The Commodity Strikes Back

Thoughts on 'Planet of the Ood'


A very beautiful episode to look at. A stark pallet of whites and blues and greys, the exterior scenes harshly bathed in cold light... counterpointed by the dark warehouses and the red haze of the Ood rage.

Series 4 continues its apparent intent of readdressing moral lapses on the part of the Doctor/show. The inexcusable laxity of the treatment of slavery in 'The Satan Pit' (and the invisibility of the issue in the preceding episode) gets repudiated here. Big time.

Some would rather have had a story about a race that actually did crave servitude... but J. K. Rowling has already given the nation that sort of thing with her innately and happily subservient House Elves. And I don't believe a sentient life form could evolve that wanted to be a commodity.  Indeed, to even suggest such a thing may be to fundamentally misunderstand what consciousness is.

This may be a straightforward polemical tale, but there's nothing wrong with that. This is about ruthless, corporate capitalism exploiting people that it sees as nothing but a resource to be used. Sentient beings cut and sliced and spliced into shape as customisable toys and then packaged, branded, priced-up and shipped out in boxes. People in pacakaging. The gimmicks with their voices say it all: it's like changeable novelty mobile-phone covers only with people.

This is a parable about commodification. About people turned into products and merchandise. About how relationships between living people become like relationships between things through the logic of the market. Halpen is, in his way, as much a victim of the commodification syndrome as the Ood. We see glimmers of decency in him, not least when he sends Ood Sigma back to his people. But he's trapped within the logic of the impersonal system. Like the PR girl who - oh joy, oh bliss - does NOT have a yawnsome "crisis of conscience" but does her job, stays within the psychological confines of the system and stays true to her corporate loyalties. The PR/marketing slime in the hospitality lounge are as lobotomised as the Ood. Sharp suits and empty heads and crippled consciences.

Mr Halpen's ultimate comeuppance is to become the thing he owned and traded in. That amazing gore moment that also, through the context, manages to be poetic, beautiful and moving. And satisfying. It's a fantasy, but a pleasing one. Let's put together a chain-gang starring Warren Buffet, Phil Nike, Rupert Murdoch, etc. See how those bastards like being at the bottom of the pile. Maybe sometimes, empathy must be imposed.

The episode does not flinch from showing the brutality or the necessity or the moral justifiability of violent revolt. No patronising sermons to the oppressed about non-violence.

The Doctor's remark to Donna - "who do you think made your clothes?" - was quite startling at the time.  Under most circumstances, such little eruptions in mainstream drama can be accounted for as mere twinges of liberal guilt... but in a story like this one, which explicitly endorses violent revolution... well, it seems to have a bit more integrity than that. Lawrence Miles has frequently criticised this scene for allowing Donna to snap back at the Doctor for being self-righteous... but she's right to. Firstly, on a character level, it would make no sense for Donna to immediately simper with middle class liberal guilt. Secondly, where does the Doctor get off saying that so self-righteously? Who made his clothes?  Who made mine, for that matter?  And is agonising about this issue really the answer to anything?  The Doctor's remark is smug and superior.  It's left to others to go beyond that sort of thing and actually, physically smash the system.

Again, this isn't a question of villainy, but nor is it about collective guilt. In this story, even the human workers are parasitic upon the bondage of the Ood. They can be brutalised by their situation - below some, above others - into becoming whip-weilding fascist bullies.

But the Ood are not just the impoverished people of the third world, corralled in EPZs. They are also the product itself, the commodity system itself, coming back for revenge, biting the hands that produce it.

There are many Doctor Who aliens that are 'product monsters'.  Machines, toys, statues, scarecrows, dolls, computers, shop window dummies.  Manufactured things that become alive and autonomous and hostile.  The Ood are the same thing in reverse.  The Autons are the products that come alive.  The Ood are the living things made into products.

They reflect what the commodity system does. The company cuts away the part of the Ood that makes them free individuals.... In their state of nature they have evolved to be communal, social, mutually aiding (not because they're angels but because their fragility makes them rely upon each other... as it was with humans in pre-class societies). The Company treats them as raw material, as a resource to be exploited. It slices into them and turns them into market fodder. But isn't that what "The Company" (in all it's forms) ALWAYS does, to both the wage-slaves and the consumers? The logic of the Company makes Mr Halpen into an anxious, scared, guilty self-interested utility-maximiser. In a system of generalised commodification, everyone has to have their brain cut into. There's a bit of us missing if we're prepared to tolerate other people being bought and sold.

Another thing I love about this episode is that the Doctor is not the hero. He doesn't free the Ood. They free themselves... with a bit of help from a brave anarchist infiltrator. That this aspect should come in for such stick is rather telling.  People would be more comfortable with the Doctor as a saviour/messiah, even if he must lead a revolution.  Seeing him simply watch as the oppressed free themselves makes people worry. 

Here, the Doctor isn't a tiresome champion, just a sympathetic onlooker. The Ood's gratitude at the end seems like a non sequitur... but perhaps they're just grateful for his and Donna's friendship, for their willingness to treat them as people.  That is, after all, their goal: to be treated as people again, rather than as things, toys, tools or commodities.

Notes from the Bibbledrome

AOL News ran a story this morning about a T-Mobile survey, asking "the public" (probably about seven people) which "personalities" they thought should be on the new UK money.  Apparently, the top choices were Pippa Middleton and Alan Sugar, with Keira Knightly and Simon Cowell as runners-up.

I think these are great ideas.  What could better express where our society is at?

Alan Sugar - an embarassing, thuggish, philistine, self-aggrandizing old shitsack, promoted as an idol by the media, a vaudeville capitalist mascot of a TV show that (along with many, many others) touts the virtues of the heroically self-interested utility-maximiser of neoliberal dogma - is a very good emblem of our society.  That's the fiver sorted.

Pippa Middleton, by association, represents the vacuous and monotonous contentless bibble that passes for public discourse, and the sexism of a media class of drooling middle aged letches slavering over young women.  There's the tenner for you.

Why not, instead of putting her face on the notes, put her arse on them.  That'd be honest.

Let's have Tony Blair on the notes, standing on top of a pile of dead Iraqis, his hands dripping blood, a wolfish smile on his face.  That'd do the twenty nicely.

Then the fifty could be David Cameron bum-banging a public sector worker who has been tied up with lots of twisted-together copies of the Daily Mail.

And Simon Cowell could grace the pound coin instead of the Queen.  He's omnipresent anyway, so why not have his greasy visage jangling in every pocket?  He - the incarnation of the smarmy, calculating, utterly insincere, ruthless, predatory, shit-flinging cultural vandal - is a much better representative of modern Britain than Elizabeth Windsor.

Veto Axons

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


The Runaway Bride

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

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



Smith and Jones

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


Daleks in Manhattan / Evolution of the Daleks

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

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

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

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


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


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


Blink

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

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

It's actually not that overrated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh.


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

Rot & Brilliance

Series 2.  The Great Disappointment.  Mostly Timelash II material... but some new stuff, especially on 'Girl in the Fireplace' and the Cybermen 2-parter.



The Christmas Invasion

Easily the best Christmas special.  Fun without being stupid.  Epic without being maniacally over-the-top.

I've never been sure about the putative Belgrano parallel, though its undoubtedly in there. Harriet's actions seem far more rooted in the whole cultural atmosphere of the "war on terror", with the ongoing public debate amongst liberals and lefties about ruthless pragmatism to protect "our civillisation" vs. principled non-aggression and/or anti-imperialism, etc...

It's interesting to compare Harriet's liberal ruthlessness with the Doctor's much-vaunted "no second chances" thing. The Doctor, for all his hard-faced and unforgiving dispatching of the Sycorax leader, only kills when he has to - his foe has been warned, is breaking a promise, is directly attacking him, etc. Moreover, his act is man to man. Harriet's actions are an act of state terrorism against a retreating enemy, done in the name of showing strength against possible future attacks.


New Earth

Apart from ‘The Empty Child’ (which is a whole can of worms by itself), this is the nearest the new series has come to doing a story about the body.

It has mutants, medicines, cat people and a grotesquely fat man who is turning to stone... the physical concerns continue into the main subplot, which is a ‘body-swap’ comedy of the type that Hollywood produced by the hundredweight in the late 80s (all of them, as far as I can recall, starring either Tom Hanks or people who built their entire careers on looking and sounding vaguely like Tom Hanks). It's quite funny, but it goes on too long and gets tiresome.

Mind you, it should be noted just how much 'New Earth' owes to 'Revelation of the Daleks'. In the secret, gothic depths below a swanky professional institution seemingly devoted to healing, ghastly experiments are afoot which treat humans as raw material, etc.

Sadly, little attention has been paid to making the plot make much sense on any level. The Face of Boe has something to tell the Doctor... and suddenly decides not to because he's suddenly not dying anymore. The richest man on the planet is waiting in an open ward of a charity hospital. The more interesting visual and thematic ideas are neglected in favour of shambling zombies (who are, like, a metaphor about vivisection... or something) who get cured by a mixture of colours that can cure all known disease. One wonders why the cat nuns bother to do all those experiments, since they're already in possession of a panacea based on colourful liquids.

The wet, Moffatesque, everybody lives, aren't-humans-wonderful ending is pretty sickening, to be honest. RTD's original idea was much better.

And how can we possibly be expected to sympathise with Cassandra? She's a mass-murdering psychopath whose subdued final attitude stems entirely from self pity.

Loads of potentially great ideas, put in a blender and thrown against a wall. This is barely bearable precisely because its so nearly good. Roll on 'Gridlock'.


Tooth and Claw

Oh dear. Already the giddy, brash, uneven, irritating, exciting, crazed, resolutely non-culty brilliance of 2005 seems a long, long, long way away.

It begins looking more or less exactly like one of the contemporaneous glossy BBC1 station ident things. It rarely shows much inclination to be much more than this but on a longer, flashier scale. Certainly, plot is very low down its list of concerns. As with the station idents, one watches it feeling that somebody is addressing you in a baby voice going "oooh, look at all the pretty colours and shapes!"

If RTD's stories in Season 1 were sometimes irritating for their sometimes desperate determination to suck up to the Meedja and da Kidz, they were also admirable for their flat refusal to play to the longings of what we might call the "cult audience", who would've wanted it to be all Dark and Serious and Gritty and all those other things that certain types of "cult TV" people pretend to like. (Fair disclosure: I was one of them back in 2005.)

What we see here is the beginning of the slide. Here, RTD chooses to emulate the approach taken by Gatiss in 'The Unquiet Dead'. Of all things. The Doctor and Charles Dickens vs the Ghosts was a great success (even on the message boards) and so we get The Doctor and Queen Victoria vs. The Werewolf.

RTD's effort at breezy, shadowy, gothicky Victoriana is miles better than Gatiss's effort, but it's still the wrong approach for him and the show as a whole. And, it hardly needs to be said, it's considerably less impressive than any of the old show's forays into the same territory. 'Ghost Light' has more big, witty ideas and clever language in any randomly chosen five minute sequence than 'Tooth and Claw' manages in its whole 45 minutes... and while 'Tooth and Claw' looks slick and expensive, it has none of 'Ghost Light's poetic visual imagination. It is much more consciously an attempt to 'do a Hinchcliffe'... yet it looks visually and conceptually glib compared to such masterworks of semiotic smash 'n' grab as 'Talons'.

Of course, John Q. Non-Fan doesn't care about that... but even he probably realised he wasn't watching something as excitingly skewiff and resolutely non-culty as, say, 'The End of the World'.

The big problem here is that 'Tooth and Claw' is deeply conservative. I don't mean politically (though its depiction of the pampered, miserable, self-pitying, autocratic, uninteresting, privileged ratbag Victoria as steely and tragic is tiresome, conventional and thoroughly bourgeois). I mean aesthetically. First time I watched this, I knew there was something about it that was ploddingly familiar... it took me a while to realise what this episode reminded me of so strongly and dispiritingly: a holodeck malfuntion episode of bloody Star Trek: The Sodding Next Bleeding Gener-fucking-ation.

The smug, flippant way the Doctor and Rose snigger at everything to each other only emphasizes the comparison. It's like that beardy bloke smirking to the bloke in the visor when Captain Picard gets exasperated with a hologram of Henry VIII (or something).

On the subject of the bumptiousness of the Doctor and Rose, I understand that the original idea was for Queen Vic to get werewolfised or killed, which would lead to the alt-universe of Cybus et al.  That this doesn't happen means that their smugness goes uncomeuppanced... which is a recurring problem all through Series 2.

The most that happens in this regard is that the Doctor and Rose get a ticking off from the Queen... but that's problemmatic by itself.  Are we to take Victoria's condemnation as a worthy reproach?  If so, are we being asked to respect the superior moral wisdom of a woman who sat at the head of an empire based on conquest and piracy, and at the apex of a national power structure which consigned millions of people to be ruthlessly exploited in factories, abused in workhouses and live lives of grinding poverty in slums... all while she sat around feeling sorry for herself (but in obscene luxury and idleness, natch) about her dead husband? Of course, the hypocrisy doesn't come across because RTD's only interested in portraying her as a tragic, twinkly, clever, steely old battleaxe. No social context, let alone criticism. The essence of the 'celeb historical', all the way back to 'Mark of the Rani'.

RTD will write masterpieces after this... and there are much worse examples of this sort of thing still to come from other writers... but this is still the moment when the show begins to slip downwards into self-congratulatory, crowd-pleasing, quip-laden, cult-lite conventionality. A process that will eventually lead to the sorry pass we're at now.


School Reunion

That poolside scene is another of the 'Here Starts The Rot' moments with which this season is littered. We're all supposed to wet our knickers with fanboy glee because the Doctor talks tough. But he's boasting about being merciless. It isn't impassioned like Nine's speech to Rose at the end of 'Bad Wolf'. Nor is it redolent of trauma and emotional damage like the Doctor's eagerness to blow away the Dalek at the end of 'Dalek'. It's masturbatory, self-adulatory, pseudo-butch posturing. It stinks. And it will start to infect the series as whole, exacerbated by Moffat, until its apotheosis in the "There's one thing you never put in a trap if you want to live" wank of Series 5.

Ditto on Sarah. This story takes a long whizz over 'The Time Warrior' and 'Invasion of the Dinosaurs', in which Sarah is naive, touchy, etc. but also genuinely strong, resourceful, independent, idealistic, angry, brave, etc. 'School Reunion' makes her a wet-eyed, gooey, sentimental ex-squeeze... because emotion (of the kind to do with sad relationships obviously, not political or intellectual emotion) is the prime goal of any 'drama' now. In other words, the writers and actors and composers do everything possible to get you to cry (a sort of lachrymose 'money shot' performed by the audience for the gratification of the producers) short of coming round to your house and brutally murdering your pet hamster.


The Girl in the Fireplace

Speaking of 'Here Starts The Rot' moments...

This is well made and well conceptualised in many respects.  The stuff with clockwork systems kicking in to save a high-tech machine which is trying to patch itself up by harvesting bits of humans... well, it's potentially very interesting.  Technological entropy, plus some dunderheadedly literal-minded machine-logic, results in a historical figure being hunted by steampunk assassins.  On paper, it sounds like Bidmead crossed with Douglas Adams.  Hell yeah!  Tell me more!

Trouble is, there is no more.  Instead we get a breathtakingly glib 'romance' between the Doctor and a woman with whom he has nothing in common.

Sure, the real Madame de Pompadour would've been an interesting person to chat to... but what evidence do we see of her intellect and accomplishments on screen?  Still less do we see of her social and cultural and sexual predicament... besides some obligatory, bog-standard, costume-drama girly gigglyness and a brief appearance by a SAD AND TRAGIC BUT ALSO UNLIKEABLE King.

Moreover, is she really the kind of person the Doctor should be palling up with anyway, still less pulling?

If the Doctor must be shown having romances with sexy female members of the French aristocracy, wouldn't someone like this be more appropriate and interesting?  She'd have been fascinated and enthusiastic about the science of space/time travel, speculating about it from her own profound knowledge of maths, physics and philosophy, etc... thus providing common ground between her and the Doctor that might make a romance between them faintly believable (not that this Doctor behaves much like a scientist).  She even had tricky relationships and died tragically young - conveniently enough for the episode!

Trouble is, by the standards of what we got, Moffat would write the woman I've suggested like a cross between a silly younger sister in a Jane Austen adaptation and a female romatic lead in a Joss Whedon script.


Rise of the Cybermen / The Age of Steel

There's some good stuff here and there, but this generally very disappointing, bland, mediocre stuff.  'The Lion Sleeps Tonight' is a rare moment of excellent chilly menace, spiced with some patented Banality of Evil.  The scene where the dying Cyberman remembers that it was once a woman about to be married is genuinely affecting.  Mrs Moore's sudden and arbitrary fate is shocking. 

However, Zeppelins and a black Prime Minister do not an interesting parallel universe make.  Nor do doubles of regular characters with amusingly different personalities.  Not any more.  Not since about the mid-90s... and it was looking pretty thin even then.

My biggest gripe with this - besides it not being 'Spare Parts' - is the plundering of 'Father's Day' for the Pete subplot.  Not only does this set us up for the horrors of the season finale... it also betrays the message of 'Father's Day' in and of itself.  In that story, Pete was a lovable no-hoper who saved the world by an act of selflessness that transcended his world, a world of psuedo-openness glowered over by the shade of Thatcher.  In this story, he's a rich success... so he was just unlucky in our universe, right?  Ack.


The Idiot's Lantern

Now there's an ironic title.  Unintentionally ironic, obviously.

This is arbitrary, routine, patented, chucked-together 'cult' bibble.

Also, the larding on of a hamhanded anti-homophobia message is excrutiating, especially when the boy says that his freedom to be "different" is what his father fought for in the war. Puh-leeeeeeeze.

Funny how Gatiss can manage to be right-on about his own oppressed minority (c.f. 'Unquiet Dead').  Or perhaps I'm just imagining the anti-discrimination message in 'Idiot's Lantern'. Perhaps I'm just reading something into it that isn't there...

...oh, isn't the presence of this subtext controversial? Hmmm, funny that.

The final insult is the scene where the Doctor and Rose encourage Wossname to go and make friends with his just-chucked abusive Dad.  Perhaps someone should consult the wife/mother on this issue?  You know, the person who actually suffered most of his abuse?  No?  Oh well, she's only a woman, I guess.


The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit

There's a term used by script writers (so I'm told). Characters are said to have "demons". Fox Mulder's "demon" was his sister's abduction, etc. This is okay, as long as the "demon" you come up with is powerful and interesting, and drives the character in consistent ways. And as long as you don't rely on it at the expense of any other characterisation. Or suddenly and glibly mention the character's "demon" when it's time for them to look uncomfortable.

'Nuff said?

Boring space people with boring character flaws on a boring space base get threatened (boringly) by a boring Heavy Metal album cover that's supposed to be impressive because it's made of computer numbers (just like every other character in every other advert). The demon in Night of the Demon looked far more impressive, despite being no less obviously fake. Why? Because it looked physical, gnarly, hard, material in nature. Because it had something classical about it. Something of Dore and Bosch. And because it was the payoff in a well-written story about people with opinions and values coming into conflict. Mind you, the drashigs are more impressive than the big, snarly thing in this... and for precisely the same reason.

There's a vague flicker of something interesting in the Ood, slaves with a Lovecraftian look - recalling the great Shoggoths... even if the Ood look more like Cthulu. But do we really want to be recalling a writer as wild, dangerous, hypnotic, indescribable and oneiric as Lovecraft in a story this dull and formulaic? (Before anybody cleverly informs me of it: yes, I know Lovecraft was a horrible man. That's not the point. He was a great writer.)

It is evidently the writer's impression that he is Saying Something about religion, faith, certainty, etc. This only exacerbates matters.

The worst problem is the Doctor's ambivalence. We are meant to see this as expressing his worldview being shaken. Nothing wrong with that. Shake the Doctor's empiricism, make him question his scientific assumptions! Great! That'd be drama, maybe even genuinely thoughtful drama. But what shakes the Doctor here? A few tricks that anybody with sufficiently powerful technology could manage with ease, and a few monumentally stupid remarks about science being a religion? That's isn't an argument. Nor does it meaningfully refer to anything the Doctor has said. Nor does it meaningfully refer to how scientists really think. I've lost count of how many times I've seen or read or heard scientists going into mystical raptures about the unfathomable unknown. They're not dogmatists who flatly refuse to see anything beyond their own bigoted worldview... no more than anybody else anyway... which renders this meaningless as an assessment of scientific closed-mindedness. Really, the Doctor's response to this kind of empiricist-baiting shouldn't be to go all quiet and thoughtful and ambiguous. His response should've been to giggle and say "Well, now I know you're not the devil - he'd have better arguments."

And then we're supposed to see the circle squared by the Doctor's "faith" in Rose... but it isn't faith, it's trust... based on precedent... so, it's actually a rational judgement based on empirical observation, isn't it?

In other words, in a story that ostentatiously sets itself the tasking of commenting on Faith vs. Science... neither is properly represented. I wouldn't like this story any more if I were a Christian. Why not? Because it reduces the Devil to an uninteresting, roaring, thicko beastie... Milton's Satan, for instance, is nowhere to be seen.  He had a personality, a worldview, motivations, intelligent arguments, tragic dimensions, etc. I don't care if the show is "literary" or not... but the show has frequently drawn on sources far better than, say, Event Horizon, to produce genuinely interesting stories. Stories that are fun adventures and quality drama, while also giving you scope to analyse them on a more philosophical and/or literary level if you want to. That's kind of the point of the show, if you ask me.

There are some that praise what they see as ambiguity over whether or not the Beast is the Devil.  But the episode is called 'The Satan Pit'. And there's a beam or something that broadcasts at a frequency of 666 somethings per second. (Subtle, that last one.) Maybe, in spite of all that, the writer isn't trying to imply that it's the real devil. But that isn't the point.

The point is that it claims to be the devil, and there's a tiny bit of evidence that seems to support this... and that's why the Doctor is seen to wobble over what the beast is. To the point where he remains sceptical but sufficiently shaken that, even up to the last scene, he's dodging Rose's questions about what he thinks. The beast makes the Doctor wonder if it might, in fact, be the devil. He at least considers it as a possibility. Just a bit.

Nowt wrong wi' that, in principle. The problem is that the Doctor starts doing this soul searching in reaction to... daft remarks that completely miss the point of the scientific attitude.

Maybe the beast just thinks that way (or talks that way) because its nasty and silly and snidey and wants to needle people? Okay... boring but acceptable. But again, that isn't the point. The "is that your religion?" remark is clearly implied to have scored a touch. It makes the Doctor visibly pause and think. But it simply isn't reasonable to start questioning perfectly rational assumptions (i.e. nothing could exist "before time"... whatever that could possibly mean) on the basis of hackneyed and meaningless assertions from a big bully!

As Jon Blum once pointed out to me, the Doctor even demonstrates this himself by being properly sceptical about the beast when he talks to the others, telling them it's just trying to unnerve them, etc. However, while I acknowledge that this happens, I depart from Blum's evaluation.  It's amazing that people defend the story on the grounds that scenes like this show the Doctor is still sceptical... when that's the very scene that demonstrates how silly it is to have him also wobbling and equivocating!

The impression the story seems to be advocating is that perfectly reasonable baseline assumptions (there's no devil... at least not one that talks nonsense, and looks and behaves like the dullest conceptions of that character) are actually held as articles of faith by people who treat science as a dogma... but seriously reconsidering something because of mere assertions is in some way open minded and sceptical! That such reconsidering is a brave thing to do because it challenges scientific beliefs which are held on faith! That really is the extent of the story's self-trumpeted thoughtfulness.

Okay, if it ended there it would be silly but perhaps bearable. But it goes on to depict "faith" as blindly letting yourself fall into a deep, dark pit (in the hope that you'll be all right) because you don't feel you've anything else to lose.

Er... I'm not religious and that characterisation even worries me.

Then, just to add insult to injury and render the whole thematic flow entirely meaningless, faith gets reduced to any kind of belief in anything at all (which does no favours to either side). 

To add insult to... er, insult... this story also associates its central monster/villain with the Devil... and what does the ultimate and primal source of all evil actually do in the story? What is its crime? It makes some slaves turn upon their masters. I think I must be 'of the Devil's party', like Milton (and there any comparison ends).

Okay, I know the Beast makes the Ood into unwilling slaves, so it isn't really a 'revolution' as such... but, in a way, that just makes it even worse. It means that 'The Satan Pit' (like 'The Web Planet' before it) depicts a revolution as something that happens when the mindless drudges get brainwashed by some malevolent outside force. It's the Blue Peter / Daily Mail version of history.  The contented lower classes as happy to serve until "outside agitators" (anarchists, troublemakers, etc.) come along and stir them up like the suggestible sheep they are.  And unlike 'Robots of Death', there's no example of one of the slaves going their own way and making up their own mind; nor is there even anything conceptually interesting about the slaves or psychologically interesting about the puppetmaster.

The oppressed are literally tools. They are incapable of consciousness of their own. So, by this story's lights, what can the Ood be but slaves? They must've been meant for it. It must be the best they can ever expect. Just what the slaveocracy used to say in Haiti, and everywhere that people are literally turned into commodities.

The Ood are used by one set of masters and then by another master. The master that makes them revolt against their original masters is worse, thus implying that the original masters were okay by comparison. The humans and the Doctor all seem to share this hypocritical and self-righteous assessment of their own behaviour, hence the formal mourning for their disposal playthings at the end. And the story isn't trying to show up the hypocrisy. It is clearly unconscious of it.

A later, far superior story addresses and negates this depiction in fine style. But that story hadn't been made - or even, as far as I know, considered - when this bilge was made and aired. And, in any case, we should confront texts as they stand.

Really, the more I bother to think about this story, the less I like it.  And I hated it to begin with.


Love & Monsters

I know my borderline-obsessional adoration of Shirley Henderson makes me biased, but I'm happy to call this as one of the best episodes of the entire revival and easily the best of Series 2.

Perhaps not quite as dazzlingly original as some might claim (it just looks that way because some of the things here have never been done in Who before, though they are to be found elsewhere), this is still very daring, fresh and new. Not to mention witty, moving and humane. And featuring possibly the most truly disturbing, revolting and terrifying Who monster ever... which is hard for me to say, given how much I despise Peter Kay... but I like to think of his casting as another example of RTD getting idiot guest stars to unwittingly satirise themselves.

I want to briefly hand over to perceptive Gallibase regular - and eternally amiable Timelash II veteran - Mickey the Idiot (don't blame me, that's what he calls himself):

Maybe some sort of commentary should be done explaining on a scene-by-scene basis what's going on, because it seems fairly obvious to me that many fans literally didn't understand the whole business of Elton telling us the story, and most of what we're seeing being filtered through his imagination. The only bits that 'really' happen are the bits Elton does to his camera. Everything else is him remembering. So when people say it's very broad brush and cartoony, and 'Scooby Doo', that's because Elton has a Scooby Doo imagination. The Abzorbaloff looks and acts like that because Elton has painted it like that in his head. It's basically copying the device that's used in the Usual Suspects, except here it's not the surprise twist, but just a narrative style that both tells us a witty story, at the same time tells us all about our own false memories, but chiefly about Elton Pope, the sort of imaginative but very geeky and lonely individual who would, say, post things on a Doctor Who forum. This last thing is really why fans hate this story - it's the rage of Caliban seeing his own reflection in the mirror. But Elton is a hero, just not a very cool one.

What really happened? Did the Abzorbaloff really look like that? Did Jackie really come on to him like that? When the internet went into meltdown, did his computer really explode? We do know that the shop window dummies, the Big Ben crash, the Sycorax ship, and of course the Doctor and Rose exist outside Elton's head, because we saw them in other stories. Also we know Ursula's face got locked into a paving slab (Though we never see Ursula’s slab face on his camcorder, so maybe he’s talking to a bit of pavement). Maybe I haven’t totally got a handle on it all, maybe we’re not supposed to, but in principle we've only got Elton's word that most of the rest of it happened. How do we know he isn't utterly insane, driven mad by what really happened, and has made up this story in order to cope with the trauma?

Seriously, it’s all there on screen, the unreliable narrator story. The clue is all in that pre-titles sequence; there's the opener of Elton walking through the wasteland (so far we're taking everything at face value), he goes into the factory and opens the door, a scary monster stands there, it opens its mouth and says "Raaa...

..aaa!" Cut to Elton in his bedroom imitating the sound of the monster. So basically everything we've just seen is a visualisation of what Elton's been telling us. That's not how it actually happened, it’s how Elton has told us it happened. It's what's in his head. "That not how it started," he says. "I just put that bit there because it's a good beginning". After teasing us with his zoom-lens (or lack of), he then says he's going to tell us the whole story, then we get the title sequence. That to me is clear cut; the whole thing is a subjective version of events, not the actual events themselves. He can't be lying, not entirely, because some of the things he speaks about happened in other stories, and his versions of Rose, the Doctor and Jackie are almost like 'our' versions. But the Abzorbaloff, and LI'n'DA we only know through him. In fact we've only got his word that they existed at all...

Seriously, anyone who thinks Love & Monsters is badly made and scripted just hasn't picked up on how sophisticated it is. I wish they would watch it again and realise that we the viewers never leave that room. Everything we see is either camcorder footage or Elton's muddle-headed memories and imaginings.

I was thinking about the scene where the Doctor confronts the monster, and he says "You're some kind of Abzorbathon... Abzorbatrix... Abzorbaloff." And Victor says emphatically, "yes, I like that." Taken at face value, that line is nuts. How can he not know what he is, what he's called? Until you consider that all of this is out of Elton's head. If the Doctor and Victor are two imperfectly-remembered characters, then they speak Elton's words as he's saying them to us. They are his characters, and he is, on the fly, naming the monster through the Doctor. When Victor says, "I like that", that's Elton speaking, deciding that's what the monster is called. Even the way the Abzorbaloff speaks, with that Bolton accent, is how Elton is 'doing' him to camera. Clearly he thinks all evil aliens talk with a Northern accent! Maybe in his head he's even cast well-known comedian Peter Kay as the creature?

[About LInDA.] I did wonder afterwards whether they were fictionalised versions of people on Elton's psychiatric support group. Whether instead of being this bunch of friends who got together to find the Doctor, they were all patients on the same mental ward as Elton, and he has projected his own Doctor-obsession onto them... Maybe that's a theory too far. 

For myself, I'd like to suggest a supplementary reading of the story to do with class.  Kennedy is the bloated, pinstriped, dandified, repressed posho who oversees the drones in his dull little sweatshop.  Their personal lives are degraded and their imaginations chained to his dictats. In his true form he's a bloated, inhuman thing that consumes people like a vampire. He sucks up people's lives to feed and gorge himself.

I think Marx would've laughed like a drain.


Fear Her

Who does Paperhouse?  Yay!

Oh.


Army of Ghosts / Doomsday


'Army' functions well enough as a mystery/thriller. Jackie is sweet at the start.

Don't know why people have a problem with the Ghostbusters bit. It's just mucking about. Mates do that.

Torchwood isn't quite the archetypal Shadowy Govt Agency That Recovers Alien Technology for Sinister Purposes.  Their offices look and feel like a non-Shadowy Government Agency... or even a private company. It looks more like the offices of a flash consultancy firm than the sinister corridors stalked by the Cigarette Smoking Man. Swanky, designer decor, smart suits, a logo, etc.

The Cyber takeover is quite dramatically done. Tennant is on good form.

It's entirely obvious, right from the start, what's in the big sphere.

It ends on a high. Oooh Daleks and Cybermen... possibly teaming up!

But 'Doomsday' (yet again RTD promises something with his finale title that doesn't even remotely appear) squanders it all. The Daleks and the Cybermen immediately start fighting (dull) and the Daleks trounce the Cybermen without effort (duller). Meanwhile, they trade showoffish insults (dullsville) and the Cybermen suddenly get all catty and bitchy about the Daleks being inelegant (huh?).

The evil jingoistic Torchwood leader gets semi-redeemed (how? why? are we meant to be inspired by how her patriotism conquers all?) and we end up with Daleks flying down from the sky, killing people for no particular reason. This isn't especially interesting here, but at least it isn't the third time we've seen it (oh, Season 4 finale, how I hate thee).

But the worst is the bringing back of the alt-universe people. Mickey is back (oh... er... great) and so is Pete (who's now Mr Ruthless Efficiency... i.e. it's not Pete in any sense that Rose and Jackie knew him, nor is it the same hopeless 'little guy' bimbler Pete that I really liked) but it's okay because these new arrivals can mend all Rose's fractured family problems.  In scenes that actually really include Jackie and alt-Pete running towards each other as though they're on a beach and Tchaikovsky is swelling in the background.

So, all Rose's family problems are fixed...rendering all the growing up and heartache of the previous two seasons... er... pointless and meaningless. Way to go.

Childhood's End

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



Rose

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


The Unquiet Dead

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aliens of London / World War III

Hated this at the time.  Now...

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

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

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

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

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

Dalek

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


The Long Game

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Father's Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Boom Town

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

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

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

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

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


Bad Wolf / The Parting of the Ways

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Real McCoy and the Forgotten (Sacrificial) Lambs

I continue to round up my Timelash II stuff with these bits 'n' bobs about the McCoy years.  There will eventually be separate posts on some of the 'big hitters' left out below.


Paradise Towers

Very Whoish ideas. Lots of clever use of language, from the street names to the slang which incorporates degenerated formal rules, to the Caretaker lingo full of subsections and codes, etc. 

It suffers from 'Mysterious Planet' disease in that the production looks good but nothing looks right.

Mel's apparently monomaniacal fixation upon the swimming pool is decidedly odd.  But, if you approach this as children's television (which is clearly what it thinks it is) then you can enjoy it as a surprisingly sophisticated story about social entropy.

Brings to mind Le Corbusier and his notion of houses as "machines for living in"... which always had a tinge of the authoritarian about it, amidst all the utopianism of early 20th century modernism (which also always had a hidden inner core of mysticism beneath all the pseudo-rational stright lines, etc). The insistence upon a buried notion of virtue (you had to be a certain kind of healthy, high-minded, thin, modern-minded, puritanical person to live in a gleaming white box with glass walls) leads to a kind of disillusion, a bit like the contempt felt by Kroagnon. The modernists (Mies, for example) got chased out by their shadowy reflections in the utopian, mystical, 'modern', puritanical Nazi party and ended up creating gigantic monuments to corporate capitalism in Chicago. The cleaners seem to represent the intersection of these ideas, rounding up the "human garbage", the unwanted elements, the uncontrolled human detritus that ruins the idealistic/totalitarian perfection embodied in the architecture.

I don't like the ending, with all the antagonistic social groups suddenly realising they don't hate each other after all and making friends.  Even the Daily Maily Rezzies turn out to be mostly nice, with only two of them being murdering cannibals.


Delta and the Bannermen

Dispiriting. So ill judged, so clashing that you can't even laugh at it.

Loud, multi-coloured, sequin-covered, self-consciously zany, folksy and naff... yet there is something melancholic, even quietly apocalyptic about watching this.

You are watching Doctor Who die. The show that gave us 'Genesis of the Daleks' is dying. In a puddle of Diet Coke. It's like watching George Orwell being kicked to death by Mr Blobby and the Krankies.

This taste malfunction carries over into the heart of the story itself. It's a story about genocidal racism... set in a holiday camp and starring light entertainers. It's like the Eichmann trial being held in Toys R Us. It's like a bright green water pistol filled with orphans' tears. It's like being murdered by being force-fed party balloons.

My god, it hurts.


The Happiness Patrol

I just love this story. Last time I put it on, I spent the whole 75 minutes giggling, grinning, cheering and clapping like a loon.

This is a liberal attack on Thatcherism as a psycho-cultural style... but it also notices that Thatcherism's rhetoric about personal liberty was pure hypocrisy.

The economics are absent, as they usually are in Who. Terra Alpha is a Stalinist 'paradise', i.e. everyone pretending to be deliriously happy... or pretending that they're pretending... and pretending that everyone else is pretending... while surrounded by corruption, decay and authoritarian brutality. But it's also a capitalist world, with an evil version of Bertie Basset (himself a PR image, an advert, an avatar of a company, a promotor of consumption, the friendly face of capitalism who cheerily encourages your kids to shovel sugary shite into their mouths so his puppetmasters can make a profit) at its core.

The Kandyman is the state torturer of a dictator... but he's also a killer brand, a manifestation of the confected malnutritious psuedo-delights of consumer capitalism reconfigured as a psychopathic sadist... and a tool... and alienated labour (he is the product of the labour of Gilbert M) that confronts his creator as hostile and alien power... and bureaucrat (picks up phone - "Kandyman?")... and parent ("what time do you call this?")... etc.

Like 'The Sun Makers', 'Happiness Patrol' notices the fundamental synergy and compatibility and similarity of Stalinism with 'market Stalinism', of authoritarianism with psuedo-libertarian neoliberalism. Helen A likes Silas P's "enterprise and initiative" as a murderer of dissidents. Thatcher admires the 'law and order' inherent in the criminal attacks (by government or police) upon miners, while always speciously excoriating the "moaning minnies" and preaching personal freedom, i.e. the personal freedom to stamp on the poor and powerless as long as you own the bought virtue that comes with wealth.

And it's a union of displaced/oppressed natives, dissidents, foreigners and striking/demonstrating workers that brings down the government.  Helen loses control of the state, factory by factory.  It ain't quite Leninism for kids... but it's getting there.


The Greatest Show in the Galaxy

As long as you remember to watch it as children's television, 'Greatest Show' is superlative on many levels. Just this simple decision helps you get past the rapping ringmaster without eating your own tongue.

Viewed this way, the clearly non-realist portrayals of Whizzkid, Nord and Cook etc. seem like what they are: deliberate and witty riffs on established stock characters. Cook's gradual self-revelation (from windy, pompous bore to ruthless self-preserving bastard) looks, from this angle, like a swipe at Thatcherism (with colonialism also implicated, via Cook's pith helmet).

Whizzkid is, of course, the archetypal (or should I say stereotypical) dweeby geeko nerdmeister sci-fan fan. But he's also far too kind a picture of fans. He's enthusiastic, optimistic, idealistic, etc. He reflects the awareness of past glories and limited appeal. He's a queasy little joke by the show at its own expense. He's the forerunner of LI'n'DA... though less human and more of a cypher.

The story has cheeky things to say about television itself, and the failure of idealism... "You were a geat clown once... funny, inventive..."... or the failure of the 60s counter-culture, or even the failure of culture itself.

The Circus could be a metaphor for all human cultural endeavours in a world run by people like Cook and presided over by unforgiving, demanding, self-involved, ossified power.  Begun in idealism, hijacked by cynicism, ending in disrepute and cruelty, ravaging the lush world around it. Astonishingly thoughtful and bleak, for a kids's show. And remember that bread and circuses (by which they actually meant things more like races) were what the Roman elitists said were the prime concern of the Roman plebs.

Beautifully directed, especially in Episode 1 during the chase across the sand dunes. Bellboy and Flowerchild, pursued by the white-faced clown in the gliding hearse, with music that's eerily good... at times, reminiscent of Peter Gabriel round about that time.

The junk mail bot is oddly prescient of spam email.

Great cast. Peggy Mount and T. P. McKenna. Ian Reddington and Chris Jury.

Great production design. The Gods of Ragnarok are an unforgettable image. Stone idols, sitting and sitting (as gods tend to do in Doctor Who), reminiscent of the heads on Easter Island.

The gods are clearly the audience, which reveals the inherent theology of all TV shows. Who seems more aware of this than most shows, with almost all its gods being seated voyeurs.

The decision to suddenly make the Doctor one jump ahead in the last episode is misguided. I've no fundamental objection to the cunning, scheming Doctor that sometimes surfaced during this era, but its unecessary in 'Greatest Show' and even disrupts the plot (not that they're paying much attention to making it make any kind of logical sense by that point anyway).

But, when he says he's been fighting the Gods of Ragnarok for millenia, he means it generally. He's always been against immovable, unaccountable, abusive, self-gratifying 'gods'. Against idols. Against the kings and rulers that sit and watch and judge and consume.

All in all, very good indeed - a refeshing leap back into creepiness, surrealism and semiotics for Doctor Who.

One great regret however... imagine this as a TARDIS team: the Doctor, Ace, Mags and Deadbeat. I'm not a crowded-TARDIS advocate, but that's a team I'd have killed for.


Battlefield

Ben A clearly had John Boorman's Excalibur in his head. Shot, acted and scored like that, 'Battlefield' could've gotten away with it and seemed pretty darn good. Sadly, it got shot, acted and scored like a corporate training video. I'm not a Keff-basher particularly, but Wagner he ain't.

Even so, there are some magical moments here and there. Ace being mistaken for the Lady of the Lake, for example. And, as so often in this era, there are superb ideas under a surface mess. The Merlin thing is a wonderful conceit.

Sadly, confusing as it is, this story undermines itself by trying to be too literal and too self-explanatory. It loses any air of mystery and ambiguity.

The worst thing, however, is the painful, self-conscious, overcooked, hectoring right-on-ness of it all. We get an anti-nuke sermon delivered in the crassest, most patronising terms imaginable... with Sylv's purple-faced scenery-chewing at the end being particularly painful... and the worst crime imaginable to Ace is to utter a (clunky and naff) racial slur to her new mate.

It's all very banal and hypocritical (as is the Doctor's queasy pacifism) - especially since two of Our Heroes in this story are military people, and the cutesy happy ending depends upon people (other than the morally-superior, disapproving Doc, natch) fighting and killing and dying.


Survival

It's really quite astonishing how 'Survival' feels like the last part of a trilogy dealing with 'social Darwinism' but also with free market values and female experience in a male dominated world (which are related issues). And I think the much-maligned "if we fight like animals!" scene is much better than the anti-nuke foaming in 'Battlefield' precisely because it has an awareness of its own potential for ridiculousness. It even switches to a comic mode the second time McCoy shouts his credo. The vertiginousness of this is quite dizzying.

This is one of the few stories to dwell on the feminine principle, exploring female solidarity, female vs male forms of agression, etc. (People always forget about 'Brain of Morbius' in this context.) Moreover, it has a female 'companion' who is as far as female companions ever get from being there for males to gaze at (pardon my half-remembered feminist film criticism) because her own gaze comes under her control and becomes a weapon. The fierce, amoral, female monster character Kara is skewered by the Master (who's even dressed like some patrician Victorian dandy/Dracula) and, instead of this being a restoration of male order, it is an obscene tragedy. We're a long way even from seeing 'femininity' restored in Helen A by the death of her pet.

It's notable how deliberately jumbled the masculine and feminine becomes. You have Ace at the end, almost surrounded by young males, obviously about to be attacked by representatives of the Master/Midge's new order - which strongly suggests a ruthlessly literal version of the kill-or-be-killed 80s political/economic ideology - and yet the power that has infused them comes from a world that embodies aggression in a natural form via intensely female symbols.

The Master has never been more hateful than he is here, where he starts embodying patriarchy and ideological Thatcherism.

They do overegg the spelling out of the theme a bit. I snark at 'The Daemons' for doing that, and even tick at Bidmead for it, so if I don't acknowledge the same problem in 'Survival' then I'm a rotten old hypocrite.