Thing is, I love Douglas Adams. He was great. A very clever man, very nice, very funny. A superb comic writer; possibly the greatest comic prose stylist since P. G. Wodehouse. An amiable and persuasive advocate of science and atheism. Creator of novels that I've read and re-read, radio shows that I've listened to over and over again, etc. A great guy.
But I don't like 'Shada'. It's pretentious. And naff. A combination exemplified in that bit of description of Chris Parsons in the script: "likes Bach and Status Quo." Oh dear.
And all that guff from Parsons about "doors that remain permanently closed to one". What a load of Student Common Room wank. How amazing that Chris Bidmead is the guy who reguarly gets accused of pumping the series full of precious, science-fixated toss!
And Adams is clearly having a poke at sci-fi writers who write lazy plots (all that satirical jabbing at the idea of taking over the universe) while also not bothering to give Skagra any real motivation or any sensible goals. Robert Holmes had done the uber-ironic pisstaking of silly sci-fi names/plots/villains etc before this, and better, and without letting the audience think he was smirking. In 'Shada', Adams seems to be openly smirking at the audience, or looking over their heads at his Cambridge mates going "look chaps! What merkins they are - they take this rubbish seriously!" Someone who laughs at their own jokes is one thing. Someone who laughs at you for laughing at their jokes is another. Someone who laughs at you for laughing at their deliberately unfunny jokes is just, well, taking the piss.
There are some genuinely funny/clever glimpses of the real Adams (the scene where the Doctor fools Skagra's ship into thinking he's dead) and an attempt at a satire of literal mindedness... but it all seems so, well, literal.
Meanwhile, Tom and Lalla alternate between openly mocking everything around them and pretending that they're in an adaptation of an Anthony Trollope novel (which both charms and repels me simultaneously) and Christopher Neame (better known from Secret Army, which was grim and gritty and all those other things that start with "gr" that Doctor Who fans pretend to like) commits skin-crawling dignitycide by walking around in Cambridge dressed as a charity shop Ziggy Stardust. Mind you, if you've seen in in Dracula A.D.1972.....
And Claire is just another dim, girly sidekick despite supposedly being a Physics postgrad student. And there's a real snobbish condescension in the way that the College Porter is mocked at the expense of all the posh, cerebral characters.
Thank goodness it was cancelled and DNA got to cannibalise it for parts when writing his infinitely superior Dirk Gently novels. Really, I'd rather have had 'Doctor Who and the Krikkit Men'.
ideas are icepickproof
Wednesday, 8 December 2010
Binro Was Right
This is a rejigged new version of something originally posted at the old site. I've snipped a few irrelevancies and amplified some conclusions. Oh, and it's dedicated to Iain Cuthbertson and Timothy Bateson, both of whom died last year.
'The Ribos Operation' seems, at first glance, to present the cosmic conflict between Good and Evil, spiralling downwards from a meeting with a quasi-God in a surreal conceptual landscape, downwards into a story about the vast conquest plans of an interplanetary warlord, further downwards into a heist caper about two semi-comic con-men, and then further downwards into a short meeting between and old man and a young man in a little flea-ridden hovel... yet it's in the hovel that we find the real message of the story. But is Binro right?
Well, he's right about the stars being suns circled by inhabited worlds (just like his somewhat-more mystical and flamboyant progenitor Giordano Bruno, who was burnt at the stake by the Church for, effectively, founding science-fiction... fair enough, some would say). But, in the wider sense, isn't the story's most moving and thematically vital scene compromised by what goes on around it? After all, it turns out that the universe is caught in the battle between light and dark "gods", and shaking bones about and chanting is a valid path to knowledge!
My feeling is that, ultimately, this story's real gist is a little more complex and contingent than it seems. I'm not convinced that it's really about oppositions between good and bad, or even science and superstition... but we're going to have to work around this a bit.
For a story which sets up and begins a quest narrative about the conflict between two godlike entities called the White Guardian and the Black Guardian, 'The Ribos Operation' is surprisingly ambiguous in its treatment of morality. The White Guardian here is certainly no lovable Mr Nice Guy. On the contrary, he's a sinister old bourgeois bully, twisting the Doctor's arm into helping him for reasons that are (by anything he actually says) self-serving. If he's God (and the opening scene cheekily teases us into momentarily thinking he might be) then he's no kindly deity, but rather the Old Testament Yahweh in one of his quiet and scary moods.
(It's interesting to note that, on the few occasions when the classic series had the Doctor meeting gods, they were usually played by plummy thesps and did an awful lot of sitting around in chairs being coldly inscrutable. Really, the "gods" in the classic series really do an astonishing amount of sitting, i.e. Sutekh, the Gods of Ragnarok, etc. By contrast, the only "god" to have appeared in the new series takes the form of a big, snarling Heavy Metal album cover. Now, the Beast may represent fine CGI, but, if you ask me, it possesses considerably less dramatic power than Cyril Luckham sipping creme de menthe.)
But, anyway... like the old geezer in the chair, Garron and Unstoffe are also hard to pin down morally. They're crooks who happily talk about mugging people, yet they seem to lack cruelty. Like Vorg in 'Carnival of Monsters', Garron can be seen as an entrepreneur, an embodiment of the cuddlier aspects of free trade and enterprise, bringing some colour to the lives of the poor souls who don't get to enjoy the benefits of the market... but he's also a criminal, a con-man. There's no doubt about that. But his saving grace is that he is not powerful himself, but preys upon the powerful. Poor rubes like the Ribans have little to fear from him. He's the kind of capitalist who bilks big investors in a shady shares deal and then buggers off to the Bahamas. As such, he's likeable. The Doctor certainly likes him (but then, he should - they're very alike) and finds his anecdotes about past jobs laugh-out-loud amusing. Garron is another of Bob Holmes' quasi-Falstaffs: a charismatic and adorably transparent fake, loquacious, cowardly but not weasley, hedonistic and debauched (though, unlike Falstaff, not in the sexual sense: charmingly, Garron takes care to avoid touching Romana's boobs when he gets the chance).
These Holmes reimaginings of Shakespeare's fat knight can go either way (c.f. Jago and Shockeye) but Garron is also one of Holmes' quasi-Doctors, those characters of his that reflect the Doctor. In Garron, we see aspects of Our Hero. In his way, the Doctor can be seen as an expression of bourgeois libertarian individualism... though he's too scrupulous for that role really. But he and Garron are both opt-outs, independants and chancers, in it for the thrills and the laughs. The Doctor coolly admits to being "terrified" even as he's clearly enjoying himself. Garron is less into actual danger but evidently finds the con game, with all the attendant risk, highly amusing. Why pick on someone like Vynda-K if not from a desire to live dangerously? Garron could sell the jethryk and retire so why doesn't he think it's "worth all that much"? Because it's not really money he wants. The jethryk is a means to an end. It allows him to work his big, audacious cons; it allows him to make fools of people he holds in contempt (like the Graff). If he sold it he'd get the money, but then what? Make Garron rich and you'd bore him to death. Similarly, the Doctor couldn't cope with the easy life. He had it and he rejected it, much to Romana's bemusement. The Doctor likes to be where the action is, or even to make the action. The White Guardian knows exactly how to threaten him: "Nothing at all. Ever." is as good as a death sentence to the Doctor. Like the Doctor, Garron ran away from a home to which he can't go back. Like the Doctor, in his way, he's on a moral mission. And he has an inbuilt sense of justice - maybe not right and wrong, but justice. "All I do is take a bit from those who have too much and then I spread it around a bit. I help to keep the economy in balance!" Well, the story started with a warning about how concentrations of "forces" can lead to chaos. Garron, despite his criminality, is an agent of the balance that the Key supposedly represents. He just balances out the money. He really is the "innocent crook" of the Doctor's description. In a way, the Doctor's an innocent crook in this story too - trying to steal the jethryk not for its monetary value, but only because it's the key to his further adventures. Just like Garron. In fact, even the Graff only wants the jethryk because it's the key to his future adventures! I suppose it all comes down to what kind of adventures you have in mind.
And maybe Romana isn't far wrong when she pronounces that Garron is labouring under a "deep seated sense of rejection" - the remark might be useless, but it isn't necessarily wrong. Is Garron taking a kind of humourous revenge on a world he finds ridiculous and mean? Is he a poor boy who likes seeing the rich with egg on their faces? He wouldn't be the first. He might not have Unstoffe's righteous rage at the murder of Binro, but he certainly enjoys making the Graff squirm with his last-minute flim-flam about security agents. That's the real Garron, I think: grinning as he mocks the Graff with what he thinks are going to be his last words, ridiculing the tyrant's pretentions and pointing out that he's just a crook like the rest of them.
The Graff himself is a less ambiguous character... though he's not quite just the "big bad soldier" that he at first appears. He's tough enough to wander around in caves for a year if he gets to kill with the lads, yet he whinges feebly about the cold. He genuinely loves his thuggish old general Sholahk, though his real distress at Sholahk's death immediately transmutes into vengeful rage - a hallmark trait of the desperately immature. In fact, Sholahk appears to be the nearest thing the Graff has to family. Sholahk clearly loves and indulges his boy, too much probably. With Vynda-K you get the sense of a big kid in an adult's body. He sulks, he throws tantrums, he has to be soothed and appeased like a baby. He's a spoilt child, deprived of affection but overindulged. You get the sense of a fractured family from the mentions of his usurping "half-brother". He's none too canny either. He was silly enough to let his half-brother steal his throne while he was off killing people. And he's completely fooled by Garron and Unstoffe (scringestone and all) until he accidentally finds Garron's bug.
Even Binro has his shadowy ambiguities. He's still alive, albeit with ruined hands. Why wasn't he burned (or whatever)? Well, maybe - like Galileo - he did the pragmatic thing and recanted... not that I'd blame him.
What makes these people interesting is the fact that they're all trapped between two different worlds and/or ways of living. The Graff doesn't know if he's a Prince anymore or not. Romana is fully qualified and well educated but next to useless in a world she's never experienced before. Her scholarly diagnoses of everything she encounters are no good when she's up against something with blood-splattered fangs. Meanwhile, Garron doesn't know if he's Ronnie Biggs or Robin Hood.
(Robin Hood seems to have been on Holmes' mind when he wrote this. Apart from Garron's idealised self-portrait of himself as a rebel wealth-redistributor, there's also the fact that "Binro" is an anagram and that the Graff is displaced by a treacherous brother while away on crusade, which is very reminiscent of King John's antics while Richard the Lionheart - or Richard the Warmongering Bastard as he probably should be known - was off splashing around in the entrails of Arabs. The Robin Hood myth is itself a product of a time of transition, a fable for people caught between forest and town, between increasingly centralised Norman power and the old Saxon ways, between the rock of law and the hard place of poverty.)
As usual in a Robert Holmes script, the story is powered by misunderstandings and, on the deeper level, by failures to understand oneself. This isn't Garron's last job, nor is Unstoffe leaving him. The Graff's plans for conquering back his throne are as illusory as Garron's business proposal, or Romana's idea that she's on a mission for her Supreme Council and can re-educate the Doctor by humouring him.
One hopes that Binro's newfound hope of vindication isn't illusory, but it may be; progress isn't a concept that this story leaves unchallenged. Binro is certainly caught between two worlds, just like all the people of Ribos. Ribos is an entire world stuck between two phases. It's not just at the mercy of extremely dualistic weather; it has arrived at the historical crossroads that divides the medieval from the modern. Ribos, one senses, is just a few Binros short of a Renaissance. It's still superstitious, but inching towards enlightenment.
In this story, we see the mingling of the sacred and the profane. This is something that the people of the Renaissance felt deeply, as they struggled through the Reformation, as the rise of Humanism began to reflect the progressive ideas of newly forming economic classes. The Riban relicary ("a holy place" says the Captain) is actually a treasure vault, full of jewelled trinkets, guarded against obviously less-then-pious locals by coppers and their pet monster, available as a temporary safe deposit box to travelling merchants (once a gratuity has gone to the head Shrieve). In one of the story's most telling details, the Graff pauses in the middle of haggling over money with Garron to notice that, outside the room, monks have started chanting matins. Even the Seeker goes all businesslike once her first Unstoffe-finding session comes to an end; you get a sense that this is one police psychic who charges overtime.
There are two worlds on Ribos, existing at once: the feudal world of shrines and devotion versus the new world of opeks and merchants and proto-banks and cannons (i.e. conglomerates and weapons tech... the Graff's world). The Greater Cyrhennic Alliance from which the offworlders hail seems to be just Ribos a few centuries on. The strangers use the same currency and wear the same kinds of clothes as the locals. You get the sense of one culture at different points: before technology and afterwards. Ribos is at the cusp of history and the Graff Vynda-K is its future, if they're not careful... because what's the Graff but the sort of person who crushes a dissident's hands, only armed with lasers and spaceships?
'The Ribos Operation', even as it champions the idea of progress through science and knowledge, interrogates the idea by showing primitive Ribos offset against a high-tech future that seems, socially and morally, to have progressed not a jot. If the Ribans embrace empirical thinking, and it simply leads them into their own version of the Graff's culture, what chance has Binro of being reverently remembered? The Levithians call the Ribans "primitive", but are they any better? Or just better equipped? Is that the only difference between "Grade 1" and "Grade 2 status"? Say the Ribans one day figure out how to get the energy out of the jethryk... maybe they'll just fuel ships of conquest, like the Graff plans to do. The Levithians, for all their advancement, are still ridden by class and hierarchy. Their world has planet-sellers and galaxy-spanning capitalist industries. This is the world that the Ribans are just starting to develop, writ large and entrenched. The Levithians still have princes and thrones, but then so do we. Societies don't develop in linear and simultaneous ways; indeed, it is the contradictions within and between them that drives history. The key to understanding why all that progress and science and reason (embodied by Binro) doesn't automatically translate into an enlightened society for the Levithians is to be found in the concentration of power and wealth and technology into private hands, that have harnessed minds like Binro's to developing fuel and weapons and industries.
Where does this all come from? Well, I think it has less to do with historical materialism or Trotsky's theory of 'uneven and combined development' than Bob Holmes' knowledge of Shakespeare. This story seems obsessed with people caught between different worlds... and that's probably because a lot of it (at least in terms of story and motif rather than language) is ransacked from Shakespeare. Shakespeare provided Holmes with the literary DNA for this story, just as 'The Talons of Weng-Chiang' gets its genes from Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, Sax Rohmer, etc. Of course, that doesn't make it necessary for Holmes to craft 'Ribos' as highbrow art (if it had, he wouldn't have done it). On the contrary, much of Shakespeare's output was, like Doctor Who, not at all "caviar to the general". Shakespeare was a man who liked money and crafted most of his plays in the hope that they would do good box office. The occasional play may have been specifically created to impress elite audiences with his cleverness and erudition (like Love's Labours Lost, which would almost certainly not have played at the Globe to thunderous applause from huge crowds of groundlings, as depicted in 'The Shakespeare Code') but, for the most part, Shakespeare was as concerned with bums on seats as any producer of Doctor Who. Falstaff - who, as I've said, bequeathed a little something of himself to Garron - was a big audience draw. The need to put on exciting adventures in thrilling historical periods and exotic foreign lands (adventures in Time and Space, you could say) explains why so many of Shakespeare's plays (particularly the earlier Histories) concern things like excitingly devious warlords who usurp or get usurped, who challenge each other to duels by chucking gloves about, who bellow insults and taunts at their enemies, who go on killing rampages for political power. Sound familiar?
Yep, the Graff not only resembles such early-Shakespearean villains as the Duke of York and his son Richard (of the Henry VI plays and Richard III) but he also resembles the war-hungry Hotspur from Henry IV Part 1 and Prospero, the former Duke of Milan from The Tempest who is displaced and banished by his scheming brother (and who plots his revenge using the resources he finds on a remote island populated by a man he treats cruelly and calls a savage). In fact, he also resembles Macbeth in taking the prophecy of a witch and then making it come true by following it as though it's his inescapable destiny. Most of all, perhaps, he reminds me of Coriolanus, who is a bloodthirsty Roman warmonger and a scornful snob, rejected by Rome for his overweening pride only to join forces with Rome's enemies and return planning to destroy his home city. Coriolanus is a child-man, just like the Graff. A spoiled brat with homicidal tendencies. He likes nothing more than wading in blood but loses his rag if you call him "boy".
At times, 'Ribos' lapses into what is almost Shakespeare pastiche... I'm thinking particularly of the "Freytus labyrinth" scene, in which the Graff and Sholahk start inverting clauses at each other and Sholahk comes close to launching into a soliloquy about their former campaign. Paul Seed catches what the script is up to and delivers a deliberately hammy, bombastic, full-throttle RSC performance to go with the quasi-Shakespearean character he's been given. Watching him, at times, you almost think you've tuned into the BBC Shakespeare by mistake. In the early 80s, the BBC did Shakespeare's first tetralogy for TV, starring Cully, Irongron, Cassandra, Major Daley from 'Carnival of Monsters', Bor from 'Terminus', Mr Magpie from 'The Idiot's Lantern', Zaphod from The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Victor Meldrew's wife (amongst others). The result was the jewel of the BBC Shakespeare series, a high-octane blast of fustian bombast, arcane politics, unrestrained violence and epic squabbling in a tiny, abstract studio set. Paul Seed's performance in 'Ribos' (minus a little of the more deliberate mucking about) would have fit right in between Julia Foster's venomous Queen Margaret and Bernard Hill's seething York.
But I digress outrageously.
The thing that 'Ribos' most owes to Shakespeare is its depiction of a society caught between two overlapping and conflicting historical moments, and of how people get caught in the middle and are thus, sometimes, ground up like mincemeat. Shakespearean tragedy has less to do with "tragic flaws" of character (whatever our teachers said) and more to do with people caught inside social contradictions. In all his great tragedies, the story is the same. Hamlet is a modern, educated youth who is caught between a Humanistic version of the future and the old feudal order, built on blood vengeance and rigid hierarchies. His tragedy is that he can't be true to himself and obey his father's ghost, no matter how much he might want to. Similarly, Macbeth is caught between a different version of the same contradictions - loyalty to the old order that keeps him in his place, or advancement by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest. Lear dismantles his kingdom and sets up a new order based on competition, yet he can't compete! Othello owes his promotion to the forward-looking commercial city of Venice, yet he cannot shake off his awareness of himself as an outsider or the resentments of the bigots... nor can his romantic nature fully handle the Venetian conception of marriage as a property relationship. Coriolanus cannot be both the imperious aristocratic bullyboy and the tactful politician, yet Rome demands both of him. Shakespeare reflected the anxieties of his age, a time when feudalism was in the process of being replaced by what would become capitalism. People, at that time, were caught between the old order (the rigid feudal class system, agrarianism, the power of the Church, etc.) and the rising new order (trade, industry, technology, social and economic mobility, innovations in religion). Well, as we've seen, exactly the same sort of thing is happening in 'The Ribos Operation'.
Ribos is caught between an old pattern of authoritarian religiosity and the new possibilities (good and bad) opened up by empirical thinking, weapons, trade and money. Binro is caught in the teeth of this trap; neither free to think nor able to content himself with stories of battling gods. Strangely, the Graff is caught in the same kind of trap. He's a tyrant without people to rule. He's trying to regain his glory days, unable to understand that the world has changed forever and left him behind. The Alliance doesn't need him anymore; presumably their period of feudal squabbling has ended and they're becoming a mercantile culture, complete with mining conglomerates. His own people don't want him back. The Graff and Binro are shadowy reflections of each other, walking onto the same flypaper but from different directions: Binro was trying to go forward, the Graff was trying to go backwards. And so, inevitably, they bump into each other. The Doctor's not even there, but this is still one of the key moments of the story. Even at this moment, when trying to lie his way out of trouble, Binro instinctively comes up with a cover story that betrays his empirical habits of thought: he says he's "looking for fossils". Well, he's found one... it's called the Graff Vynda-K.
Binro then says that he sells the fossils, showing the way the rise of the new world of markets and money and commodities is inextricably linked to his empiricism.
But what about the apparent contradiction between Binro's empirical insights and the story's presentation of the apparently supernatural? Well, supernatural elements occur in many of Shakespeare's greatest plays. Even Julius Caesar - sometimes described as a spare and austere tragedy - is full of ghosts, prophets, portentous dreams and weird visions. You have to understand these things as symptoms of the conflict between the old world and the new. The ghost of Hamlet's father is less an actual ghost than he is a personification of the dying age. Hamlet (deceased) speaks of the tormenting fires he was sent to because he was murdered while unconfessed (as in Catholicism, which was the "old" faith in Elizabeth's Protestant England) and commands his son to instantly exact bloody revenge in accordance with the old honour code. The Seeker and the Guardians in 'Ribos' can be understood in a similar way.
The Seeker seems to embody the old order on Ribos. She rattles bones while chanting about ancestors, she leads the story down into the Catacombs, the "home of the long dead and of the Ice Gods". Her persona unites the past generations, the old religion and the forces of Riban authority. She brings the brutal officers of both the Shrievalty and the Graff down after Binro and Unstoffe. And this is key: she unites the forces of Ribos and Levithia in a search for two hunted men. When Vynda-K and Sholahk begin to despair of finding their prey in the catacombs, they decide to employ the Seeker as a hunting dog for them. They're the ones from the world of technology, allying themselves with the world of witchery... and the link is in the brutality of oppression.
The Graff might be every inch the modern imperialist, sneering at the Ribans as "primitives" and "natives", but he fits right in with their witch hunt. As already noted, he's just them a few thousand years hence. He might loathe the Ribans and plan to slaughter them, but in so doing he just makes himself look more at home in their medieval world, strewn with bones and patrolled by monsters. At this level of the story, the Graff seems to fuse with the bones and the ghosts and the Seeker and the monsters and the forces that persecuted Binro. The morbidity of supernaturalism, the squalor of ignorance and the crazed imperialism of the Graff melt into each other. How fitting that he should die because - like some Islamist terrorist - he has tried to send one of his followers out to be a suicide bomber. Of course, he also resembles the neo-con warmongers whose cynicism and irrational faiths (in extremist free market economics, for instance) mirror and trump their Islamist enemies/counterparts in their levels of destructiveness.
This is why we can't just say that Binro's materialist and empiricist conclusions are an end in themselves. Dawkins and Hitchens and so on might see science as a potential guaranteur of humane, tolerant, liberal, modernity which ranges itself against the backward, regressive, medieval violence of religion... and there's a grain of truth in that... but not when it is allied to the kind of culturalist 'clash of civilisations' hogwash beloved of Hitchens and Sam Harris. The thing that produces both Islamist terrorism and Western imperialism is the system of class, hierarchy and unaccountable power that also produced the Enlightenment and the scientific and technological revolution. We need more than just science and reason, however Baconian they may be.
Binro is no political philosopher, but he understands the need to protect a hunted man from guards. His insights are superb, but so is his humanity and his resistance to power... even the power that comes stomping in from the scientific, technological future. That's what makes him right.
'The Ribos Operation' seems, at first glance, to present the cosmic conflict between Good and Evil, spiralling downwards from a meeting with a quasi-God in a surreal conceptual landscape, downwards into a story about the vast conquest plans of an interplanetary warlord, further downwards into a heist caper about two semi-comic con-men, and then further downwards into a short meeting between and old man and a young man in a little flea-ridden hovel... yet it's in the hovel that we find the real message of the story. But is Binro right?
Well, he's right about the stars being suns circled by inhabited worlds (just like his somewhat-more mystical and flamboyant progenitor Giordano Bruno, who was burnt at the stake by the Church for, effectively, founding science-fiction... fair enough, some would say). But, in the wider sense, isn't the story's most moving and thematically vital scene compromised by what goes on around it? After all, it turns out that the universe is caught in the battle between light and dark "gods", and shaking bones about and chanting is a valid path to knowledge!
My feeling is that, ultimately, this story's real gist is a little more complex and contingent than it seems. I'm not convinced that it's really about oppositions between good and bad, or even science and superstition... but we're going to have to work around this a bit.
For a story which sets up and begins a quest narrative about the conflict between two godlike entities called the White Guardian and the Black Guardian, 'The Ribos Operation' is surprisingly ambiguous in its treatment of morality. The White Guardian here is certainly no lovable Mr Nice Guy. On the contrary, he's a sinister old bourgeois bully, twisting the Doctor's arm into helping him for reasons that are (by anything he actually says) self-serving. If he's God (and the opening scene cheekily teases us into momentarily thinking he might be) then he's no kindly deity, but rather the Old Testament Yahweh in one of his quiet and scary moods.
(It's interesting to note that, on the few occasions when the classic series had the Doctor meeting gods, they were usually played by plummy thesps and did an awful lot of sitting around in chairs being coldly inscrutable. Really, the "gods" in the classic series really do an astonishing amount of sitting, i.e. Sutekh, the Gods of Ragnarok, etc. By contrast, the only "god" to have appeared in the new series takes the form of a big, snarling Heavy Metal album cover. Now, the Beast may represent fine CGI, but, if you ask me, it possesses considerably less dramatic power than Cyril Luckham sipping creme de menthe.)
But, anyway... like the old geezer in the chair, Garron and Unstoffe are also hard to pin down morally. They're crooks who happily talk about mugging people, yet they seem to lack cruelty. Like Vorg in 'Carnival of Monsters', Garron can be seen as an entrepreneur, an embodiment of the cuddlier aspects of free trade and enterprise, bringing some colour to the lives of the poor souls who don't get to enjoy the benefits of the market... but he's also a criminal, a con-man. There's no doubt about that. But his saving grace is that he is not powerful himself, but preys upon the powerful. Poor rubes like the Ribans have little to fear from him. He's the kind of capitalist who bilks big investors in a shady shares deal and then buggers off to the Bahamas. As such, he's likeable. The Doctor certainly likes him (but then, he should - they're very alike) and finds his anecdotes about past jobs laugh-out-loud amusing. Garron is another of Bob Holmes' quasi-Falstaffs: a charismatic and adorably transparent fake, loquacious, cowardly but not weasley, hedonistic and debauched (though, unlike Falstaff, not in the sexual sense: charmingly, Garron takes care to avoid touching Romana's boobs when he gets the chance).
These Holmes reimaginings of Shakespeare's fat knight can go either way (c.f. Jago and Shockeye) but Garron is also one of Holmes' quasi-Doctors, those characters of his that reflect the Doctor. In Garron, we see aspects of Our Hero. In his way, the Doctor can be seen as an expression of bourgeois libertarian individualism... though he's too scrupulous for that role really. But he and Garron are both opt-outs, independants and chancers, in it for the thrills and the laughs. The Doctor coolly admits to being "terrified" even as he's clearly enjoying himself. Garron is less into actual danger but evidently finds the con game, with all the attendant risk, highly amusing. Why pick on someone like Vynda-K if not from a desire to live dangerously? Garron could sell the jethryk and retire so why doesn't he think it's "worth all that much"? Because it's not really money he wants. The jethryk is a means to an end. It allows him to work his big, audacious cons; it allows him to make fools of people he holds in contempt (like the Graff). If he sold it he'd get the money, but then what? Make Garron rich and you'd bore him to death. Similarly, the Doctor couldn't cope with the easy life. He had it and he rejected it, much to Romana's bemusement. The Doctor likes to be where the action is, or even to make the action. The White Guardian knows exactly how to threaten him: "Nothing at all. Ever." is as good as a death sentence to the Doctor. Like the Doctor, Garron ran away from a home to which he can't go back. Like the Doctor, in his way, he's on a moral mission. And he has an inbuilt sense of justice - maybe not right and wrong, but justice. "All I do is take a bit from those who have too much and then I spread it around a bit. I help to keep the economy in balance!" Well, the story started with a warning about how concentrations of "forces" can lead to chaos. Garron, despite his criminality, is an agent of the balance that the Key supposedly represents. He just balances out the money. He really is the "innocent crook" of the Doctor's description. In a way, the Doctor's an innocent crook in this story too - trying to steal the jethryk not for its monetary value, but only because it's the key to his further adventures. Just like Garron. In fact, even the Graff only wants the jethryk because it's the key to his future adventures! I suppose it all comes down to what kind of adventures you have in mind.
And maybe Romana isn't far wrong when she pronounces that Garron is labouring under a "deep seated sense of rejection" - the remark might be useless, but it isn't necessarily wrong. Is Garron taking a kind of humourous revenge on a world he finds ridiculous and mean? Is he a poor boy who likes seeing the rich with egg on their faces? He wouldn't be the first. He might not have Unstoffe's righteous rage at the murder of Binro, but he certainly enjoys making the Graff squirm with his last-minute flim-flam about security agents. That's the real Garron, I think: grinning as he mocks the Graff with what he thinks are going to be his last words, ridiculing the tyrant's pretentions and pointing out that he's just a crook like the rest of them.
The Graff himself is a less ambiguous character... though he's not quite just the "big bad soldier" that he at first appears. He's tough enough to wander around in caves for a year if he gets to kill with the lads, yet he whinges feebly about the cold. He genuinely loves his thuggish old general Sholahk, though his real distress at Sholahk's death immediately transmutes into vengeful rage - a hallmark trait of the desperately immature. In fact, Sholahk appears to be the nearest thing the Graff has to family. Sholahk clearly loves and indulges his boy, too much probably. With Vynda-K you get the sense of a big kid in an adult's body. He sulks, he throws tantrums, he has to be soothed and appeased like a baby. He's a spoilt child, deprived of affection but overindulged. You get the sense of a fractured family from the mentions of his usurping "half-brother". He's none too canny either. He was silly enough to let his half-brother steal his throne while he was off killing people. And he's completely fooled by Garron and Unstoffe (scringestone and all) until he accidentally finds Garron's bug.
Even Binro has his shadowy ambiguities. He's still alive, albeit with ruined hands. Why wasn't he burned (or whatever)? Well, maybe - like Galileo - he did the pragmatic thing and recanted... not that I'd blame him.
What makes these people interesting is the fact that they're all trapped between two different worlds and/or ways of living. The Graff doesn't know if he's a Prince anymore or not. Romana is fully qualified and well educated but next to useless in a world she's never experienced before. Her scholarly diagnoses of everything she encounters are no good when she's up against something with blood-splattered fangs. Meanwhile, Garron doesn't know if he's Ronnie Biggs or Robin Hood.
(Robin Hood seems to have been on Holmes' mind when he wrote this. Apart from Garron's idealised self-portrait of himself as a rebel wealth-redistributor, there's also the fact that "Binro" is an anagram and that the Graff is displaced by a treacherous brother while away on crusade, which is very reminiscent of King John's antics while Richard the Lionheart - or Richard the Warmongering Bastard as he probably should be known - was off splashing around in the entrails of Arabs. The Robin Hood myth is itself a product of a time of transition, a fable for people caught between forest and town, between increasingly centralised Norman power and the old Saxon ways, between the rock of law and the hard place of poverty.)
As usual in a Robert Holmes script, the story is powered by misunderstandings and, on the deeper level, by failures to understand oneself. This isn't Garron's last job, nor is Unstoffe leaving him. The Graff's plans for conquering back his throne are as illusory as Garron's business proposal, or Romana's idea that she's on a mission for her Supreme Council and can re-educate the Doctor by humouring him.
One hopes that Binro's newfound hope of vindication isn't illusory, but it may be; progress isn't a concept that this story leaves unchallenged. Binro is certainly caught between two worlds, just like all the people of Ribos. Ribos is an entire world stuck between two phases. It's not just at the mercy of extremely dualistic weather; it has arrived at the historical crossroads that divides the medieval from the modern. Ribos, one senses, is just a few Binros short of a Renaissance. It's still superstitious, but inching towards enlightenment.
In this story, we see the mingling of the sacred and the profane. This is something that the people of the Renaissance felt deeply, as they struggled through the Reformation, as the rise of Humanism began to reflect the progressive ideas of newly forming economic classes. The Riban relicary ("a holy place" says the Captain) is actually a treasure vault, full of jewelled trinkets, guarded against obviously less-then-pious locals by coppers and their pet monster, available as a temporary safe deposit box to travelling merchants (once a gratuity has gone to the head Shrieve). In one of the story's most telling details, the Graff pauses in the middle of haggling over money with Garron to notice that, outside the room, monks have started chanting matins. Even the Seeker goes all businesslike once her first Unstoffe-finding session comes to an end; you get a sense that this is one police psychic who charges overtime.
There are two worlds on Ribos, existing at once: the feudal world of shrines and devotion versus the new world of opeks and merchants and proto-banks and cannons (i.e. conglomerates and weapons tech... the Graff's world). The Greater Cyrhennic Alliance from which the offworlders hail seems to be just Ribos a few centuries on. The strangers use the same currency and wear the same kinds of clothes as the locals. You get the sense of one culture at different points: before technology and afterwards. Ribos is at the cusp of history and the Graff Vynda-K is its future, if they're not careful... because what's the Graff but the sort of person who crushes a dissident's hands, only armed with lasers and spaceships?
'The Ribos Operation', even as it champions the idea of progress through science and knowledge, interrogates the idea by showing primitive Ribos offset against a high-tech future that seems, socially and morally, to have progressed not a jot. If the Ribans embrace empirical thinking, and it simply leads them into their own version of the Graff's culture, what chance has Binro of being reverently remembered? The Levithians call the Ribans "primitive", but are they any better? Or just better equipped? Is that the only difference between "Grade 1" and "Grade 2 status"? Say the Ribans one day figure out how to get the energy out of the jethryk... maybe they'll just fuel ships of conquest, like the Graff plans to do. The Levithians, for all their advancement, are still ridden by class and hierarchy. Their world has planet-sellers and galaxy-spanning capitalist industries. This is the world that the Ribans are just starting to develop, writ large and entrenched. The Levithians still have princes and thrones, but then so do we. Societies don't develop in linear and simultaneous ways; indeed, it is the contradictions within and between them that drives history. The key to understanding why all that progress and science and reason (embodied by Binro) doesn't automatically translate into an enlightened society for the Levithians is to be found in the concentration of power and wealth and technology into private hands, that have harnessed minds like Binro's to developing fuel and weapons and industries.
Where does this all come from? Well, I think it has less to do with historical materialism or Trotsky's theory of 'uneven and combined development' than Bob Holmes' knowledge of Shakespeare. This story seems obsessed with people caught between different worlds... and that's probably because a lot of it (at least in terms of story and motif rather than language) is ransacked from Shakespeare. Shakespeare provided Holmes with the literary DNA for this story, just as 'The Talons of Weng-Chiang' gets its genes from Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, Sax Rohmer, etc. Of course, that doesn't make it necessary for Holmes to craft 'Ribos' as highbrow art (if it had, he wouldn't have done it). On the contrary, much of Shakespeare's output was, like Doctor Who, not at all "caviar to the general". Shakespeare was a man who liked money and crafted most of his plays in the hope that they would do good box office. The occasional play may have been specifically created to impress elite audiences with his cleverness and erudition (like Love's Labours Lost, which would almost certainly not have played at the Globe to thunderous applause from huge crowds of groundlings, as depicted in 'The Shakespeare Code') but, for the most part, Shakespeare was as concerned with bums on seats as any producer of Doctor Who. Falstaff - who, as I've said, bequeathed a little something of himself to Garron - was a big audience draw. The need to put on exciting adventures in thrilling historical periods and exotic foreign lands (adventures in Time and Space, you could say) explains why so many of Shakespeare's plays (particularly the earlier Histories) concern things like excitingly devious warlords who usurp or get usurped, who challenge each other to duels by chucking gloves about, who bellow insults and taunts at their enemies, who go on killing rampages for political power. Sound familiar?
Yep, the Graff not only resembles such early-Shakespearean villains as the Duke of York and his son Richard (of the Henry VI plays and Richard III) but he also resembles the war-hungry Hotspur from Henry IV Part 1 and Prospero, the former Duke of Milan from The Tempest who is displaced and banished by his scheming brother (and who plots his revenge using the resources he finds on a remote island populated by a man he treats cruelly and calls a savage). In fact, he also resembles Macbeth in taking the prophecy of a witch and then making it come true by following it as though it's his inescapable destiny. Most of all, perhaps, he reminds me of Coriolanus, who is a bloodthirsty Roman warmonger and a scornful snob, rejected by Rome for his overweening pride only to join forces with Rome's enemies and return planning to destroy his home city. Coriolanus is a child-man, just like the Graff. A spoiled brat with homicidal tendencies. He likes nothing more than wading in blood but loses his rag if you call him "boy".
At times, 'Ribos' lapses into what is almost Shakespeare pastiche... I'm thinking particularly of the "Freytus labyrinth" scene, in which the Graff and Sholahk start inverting clauses at each other and Sholahk comes close to launching into a soliloquy about their former campaign. Paul Seed catches what the script is up to and delivers a deliberately hammy, bombastic, full-throttle RSC performance to go with the quasi-Shakespearean character he's been given. Watching him, at times, you almost think you've tuned into the BBC Shakespeare by mistake. In the early 80s, the BBC did Shakespeare's first tetralogy for TV, starring Cully, Irongron, Cassandra, Major Daley from 'Carnival of Monsters', Bor from 'Terminus', Mr Magpie from 'The Idiot's Lantern', Zaphod from The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Victor Meldrew's wife (amongst others). The result was the jewel of the BBC Shakespeare series, a high-octane blast of fustian bombast, arcane politics, unrestrained violence and epic squabbling in a tiny, abstract studio set. Paul Seed's performance in 'Ribos' (minus a little of the more deliberate mucking about) would have fit right in between Julia Foster's venomous Queen Margaret and Bernard Hill's seething York.
But I digress outrageously.
The thing that 'Ribos' most owes to Shakespeare is its depiction of a society caught between two overlapping and conflicting historical moments, and of how people get caught in the middle and are thus, sometimes, ground up like mincemeat. Shakespearean tragedy has less to do with "tragic flaws" of character (whatever our teachers said) and more to do with people caught inside social contradictions. In all his great tragedies, the story is the same. Hamlet is a modern, educated youth who is caught between a Humanistic version of the future and the old feudal order, built on blood vengeance and rigid hierarchies. His tragedy is that he can't be true to himself and obey his father's ghost, no matter how much he might want to. Similarly, Macbeth is caught between a different version of the same contradictions - loyalty to the old order that keeps him in his place, or advancement by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest. Lear dismantles his kingdom and sets up a new order based on competition, yet he can't compete! Othello owes his promotion to the forward-looking commercial city of Venice, yet he cannot shake off his awareness of himself as an outsider or the resentments of the bigots... nor can his romantic nature fully handle the Venetian conception of marriage as a property relationship. Coriolanus cannot be both the imperious aristocratic bullyboy and the tactful politician, yet Rome demands both of him. Shakespeare reflected the anxieties of his age, a time when feudalism was in the process of being replaced by what would become capitalism. People, at that time, were caught between the old order (the rigid feudal class system, agrarianism, the power of the Church, etc.) and the rising new order (trade, industry, technology, social and economic mobility, innovations in religion). Well, as we've seen, exactly the same sort of thing is happening in 'The Ribos Operation'.
Ribos is caught between an old pattern of authoritarian religiosity and the new possibilities (good and bad) opened up by empirical thinking, weapons, trade and money. Binro is caught in the teeth of this trap; neither free to think nor able to content himself with stories of battling gods. Strangely, the Graff is caught in the same kind of trap. He's a tyrant without people to rule. He's trying to regain his glory days, unable to understand that the world has changed forever and left him behind. The Alliance doesn't need him anymore; presumably their period of feudal squabbling has ended and they're becoming a mercantile culture, complete with mining conglomerates. His own people don't want him back. The Graff and Binro are shadowy reflections of each other, walking onto the same flypaper but from different directions: Binro was trying to go forward, the Graff was trying to go backwards. And so, inevitably, they bump into each other. The Doctor's not even there, but this is still one of the key moments of the story. Even at this moment, when trying to lie his way out of trouble, Binro instinctively comes up with a cover story that betrays his empirical habits of thought: he says he's "looking for fossils". Well, he's found one... it's called the Graff Vynda-K.
Binro then says that he sells the fossils, showing the way the rise of the new world of markets and money and commodities is inextricably linked to his empiricism.
But what about the apparent contradiction between Binro's empirical insights and the story's presentation of the apparently supernatural? Well, supernatural elements occur in many of Shakespeare's greatest plays. Even Julius Caesar - sometimes described as a spare and austere tragedy - is full of ghosts, prophets, portentous dreams and weird visions. You have to understand these things as symptoms of the conflict between the old world and the new. The ghost of Hamlet's father is less an actual ghost than he is a personification of the dying age. Hamlet (deceased) speaks of the tormenting fires he was sent to because he was murdered while unconfessed (as in Catholicism, which was the "old" faith in Elizabeth's Protestant England) and commands his son to instantly exact bloody revenge in accordance with the old honour code. The Seeker and the Guardians in 'Ribos' can be understood in a similar way.
The Seeker seems to embody the old order on Ribos. She rattles bones while chanting about ancestors, she leads the story down into the Catacombs, the "home of the long dead and of the Ice Gods". Her persona unites the past generations, the old religion and the forces of Riban authority. She brings the brutal officers of both the Shrievalty and the Graff down after Binro and Unstoffe. And this is key: she unites the forces of Ribos and Levithia in a search for two hunted men. When Vynda-K and Sholahk begin to despair of finding their prey in the catacombs, they decide to employ the Seeker as a hunting dog for them. They're the ones from the world of technology, allying themselves with the world of witchery... and the link is in the brutality of oppression.
The Graff might be every inch the modern imperialist, sneering at the Ribans as "primitives" and "natives", but he fits right in with their witch hunt. As already noted, he's just them a few thousand years hence. He might loathe the Ribans and plan to slaughter them, but in so doing he just makes himself look more at home in their medieval world, strewn with bones and patrolled by monsters. At this level of the story, the Graff seems to fuse with the bones and the ghosts and the Seeker and the monsters and the forces that persecuted Binro. The morbidity of supernaturalism, the squalor of ignorance and the crazed imperialism of the Graff melt into each other. How fitting that he should die because - like some Islamist terrorist - he has tried to send one of his followers out to be a suicide bomber. Of course, he also resembles the neo-con warmongers whose cynicism and irrational faiths (in extremist free market economics, for instance) mirror and trump their Islamist enemies/counterparts in their levels of destructiveness.
This is why we can't just say that Binro's materialist and empiricist conclusions are an end in themselves. Dawkins and Hitchens and so on might see science as a potential guaranteur of humane, tolerant, liberal, modernity which ranges itself against the backward, regressive, medieval violence of religion... and there's a grain of truth in that... but not when it is allied to the kind of culturalist 'clash of civilisations' hogwash beloved of Hitchens and Sam Harris. The thing that produces both Islamist terrorism and Western imperialism is the system of class, hierarchy and unaccountable power that also produced the Enlightenment and the scientific and technological revolution. We need more than just science and reason, however Baconian they may be.
Binro is no political philosopher, but he understands the need to protect a hunted man from guards. His insights are superb, but so is his humanity and his resistance to power... even the power that comes stomping in from the scientific, technological future. That's what makes him right.
A Critique of the Gothic Seasons
Yes, I know I've already done that joke... but it's too good not to overuse. Here's my stuff from Timelash II for the first three years of Tom's tenure, generally regarded as the "golden age" (or something) of the old show. Not much extra stuff. Sorry. Oh, one warning: at several points in the essay below I will be going into gush mode. You have been warned.
‘Robot’
Dafter than the Rt. Hon. Lady Daftetta Daftington-Dafton of Daftwood Hall, Daftfordshire. A robot that grows to the size of King Kong (and starts acting like him)... a disintegrator gun kept in pieces and scattered in different locations... a government think tank that turns out to be a cover for fanatical right-wing scientific 'progressives' who think a good way to take over the world would be to destroy it first... umm, well actually the last ten years or so have made that last one seem quite plausible.
This is set in a world in which 'bad' scientists are spottable by their evil suits and ties, their evil black armbands and their evil black leather gloves; meanwhile 'good' scientists all work on renewable fuels, have bottle-end spectacles (as distinct from the evil little Himmler spectacles worn by 'bad' scientists) and cardigans and wildly unkempt hair.
But all that is nothing compared to the idea that, as Wikipedia puts it: "to ensure peace, the governments of Russia, China and America decided to give the locations and launch codes of their nuclear weapons to a neutral country — Britain — for safekeeping".
Words fail me.
As in 'Invasion of the Dinosaurs', people who have an ideological desire to make a better world are portrayed as deluded, ruthless, callous fanatics.
Of course, you can simply decide not to worry about any of this (just as you can decide not to worry about the fact that the giganticized robot spends a lot of time carrying a wobbly doll and attacking tonka trucks) and enjoy this for the utter hokum that it is.
This is the last gasp of the detumescent Letts/Dicks comfy-cosy-nicey-wicey-matey-watey style (complete with the usual bit of largely-fatuous liberal/moralistic political comment). There's something melancholy about watching a story with the Brigadier, Benton, UNIT HQ, Bessie, etc... but no Pertwee. I understand why they did it that way: if this new guy drives Bessie and the Brig calls him "Doctor" then he must be the same guy. But it just feels wrong somehow. And the style is past its prime. It's done good service for a few years but now is clearly the time for it to be retired... which, fortunately, is precisely what happened. There are some eras that feel truncated wheras others end right on time, and 'Robot' is evidence that the Pertwee/Letts era was one of the latter.
I'll post something about 'The Ark in Space' seperately, and I've done 'Genesis of the Daleks' here.
'Terror of the Zygons'
Brilliantly done hokum. The direction is some of the best in the series: stylish, pacey, scary, beautifully cinematic (especially the location sequences which are amazing - they could be from a movie). Superb, eerie music. Great creature design: the suckered-foetus look of the Zygons is effective and memorable. Great Harryhausen-style monster, only actually embarassing when filmed as a puppet rather than animated.
Sarah gets to be a journalist again; 'Harry' gets to be evil; the Doctor gets to wear tartan; the Brigadier gets a lovely comedy moment that Courtney absolutely aces.
The Zygon shape-shifting stuff is well done, neither neglected nor overused. Nowdays, you'd have to have a scene where one of the Zygons impersonates the Doctor and/or Brigadier... but you don't need it. The point is made and is used to advance the plot when they impersonate Harry, the Nurse, etc. No overkill.
Downsides? Bit too much infodumping, especially from Broton when talking to Harry. And Scottish stereotypes galore. Och aye, pass the haggis Morag, etc.
Lovely touches abound, however. The psychic landlord stops playing his bagpipes the moment the Doctor walks into his inn. And I love the whole queasy baby vibe going on with the Zygons. Zygons sounds like "zygotes". And they have big, domed foreheads. And live in a womblike ship. And live on the Skarasan's "lactic fluid", i.e. milk.
‘Pyramids of Mars’
Without the extended confrontation scenes in Part Four, this would be a solid bit of Hammeresque gothic fun (albeit tainted with the orientalism inherent in all these stories about ancient evil Egyptian curses and fanatical Egyptian acolytes).
With the extended confrontation scenes in Part Four, this is something extra-special. The awesome mask, Gabriel Woolf's terrifyingly quiet and cultured psycho voice, Tom's amazingly committed performance... it all does great service to the scripted exchanges, which are potent and thrilling.
There's something about the things the Doctor says here. "I renounced the society of Time Lords. Now I'm simply a traveller." No grandiose boasting, no messianic showing off, no fetishised superman posturing, no trembly-lipped emoting. Just a simple statement. It's one of the best Doctor-characterisation moments in the whole series.
‘The Android Invasion’
The plot of this story depends upon the main guest character failing to notice one of his own eyeballs.
'Nuff said?
‘The Brain of Morbius’
Superlative. Dark, grisly, funny, legendary. A schlock-gothic, politico-mythic, literary/movie-pastiche/parody with terrific verbal texture, hilarious but disturbing jokes and some deceptively big themes. This is raw, pure, quintessential, uber-Who, performed with a perfect combination of knowing wit and grim seriousness by a uniformly excellent cast. Special laurels must go to Lis Sladen for her astonishing performance during the 'blind scenes'.
Time Lords are not just a race of cardboard spacemen but an unseen Power, devious and dangerous, manipulative and unpredictable; when they go rogue they don't just turn into whimsical adventurers, sometimes they lead campaigns of conquest so devastating that they might as well be Daleks. They have war criminals and secret pacts with covens of witches. In short, they are the Greek Gods: phenomenally powerful but subject to human frailties and peccadilloes (but on a cosmic scale).
This is, essentially, a story about the need for decay and death. The Sisterhood have fallen into the trap of immortality. They've juddered to a perpetual halt and, without change and decay, they've become "quaint", weak, ineffectual, backward. They huddle together in ritual and eternal stasis, achieving nothing, blind to deadly danger under their noses. Morbius has fallen into the same trap. He's stuck in his absurd, megalomaniacal dream of continuance; but he's nothing but a remnant. His bid for unnatural survival has left him a powerless, helpless, impotent, raging relic in a jar, at the mercy of a mad servant.
Morbius at the mercy of Solon's whims, yet nominally Solon's Master; Solon needing his crazy mission as a justification for his own fanaticism and failure in life. The relationship of Solon and Condo echoes it in miniature: Condo is Solon's whipping boy for his frustrations (Solon and Morbius) and Condo is at Solon's mercy while he waits for the restoration of his body (Morbius and Solon). The ultimate in co-dependence.
All these sad and silly people, stuck together in a cul-de-sac because they've cheated or denied death and, as a result, lost the possibility of change and progress. How telling that the final battle in the story involves the two antagonists trying to regress each other backwards through their long lives. This scene works beautifully, regardless of whose faces they are on the screen.
As a reworking of Frankenstein (the movies more than the book) this is also an expression of what you could call the ‘industrial turn’ in teratoculture. This shift, which starts with Mary Shelley’s novel and becomes even more pronounced in the 20th century (especially via sci-fi), sees our monsters becoming man-made, or even mass produced; they start to become mechanical or cybernetic or semi-artificial; the monsters change to reflect the rise of industrial and technological capitalism, with all its alienation and destructive by-products, with all its mass production of machinery that seems to live beyond us and escape our control and even to turn upon us. (I’ve looked at Frankenstein a bit and suggested some notions of the monster as product, here). The other way that ‘Morbius’ reflects the modern era is its emphasis on the monster as “war criminal”. Solon doesn’t play god so much as resurrect the ghost of a defeated totalitarian dictator.
How can it be this good when it's the product of a falling out between two writers leading to a ground-up rewrite? Easy, when the two writers are Terrence Dicks and Robert Holmes. All hail Robin Bland - the ultimate Doctor Who writer!
‘The Seeds of Doom’
Never quite seen what all the fuss was about with this one.
Best scene? Scorby picks up a bit of beautiful scientific equipment and, prompted by Keeler’s whine of bourgeois distress (“careful, that’s valuable!”) smashes it to the floor, just for the pure fun of destroying something that someone values.
Meanwhile, the disenchanted Dunbar (lack of promotion is such a realistic motivation for corrupt behaviour) sells his information to Chase, a man so wrapped up in his own id and absurd fetishes that he seems detached from reality. Chase is a bit gay (so is Scorby actually... well, and Keeler) but that's not why he's evil. In Who, being rich (and emotionally closed off) is a much more reliable sign of evil than mere campness.
Oh, and I love the way Sarah gets as close as teatime scheduling will permit to accusing Scorby of having a tiny cock.
‘The Masque of Mandragora’
Well, it looks gorgeous. It looks like one of the early BBC Shakespeares, but with nice location footage too! Portmeirion really adds an authentic feel, oddly enough... but then it would because it's nothing but a huge, witty, eccentric, eclectic, pastiched folly, a bit like Doctor Who itself. It looks right at home with Tom Baker striding around in it.
And the acting is largely excellent, especially from Tim Piggot Smith and Jon Laurimore. There's some superb dialogue for the cast to get their thespianic teeth into. "They say there are places where the bat droppings are twice the height of a man!" is a particular favourite of mine.
The mixing of the Hamlet pastiche with the Borgia/Medici/Machiavelli vibe and all the gothic business of masked acolytes sacrificing maidens in caves is rather satisfying.
As for the themes?
Mandragora as the embodiment of superstition. It makes its home in caves, in a ruined pagan temple (which it promises/threatens to resurrect), in ritual and mumbo-jumbo, in blades flashing with moonlight before being used in the blood rituals of old Roman sects. It demands mindless obedience, chanting, fearful submission, etc. It is intellectually what Frederico is politically. Hierarchy, despotism, cruelty, mindlessness.
On the other hand, the Renaissance brought new ways of thinking, new intellectual freedoms and pioneering ideas... reason began to make headway against superstition... men like Leonardo embodied the spirit of the age... more enlightened rulers began to champion such things while old-fashioned despots started to lose traction...
The Doctor stands with the future, with the 'enlightened' ruler who's interested in optics and astronomy and new ideas, who invites scientists to his big party, who doesn't use the torture chamber in the cellar of his palace, who sympathises with the peasants, etc.
Well, Guiliano is very idealised. But there were people a bit like him, who wanted to rule in a more enlightened fashion. Of course, they still wanted to rule.
He's drawn from Hamlet (the young heir who mourns a murdered father, displaced by the uncle who murdered him) and that's apt because Hamlet is an expression of the new Renaissance generation... educated at (Protestant) Wittenburg, ironic, witty, sceptical, bookish, etc., but also torn by his lingering attachment to the old ways.
Guiliano wants to "rule over a land where there is no tyranny", which is an oxymoron if you ask me, but we know what he means. He wants to be one of the new, liberal, tolerant rulers who doesn't slaughter peasants for fun and who encourages the development of science. Of course, in practice, such people wanted scientists to devise new weapons (which Leonardo did) and wanted artists to paint gigantic frescos which would symbolise the power of their own regime (which Michaelangelo did). And people who questioned the status quo would still end up in torture chambers or execution blocks, this time harangued with ingratitude to their new, modern, liberal, tolerant ruler.
Of course, things are soooooo different today, aren't they?
Also, the opposition between science and magical thinking is far too unambiguously drawn. For ages, the people who thought of themselves as modern, enlightened, rational and progressive would still engage in the rituals of the freemasons, or the gibberish of alchemy, or the religious heresies of the Arians or Rosicrucians. In fact, much of the scientific and cultural advances in the Renaissance wouldn't have been possible without magic thinking, without the traditions of alchemy, without the economic and social power of the Church and/or the despots (enlightened or otherwise).
There's a danger with the kind of linear and stagist thinking (backwardness vs. progress; religion vs. science) that this story seems to be based on. It can lead to the kind of ahistorical, culturalist nonsense you hear from people like the Sams Huntington and Harris.
Also, the story fails to even gesture towards the fact that the Renaissance didn't just happen, that it grew from changes in the economy of Europe, from advances in trade and credit and the rise of a new mercantile middle class, about pressure from below, from ordinary people demanding political change so that the could enjoy new freedoms and social mobilities, etc...
But this is all nitpicking. The story gets the gist pretty much right and presents it in a lovely package of semiotics and narrative quotes. It's hard not to love something so sumptuous, especially if its heart is in the right place.
I've posted about 'The Deadly Assassin', here.
‘The Face of Evil’
This is easily one of the best Doctor Who stories ever made. Its method is the classic Doctor Who method: shamelessly raid gothic fiction (of both the literary and B-movie variety) for images and ideas, then combine them with its own peculiar perspective, creating a unique fusion. Its style is the classic Doctor Who style: a kind of halfway house between realism or naturalism on the one hand and discursive theatricality on the other. But the subject matter is unusual, possibly a first in the show: the Doctor himself. About the consequences of his actions, about the effect he has on the places and people he 'helps' and about his own understanding of himself, his own grasp upon his own identity.
The face in the title is the Doctor's own face, and every cliffhanger depends upon an encounter with that face.
The first cliffhanger is an existential one, in which the Doctor sees himself outside himself, as an evil idol, a sick Mount Rushmore (not that the original isn't pretty sick in my book), a trace of his forgotten past, evidence of his own effect upon an entire culture, an explanation of why the Sevateem think he's "the evil one" and an almost Lacanian moment of self-cognition, in which he begins the journey that will occupy him for the rest of the story; a journey into his own reflection.
The second cliffhanger sees rampaging monsters of the id, attacking people, snarling at them... and all of them with the Doctor's face (though Tom Baker's amazing technique is to make these monsters look more afraid than savage). Andor is killed by one of these Doctor/id monsters, little knowing that he is being killed by splinters of the Xoanon he prays to for salvation. And it's interesting to see monsters directly lifted from a gothic, Shakespeare-inspired, sci-fi B-movie as expressions of the id of Xoanon/Doctor... precisely because Doctor Who as a text is built on a foundation of lifted elements from just such other texts!
The third cliffhanger sees the Doctor's sanity under direct assault by his own screaming face, fractured in several parts. An evil, mad, terrified reflection that demands of him "WHO AM I?" (which, rearranged, is "I AM WHO!") in the voice of a child. Looked at one way, that's what childhood is: the period during which we wander around constantly asking everyone who we are. That's where Xoanon is, but he's trying to disentangle himself from his parent in order to find his own identity... but then we all have to do that too, don't we?
Beyond all this psychology (none of which has to actually be true in an objective sense for this story to be subjectively fascinating) we have an amazing, Feuerbachian analysis of relgion. Man builds the totem pole, falls down before it, imagines it to be an expression of something outside of himself and greater than himself... and forgets that he is grovelling before a material expression of his own powers, and a idealised image of his own capabilities. Religion as alienation. Xoanon is an expression of our alienation from both our own technical skills and production capacities (he's an artefact, after all) and our own image, both physical and psychological.
Plus Leela is a great character, a companion who is also an image of the Doctor. A dissident, a free-thinker, a sceptic, someone who has left her static society (by being expelled/willfully opting out) and struck out on her own. Louise Jameson puts across Leela's strength (both physical and intellectual) effortlessly, subverting the sexism inherent in the idea of a companion in skimpy skins, making Leela probably the greatest ever companion.
If sci-fi is about "the relationship between man and his tools", this story shows that relationship very deliberately and consciously. I think sci-fi is more the reiteration of myth and legend in the technological age... and this story shows that happening deliberately and consciously too. And both are shown from the point of view of the machine, the tool, the technology. In this story, the machine itself has lost the difference between itself and its creator, and is deliberately re-enacting mythology in order to express itself. That's where the themes meet, and that's why the story is ultimately so satisfying.
‘The Robots of Death’
Absolutely thrilling. A script that, for once, really is about well-drawn and psychologically complex characters interacting with each other in human, funny, scary ways.
Uvanov's obvious sexual desire for Zilda takes the form of hostility, probably because it is based on class envy and a deep inferiority complex. Poul spends the story circling the others like the thoughtful, reserved, removed, brittle voyeur that he is... and, underneath, he seethes with existential terror... and his existential terror throws a revelatory light upon the neuroses of Capel, who is trying to merge with the robots and control them, thereby neutralising his oedipal terror of the benign, obedient, emotionally blank things that raised him and accidentally screwed him up beyond redemption (just as they seem to have screwed up this entire society).
The unexpected costume and production design suggests an indolent, decadent, aristocratic culture. But these people are workers, in their own way... they need to be there for the minerals to get back to the Company... so... in this culture, where almost everything is done by the robots, to be allowed to work (even a tiny bit) is to be privileged, is to be the aristocrat. The products of human labour have now alienated humans entirely, even from their ability to produce things.
But, of course, the robots are slaves... and the masters are always terrified of their slaves. They're also repositories of human neuroses. Dummies onto which the people project their inner demons. And dolls, toys in the hand of a psychopathic child in an adult's body.
Meanwhile, we have Tom on worldbeating form, playing THE Doctor (this really is, for me, THE Doctor, in a very fundamental way) as a sceptical, sardonic, razor-sharp intellectual whose one-liners slice through ignorance and thuggishness... while showing immense respect for Leela and D84 (surely one of the most lovable guest characters ever). D84 shows the difference between Capel's false revolution (in which the robots just lose one master and gain another) and a real revolution, in which the lowest of the low (a Dum, for goodness sake!) saves the day with an act of self-sacrifice born of friendship.
Louise Jameson is marvellous, playing Leela as a true force, as a character who shapes the story herself. In fact, you really should watch 'Face' and 'Robots' together, as two halves of one story. Not only for Leela's journey but because they cover much the same ground but from different angles.
The guest cast (with one exception) are all excellent. The music, the model work, etc... all superb. The script is full of amazing lines. "Please do not throw hands at me" is the most simple, D84s little poem to the power of the Laserson Probe is the most beautiful... and ironic. A machine, a tool, rhapsodizes the capabilities (for science and violence) of another machine, another tool.
It just doesn't get much better than this.
‘The Talons of Weng-Chiang’
Blissful, pulpy Victorian gothic. Literary pastiche that synthesizes something new and unique out of its borrowed parts. Jack the Ripper, Sherlock Holmes, Jekyll and Hyde, Fu Manchu, Dracula... it's all in there. A sort of voyage into our collective consciousness of pea-souper-ridden Victorian London. The story and the society in which it is set keep on unfolding in new directions. We keep getting some new angle. The town, the characters, the interactions, the relationships keep shifting and realigning. We have carefully-executed forays into very adult territory. We even have a prostitute and a scene set in an opium den. Of course, it's a "tissue of quotations", but isn't everything?
Against the psuedo-historical backdrop (and this story really might as well be set in the Land of Fiction), Holmes summons up a vast, complex, convincing and richly-textured backstory of future history in just a few lines of stunning dialogue. In fact, the whole story has a wonderfully extravagant verbal texture. The villain doesn't say "Why am I surrounded by fools?", he says "Your opium-sodden scum are all bunglers!" and "You stupid, incompetent lice! You crawling, mindless dogs!"
Tom Baker is at the height of his powers. The Doctor comes over as a man playing a game that he loves, but also as a deadly-serious tactician. Tom and the superb Louise Jameson (despite their supposed coolness towards each other) have tremendous chemistry. Their characters seem to have mutual respect for each other's powers, and the inherent imbalance in every Doctor/Companion relationship is here transmuted into a Guru/Trainee thing.
Great guest characters. Chang, despite his crimes, is no simple villain; he's devotee of a cause he believes in, a peasant's son seeking status, a man of personal dignity who exaggerates his accent and demeanour on stage to play up to the preconceptions of his Causcasian audiences. Jago is almost Falstaffian; a deeply flawed but utterly lovable old fake whirling around in a verbal tornado of fustian and flim-flam.
I think 'Talons' is clearly a bit racist (no more than many things) but it's a very complex business. I think it represents Chinese culture (or rather a second hand, pastiched and confabulated version of Chinese culture) according to Western assumptions and cultural tropes, i.e. exoticism (which is inherently a viewpoint that is imposed on Eastern culture by the Westerner), decadence, sensuality, enigmatic inscrutability, etc., as well as clearly making it a source of the uncanny, the menacing, and so on. It's a complex text because it imports these sorts of representations from its source texts... Sax Rohmer, etc... as part of its pastiche method, not as part of a political objective. And it problematises its own representations by making the ultimate source of the corruption in the story a Caucasian who has exploited Asians in an imperialistic way and has engaged in the kind of crimes of 20th century modernity that were common to both European and Asian forms of fascism. Moreover, he was overthrown by Philippinos... historically, the victims of a particularly ferocious campaign of Western imperialist aggression that the world has now all but forgotten.
More broadly, it's a shame that all the Chinese characters are either baddies or coolies or nunchucka-weilding thugs. But at least we are shown the racism of the Londoners, from the piggishness of the coppers to the condescending nonsense from Lightfoot about the Chinese being "enigmatic". The Doctor doesn't immediately notice that Chang is ethnically different from the Londoners and the story deliberately has Leela and the Doctor talking about the "tribe" in London known as "Cockneys".
‘Robot’
Dafter than the Rt. Hon. Lady Daftetta Daftington-Dafton of Daftwood Hall, Daftfordshire. A robot that grows to the size of King Kong (and starts acting like him)... a disintegrator gun kept in pieces and scattered in different locations... a government think tank that turns out to be a cover for fanatical right-wing scientific 'progressives' who think a good way to take over the world would be to destroy it first... umm, well actually the last ten years or so have made that last one seem quite plausible.
This is set in a world in which 'bad' scientists are spottable by their evil suits and ties, their evil black armbands and their evil black leather gloves; meanwhile 'good' scientists all work on renewable fuels, have bottle-end spectacles (as distinct from the evil little Himmler spectacles worn by 'bad' scientists) and cardigans and wildly unkempt hair.
But all that is nothing compared to the idea that, as Wikipedia puts it: "to ensure peace, the governments of Russia, China and America decided to give the locations and launch codes of their nuclear weapons to a neutral country — Britain — for safekeeping".
Words fail me.
As in 'Invasion of the Dinosaurs', people who have an ideological desire to make a better world are portrayed as deluded, ruthless, callous fanatics.
Of course, you can simply decide not to worry about any of this (just as you can decide not to worry about the fact that the giganticized robot spends a lot of time carrying a wobbly doll and attacking tonka trucks) and enjoy this for the utter hokum that it is.
This is the last gasp of the detumescent Letts/Dicks comfy-cosy-nicey-wicey-matey-watey style (complete with the usual bit of largely-fatuous liberal/moralistic political comment). There's something melancholy about watching a story with the Brigadier, Benton, UNIT HQ, Bessie, etc... but no Pertwee. I understand why they did it that way: if this new guy drives Bessie and the Brig calls him "Doctor" then he must be the same guy. But it just feels wrong somehow. And the style is past its prime. It's done good service for a few years but now is clearly the time for it to be retired... which, fortunately, is precisely what happened. There are some eras that feel truncated wheras others end right on time, and 'Robot' is evidence that the Pertwee/Letts era was one of the latter.
I'll post something about 'The Ark in Space' seperately, and I've done 'Genesis of the Daleks' here.
'Terror of the Zygons'
Brilliantly done hokum. The direction is some of the best in the series: stylish, pacey, scary, beautifully cinematic (especially the location sequences which are amazing - they could be from a movie). Superb, eerie music. Great creature design: the suckered-foetus look of the Zygons is effective and memorable. Great Harryhausen-style monster, only actually embarassing when filmed as a puppet rather than animated.
Sarah gets to be a journalist again; 'Harry' gets to be evil; the Doctor gets to wear tartan; the Brigadier gets a lovely comedy moment that Courtney absolutely aces.
The Zygon shape-shifting stuff is well done, neither neglected nor overused. Nowdays, you'd have to have a scene where one of the Zygons impersonates the Doctor and/or Brigadier... but you don't need it. The point is made and is used to advance the plot when they impersonate Harry, the Nurse, etc. No overkill.
Downsides? Bit too much infodumping, especially from Broton when talking to Harry. And Scottish stereotypes galore. Och aye, pass the haggis Morag, etc.
Lovely touches abound, however. The psychic landlord stops playing his bagpipes the moment the Doctor walks into his inn. And I love the whole queasy baby vibe going on with the Zygons. Zygons sounds like "zygotes". And they have big, domed foreheads. And live in a womblike ship. And live on the Skarasan's "lactic fluid", i.e. milk.
‘Pyramids of Mars’
Without the extended confrontation scenes in Part Four, this would be a solid bit of Hammeresque gothic fun (albeit tainted with the orientalism inherent in all these stories about ancient evil Egyptian curses and fanatical Egyptian acolytes).
With the extended confrontation scenes in Part Four, this is something extra-special. The awesome mask, Gabriel Woolf's terrifyingly quiet and cultured psycho voice, Tom's amazingly committed performance... it all does great service to the scripted exchanges, which are potent and thrilling.
There's something about the things the Doctor says here. "I renounced the society of Time Lords. Now I'm simply a traveller." No grandiose boasting, no messianic showing off, no fetishised superman posturing, no trembly-lipped emoting. Just a simple statement. It's one of the best Doctor-characterisation moments in the whole series.
‘The Android Invasion’
The plot of this story depends upon the main guest character failing to notice one of his own eyeballs.
'Nuff said?
‘The Brain of Morbius’
Superlative. Dark, grisly, funny, legendary. A schlock-gothic, politico-mythic, literary/movie-pastiche/parody with terrific verbal texture, hilarious but disturbing jokes and some deceptively big themes. This is raw, pure, quintessential, uber-Who, performed with a perfect combination of knowing wit and grim seriousness by a uniformly excellent cast. Special laurels must go to Lis Sladen for her astonishing performance during the 'blind scenes'.
Time Lords are not just a race of cardboard spacemen but an unseen Power, devious and dangerous, manipulative and unpredictable; when they go rogue they don't just turn into whimsical adventurers, sometimes they lead campaigns of conquest so devastating that they might as well be Daleks. They have war criminals and secret pacts with covens of witches. In short, they are the Greek Gods: phenomenally powerful but subject to human frailties and peccadilloes (but on a cosmic scale).
This is, essentially, a story about the need for decay and death. The Sisterhood have fallen into the trap of immortality. They've juddered to a perpetual halt and, without change and decay, they've become "quaint", weak, ineffectual, backward. They huddle together in ritual and eternal stasis, achieving nothing, blind to deadly danger under their noses. Morbius has fallen into the same trap. He's stuck in his absurd, megalomaniacal dream of continuance; but he's nothing but a remnant. His bid for unnatural survival has left him a powerless, helpless, impotent, raging relic in a jar, at the mercy of a mad servant.
Morbius at the mercy of Solon's whims, yet nominally Solon's Master; Solon needing his crazy mission as a justification for his own fanaticism and failure in life. The relationship of Solon and Condo echoes it in miniature: Condo is Solon's whipping boy for his frustrations (Solon and Morbius) and Condo is at Solon's mercy while he waits for the restoration of his body (Morbius and Solon). The ultimate in co-dependence.
All these sad and silly people, stuck together in a cul-de-sac because they've cheated or denied death and, as a result, lost the possibility of change and progress. How telling that the final battle in the story involves the two antagonists trying to regress each other backwards through their long lives. This scene works beautifully, regardless of whose faces they are on the screen.
As a reworking of Frankenstein (the movies more than the book) this is also an expression of what you could call the ‘industrial turn’ in teratoculture. This shift, which starts with Mary Shelley’s novel and becomes even more pronounced in the 20th century (especially via sci-fi), sees our monsters becoming man-made, or even mass produced; they start to become mechanical or cybernetic or semi-artificial; the monsters change to reflect the rise of industrial and technological capitalism, with all its alienation and destructive by-products, with all its mass production of machinery that seems to live beyond us and escape our control and even to turn upon us. (I’ve looked at Frankenstein a bit and suggested some notions of the monster as product, here). The other way that ‘Morbius’ reflects the modern era is its emphasis on the monster as “war criminal”. Solon doesn’t play god so much as resurrect the ghost of a defeated totalitarian dictator.
How can it be this good when it's the product of a falling out between two writers leading to a ground-up rewrite? Easy, when the two writers are Terrence Dicks and Robert Holmes. All hail Robin Bland - the ultimate Doctor Who writer!
‘The Seeds of Doom’
Never quite seen what all the fuss was about with this one.
Best scene? Scorby picks up a bit of beautiful scientific equipment and, prompted by Keeler’s whine of bourgeois distress (“careful, that’s valuable!”) smashes it to the floor, just for the pure fun of destroying something that someone values.
Meanwhile, the disenchanted Dunbar (lack of promotion is such a realistic motivation for corrupt behaviour) sells his information to Chase, a man so wrapped up in his own id and absurd fetishes that he seems detached from reality. Chase is a bit gay (so is Scorby actually... well, and Keeler) but that's not why he's evil. In Who, being rich (and emotionally closed off) is a much more reliable sign of evil than mere campness.
Oh, and I love the way Sarah gets as close as teatime scheduling will permit to accusing Scorby of having a tiny cock.
‘The Masque of Mandragora’
Well, it looks gorgeous. It looks like one of the early BBC Shakespeares, but with nice location footage too! Portmeirion really adds an authentic feel, oddly enough... but then it would because it's nothing but a huge, witty, eccentric, eclectic, pastiched folly, a bit like Doctor Who itself. It looks right at home with Tom Baker striding around in it.
And the acting is largely excellent, especially from Tim Piggot Smith and Jon Laurimore. There's some superb dialogue for the cast to get their thespianic teeth into. "They say there are places where the bat droppings are twice the height of a man!" is a particular favourite of mine.
The mixing of the Hamlet pastiche with the Borgia/Medici/Machiavelli vibe and all the gothic business of masked acolytes sacrificing maidens in caves is rather satisfying.
As for the themes?
Mandragora as the embodiment of superstition. It makes its home in caves, in a ruined pagan temple (which it promises/threatens to resurrect), in ritual and mumbo-jumbo, in blades flashing with moonlight before being used in the blood rituals of old Roman sects. It demands mindless obedience, chanting, fearful submission, etc. It is intellectually what Frederico is politically. Hierarchy, despotism, cruelty, mindlessness.
On the other hand, the Renaissance brought new ways of thinking, new intellectual freedoms and pioneering ideas... reason began to make headway against superstition... men like Leonardo embodied the spirit of the age... more enlightened rulers began to champion such things while old-fashioned despots started to lose traction...
The Doctor stands with the future, with the 'enlightened' ruler who's interested in optics and astronomy and new ideas, who invites scientists to his big party, who doesn't use the torture chamber in the cellar of his palace, who sympathises with the peasants, etc.
Well, Guiliano is very idealised. But there were people a bit like him, who wanted to rule in a more enlightened fashion. Of course, they still wanted to rule.
He's drawn from Hamlet (the young heir who mourns a murdered father, displaced by the uncle who murdered him) and that's apt because Hamlet is an expression of the new Renaissance generation... educated at (Protestant) Wittenburg, ironic, witty, sceptical, bookish, etc., but also torn by his lingering attachment to the old ways.
Guiliano wants to "rule over a land where there is no tyranny", which is an oxymoron if you ask me, but we know what he means. He wants to be one of the new, liberal, tolerant rulers who doesn't slaughter peasants for fun and who encourages the development of science. Of course, in practice, such people wanted scientists to devise new weapons (which Leonardo did) and wanted artists to paint gigantic frescos which would symbolise the power of their own regime (which Michaelangelo did). And people who questioned the status quo would still end up in torture chambers or execution blocks, this time harangued with ingratitude to their new, modern, liberal, tolerant ruler.
Of course, things are soooooo different today, aren't they?
Also, the opposition between science and magical thinking is far too unambiguously drawn. For ages, the people who thought of themselves as modern, enlightened, rational and progressive would still engage in the rituals of the freemasons, or the gibberish of alchemy, or the religious heresies of the Arians or Rosicrucians. In fact, much of the scientific and cultural advances in the Renaissance wouldn't have been possible without magic thinking, without the traditions of alchemy, without the economic and social power of the Church and/or the despots (enlightened or otherwise).
There's a danger with the kind of linear and stagist thinking (backwardness vs. progress; religion vs. science) that this story seems to be based on. It can lead to the kind of ahistorical, culturalist nonsense you hear from people like the Sams Huntington and Harris.
Also, the story fails to even gesture towards the fact that the Renaissance didn't just happen, that it grew from changes in the economy of Europe, from advances in trade and credit and the rise of a new mercantile middle class, about pressure from below, from ordinary people demanding political change so that the could enjoy new freedoms and social mobilities, etc...
But this is all nitpicking. The story gets the gist pretty much right and presents it in a lovely package of semiotics and narrative quotes. It's hard not to love something so sumptuous, especially if its heart is in the right place.
I've posted about 'The Deadly Assassin', here.
‘The Face of Evil’
This is easily one of the best Doctor Who stories ever made. Its method is the classic Doctor Who method: shamelessly raid gothic fiction (of both the literary and B-movie variety) for images and ideas, then combine them with its own peculiar perspective, creating a unique fusion. Its style is the classic Doctor Who style: a kind of halfway house between realism or naturalism on the one hand and discursive theatricality on the other. But the subject matter is unusual, possibly a first in the show: the Doctor himself. About the consequences of his actions, about the effect he has on the places and people he 'helps' and about his own understanding of himself, his own grasp upon his own identity.
The face in the title is the Doctor's own face, and every cliffhanger depends upon an encounter with that face.
The first cliffhanger is an existential one, in which the Doctor sees himself outside himself, as an evil idol, a sick Mount Rushmore (not that the original isn't pretty sick in my book), a trace of his forgotten past, evidence of his own effect upon an entire culture, an explanation of why the Sevateem think he's "the evil one" and an almost Lacanian moment of self-cognition, in which he begins the journey that will occupy him for the rest of the story; a journey into his own reflection.
The second cliffhanger sees rampaging monsters of the id, attacking people, snarling at them... and all of them with the Doctor's face (though Tom Baker's amazing technique is to make these monsters look more afraid than savage). Andor is killed by one of these Doctor/id monsters, little knowing that he is being killed by splinters of the Xoanon he prays to for salvation. And it's interesting to see monsters directly lifted from a gothic, Shakespeare-inspired, sci-fi B-movie as expressions of the id of Xoanon/Doctor... precisely because Doctor Who as a text is built on a foundation of lifted elements from just such other texts!
The third cliffhanger sees the Doctor's sanity under direct assault by his own screaming face, fractured in several parts. An evil, mad, terrified reflection that demands of him "WHO AM I?" (which, rearranged, is "I AM WHO!") in the voice of a child. Looked at one way, that's what childhood is: the period during which we wander around constantly asking everyone who we are. That's where Xoanon is, but he's trying to disentangle himself from his parent in order to find his own identity... but then we all have to do that too, don't we?
Beyond all this psychology (none of which has to actually be true in an objective sense for this story to be subjectively fascinating) we have an amazing, Feuerbachian analysis of relgion. Man builds the totem pole, falls down before it, imagines it to be an expression of something outside of himself and greater than himself... and forgets that he is grovelling before a material expression of his own powers, and a idealised image of his own capabilities. Religion as alienation. Xoanon is an expression of our alienation from both our own technical skills and production capacities (he's an artefact, after all) and our own image, both physical and psychological.
Plus Leela is a great character, a companion who is also an image of the Doctor. A dissident, a free-thinker, a sceptic, someone who has left her static society (by being expelled/willfully opting out) and struck out on her own. Louise Jameson puts across Leela's strength (both physical and intellectual) effortlessly, subverting the sexism inherent in the idea of a companion in skimpy skins, making Leela probably the greatest ever companion.
If sci-fi is about "the relationship between man and his tools", this story shows that relationship very deliberately and consciously. I think sci-fi is more the reiteration of myth and legend in the technological age... and this story shows that happening deliberately and consciously too. And both are shown from the point of view of the machine, the tool, the technology. In this story, the machine itself has lost the difference between itself and its creator, and is deliberately re-enacting mythology in order to express itself. That's where the themes meet, and that's why the story is ultimately so satisfying.
‘The Robots of Death’
Absolutely thrilling. A script that, for once, really is about well-drawn and psychologically complex characters interacting with each other in human, funny, scary ways.
Uvanov's obvious sexual desire for Zilda takes the form of hostility, probably because it is based on class envy and a deep inferiority complex. Poul spends the story circling the others like the thoughtful, reserved, removed, brittle voyeur that he is... and, underneath, he seethes with existential terror... and his existential terror throws a revelatory light upon the neuroses of Capel, who is trying to merge with the robots and control them, thereby neutralising his oedipal terror of the benign, obedient, emotionally blank things that raised him and accidentally screwed him up beyond redemption (just as they seem to have screwed up this entire society).
The unexpected costume and production design suggests an indolent, decadent, aristocratic culture. But these people are workers, in their own way... they need to be there for the minerals to get back to the Company... so... in this culture, where almost everything is done by the robots, to be allowed to work (even a tiny bit) is to be privileged, is to be the aristocrat. The products of human labour have now alienated humans entirely, even from their ability to produce things.
But, of course, the robots are slaves... and the masters are always terrified of their slaves. They're also repositories of human neuroses. Dummies onto which the people project their inner demons. And dolls, toys in the hand of a psychopathic child in an adult's body.
Meanwhile, we have Tom on worldbeating form, playing THE Doctor (this really is, for me, THE Doctor, in a very fundamental way) as a sceptical, sardonic, razor-sharp intellectual whose one-liners slice through ignorance and thuggishness... while showing immense respect for Leela and D84 (surely one of the most lovable guest characters ever). D84 shows the difference between Capel's false revolution (in which the robots just lose one master and gain another) and a real revolution, in which the lowest of the low (a Dum, for goodness sake!) saves the day with an act of self-sacrifice born of friendship.
Louise Jameson is marvellous, playing Leela as a true force, as a character who shapes the story herself. In fact, you really should watch 'Face' and 'Robots' together, as two halves of one story. Not only for Leela's journey but because they cover much the same ground but from different angles.
The guest cast (with one exception) are all excellent. The music, the model work, etc... all superb. The script is full of amazing lines. "Please do not throw hands at me" is the most simple, D84s little poem to the power of the Laserson Probe is the most beautiful... and ironic. A machine, a tool, rhapsodizes the capabilities (for science and violence) of another machine, another tool.
It just doesn't get much better than this.
‘The Talons of Weng-Chiang’
Blissful, pulpy Victorian gothic. Literary pastiche that synthesizes something new and unique out of its borrowed parts. Jack the Ripper, Sherlock Holmes, Jekyll and Hyde, Fu Manchu, Dracula... it's all in there. A sort of voyage into our collective consciousness of pea-souper-ridden Victorian London. The story and the society in which it is set keep on unfolding in new directions. We keep getting some new angle. The town, the characters, the interactions, the relationships keep shifting and realigning. We have carefully-executed forays into very adult territory. We even have a prostitute and a scene set in an opium den. Of course, it's a "tissue of quotations", but isn't everything?
Against the psuedo-historical backdrop (and this story really might as well be set in the Land of Fiction), Holmes summons up a vast, complex, convincing and richly-textured backstory of future history in just a few lines of stunning dialogue. In fact, the whole story has a wonderfully extravagant verbal texture. The villain doesn't say "Why am I surrounded by fools?", he says "Your opium-sodden scum are all bunglers!" and "You stupid, incompetent lice! You crawling, mindless dogs!"
Tom Baker is at the height of his powers. The Doctor comes over as a man playing a game that he loves, but also as a deadly-serious tactician. Tom and the superb Louise Jameson (despite their supposed coolness towards each other) have tremendous chemistry. Their characters seem to have mutual respect for each other's powers, and the inherent imbalance in every Doctor/Companion relationship is here transmuted into a Guru/Trainee thing.
Great guest characters. Chang, despite his crimes, is no simple villain; he's devotee of a cause he believes in, a peasant's son seeking status, a man of personal dignity who exaggerates his accent and demeanour on stage to play up to the preconceptions of his Causcasian audiences. Jago is almost Falstaffian; a deeply flawed but utterly lovable old fake whirling around in a verbal tornado of fustian and flim-flam.
I think 'Talons' is clearly a bit racist (no more than many things) but it's a very complex business. I think it represents Chinese culture (or rather a second hand, pastiched and confabulated version of Chinese culture) according to Western assumptions and cultural tropes, i.e. exoticism (which is inherently a viewpoint that is imposed on Eastern culture by the Westerner), decadence, sensuality, enigmatic inscrutability, etc., as well as clearly making it a source of the uncanny, the menacing, and so on. It's a complex text because it imports these sorts of representations from its source texts... Sax Rohmer, etc... as part of its pastiche method, not as part of a political objective. And it problematises its own representations by making the ultimate source of the corruption in the story a Caucasian who has exploited Asians in an imperialistic way and has engaged in the kind of crimes of 20th century modernity that were common to both European and Asian forms of fascism. Moreover, he was overthrown by Philippinos... historically, the victims of a particularly ferocious campaign of Western imperialist aggression that the world has now all but forgotten.
More broadly, it's a shame that all the Chinese characters are either baddies or coolies or nunchucka-weilding thugs. But at least we are shown the racism of the Londoners, from the piggishness of the coppers to the condescending nonsense from Lightfoot about the Chinese being "enigmatic". The Doctor doesn't immediately notice that Chang is ethnically different from the Londoners and the story deliberately has Leela and the Doctor talking about the "tribe" in London known as "Cockneys".
Flat Earth Society
The greatness and uniqueness of 'Image of the Fendahl' is shown in the scene where the Doctor "explains" what's going on to Adam Colby. Of course, he doesn't actually do any such thing. He suggests two possible explanations. He favours the first but his listener is sceptical so the Doctor offers an alternative which his listener finds more plausible. The Doctor also says that it might all be a coincidence. His tone is flippant but there is no real reason to suppose that he isn't being serious. It is clear that the Doctor is theorising and that he doesn't have the final answer.
This is fascinating and, as far as I can recall, unique in classic Doctor Who.
The Doctor has often been seen to behave superficially like a scientist (mucking about with test tubes, talking about oscillators, etc.) but this is the first and only real occasion when he really acts like one (like an idealised, Baconian one, that is). The Doctor is admitting that he doesn’t know and doing his best to come up with workable explanations which fit the facts. Moreover, the person the Doctor is speaking to is a scientist who has demanded answers and is coming to his own conclusions about how plausible the Doctor's ideas are. No final decision is reached or stated as to which solution (if any) is correct. Fendleman's rant to Stael before his death tends to support the Doctor's idea about genetic manipulation (Colby's preferred option, possibly because he heard Fendleman speak) but the Doctor seems to prefer his first idea about a "biological transmutation field" which Colby might doubt simply because he doesn't know what one is.
This is all highly appropriate in a story that is preoccupied with the tensions between science, evidence, theory, supposition, superstition and belief.
The story opens with Colby fretting over a dissonance between established scientific facts (the age of the skull) and the apparent impossibility of their implications. (Someone once asked J.B.S. Haldane if any scientific finding could disprove evolution; "Fossil rabbits in the pre-Cambrian" was his gruff response.) Meanwhile, Fendleman spends much of the story trying to convince Adam of the validity of his theories. Wonderfully, Fendleman gets it partly right and partly wrong (something else that doesn’t usually happen in tales like this). His theory about the pentagram being a neural relay seems to be borne out, but his idea of the nature of the power it contains is woefully mistaken. Nobody is really entirely Right or Wrong about anything in this story, which is very refreshing.
Stael is an interesting character. His employment of the occult ritual is self-consciously ironic and cynical. He rejects Colby's taunts about being a Satanist and claims to be unimpressed by "the grimoires". Nevertheless, he employs occult language and ceremonies... this might be meant as showing unconscious drives. Scott Fredericks (an actor with a lot of interiority) even seems to be working to endow Stael with a repressed sexual interest in Colby. Stael's ideas exist on that deeply-70s line of thinking along which the occult, paranormal phenomena and science intersect. This might be dated but it is perfectly appropriate with this story.
The story does a lot of that Nigel Kneale stuff. Apparently supernatural effects are revealed as side-effects of natural phenomena. Quatermass is usually mentioned but the story’s real debt is to Kneale’s masterpiece The Stone Tape, in which a team of practical scientists (!) who dig down in an old priory (!) discover that a haunting in the house is a kind of natural recording. The central female character in The Stone Tape has an unusual sympathy with the haunting/entity and ends up being absorbed by it… just like Thea Ransome. I don’t mean to accuse Boucher of plagiarism; there are as many differences as similarities and Boucher’s script, arguably, has more to say about the nature of belief that Kneale’s.
The Fendahl manifests itself in the manner of an all-out occult horror. Skulls, pentagrams, rituals, sacrifices. But the entity is clearly described as a horrible, one-off evolutionary snafu. It is suggested (the Doctor continues to offer suggestions rather than statements) that our human concepts of evil are influenced by the appearance and methods of the Fendahl... so human superstitions about evil come from our attempts to understand things like death and predation. The Fendahl is not stored inside a pentagram-embossed skull because it is diabolical, rather we have drawn our iconography of evil from a collective memory of the Fendahl, a creature so inimical to life that is it, effectively, a personification of death... but then, evolution is itself a kind of personification of death. It depends upon death as much as upon anything else.
Interestingly, the Fendahl never displays actual, conscious malice. I used to think that the core should have spoken up with sinister words. Watching the story now I am very glad that it stays silent and enigmatic. The closest it gets to expressing a malevolent personality is the little smile as it consumes human life force... but any creature might express satisfaction as it feeds. It is not really evil. It is just a supremely evolved predator. It is Death, in the sense that it feeds on living things in the most fundamental way possible: it assimilates them into itself... but in biological terms, that's quite right. To feed on something is to absorb those parts of it that can become part of you, excreting those bits that are unassimilable.
The key to understanding this story lies in the exchange between Ma Tyler and Jack about the nature of belief. “When most believe, that do make it true,” she asserts. “People used to think the world was flat,” Jack tells his grandma, “but it were still round.” “Ah,” she replies immediately, “but they behaved as though t’were flat!” This apparent gibberish is actually right to the point.
The story is full of people who behave as though their assumptions are correct and, in so doing, contribute to the situation in which the Fendahl reawakens. Fendleman and Stael, for their different reasons, have decided that the power within the skull should be released and so they set about it. Ted Moss clings to “the old ways” and thus takes part in Stael’s ceremony. Even Colby refuses to accept scientific facts when they contradict his assumptions and so brings Thea into contact with the skull. The Fendahl feeds on the life force, according to the Doctor, so it can be seen as a personification of death, more particularly as the dark side of evolution. But another subtext is also clear: it feeds on belief. Belief without reason. Belief against evidence.
How apt that it should have evolved as a result of natural selection turning back on itself.
The thing unfolds like a nightmare. I mean that in the broad sense. The story is dreamlike. Its narrative logic is fairly strong (even the matter of who releases the Doctor is fathomable, given some deduction) but the nuts and bolts of the story are jumpy, dream-logical, figurative and alliterative. The Doctor and Leela disappear into time for a brief period but return after what looks like a full day has passed for the other characters. We are asked to interpret quite important parts of the action from the standpoint of thematic rhymes and resonances. The fourth wall is broken. Spoken numbers fail to match the number of fingers being held up. We keep getting references to dreams. And dream scenarios crop up: sudden, inexplicable imobility for example. People have names that seem oddly appropriate. "Thea Ransome" suggests sacrifice: she is the ransom paid to a theistic entity. Even Ted Moss clings like a slow growth. The idiosyncratic editing emphasizes the peculiarity of the proceedings. We cut sharply away from scenes after highly pregnant remarks have been snapped out... and then the camera will linger longer than seems obviously necessary, in order to catch the expressions of a speaker or hearer.
The only cloud on the horizon (other than a certain painful tweeness in certain scenes) is the mooted notion that people might behave in certain specific ways because they've been genetically programmed to. But then, the Doctor only talks about "desires and instincts", which probably do have a genetic factor. Fendleman's interpretation is more extreme, and sounds like genetic destiny... but the Fendahl might've employed a scattershot effect, feeding in the right "desires and instincts" and hoping that eventually someone would be in a position to act upon them in the right way. Does it "explain the dark side of man's nature"? Well, if the Fendahl personifies evolution (through death and predation) then... maybe... but I don't think anything in the story reduces the picture to genetic-determinism.
Of course, either way, the meaning of the oblique title becomes clear. As does the significance of the name Adam. Whether it personifies brutal evolution or a demonic puppetmaster that depends upon unreason, the Fendahl, it is implied, created us in its own image.
This is fascinating and, as far as I can recall, unique in classic Doctor Who.
The Doctor has often been seen to behave superficially like a scientist (mucking about with test tubes, talking about oscillators, etc.) but this is the first and only real occasion when he really acts like one (like an idealised, Baconian one, that is). The Doctor is admitting that he doesn’t know and doing his best to come up with workable explanations which fit the facts. Moreover, the person the Doctor is speaking to is a scientist who has demanded answers and is coming to his own conclusions about how plausible the Doctor's ideas are. No final decision is reached or stated as to which solution (if any) is correct. Fendleman's rant to Stael before his death tends to support the Doctor's idea about genetic manipulation (Colby's preferred option, possibly because he heard Fendleman speak) but the Doctor seems to prefer his first idea about a "biological transmutation field" which Colby might doubt simply because he doesn't know what one is.
This is all highly appropriate in a story that is preoccupied with the tensions between science, evidence, theory, supposition, superstition and belief.
The story opens with Colby fretting over a dissonance between established scientific facts (the age of the skull) and the apparent impossibility of their implications. (Someone once asked J.B.S. Haldane if any scientific finding could disprove evolution; "Fossil rabbits in the pre-Cambrian" was his gruff response.) Meanwhile, Fendleman spends much of the story trying to convince Adam of the validity of his theories. Wonderfully, Fendleman gets it partly right and partly wrong (something else that doesn’t usually happen in tales like this). His theory about the pentagram being a neural relay seems to be borne out, but his idea of the nature of the power it contains is woefully mistaken. Nobody is really entirely Right or Wrong about anything in this story, which is very refreshing.
Stael is an interesting character. His employment of the occult ritual is self-consciously ironic and cynical. He rejects Colby's taunts about being a Satanist and claims to be unimpressed by "the grimoires". Nevertheless, he employs occult language and ceremonies... this might be meant as showing unconscious drives. Scott Fredericks (an actor with a lot of interiority) even seems to be working to endow Stael with a repressed sexual interest in Colby. Stael's ideas exist on that deeply-70s line of thinking along which the occult, paranormal phenomena and science intersect. This might be dated but it is perfectly appropriate with this story.
The story does a lot of that Nigel Kneale stuff. Apparently supernatural effects are revealed as side-effects of natural phenomena. Quatermass is usually mentioned but the story’s real debt is to Kneale’s masterpiece The Stone Tape, in which a team of practical scientists (!) who dig down in an old priory (!) discover that a haunting in the house is a kind of natural recording. The central female character in The Stone Tape has an unusual sympathy with the haunting/entity and ends up being absorbed by it… just like Thea Ransome. I don’t mean to accuse Boucher of plagiarism; there are as many differences as similarities and Boucher’s script, arguably, has more to say about the nature of belief that Kneale’s.
The Fendahl manifests itself in the manner of an all-out occult horror. Skulls, pentagrams, rituals, sacrifices. But the entity is clearly described as a horrible, one-off evolutionary snafu. It is suggested (the Doctor continues to offer suggestions rather than statements) that our human concepts of evil are influenced by the appearance and methods of the Fendahl... so human superstitions about evil come from our attempts to understand things like death and predation. The Fendahl is not stored inside a pentagram-embossed skull because it is diabolical, rather we have drawn our iconography of evil from a collective memory of the Fendahl, a creature so inimical to life that is it, effectively, a personification of death... but then, evolution is itself a kind of personification of death. It depends upon death as much as upon anything else.
Interestingly, the Fendahl never displays actual, conscious malice. I used to think that the core should have spoken up with sinister words. Watching the story now I am very glad that it stays silent and enigmatic. The closest it gets to expressing a malevolent personality is the little smile as it consumes human life force... but any creature might express satisfaction as it feeds. It is not really evil. It is just a supremely evolved predator. It is Death, in the sense that it feeds on living things in the most fundamental way possible: it assimilates them into itself... but in biological terms, that's quite right. To feed on something is to absorb those parts of it that can become part of you, excreting those bits that are unassimilable.
The key to understanding this story lies in the exchange between Ma Tyler and Jack about the nature of belief. “When most believe, that do make it true,” she asserts. “People used to think the world was flat,” Jack tells his grandma, “but it were still round.” “Ah,” she replies immediately, “but they behaved as though t’were flat!” This apparent gibberish is actually right to the point.
The story is full of people who behave as though their assumptions are correct and, in so doing, contribute to the situation in which the Fendahl reawakens. Fendleman and Stael, for their different reasons, have decided that the power within the skull should be released and so they set about it. Ted Moss clings to “the old ways” and thus takes part in Stael’s ceremony. Even Colby refuses to accept scientific facts when they contradict his assumptions and so brings Thea into contact with the skull. The Fendahl feeds on the life force, according to the Doctor, so it can be seen as a personification of death, more particularly as the dark side of evolution. But another subtext is also clear: it feeds on belief. Belief without reason. Belief against evidence.
How apt that it should have evolved as a result of natural selection turning back on itself.
The thing unfolds like a nightmare. I mean that in the broad sense. The story is dreamlike. Its narrative logic is fairly strong (even the matter of who releases the Doctor is fathomable, given some deduction) but the nuts and bolts of the story are jumpy, dream-logical, figurative and alliterative. The Doctor and Leela disappear into time for a brief period but return after what looks like a full day has passed for the other characters. We are asked to interpret quite important parts of the action from the standpoint of thematic rhymes and resonances. The fourth wall is broken. Spoken numbers fail to match the number of fingers being held up. We keep getting references to dreams. And dream scenarios crop up: sudden, inexplicable imobility for example. People have names that seem oddly appropriate. "Thea Ransome" suggests sacrifice: she is the ransom paid to a theistic entity. Even Ted Moss clings like a slow growth. The idiosyncratic editing emphasizes the peculiarity of the proceedings. We cut sharply away from scenes after highly pregnant remarks have been snapped out... and then the camera will linger longer than seems obviously necessary, in order to catch the expressions of a speaker or hearer.
The only cloud on the horizon (other than a certain painful tweeness in certain scenes) is the mooted notion that people might behave in certain specific ways because they've been genetically programmed to. But then, the Doctor only talks about "desires and instincts", which probably do have a genetic factor. Fendleman's interpretation is more extreme, and sounds like genetic destiny... but the Fendahl might've employed a scattershot effect, feeding in the right "desires and instincts" and hoping that eventually someone would be in a position to act upon them in the right way. Does it "explain the dark side of man's nature"? Well, if the Fendahl personifies evolution (through death and predation) then... maybe... but I don't think anything in the story reduces the picture to genetic-determinism.
Of course, either way, the meaning of the oblique title becomes clear. As does the significance of the name Adam. Whether it personifies brutal evolution or a demonic puppetmaster that depends upon unreason, the Fendahl, it is implied, created us in its own image.
Fang Rock, Class and the Tentacular Revolution
If you ask me, 'Horror of Fang Rock' is one of the best ever; a thriller that focuses on characters who really interact while they're trapped together, featuring Tom and Louise at their acme.
It investigates the nature of belief in an age of rising science and technology: Adelaide's astrology fetish compares to the superstition of Vince and Reuben, with Vince's terror as real as hers, and Reuben's fear of monsters more a manifestation of melancholy stubbornness at the rise of unsympathetic forces he doesn't understand (like electricity... which is also the weapon of the monster that kills and impersonates him). Meanwhile, Leela lectures Adelaide that consulting her "shaman" (despite Adelaide's denial, that is the right word for people like Miss Nethercote) is a "waste of time"... but, with relishable irony, the semi-educated Leela simply believes in science because her mentor has told her to.
'Fang Rock' has a quiet undercurrent about sex too. Adelaide is understood by Harker to be Palmerdale's "fancy woman" and Skinsale obviously envies this (though god knows why)... but he's also clearly very taken with Leela. Paddy Russell gives us a whole shot simply to establish how much Skinsale digs Leela on sight. Vince is very flustered by Leela's impromptu striptease (which she completely fails to understand) and pays attentions to Adelaide, which she simply treats with a patronising indulgence (to her he's an instrumentum vocale, not a young man). And then we have the porn under Reuben's bed. Mind you, I'm not a Freudian so I'm not saying anything about phallic symbolism. Sometimes, a lighthouse is just a lighthouse.
'Fang Rock' is also very interested in class and the way it was changing in the early 20th century. Palmerdale is loaded and is therefore a scumbag, obviously. Crude but very Whoish... and true enough in general terms. He seems dead posh to the keepers... but to Skinsale (a wonderfully apt name, considering the manner of his death) Palmerdale is a nouveu riche, arriviste, vulgar little money-grubber... and such things obviously matter to Palmerdale since he has evidently purchased his lordly title. He tries to buy everything. He even seems to be paying his mistress (albeit for being a secretary rather than a concubine). Skinsale, meanwhile, considers himself Palmerdale's social superior, despite obviously being skint (old money, obviously... and with a reputation built on enforcing empire in India). Palmerdale gets loads of his sailors killed but makes sure that he escapes (there are lifeboats enough for the gentry, as with the Titanic disaster, but not for the commoners) after causing the crash because he's anxious to use insider info to fleece the markets... and then views Harker's recriminations as irrelevant impertinence, and the keepers as more servants.
It's worth noticing that the Doctor treats the workers (other than the cloddish and xenophobic Reuben) with respect. He starts off calling Vince "Mr Hawkins" while the poshos automatically talk to him like he's a footman.
Vince, upon realising that Palmerdale is dead, burns the cash that His Lordship gave him, instinctively understanding that if he's found in possession of it, the society he lives in will simply assume that he murdered the venal, titled git for the money.
Perhaps you think I'm imagining that this story is obsessed with class, status and snobbery? I ask you to remember that seemingly throwaway detail that the Rutan refers to the Sontarans as "rabble". See what I mean?
Okay, it ain't revolutionary. Very little Who is. 'Fang Rock' offers a lefty/liberal critique rather than a radical challenge. But the critique is quite strong and sophisticated.
It does occur to me that the Rutan embodies electricity and technology and militarism... and the oncoming 'Great War' was pretty indiscriminate in the way it killed, precisely because of the startling new military technology that it produced.
It's interesting to ponder what China Miéville calls "the tentacular revolution", that strange occurrence within sci-fi/horror fiction, roughly starting round about the turn of the century, in which the West suddenly discovered the uncanny potential of the giant squid and the octopus. The tentacled beast also saturates political posters and propaganda round about this period (reaching a crescendo in the twenty years or so around WWI). Have a look at this amazing blog.
Miéville doesn't give a straightforward or reductionist reading of this tentacular trend. He suggests it represents a failure of meaning (the octopus is amorphous and terrifyingly unlike anything else specific, hence it's like everything) in an age of uncertainty. But it seems to me that it can also be connected to the rise of modern communication and travel (railways, telegraphs, etc) and to the rise of global companies, global military aims and political movements. Which is precisely the sort of thing the Rutan embodies - an imperialist philosophy, communication (his signal modulator), new weaponry, new tech, etc - and which the other characters talk about too (i.e. Palmerdale with the wireless telegraph, etc).
The most salient physical feature of the octopus/squid is its many arms - which is graphically perfect for representing 'global reach' of the kind attributed to countries, companies, ideas, technology, imperialist armies, etc... especially in an age of expansion (or, to use our terms, globalization). In political posters, the octopus is constantly represented hugging a map or globe, with its arms in many places.
Of course, 'Fang Rock' was made in the 70s not the 1910s, so it doesn't have quite the same meaning as octopus horror stories by H.G. Wells or Tsarist anti-semitic octopus posters... so this is a case of semiotic drift. The signs and symbols of one age get a piggyback ride on its representation in a period drama. But there were similar things in the air in the 70s too, thanks to Vietnam, etc. And now also, which might be why the tentacle is making something of a comeback in political posters (often with either 'al-Qaeda' or 'Neo-liberalism' written on it, depending on who produced it) and also in modern fantasy writing.
It investigates the nature of belief in an age of rising science and technology: Adelaide's astrology fetish compares to the superstition of Vince and Reuben, with Vince's terror as real as hers, and Reuben's fear of monsters more a manifestation of melancholy stubbornness at the rise of unsympathetic forces he doesn't understand (like electricity... which is also the weapon of the monster that kills and impersonates him). Meanwhile, Leela lectures Adelaide that consulting her "shaman" (despite Adelaide's denial, that is the right word for people like Miss Nethercote) is a "waste of time"... but, with relishable irony, the semi-educated Leela simply believes in science because her mentor has told her to.
'Fang Rock' has a quiet undercurrent about sex too. Adelaide is understood by Harker to be Palmerdale's "fancy woman" and Skinsale obviously envies this (though god knows why)... but he's also clearly very taken with Leela. Paddy Russell gives us a whole shot simply to establish how much Skinsale digs Leela on sight. Vince is very flustered by Leela's impromptu striptease (which she completely fails to understand) and pays attentions to Adelaide, which she simply treats with a patronising indulgence (to her he's an instrumentum vocale, not a young man). And then we have the porn under Reuben's bed. Mind you, I'm not a Freudian so I'm not saying anything about phallic symbolism. Sometimes, a lighthouse is just a lighthouse.
'Fang Rock' is also very interested in class and the way it was changing in the early 20th century. Palmerdale is loaded and is therefore a scumbag, obviously. Crude but very Whoish... and true enough in general terms. He seems dead posh to the keepers... but to Skinsale (a wonderfully apt name, considering the manner of his death) Palmerdale is a nouveu riche, arriviste, vulgar little money-grubber... and such things obviously matter to Palmerdale since he has evidently purchased his lordly title. He tries to buy everything. He even seems to be paying his mistress (albeit for being a secretary rather than a concubine). Skinsale, meanwhile, considers himself Palmerdale's social superior, despite obviously being skint (old money, obviously... and with a reputation built on enforcing empire in India). Palmerdale gets loads of his sailors killed but makes sure that he escapes (there are lifeboats enough for the gentry, as with the Titanic disaster, but not for the commoners) after causing the crash because he's anxious to use insider info to fleece the markets... and then views Harker's recriminations as irrelevant impertinence, and the keepers as more servants.
It's worth noticing that the Doctor treats the workers (other than the cloddish and xenophobic Reuben) with respect. He starts off calling Vince "Mr Hawkins" while the poshos automatically talk to him like he's a footman.
Vince, upon realising that Palmerdale is dead, burns the cash that His Lordship gave him, instinctively understanding that if he's found in possession of it, the society he lives in will simply assume that he murdered the venal, titled git for the money.
Perhaps you think I'm imagining that this story is obsessed with class, status and snobbery? I ask you to remember that seemingly throwaway detail that the Rutan refers to the Sontarans as "rabble". See what I mean?
Okay, it ain't revolutionary. Very little Who is. 'Fang Rock' offers a lefty/liberal critique rather than a radical challenge. But the critique is quite strong and sophisticated.
It does occur to me that the Rutan embodies electricity and technology and militarism... and the oncoming 'Great War' was pretty indiscriminate in the way it killed, precisely because of the startling new military technology that it produced.
It's interesting to ponder what China Miéville calls "the tentacular revolution", that strange occurrence within sci-fi/horror fiction, roughly starting round about the turn of the century, in which the West suddenly discovered the uncanny potential of the giant squid and the octopus. The tentacled beast also saturates political posters and propaganda round about this period (reaching a crescendo in the twenty years or so around WWI). Have a look at this amazing blog.
Miéville doesn't give a straightforward or reductionist reading of this tentacular trend. He suggests it represents a failure of meaning (the octopus is amorphous and terrifyingly unlike anything else specific, hence it's like everything) in an age of uncertainty. But it seems to me that it can also be connected to the rise of modern communication and travel (railways, telegraphs, etc) and to the rise of global companies, global military aims and political movements. Which is precisely the sort of thing the Rutan embodies - an imperialist philosophy, communication (his signal modulator), new weaponry, new tech, etc - and which the other characters talk about too (i.e. Palmerdale with the wireless telegraph, etc).
The most salient physical feature of the octopus/squid is its many arms - which is graphically perfect for representing 'global reach' of the kind attributed to countries, companies, ideas, technology, imperialist armies, etc... especially in an age of expansion (or, to use our terms, globalization). In political posters, the octopus is constantly represented hugging a map or globe, with its arms in many places.
Of course, 'Fang Rock' was made in the 70s not the 1910s, so it doesn't have quite the same meaning as octopus horror stories by H.G. Wells or Tsarist anti-semitic octopus posters... so this is a case of semiotic drift. The signs and symbols of one age get a piggyback ride on its representation in a period drama. But there were similar things in the air in the 70s too, thanks to Vietnam, etc. And now also, which might be why the tentacle is making something of a comeback in political posters (often with either 'al-Qaeda' or 'Neo-liberalism' written on it, depending on who produced it) and also in modern fantasy writing.
Wednesday, 24 November 2010
Rise Like Lions
Even as I type this, protestors are clambering over the stone lions at the base of Nelson's Column, waving anti-cuts placards while sat astride the petrified leonine relics of an imperial age that is still decaying... and trying to take us all with it.
'Warrior's Gate' came up for discussion at Gallifrey Base today. It seems almost ridiculously appropriate. Well, it does to me anyway.
Biroc makes me think of Walter Benjamin’s ‘Angel of History’:
Benjamin's exegesis was inspired by a figure in a painting by Klee... but, sometimes, when I read that passage, I see Biroc. To me, Biroc is the angel, haunted by the cruelties of the past and propelled forwards by the inexorable progress of brutality, yearning to pull the emergency cord and stop the train of history, to burst apart the continuum of repetitive exploitation. The media of his travel are the mirrors, the shimmering reproaches that reflect his and his people’s ruin back at him, and allow him through into the past where he can see – and even participate in - the horror of the lost empire that has doomed his people to their turn in servitude, the lions now kings no more, the king’s beasts in chains.
The Doctor walks into the cobwebby, ruined Tharil dining hall and sets right a goblet that was left on its side centuries ago. Later in the story he is taken back to the moment when the Tharils began to lose control of their empire, when they were attacked at the height of their power by the revolution they thought they could dodge forever. Disgusted by their treatment of their slaves, the Doctor pours wine into the very same goblet (but centuries before he first saw and righted it) until … well, until the Tharil’s cup runneth over… and then knocks it over in a gesture of splendid, ironic contempt for their decadence; decadence built on the suffering, servitude, abuse and unrequited labour of those the Tharils call “only people”.
The grand feudalism of the Tharils has crumbled, demolished by the revenge of history, by the revolt of the serfs and their faceless machines of violent liberation… and the industrious serfs have built their own civilisation, which has become mercantile and imperialistic, technological and temporal, perhaps with their time engines based on the looted skills of the time sensitives who used to loot their skills long ago. It’s never stated that Rorvik and his gang are the descendants of the slaves who built the Gundans… but even if they’re not, it hardly matters. They represent the high-technological interplanetary trading society that replaces the empires of castles and banqueting halls and leonine heraldry. In the history of our world, the international slave traders were essential to the rise of capitalism, helping to supersede the world of feudalism and aristocracy.
Biroc is the noble warrior who knows his world is gone - and that it deserves to be gone - forced to represent his people who are now the wracked and stacked and bought and sold merchandise of a philistine capitalist culture, a culture that gives opportunities to cretinous, narcissistic but enterprising bigots who can pay enough bonus-hunters to help them ship the slaves through the gateway, the eye of the needle.
(Rorvik, by the way, is every inch the swaggering Thatcherite of the early-80s... and of today. He's self-righteous about his own supposed leadership qualities and initiative. He's all hubristic bibble about "lily-livered deadweights". He doesn't even understand the Doctor's reference to the Tharil slaves as "poor creatures", interpreting it as impugning their monetary value. The sublime merely irritates him. Everything that doesn't serve him, he tries to break. "Everything breaks eventually" could be the motto of Tory socio-economic policy.)
But Biroc, with a little unnecessary help from the Doctor & Co… who don’t realise that all they have to do is sit back and watch the gears and cogs of history tick by as Biroc and his friends wind them… manages to blast open the trap. And Romana goes with him because she doesn’t want to go back to a static and petty and reactionary world that would never understand a temporal, striving, regretful, angry thing like Biroc in a million years. The words the Doctor uses to say goodbye to her are a cheeky appropriation of Shakespeare, from a story about men who tried to swim against the ruthless tide of history.
The weak enslave themselves. The slaves who do not revolt consent to their condition. The imperialists, lords and slavers all create the conditions for their own dethronement and indenture… in fact, just being a slaver is a kind of indenture, an enslavement to boredom and decadence and banality and routine cruelty. But, if you are sensitive to time, if you understand history, if you can see the pattern of the whole in the behaviour of the tiny random chances, then you can visualise a different possible future and jump for it… and break out of the loop even as it shrinks around you. In other words: if you are sincere, blood vanishes and fear gives way.
Go, protestors! You'll be superb. You're the Tharils now. Rise like lions.
'Warrior's Gate' came up for discussion at Gallifrey Base today. It seems almost ridiculously appropriate. Well, it does to me anyway.
Biroc makes me think of Walter Benjamin’s ‘Angel of History’:
The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.
Benjamin's exegesis was inspired by a figure in a painting by Klee... but, sometimes, when I read that passage, I see Biroc. To me, Biroc is the angel, haunted by the cruelties of the past and propelled forwards by the inexorable progress of brutality, yearning to pull the emergency cord and stop the train of history, to burst apart the continuum of repetitive exploitation. The media of his travel are the mirrors, the shimmering reproaches that reflect his and his people’s ruin back at him, and allow him through into the past where he can see – and even participate in - the horror of the lost empire that has doomed his people to their turn in servitude, the lions now kings no more, the king’s beasts in chains.
The Doctor walks into the cobwebby, ruined Tharil dining hall and sets right a goblet that was left on its side centuries ago. Later in the story he is taken back to the moment when the Tharils began to lose control of their empire, when they were attacked at the height of their power by the revolution they thought they could dodge forever. Disgusted by their treatment of their slaves, the Doctor pours wine into the very same goblet (but centuries before he first saw and righted it) until … well, until the Tharil’s cup runneth over… and then knocks it over in a gesture of splendid, ironic contempt for their decadence; decadence built on the suffering, servitude, abuse and unrequited labour of those the Tharils call “only people”.
The grand feudalism of the Tharils has crumbled, demolished by the revenge of history, by the revolt of the serfs and their faceless machines of violent liberation… and the industrious serfs have built their own civilisation, which has become mercantile and imperialistic, technological and temporal, perhaps with their time engines based on the looted skills of the time sensitives who used to loot their skills long ago. It’s never stated that Rorvik and his gang are the descendants of the slaves who built the Gundans… but even if they’re not, it hardly matters. They represent the high-technological interplanetary trading society that replaces the empires of castles and banqueting halls and leonine heraldry. In the history of our world, the international slave traders were essential to the rise of capitalism, helping to supersede the world of feudalism and aristocracy.
Biroc is the noble warrior who knows his world is gone - and that it deserves to be gone - forced to represent his people who are now the wracked and stacked and bought and sold merchandise of a philistine capitalist culture, a culture that gives opportunities to cretinous, narcissistic but enterprising bigots who can pay enough bonus-hunters to help them ship the slaves through the gateway, the eye of the needle.
(Rorvik, by the way, is every inch the swaggering Thatcherite of the early-80s... and of today. He's self-righteous about his own supposed leadership qualities and initiative. He's all hubristic bibble about "lily-livered deadweights". He doesn't even understand the Doctor's reference to the Tharil slaves as "poor creatures", interpreting it as impugning their monetary value. The sublime merely irritates him. Everything that doesn't serve him, he tries to break. "Everything breaks eventually" could be the motto of Tory socio-economic policy.)
But Biroc, with a little unnecessary help from the Doctor & Co… who don’t realise that all they have to do is sit back and watch the gears and cogs of history tick by as Biroc and his friends wind them… manages to blast open the trap. And Romana goes with him because she doesn’t want to go back to a static and petty and reactionary world that would never understand a temporal, striving, regretful, angry thing like Biroc in a million years. The words the Doctor uses to say goodbye to her are a cheeky appropriation of Shakespeare, from a story about men who tried to swim against the ruthless tide of history.
The weak enslave themselves. The slaves who do not revolt consent to their condition. The imperialists, lords and slavers all create the conditions for their own dethronement and indenture… in fact, just being a slaver is a kind of indenture, an enslavement to boredom and decadence and banality and routine cruelty. But, if you are sensitive to time, if you understand history, if you can see the pattern of the whole in the behaviour of the tiny random chances, then you can visualise a different possible future and jump for it… and break out of the loop even as it shrinks around you. In other words: if you are sincere, blood vanishes and fear gives way.
Go, protestors! You'll be superb. You're the Tharils now. Rise like lions.
Tharil Graffiti
Tuesday, 16 November 2010
Royal Wedding
It's been announced that King Peladon is to marry some blonde or other. They'll be married in a marriage ceremony after which they'll be married. They'll then be husband and wife. And King and Queen. And be married. After their glittering wedding, which will glitter. She'll look wonderful. He'll look less wonderful but still wonderful. They'll glitter. It'll be a marvellous occasion. They'll be married in a royal wedding by the High Priest and there'll be lots of wedding stuff and clothes and music and dancing and food and wine and weddings and married and royal wedding and king and queen crown tiara dress ball gala dress crown look lovely wedding married king palace glitter coach dress trumpets guests wedding cake oooh doesn't she look beautiful marriage royal crown queen king wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding wedding...
For more on the forthcoming royal wedding, see almost every other page of this newspaper and all other newspapers for months and months and months and months and fucking months.
In other news:
Society in full collapse and working classes starving.
See our special comment section for an article from the High Priest of Aggedor on the evil of window breaking.
For more on the forthcoming royal wedding, see almost every other page of this newspaper and all other newspapers for months and months and months and months and fucking months.
In other news:
Society in full collapse and working classes starving.
See our special comment section for an article from the High Priest of Aggedor on the evil of window breaking.
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