swilling street poor as an essential background decoration, a set of tropes to locate us.  Victoriana is brown derby-wearing police inspectors (probably called Lestrade) who consult toff private detectives because, being working class, they're too thick to do their jobs themselves (the implicit goodness and necessity of the police is never questioned in Victoriana - something that wasn't true amongst common people in actual Victorian London, who often saw the bobbies as incompetents at best, violent spies at worst).  Victoriana is empire as backdrop.  Queen and country.  Big Ben.  Smog, gaslight, cobbles, hansom cabs, etc etc etc.  This is the milieu that Vastra, Jenny and Strax have assimilated themselves into.  Vastra even challenges the bad guys "in the name of the British Empire!"  This sort of thing no doubt seems desperately cute to Moffat, and all those people who write those rubbishy Jago & Litefoot audios for Big Finish, but its only our historical amnesia to what the British Empire was that allows this kind of desperate cutesiness to subsist.  The subsistence of it, in turn, allows the amnesia.  And boy, do we love our symptoms... hence our desire to inflict them on everyone and pull everyone, and everything, into them.  The Silurian and the Sontaran, for instance, have joined us in our adorable, pop-Conan-Doyle-inflected national fantasy of a penny dreadful past of wonders and horrors.  The horrors are all safely in the past (things we've cured now) and the wonders remain as a kind of nostalgic longing for the lost times when, right or wrong, he had confidence and lush gothic cliches galore on our side.  Vastra - the representative of a displaced people who are perpetually denied redress and justice (umm... imperialism? colonialism?) - has isolated herself from her people and integrated herself into imperial Britain.  She has ceased to be any kind of rebuke to 'our' world, or 'us'.  And 'we' have become the national gestalt that once lived in the United Kingdom of Sherlock.  Strax - the representative of a culture of militarism and conquest - has similarly integrated himself.  His imperialist attitudes are turned into cute, amusing misprisions which allow him to sink with ease into the warm slippers of imperial Victoriana.  The militarism of the Sontarans is no longer a rebuke to 'our' militarism.  The Sontaran may not be a threatening other anymore, but he is now no longer, in any sense, a mirror reflecting our own nastier values back at us.  He's not a reflection that attacks.  He's a stooge who safely reminds us of our foibles by being sillier than us, and then puts on the uniform of a servant and takes his place in the pyramid.  The good pyramid.  'Our' pyramid.  The pyramid we all fit into somewhere, nicely and neatly.  The pyramid that even the comedy tramps fit into.  The pyramid in which the chirpy cockney maid voluntarily calls people "ma'am" and serves them their tea, as an empowered life choice.  The pyramid of contextless, gutted, sanitised tropes.  This is partly why our representations of the Victorian era are so tropetastic... because tropes slot neatly into each other (hence all the Victoriana crossovers, i.e. Holmes vs Jack the Ripper, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, etc), arrange themselves into pyramids of perceived cultural weight, and start to resemble a vertiginous but orderly class structure, a sort of naturally-occuring periodic table of the social roles, which is the ideology of Victoriana that we are sold by every bit of culture the tropes come from.  This is why 'actually existing steampunk' (which 'Deep Breath' appropriates in predictable fashion, Moffat having been pulling at this particular thread for some time) is so pernicious.  Because the iconography of the high era of industrialisation, imperialism and colonialism is reduced to contextless fetishized commodities, sumptuous archaic kit, and safely de-conflicted social classes.  And even the identification of the cogwheel and the top hat with villainy nevertheless makes no apology for the joy we're supposed to take in the sheen of the 19th century machine. 

Of course, once again, we shouldn't be too hard on Moffat.  He's just doing what lots of people do.  He's just going along.  And he's not doing anything worse than Robert Holmes did in 'Talons of Weng Chiang'.  In fact, he's better than that.  His obligatory Victorian chinese person looks right, according to the big book of stereotypes... but at least he was played by an actual Chinese person.  And at least he wasn't being singled out.  At least he was just another brick in the pyramid, another character on the picturesque Quality Street tin that Victorian London has been turned into by our culture industries.  That's what we do now.  We don't do stories about Victorian London in which Chinese people are The Enemy.  The sneer at the foreigner has been displaced elsewhere, translated into code.  Now, we do stories in which all races and classes, all costumes and styles, all tropes, are brought together, all present and correct, all slotted into place.

Is that so bad?  I honestly don't know.  I'm not necessarily arguing that we're looking at a regress.  But I'm pretty sure we're not looking at progress.  And I'm not talking about the paucity of round things on the wall.

The Perfect Companion

Yes, the female companions of the Moffat era are smart, strong, capable, multi-talented, capable, prone to saving the day, etc.

But this is just the job of the companion.  Even the worst of the classic series companions - Victoria, Dodo, etc - gets to be smart, strong, capable, etc when required.  They don't tend to save the day in the classic series, but they always do what is needed and expected of them.  It's a tautology: the companions do the companion things more or less successfully.  That's not something that's entirely untroubling, but - for good or ill - it's how this works.  In the revived series, a great deal more is expected of the companions.  It's actually worrying just how much is expected of Martha.  But the point is that they all step up because that's what they're in the text to do.  The ones that don't, fail to be companions (i.e. Adam).

You also have to look at what they do and what happens to them on top of their basic role as companion.  Rose rejects the roles of shop worker, daughter, girlfriend, etc. in favour of gradually becoming a committed social actor.  Sadly, she is reabsorbed into such roles by the end (a major disappointment).  Martha throws herself into the role of social actor to a huge extent, ultimately rejecting the Doctor because he cannot satisfy her level of newly self-created level of self-esteem.  Donna escapes her emotionally unsatisfying family life and work life to, once again, become a social actor.  The theft of this from her is horrific, and is clearly meant to be.  It all goes wrong by the end of the RTD era, with them all married off, etc.  But this, however awful (and it is crushingly awful), is still a relatively late development.

The early-to-mid Moffat-era companions, by contrast, are given the arrangement of their domestic lives as their main extra-curricular activity (so to speak) on top of their 'duties' as a companion, right the way through.

Amy's character - i.e. what she does, says and thinks on top of all the fulfilment of 'companion duties' - is focused upon getting married or not getting married, being a mother or not being a mother, having a domestic home life or not having a domestic home life, being a wife, saving her marriage, etc, etc etc.  The Doctor actually intervenes, several times, to ensure that her personal life runs along the proper lines.  Whereas, in the RTD era, the Doctor was a force that (selfishly) drew the women out of the confines of personal and work life and into the wider arena of social action, in the Moffat era the Doctor actively tries to provide Amy with a perfect, middle-class domestic idyll.  House.  Car.  Marriage.  Etc.

River is ostensibly an archaeologist, or sometimes an assassin, but her character arc (if the random string of things she does can be called a character arc) is all about her assimilation into stability via her romance with, and marriage to, the Doctor.  Far from dragging her out of domesticity into social action, the Doctor saves her by dragging her the other way...and she does the same to him.

Clara, it must be admitted, is a little different.  She's got hardly any personal life at all, and has her duties on top of this absence.  They are initially employment duties which seem to meld strangely with her companion duties (i.e. the kids in 'Nightmare in Silver').

She's interesting actually, because she's an inflection of the true neoliberal ideal of the female as both domestic provider and multi-tasking worker.  Her work is domestic.  But she also plays whatever role is required of her by whatever episode she's in.  She is fractured into multiple selves, all of whom perform necessary tasks.  She's even shown to literally moonlight between two jobs in 'The Snowmen'. 

The objection that she doesn't revolve around the Doctor because she chooses to enter his timelines and save him, and that she is therefore her own woman and the solution to her own riddle, flounders on the realisation that she has, essentially, accepted a job or a duty and the fracturing of self that this entails.

Admittedly, Clara is not depicted without a certain occasional ambivalence towards the idea of absorbtion into the workforce as a multi-tasking, multi-skilled drone with multiple jobs.  In her debut proper, 'The Bells of Saint John', she is caught in a vast corporate machinery of soul-sucking employment.  However, ultimately, the inescapability of neoliberalism is arrived at, once again, as she enters a similar kind of self-fracturing machinery of work by her own choice.  The 'good' machinery rather than the bad.  The ultimate irony here may be that the self-fracturing machinery of work in question, the supposedly good machinery, her ultimate destination, turns out to be the Doctor himself.

No, actually, that's not quite an irony...  because this has always been latent in the companions, to a greater or lesser extent, almost since day one.  Remember above, when I said that it wasn't entirely untroubling that companions had to fulfill certain demands and do certain jobs simply in order to remain functional within the texts as companions?  Clara may be the final and open acceptance, on the part of the show, of one version of what the companion is: a precariously employed worker with great and various demands made upon them because of their (usually) voluntary decision to serve the Doctor.  She is the moment when that troubling, duty-laden, ideologically market-based conception, triumphs over the others.

Does this mean, then, that the pre-Clara Moffat companions are actually the most liberated from this syndrome, given the emphasis placed on their private lives aside from their 'duties'?  Well no, I don't think so.  They are still dragged away from the role of social actor - the potential positive flipside of the 'Doctor's happy worker' model - by their entanglement within extremely gendered conceptions of personal/emotional life.  They are dragged away from being either workers or social actors by also being women.

The better course to have taken would have been to trump RTD's failed (self-betrayed) project to fully embrace the companion as transitioning from the truncation of personal life under neoliberalism into independant - sometimes emancipatory - social action.  Instead, one way or another, Moffat does the exact opposite.

Anti-Moffat

or

News from Elsewhere II: This Time It's Polemical

I've done another guest post for Phil Sandifer's site, here.  He wanted someone to put a case against the Moffat era before he proceeded to post his own thoughts about it.  He asked me to provide and, despite the obvious dangers, I bravely agreed... to attack someone who can't answer back without looking like a massive prick.  Still, I've done it before.  Just never on a site with an actual readership.  The scarier thing is how Phil's own subsequent posts will stamp all over me. 

I've steered well clear of having a go at the man personally, which means I've not engaged with any of his troubling public statements.  I've tried to argue from the texts.

Phil has called my post 'A Case for the Prosecution'.  I'm glad he put "A" rather than "The", because - inevitably - my attempt will disappoint some of the many people who care about this issue, not least because I didn't have time to do much more than cobble together a (relatively) brief overview. 

To me, this bit of writing will always be called the 'Anti-Moffat'.  Not that I compare myself to Engels.  In his Anti-Dühring, Engels not only wrote a blistering polemic, he also did the one thing that genuinely makes polemic valuable: he explained his own, alternative view.  It became one of the most brilliant and inspiring elaborations of Marxism ever written.  I, by contrast, have failed to even come away with something positive to say about what my favourite TV show should be like.  I also failed - apart from the odd hint - to find space to put the Moffat era in its historical and political context, as the Who of late neoliberalism, ongoing crisis, backlash and austerity.  (Maybe I'll put all that in the book.)

So, basically, it's just a whinge.  But an entertaining one, I hope.

Engels.  Some people say Marxism wasn't as good after he took over.

ADDITIONAL, 23/03/14:  Richard Cooper, over at his blog 'Finger-Steepling and Sharks', also has an excellent essay about the issue of Moffat and sexism, here, which pre-dates mine.

The No Man

Well, I watched 'The Snowmen'.

It started badly, with the loner as unhealthy future villain. Watch out for the loners everybody - they're scary.

It briefly picked up with a rather good new title sequence.

Then we got into the mystery section, which was okay. I have serious issues with the idea that the Doctor is now mates with a Silurian and a Sontaran. Both races should hate his guts, the Silurians with good reason.  He's repeatedly failed to do anything but posture some platitudes for these Palestinians of the Who-world.  And then either sit by while his mates kill them, or kill them himself.  And the Sontarans don't work as comedy pratts.  I remember when they were satirical deconstructions of literal-mindedness and militarism, compared archly to medieval chivalric hypocrisy.  Now they're straight men.

But some of the jokes were funnyish, even if they did rely on the idea that it's okay to mock people for being short, looking odd, etc.

The spiral staircase was nice.

But then... Look, it's now clear that this show has no ambition to be anything more than put-down comedy and sentimentality, interspersed with stuff about how awesomely wonderful the Doctor is... despite the fact that he's now a prattling, petulant, sulky, self-pitying idiot.

Fatuous tear-jerkery. Manipulative, hollow gunk which instructs the viewer to feel certain things on command. No sense of history or politics at all, beyond some nonsequiturs about "Victorian values" which connected to nothing. And we have to get preached at about how wonderful it is to love your kids and cry. The most banal and bland moralising posing as inspirational and uplifting profundity. The most cynical arm-twisting of the feelings, posing as moving drama.

And then... "the only force in the world capable of conquering evil... the tears of a whole family on Christmas Eve". I just don't know where to start. I literally felt sick. It's like inhaling Steven Moffat's farts after he's spent 48 hours doing nothing but reading the insides of greetings cards and masturbating in front of a mirror.

And am I to understand that the Great Intelligence began as a lonely child's imaginary friend? You know, I have no problem with continuity being rewritten... but rewritten as explanations, couched in terms of cloying sentimentality, when there was no need for explanations in the first place?

Also, on the subject of the Clara mystery... who cares? I mean, how can one get interested in the solution to a riddle when you know that the solution will be 'some bit of sci-fi handwaving'. The interest in the best Doctor Who always used to be 'what does this mean?'. 'The Snowmen' tells you what it means (ie 'be nice to your kids, being a loner is bad for you, Victorian Values are BAD... whatever they are, and the Doctor is amazing'. Profound stuff like that.) The interest supposedly now lies in what everyone is feeling (which usually turns out to be something like 'Sad' or 'Happy' about completely inhuman and unrelateable experiences) and 'how will Moffat cleverly resolve this bit of apparently inescapable plot trickery?'.

Well frankly, fuck right off.

I like DW when it's 'just' well-made and unpretentious escapism (ie 'Terror of the Zygons') but this cack isn't escapism. Escapism would be something that took my mind off the fact that the world is turning to shit. 'The Snowmen' - being about the most perfect expression of Moffat's neoliberal Who - just rubs the shit in my face while screaming "cry, you proletarian meat-puppet!  CRY!!!!"

This is now not just a show I don't like. This is now something I actively hate.

Merry Fucking Christmas.

17

Ms. Kizlet is using the wi-fi signal to control people in the coffee shop.

 “I do love showing off,” she says through a waitress she has made her puppet. “Just let me show you what control of the wi-fi can do for you,” she adds through the mouth of a young girl.

It’s a tech demo. Here’s what this latest version of the operating system can do. Upgrade now. The iconography is all ruthlessly current. Particularly fitting: Kizlet and her crew are playing around on iPads as they do their little Steve Jobs routine. You almost expect her to reveal that they’ve captured Clara with an “oh, and one more thing.”

Kizlet explains that they’ve “released thousands” of base stations into the world, blanketing the whole of humanity in their Worldwide Web of Fear.

Meanwhile, Clara’s on her laptop. She recognizes the vulnerability in every grand system: people. With just a bit of clicking around she’s figured out where Kizlet is transmitting from. The most obvious spot in London, really. Kizlet's client loves using grand projects for his own purposes. It’s what he did in the Underground, and it’s what he’s doing now. But it’s 2013 now, and London’s grand projects aren’t for the little people anymore. Now they’re for the elite.

So it's the perfect place for Kizlet’s operation. The prestigious tallest building in London, to be filled with high-paying businesses. The metaphor is straightforward: the grand prestige project, like the Olympics and the Jubilee from the same year, is literally eating people alive. Construction is consumption. It even consumes and annexes the protests against it. Its name comes from the complaints about its design - the fear that it would be “a shard of glass through the heart of historic London.” Of course, the objection, like the vision itself, is concerned with the abstract form of London, as opposed to with the lives of those within it. Heritage London or the modern corporate state. It’s all the same: an aesthetic to show off. A system for control.

And yet, architecturally, the building is designed to be invisible - to blend into the clouds around it. Control is always supposed to be invisible, after all. Just something in the air, like the wi-fi signal itself. The spectacle is always showing off and remaining invisible at the same time. As with any demo, it’s not just technology being shown off. It’s ideology. Dressed up, inevitably, in the rhetoric of upper middle class consumption. The Great Intelligence wants “healthy, free-range, human minds.”

 “The farmer tends his flock like a loving parent,” Kizlet says.

“The abbatoir is not a contradiction,” she insists.

“No one loves cattle more than Burger King.”

So the Doctor smashes into the side of the building and tears it all down.

Damp Little Ideas

Phwoar, look at the imperialist symbolism on that!

That bit in 'The Empty Child' when the Doctor talks about the "damp little island" standing alone against Hitler... when I first saw that I hurled a coat-hanger I happened to be holding at my television.

Okay, so: patriotism as progressive, yeah?  "Don't forget the Welfare State" or whatever he says.

Hmm.  You will unsurprised to learn that I have doubts.


1.

There is sometimes an unwarranted elision of the idea of 'patriotism' with the idea of 'loving one's home'.  This is an elision that many left-wingers have been guilty of, from Orwell to Billy Bragg.  But it confuses distinct concepts.  Moreover, it acquiesces in the ideological project of confusing these concepts, a project of immense utility to ruling classes going back to the very birth of the state.  Patriotism isn't just a cynical scheme of the rulers... though it is  that, amongst other things.  The point here is that it is an ideological construction and a form of social practice which cannot be simplistically overlaid upon personal affection for one's origins and surroundings.

I love London.  In order to get sentimentally misty-eyed about this, I'd have to forget that the city is a concentrated site of racial discrimination, police repression, social cleansing, centralised state bureaucracy, drastic inequality; that it's the hub of the organisation and enforcement (physical and ideological) of a neoliberal and neo-imperialist power, strewn with monuments to one of the most savagely aggressive colonial empires in modern history.  And on and on and on.

The love of one's home is one thing.  'Patriotism' and 'nationalism' are both, finally, ideological notions mapped-onto it.  They both immediately elide the flexible and contextual concept of 'home' with the political category of 'country'.  Even the term 'homeland' starts to do this.  We should never let ourselves become deaf to the shades of meaning imported by extra syllables. 

The idea that patriotism can be a 'way in' to a larger feeling of social involvement is similarly dubious.  To the extent that patriotism makes the individual feel connected to something larger than him-or-herself, the connection is a masochistic one.  It is the sublimation of oneself into a dominating framework, not the integration of oneself into a genuinely collective endeavour, whatever the rhetoric.

Besides, this sublime idea of ecstatic sublimation is not only unduly R/romantic, but is also so vague, and so applicable as a description of so many varied and mutually-exclusive things, that it loses all substantive content. It can refer to mysticism, chauvinism, trade union activity, identity politics, family, etc.  Richard Dawkins feels 'part of something greater than himself'; so does the Pope.  For the idea of personal integration into wider structures to be meaningful, it must be individuated... whereupon we start to see patriotism as a distinct phenomenon, quite separate from, say, social work or progressive activism.  The mooted connection collapses.

Ideas of 'national community' are largely ideological constructions which artificially smooth-out hugely contradictory social arrangements riddled with class antagonisms. The idea that 'the nation' is a space where we can work for 'the public good' is similarly panglossian. In societies divided into social groups of mutually-exclusive interests that are constantly in material conflict, is there such a thing as a 'public good'?  Any concept of 'public good' is always, consciously or unconsciously, an expression of class interest, because it always ends up being an assertion that the interests of one class are synonymous with the interests of all classes.  This is simply impossible, barring something extreme like the immediate threat of a massive nuclear explosion.  Given that even imminent environmental catastrophe has not been enough to convince the bourgeoisie that they share a common interest with humanity as a whole, it's fair to say that 'the public good' is a last, temporary and remote possibility... at best.

The heart of capitalism is the antagonism between the interests of those who produce surplus value and those who pocket it. That makes me very suspicious of 'the nation', which in its modern form, is an integral part of global capitalism. Patriotism, similarly, is an ideological buttress of this system. It is also intimately bound up with imperialism rather than just being an unfortunate side-effect.  Patriotism has always been linked to the competition of states.  Viz the rise of patriotism alongside the rise of the modern state in Early Modern Europe, viz the patriotism of Roman senators, etc, etc.


2.

Does patriotism ever do any good? Well, as far as I can see, only when it's bound up with other ideas that actually conflict with it (which happens, of course).  The great post-war national liberation struggles against European colonial domination, for example... something Orwell never lived to see, leading him to rather simplistically seperate patriotism (good) from nationalism (bad).  Back 'home', many crusading socialists who laid the groundwork for the Welfare State, many Chartists etc., stressed the common welfare of 'the people' of 'the nation'.  Left-wingers such as Michael Parenti still assert that they are the real patriots for opposing America's wars in favour of social programs to benefit ordinary Americans.  This is a widespread strategy.  But it rings hollow.

We can't put the credit for the British Welfare State onto 'Britain' because it was a product of currents within the British polity (i.e. the labour movement, socialism, reformism, and yes even aspects of liberalism, etc) which had to fight long and bitter struggles against other groups in order to achieve any such gains.  (Now, of course, patriotic we'reallinthistogetherness is used to justfiy the wanton dismantling of these gains... which only goes to demonstrate that the patriotic idea is, at best, a tool that can be used by both sides... rather like a blunt instrument that can be snatched back and forth between mugger and muggee... except that the mugger brought it with him and knows how to use it.)

That the NHS happened is no reason to be proud of 'the nation', no more than one person's beauty is reason to praise the attractiveness of everyone on the bus... especially if a significant portion of the people on the bus are actively trying to disfigure the pretty one with knives.  (This is without pushing the analogy further by pointing out that 'beauty' is subjective, means different things to different people, and that praising it is by no means obviously a proper thing to do.  Apart from anything else, praising the beauty of strangers on buses would usually be tantamount to sexual harassment.  Something of the same combination of self-serving motives, arrogant presumption and abuse of privilege - all lurking beneath ostensible nobility - is usually to be found in patriotic waffle.  Even putting this aside, patriotism is an inherently dubious idea, not just because it relies upon a spurious lumping together of hugely disparate groups with hugely disparate interests, not just because it is bound up with the ideological hegemony of powerful interests, but also because it relies upon lazy assumptions that certain things are always positive, always worthy of public pride.)

As ever, we end up with the problem of 'we'.  Is there any word more abused in political discourse than 'we'?  It is abused by all sides, by David Cameron and Tony Benn.  'We' bomb Pakistan.  'We' created the Welfare State.  'We' had an empire.  'We' produced Shakespeare.  What obfuscatory nonsense this rests on.  A lot of those national liberation struggles I mentioned were waged against my very own 'damp little island'.  That this island has wildlife, literature, theatre culture and BBC sci-fi shows that I love, as well as an inspiring history of working class resistance, doesn't make it any less an imperial culture soaked in blood.  If we go along with the essentially patriotic idea of the island as a community, the idea that the material nature of the island creates a meaningful 'national identity' or something like that, then we end up with the dubious idea that, for instance, 'we' unleashed terror and torture against the Mau Mau rebellion. This is the flipside of saying that 'we' fought Hitler.  If the first isn't fair or true, neither is the second.

The only way to efface this is to simply not mention one side or the other.  In the interests of the patriotic mainstream, we never mention the Mau Mau.  This is the time-honoured and constant technique of capitalist media culture, 'The Empty Child' not-excepted: what cannot be said within the confines of mainstream ideological discourse must be passed over in silence... and because it always is  passed over in silence, it stays forever out of the hegemonic mainstream discourse, that discourse being composed of only those notions which can be spoken about without any awareness of breaching the 'common sense' consensus.  A self-perpetuating echo chamber which endures because it has, in many ways, won a kind of Darwinian battle of methods for containing discourse in capitalist societies, winning out over both extreme censorship and over genuine freedom of speech.

To breach this silence is to become political or 'controversial' (while the political valences of those things which *can* be said are not noticed... they simply become the ideological equivalent of wallpaper).  We forget the imperial crimes of Britain and leave it at saying 'we fought Hitler'... but again, the spurious 'we' does its work.  'We' fought Hitler. My grandad, Beaverbrook, Churchill, RAB Butler, Edward and Mrs Simpson... all in it together. It's obvious what's wrong with that, I'd hope. Large swathes of the British ruling class were sympathetic to the fascists as bulwarks against communism.  Unlike Churchill, my grandad ended up with shrapnel in his body for the rest of his life.  It might be objected that 'we' often means 'we the people'... but, as I said, we mustn't be deaf to the syllables.  Even the ones that pointedly aren't there. And even if we are  talking about 'the people'... who are they?  How do you get to be part of 'the people'.  Our latterday English narodniks indulge in this kind of vagueness at best; at worst they indulge in fascist sentimentalism.  The EDL talk about 'the people'.  There's nothing in the term to stop them.  As Walter Benjamin realised, cultural artefacts should be unusable by fascists if they are to be relied upon.

On this subject... I flat-out disbelieve that 'national culture' entails respect for diversity, given the sustained assaults upon diversity that are utterly mainstream in British culture.  We're always hearing about how 'British values' (presumably what is meant are not those values which permit Britain to bomb the shit out of civillians in the Middle East) are under threat from multiculturalism, Islam, etc.  On the ground, some people cling to fictions like 'British fair play' as a way of expressing tolerance and democracy, but at least as often (far more often, I suspect) such notions are employed by xenophobes, ressentimental Tories, Dailymailistas, and those fascist sentimentalists already mentioned). I don't even think that the aggregation 'national culture' is actually possible.  Such aggregations are highly selective ideological fictions.  But even if it were true, it leaves us with the problem of respect for diversity *outside* the artificially/ideologically-constructed idea of 'the nation'. This is especially problematic when the nation being talked about/celebrated is also an empire, or a former empire, or run by 'humanitarian interventionists'.


3.

Of course, in the mainstream, all this isn't even a blip. In the near-constant drip-drip-drip of popular culture, Britain is a collective hero (a crusty John Bull, flawed and old-fashioned, but coming-out-swinging for freedom) fighting evil German imperialism. Our own imperialism is effaced, eternally.  In this context, the true history of the British ruling class' role in tolerating fascism, comforting fascism, enabling fascism, and finally fighting fascism only when their own imperial hegemony was threatened, must be left out because it strays out of the mainstream 'common sense' and into the 'political' or 'controversial'.  And so we end up with the Doctor praising the damp little island.  Somebody pass me a sick bag.

Another favourite example of mine is in Agatha Christie's Poirot , in an adaptation of 'The Clocks'.  Poirot is confronted by a German spy motivated by appeaser-sympathies who sneers at "weak, liberal England".  Poirot angrily retorts that "weak, liberal England" gave him a home when the Germans overran Belgium during the First World War.  What isn't mentioned, amidst all this moving drama about standing up to tyranny, is the teensy-weensy little business of Belgium's utterly murderous and racist imperial domination of the Congo, which King Leopold initiated in order to compete with the imperialism of other European powers such as Britain, and which was immensely profitable because of trade with Britain, amongst other countries.

'We' all know about German imperialism... well, about bits of it.  As has been said elsewhere, the real problem with German imperialism (the problem that makes it exceptionally memorable) is that they tried standard European methods of violent colonial landgrabbing, repression and racial mass-murder in mainland Europe rather than in Africa... after all, nobody in mainstream media-culture remembers the Kaiser's genocide of the Hereros and Namaquas in Namibia.  'We' also remember German imperialism for another reason: it is the imperialism that excuses, effaces, blots out our own.  The writer of the Poirot episode knew that Nazi Germany was bad, and that Britain 'stood against it'.  He knew Poirot was the hero, and so had to give voice to these uncontroversial notions.  He probably didn't know much about the Belgian Congo, about Mark Twain's King Leopold's Soliloquy , about Tintin in the Congo... after all, we don't get morality plays about how dreadful Belgian imperialism was rammed down our throats in constant TV/film dramas.  Nothing in it to make 'us' brits feel good about 'our' heroism. 

This is not, by itself, a huge problem within the confines of a TV show... and, indeed, The Empty Child is probably Moffat's best work precisely because it manages a certain scepticism towards the idea of an untroubled national community, albeit mediating its issues with this notion through the free-floating conduit of sexual repression. The last refuge of the scoundrel, however, leaves a nasty taste in my mouth when it makes its appearance in a quite good piece of work like 'Empty Child'.

We might ask why it was possible to do a WWII Who story in 1989 that did not embrace the concepts of patriotism or 'the nation' uncritically, but it no longer seemed possible in 2005. The degeneration of our 'national' political discourse since 1989 surely has a fair bit to do with it.  Maybe Moffat shouldn't shoulder all the blame.  Thanks be to many, but perhaps especially to Blair.

The Way We Live Now

Capaldi.  Wow.  I'd have put money on it being some new variation on the Tenant/Smith entity.  A young relative unknown with male model looks (one reason Moffat says he hired Smith is that he looked like someone who got photographed wearing pants for a living).  I admit, I'm astonished.  Capaldi is a genuinely great choice (if only I could believe he's likely to get decent scripts to work with).

Of course, the Doctor is STILL not a woman or a person of colour... but I'm not 'disappointed' because I never expected that to happen.  Either written by Moffat would've been likely to end up as a blood-curdling, shaming disaster.  As one bizarre online comment has it, Moffat's idea of a woman Doctor wouldn't have pleased "internet anti-equality feminists" (whatever the bloody hell an 'anti-equality feminist' might be).

So it's probably just as well that Moffat has - completely out of left-field - cast an older, male, white Scotsman. 

On the subject of online comment...  Facebook and Twitter are now plastered in remarks and memes in which fans sneer at all the (supposedly) weepy young fangirls who're unimpressed with Capaldi because he's not young and hot.

There's a bit of me that sympathises with the derision, if I'm honest. These young whippersnappers are annoying (largely because they're young and happy and I'm neither)... but the comment on this has immediately become venomously contemptuous and sneeringly sexist.  Because the focus is clearly on the silly, hormonal young wimmenz.

Viz:

Yeah, 'cos that's just what the Fourth Doctor symbolises: sneering at young women.

There's also a YouTube video doing the rounds of a young woman, possibly a teenager (I can't tell anymore; anyone under thirty looks like a foetus to me nowadays) reacting unhappily to the announcement that the new Doc will be an older, craggy fella.  Take a look at the comments below it.  I shouldn't need to quote them.  They're all too predictable.

As I say: misogynistic society + internet anonymity = ugly honesty.

Apart from anything else, this is rank hypocrisy. Just imagine the tantrums from the legions of sad, middle-aged fanboys if the new companion were an older, craggy actress rather than some perky young ingenue that they'd like to daydream about tupping.

Still, that's sexism for you. The sense of entitlement on the part of the privileged is so ingrained that it isn't even noticed, and any challenge to it as perceived as persecution or silliness.

On a related issue (well, it's the same issue really), it seems Moffat took the opportunity of the Capaldi announcement to sneer at the idea of a woman Doctor.  He says, sarcastically, that he wants a man to play the Queen.

Well doesn't that just say it all?

Firstly, Moff, why do you always, instinctively run to establishment authority figures?  You creep.

Secondly... OH YEAH 'COS NO MEN HAVE EVER PLAYED WOMEN HAVE THEY!?!?!?!?!  I MEAN, IT'S NOT AS IF CROSS-DRESSING AND DRAG ARE INBUILT, AGE-OLD ASPECTS OF THE BRITISH THEATRICAL AND TELEVISUAL TRADITION!!!!!  IT'S NOT LIKE MALE ACTORS, MALE WRITERS AND MALE PRODUCERS HAVE BEEN APPROPRIATING FEMALE CHARACTERS AND EXPERIENCES FOR, LITERALLY, CENTURIES, IS IT!?!?!?

Of course, that's not even the point.  Indeed, Moffat's glib deflection is a paradigmatic example of entitled fanboy tactical point-missing.  But we'll let it pass.  I'm not here going to rehearse, yet again, the same rhetorical questions about why an alien who changes his entire body periodically can't spend some time having a fanny instead of a willy.

Oh dear, look, I just rehearsed it.

Whoops.

The real point here is that the Doctor is a cultural marker who punches well above his weight.  And he is currently an exclusionary marker masquerading as an inclusive one. Still, as I say, that's the norm... and any challenge to it is perceived as persecution or silliness.

A Town Without Context

On 'A Town Called Mercy'

The ends can justify the means, but there needs to be something which justifies the ends.

 - Trotsky

Jex experiments on people in order to create a cyborg supersoldier.  His motive is to end a war which is killing his people.  But were his people the attackers or the attacked?  That this is ignored tells us a great deal about the writer/s but deprives us of the possibility of making moral sense of the story.  It is ignored, presumably because it is considered irrelevant.  Yet, the whole point of the story appears to be the question of whether Jex is a bad man or a good one... with the answer being, of course, "yes".  But I'd argue that the wider social context of Jex's actions (beyond just saying that 'it was war') is as important as it is obscure.

The notion - that war is, as Jex puts it, "a different world" in which normality shifts drastically and morality becomes fuzzy - is, for a start, a somewhat glib truism.  Like all such glib truisms, it can be pressed into service (i.e. "Yes, an invasion will kill lots of Iraqi people... but we have to do something; Saddam has WMD!!!") or ignored (i.e. "Those Muslamic terrorists are killing Our Boys!!!  Why do they hate us???") according to ideological needs and preferences.

Kryten would find it easier to get rid of the Apocalypse Boys
now that he'd been assimilated by the Borg.

'A Town Called Mercy' actually tries to hone in on questions of moral ambiguity, and to try to represent that ambiguity in a sustained way, which is actually fairly good going for the series (at this time).  Usual practice for Moffat-era Who is to suggest extremely crude, superficially worrying moral equivalences in dialogue which are then papered-over by the actual behaviour of the Doctor and his gang (whom we might want to start calling 'Our Boys and Girls', since it is assumed that they deserve 'our' support whatever they do).  'Mercy', by contrast, briefly shows the lead characters in genuine quandries about what to do for the best.  Sadly, however, vital information is omitted from their calculations... and the omissions are interesting.

As I say, it's not exactly an earth-shattering observation that a basically good guy can do horrible things.  Orwell begins The Lion & The Unicorn - written during the Blitz - with a passage saying that, as he writes, civilised people are flying overhead trying to kill him.  The pilot in the bomber, Orwell remarks, "is serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from evil."

Jex is, of course, serving his 'country', so to speak.  But is he from Space Poland or from the empire of the Space Nazis?  To translate into geek: is he as much of a Bajoran as he seems, or is he a Cardassian?  Or is the situation more complex than that?  Is it more like America vs Japan?  Two rival empires clashing.  One the overt aggressor, but the other also implicated in bringing the conflict on via, say, provocation.

It matters.  War crimes are never excusable, of course... except that they are  excused.  All the time.  They're excused as long as they're 'ours', whoever 'we' happen to be.  In fact, if they're 'ours', they tend to not even be noticed, let alone excused.  When they cannot be ignored or straight-facedly excused (i.e. the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib) they are ideologically neutralised as aberrations, quickly corrected by the putatively aggressive questioning of a Media who are actually pussycats sitting on the laps of the powerful and purring for bellyrubs.  The odd playful scratch does not a ferocious tiger make... and anything more than the odd playful scratch might endanger the reliable supply of Kit-e-Kat.

However, it is simply not enough to know that a horrible act was committed, to condemn it and leave it at that.  Atrocities are never excusable, but context must make us view violence committed in defence, or in the cause of liberation, differently to how we view violence committed by the aggressors... if only so that we can make intelligible sense of what is actually happening.

International law draws distinctions, at least formally:

 2. Reaffirms the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, particularly armed struggle

- United Nations General Assembly Resolution A/RES/33/24 of 29 November 1978

People have the moral right to use violence against their occupiers, to use any means available to rid themselves of those who have invaded their territory.  There is, of course, no such thing as 'legal terrorism' (though terrorism is subject to definition)... except that, once again, there is.  Terrorism is, generally, legal when it is committed by the powerful against the powerless.  State terrorism is so legal, it isn't even seen as terrorism at all.  'Terrorism' is something done by people with bolt-cutters or homemade bombs or hijacked jumbo jets.  Worse atrocities carried out by states (and/or their hired thugs) are called 'counterterrorism' or 'counter insurgency', etc.  The US government can organise genocidal levels of violence against those regimes of which it disapproves and this doesn't count.

Again, our culture tends to see these sorts of issues clearly enough when looking at the French Resistance, but runs into difficulty acknowledging the exact same principle with regards to the Iraqi Resistance.  It all comes down to who's side 'we' are on... or rather, who is on 'our' side.  Since 'we' are, by definition and by common sense, the goodies, then our friends must, ipso facto, be goodies too... goodies don't ally with baddies, after all... and so those who attack 'our' friends must, logically, be baddies.  This is what responsible journalists call 'living in the real world'.

Israel, for instance, is 'our' ally, ergo Israel is 'the only democracy in the Middle East', constantly fighting for its life against evil-minded Arab aggressors... despite the fact that Israel is a war-starting, avowedly racist, settler-colonial Apartheid state, existing in clear breach of international law (it holds territory it acquired through aggressive war) which is capable of nuclear devastation that Iran can only daydream about. (By the way... it is sometimes argued that the attitude of the Western left towards Israel - i.e. obsessing over it while paying less attention to equally bad or worse states elsewhere - is a mirror image of the hypocrisy of the Western establishment... but this ignores the fact that one has a greater moral obligation to protest the actions of ones own state than those of others, and Israel simply could not do what it does without the funding and support of the US and UK.  One wouldn't pay much heed to the wife of a serial killer who said "well, it's all very well, all these people going on about my husband... but what about Robert Mugabe?!"  We would rightly construe this as a distraction.)

Terrorism is never excusable, but it always has context... and the context is usually one of power relations.  It would be a travesty (as purblind as it is common) to simply wag a moralising finger at atrocities like suicide bombings by Palestinians in Tel Aviv without properly contextualising and historicising them, i.e. without properly explaining why they occur.  It's terribly easy to condemn things.  It's much harder to historicise them, especially when history doesn't support our ideological convictions.  Contrary to myth, it's not just people like me who have ideological convictions.  Even those who trumpet their own supposed scepticism are usually riddled with unexamined and unacknowledged ideology.  People like Sam Harris, for instance, would have us believe (using anecdotal examples of individual cases) that such attacks occur simply because of the intoxicating effects of Islamic dogma... leaving out the evidence which shows that suicide bombing is almost invariably a product of political anger in response to tyranny, despair, injustice and helplessness... say, in the face of the continued, illegal, violent, occupation of Palestine by the Israelis, or of the American occupation of Iraq.  This doesn't 'excuse' suicide bombing (whatever 'excuse' could possibly mean in this context) but it does historicise and contextualise it... in a way that shows the historical and political culpability of those moralisers who do so much to create the conditions for it.

Part of the problem with talking about this issue is what we might call the make-the-foundation-of-this-society-a-man-who-never-would fallacy: that to make moral judgements is the same thing as to moralise.  The assumption is one of moral absolutes, which are generally decried while being tacitly employed (including, of course, by me)... in much the same way that we tend to think of 'situational ethics' as lacking integrity, despite the fact that ethical judgements always depend upon situation.  Making moral judgements doesn't need to involve expressing categorical disapproval.  (The 'Thou Shalt Not!' model of ethics is far from the oldest and most venerable.)  Nor is the flipside true; to make moral distinctions is not to excuse.  People who'll tell you that it was 'moral relativism' to equate US/UK aggression against Iraq to, say, German aggression against Poland, are themselves the real moral relativists, because they see crimes committed by 'us' as being somehow less immoral than the same crime committed by another.  As I've implied, similar crimes are not always morally equivalent... but the key issue for parsing this is the issue of power.  Who has it and what are they using it for?  For instance, domestic violence is sometimes committed by women against men, and this is inexcusable... but it would be intellectually and politically dishonest to forget the context.  We live in a patriarchal society soaked in rape culture; males still have enormous social, financial, cultural, political advantages; domestic violence (and violence generally) by men against women is much more common; etc.

The moral status of unprovoked aggression by states is very clear according to international law going back to the Nuremberg trials.  It is the supreme war crime because it contains within itself all the crimes that always follow from invasion and occupation: theft, torture, rape, murder, etc.  That's why, as Chomsky observed, every US President in the post-WWII era would have been hanged if such tenets of international law were applicable to the most powerful empire of the post-war period.  As it happens, they were inapplicable from the start.  Axis criminals were simply not charged with crimes that were also committed by the Allies (i.e. indiscriminate terrorist bombing of civillians) precisely because the framers of the Nuremberg laws didn't want to set dangerous precedents.

The Doctor sometimes does the things that his enemies are portrayed as evil for doing.  Genocide, for example, in 'Remembrance of the Daleks'.  There is an extent, however, to which any attempt to put the Doctor's actions in 'Remembrance' into real world terms is always going to fail politically... since only the fantastical scale of the Dalek threat can possibly justify what he does.  In the real world, there is no level of threat or oppression which could justify genocide... the key point here being that any force in the real world capable of genocide on that scale would be, by definition, an immensely powerful political/economic/military imperialism.  By posessing the Hand, the Doctor becomes powerful himself.  In reality, the victims are never as powerful as the victimisers.  The reason 'we' want to attack Iran rather than, say, North Korea, is precisely because 'we' know that 'they' can't  chuck nukes at us.

It's likely that anybody capable of supplying Jex with the technical, technological, monetary and 'human' resources to create the Gunslinger would have to be pretty powerful.  It would've been nice to know for sure one way or the other, but my bet would be on Jex being from an imperialist power of some kind.  Modern warfare is always imperialistic when it isn't defensive.  So should Jex be killed?  I certainly wouldn't want to preach to the Gunslinger about morality.  I'd be much more inclined to think he had the right to decide than the Doctor.  Thing is, I just don't find this question particularly interesting.  Neither a 'yes' nor a 'no' answer changes anything or achieves anything real.  It gets us nowhere.  The question is strangely empty.  Debating the morality of hanging the Nuremberg defendants doesn't help us understand the rise of fascism or the imperialist nature of the European conflagration they helped oversee.  Hanging Blair in Fallujah wouldn't stop the system he represents creating any more Fallujahs.  Does he deserve to swing?  I don't really care.  It's a fundamentally uninteresting question.  We end up back with that old question about whether the ends justify the means?  Well, that's a no-brainer, obviously.  Yes, possibly, sometimes - it depends on the context.  That's assuming, of course, that the question is asked honestly... which it usually isn't.  Usually, all that needs to be ascertained by the commissar to whom the question has been posed, is who did what.  It's like that other cliche, about how "I was just following orders" is no defence.  In real-world ideological discourse, when 'we' (whoever 'we' are) were just following orders, then that's fair enough... and it constitutes extremist lunacy to even think otherwise.

I'd like to know about the context of the orders Jex got, and the context in which he obeyed them.  The episode, however, neglects to mention any of that.  It is clearly considered that a debate about the ethics of war can be carried out without such context.  I disagree.  I want to know.  Not because I want to know if Jex is 'good' or 'bad' (unlike the writer/s, I don't think these things can be settled so easily... certainly not by an act of self-sacrifice which doesn't actually change anything from the past one iota) but because I want to understand the political meaning of what transpires.  Sadly, like so much of 21st century Doctor Who, particularly under Moffat, 'Mercy' simply doesn't possess an interior political context. 

'A Town Called Mercy' actually does comparatively well in its awareness that morality depends upon context, that the social context of an act can alter its meaning, that the social context of a person can alter his or her moral status, etc.  It permits Jex to be both a 'war criminal' and to be capable of more than that.  Moreover, it allows the Gunslinger to do much the same.  Having been a victim, he becomes an attacker (the point is not that he attacks his tormentors but that he then attacks the town of Mercy) and then, later, to become the town's protector.

However, ultimately, the story flounders on lack of context.  What, one feels like demanding, was the context for Jex's actions?  The Doctor's initial enthusiasm for his people doesn't mean they were necessarily the victims of aggression (he's enthusiastic about America during the Vietnam war, when Nixon was dropping more tonnage of bombs than were dropped during WWII on the peasants of South East Asia).  It isn't that there may be some justification for having mutilated and murdered people, but that there may be some wider political and moral context which will help us to understand how he came to do such things.  Even if he was on the attacking side, I'd like to know about the culture which created a situation in which he got caught up in such a venture.  Was he an enthusiastic volunteer, like so many of the doctors who formed the single largest professional group within the SS?  Was he one of those 'ordinary men' who found themselves committing extraordinary atrocities out of an inability to resist social pressure?  Was he propagandized into accepting a pernicious ideology that he now rejects?  I'd really like to know this stuff.  This interests me, far more than a scene where the Doctor lectures the assembled townspeople (most of whom are, natch, fickle moral cowards) about non-violence.

This leads me to another issue.  The Doctor straps on guns when he becomes the Sheriff.  Well, I'm not a pacifist so I don't have an objection to that per se.  I'm not one of those people who wants the Doctor to be inherently non violent.  However, it does make me think of The Prisoner  episode 'Living in Harmony' (you know, the Western one).  This episode was not shown on American TV at the time.  The official reason was that it featured mind-altering drugs... but this is unconvincing, given how many episodes which did make it onto US TV also featured mind-altering drugs. The real reason, as Robert Fairclough has argued, is probably the anti-war subtext of the episode in the context of the Vietnam war and the protest movement against it.  It was just too near the knuckle.  An episode which evokes the primal myth of America (the Wild West), in which the hero refuses to strap on a six-shooter.  Now, context changes things.  I'm not, as I say, a pacifist, but 'Living in Harmony' acquires a political charge that is thrilling in the context of that moment of history, in which a generation were marching for peace.  So it's disappointing that, in the context of British and US troops still engaged in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and elsewhere, Doctor Who does a Western in which the Doctor straps on his six-shooter without a qualm.

He also pins on that sheriff's badge eagerly too... which is a sign of the times, like his unworried acceptance of the Tesselecta's assertion that, like them, he stands for 'law and order'.  Who's law?  Who's order?  And are the two things necessarily linked, or even desirable.  Lots of laws are pretty fucking awful, precisely because of who's interests they serve.  There's that missing political context again.  What a gaping hole its absence leaves in a story that specifically tries to examine these issues!

Of course, blaming Steven Moffat or Toby Whithouse for this would be to miss the point rather.  They're not there to make political statements but to make fantasy TV.  That the fantasy TV they make seems depressingly conformist and apolitical (meaning, in practice, apologetical for powerful interests and prejudices) is, to a large extent, the fault of a society that has, by and large, abandoned anti-war activism and protest.  That's not to say that protest has disappeared, but we're a long way from the big march against the invasion of Iraq in 2003.  If people don't mind their country being engaged in murderous imperialism, then their fictional cultural heroes are not going to reflect any unease about it.  Like everything good, such anger and protest must flow upwards from the bottom.  Steven Moffat - and the media culture he embodies - isn't going to be pushed to the left by its own conscience.  Some hope.  Meanwhile, in the absence of any countervailing tendency, capitalist media culture drifts ever rightwards.

You know, a recent survey has suggested that most British people think the invasion of Iraq caused the deaths of under 10,000 people. The evidence seems to show that the actual figure is probably between 600,000 and a million... which is without calculating the death toll of the first Gulf War or the sanctions regime that Britain supported. This fact alone should shame the British out of producing or watching any televisual morality fables about war ever again. Really... just who the bloody hell do we think we are, swaggering around the globe, annihilating people for the convenience of the American imperium and for neoliberalism's access to markets, and then entertaining ourselves (and improving our children's morals) with comfortingly smug little homilies about war?

The anodyne smugness is a function of the lack of context.  And it gets everywhere, into even the most frivolous bits of narrative culture.  Leaving out the context and the history is an essential ideological tool of the capitalist media.  This is how the Israel/Palestine 'conflict' is portrayed as being about 'two tribes' who can't get on.  Every news report that tuts over 'conflict' in the West Bank or Gaza takes, essentially, the same tack as 'A Town Called Mercy' (and other Doctor Who  texts, including many from the classic series) in the way it presents us with a tragic drama about the horror of war, etc., while neatly and discreetly editing out any context which will help us make moral sense of it all.  The moral sense is always inextricably bound up with the political and historical sense.  That's why the capitalist culture industry usually thinks we don't need to know the context.