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"The colonists shouldn't be here," says Dent. "My Corporation has been assigned the mineral rights on this planet. Our preliminary survey indicates a very rich concentration of duralinium. You know how the Earth needs that mineral."

"Earth, or your corporation's profits?" asks the Doctor.

Dent and his mining corporation will go on to prove that they will do literally anything, including mass murder, to obtain the duralinium they want.

"What's good for IMC is good for Earth," says Dent, echoing a famous statement once made in the real world.  "There are one hundred thousand million people back on Earth and they desperately need all the minerals we can find."

"What those people need, my dear sir," asserts the Doctor, "are new worlds to live in like this one. Worlds where they can live like human beings, not battery hens."

What nobody mentions during this conversation, or during any of the conversations anybody has about the controversy, is the notion that no non-Uxarians might have the right to appropriate Uxarius.  There are people already living there, you see.  But those people don't count.  They're "primitives".

This story is a reiteration of Western tropes, in both the sense of the genre 'the Western' and in the sense of the culture of Western civilisation.  IMC are the cynical railroad men; the colonists are settlers being expropriated by them.  The Uxarian natives are 'Indians'.  They conform to the stereotypes.  They're silent and sullen and irrational, scrabbling around in the dirt and waggling staffs aggressively.

But...

In a way, this complete failure to acknowledge the claims of the aboriginal Uxarians adds to the suffocating nastiness of what's going on.  In the real world, aboriginals were displaced by settlers who then complained when big powers or big companies came to displace them in turn... and the settlers often remained blissfully unaware of their own hypocrisy.  The original inhabitants of settler-colonial states usually ended up enslaved, massacred, and/or crowded into ghettos or bantustans or the Gaza Strip, like battery hens.  Nobody in 'Colony in Space' seems aware of this; but then, as I said, that's only realistic.

It's a bit like the way Conrad's Heart of Darkness manages to be both an appallingly racist tract of loathing and contempt for black Africans and a searing indictment of imperialism.  It does this by, as China Mieville observed, allowing no hope within the text that the Africans will liberate themselves.  'Colony in Space' isn't a visionary, feverish masterpiece... and yet, it does have something of the sublime and terrifying wasteland about it, mirroring Conrad's nasty view of Africa as a soulless jungle.  'Colony' has the people of the future replaying ancient mistakes (and all for the same reasons) amidst a bleak, hard-scrabble wilderness of grey, dull, flat, featureless rocks and mud.  There's a protracted fight in a mud pool that is almost nihilistic, like that Goya painting where two guys are still trying to club each other to death while both sinking into the same quicksand.

Uxarius is, of course, a world ravaged by its own technological triumphs, by its trajectory towards total weaponization.  The Uxarians aren't really 'primitives', no matter what the colonists think.  They're actually more 'advanced' than the humans.  If the story has a blind spot about the "primitives", it sees clearly enough the true nature of 'advancement'.

Liberty in Space

From the October 2011 issue of Panic Moon.  Very slightly edited and revised.  This piece really only scratches the surface of its topic.  Please think of it as a 'place-holder' for something longer that I haven't written yet.

"In the end, the liberals always do what the empire wants."
- Christopher Hitchens (I got the quote via this.)

No story better demonstrates the ambivalence of Doctor Who’s liberal ethos than 'Colony in Space'.  It's an anti-corporate eco-parable.  Industrial technology has destroyed Earth’s environment and so the industrialists want to get their claws into other planets.  IMC even fit claws to their mining robots.  They lie, bully and kill for profit.  Interplanetary law seems to favour such corporations, even without Time Lord supervillains impersonating Adjudicators.  Big business is thus depicted as legal gangsterism.  Strong stuff for Saturday tea-time, as you’d expect from Malcolm Hulke.

"Here comes another one looking for a lost droid...
he'll feel the edge of my gaffi-stick and no mistake!"

Thing is, 'Colony' is also a sci-fi reiteration of the frontier Western genre.  Poor settler townsfolk versus unscrupulous railroad men.  And, like most such tales, it ignores the injustice suffered by the ‘Indians’, ie the Uxariean natives.  They may be innocent of Norton’s slurs, but their depiction mostly follows standard stereotypes: they’re inscrutable, sullen, silent, changeable, likely to attack and/or sacrifice you if the mood strikes them.

It’s not entirely straightforward.  The Guardian, the one Uxareian who speaks, displays a kind of humane wisdom. However, that’s because he’s the last ‘advanced’ Uxariean.  The rest of his people turn out to be the descendants of his ruined high-tech civilisation.  Still, this renders the humans’ dismissive term “primitives” rather ironic.  It also chimes with the backstory about an Earth devastated by technology: the "primitives” may be a glimpse of the future of Earth’s population.

All the same, the story ignores the issue that the humans – colonists or miners – threaten the aboriginal people with displacement.  Ashe and Winton fulminate about their rights against the encroachment of IMC, yet fail to notice that they are themselves encroaching on the land and rights of the natives.  Nobody questions that one or other group of humans has a right to appropriate Uxarieus.  Even the Doctor blithely says that any hostile alien life on the planet can be hunted and destroyed (how very eco-unfriendly of him!) and advocates human colonisation as an escape from lives “like battery hens”.  Meanwhile, not even the Guardian gets to speak about his people’s rights.

Hulke, a one-time Communist whose Doctor Who stories exemplify (ironically enough) the show’s liberal outlook, had previously explored the theme of ‘humans as newcomers’ in 'Doctor Who and the Silurians', but there the situation is depicted as an ethical minefield: Silurian prior claims versus human squatters’ rights.  Both sides experience each other as immigrants and both are, in a sense, right.  In 'Colony in Space', however, the humans are just alien invaders.  This point is never addressed. Indeed, the Doctor supports the colonists on liberal grounds. In a story so otherwise sceptical about ‘progress’ and ‘civilisation’, this is a serious stumble.

How do we account for such a blind spot?  The truth is that liberalism itself has frequently been pro-colonialist.  John Stuart Mill thought that “barbarians” should be ruled for their own good.  Alexis de Tocqueville approved of the French conquest of Algeria and British rule in India.  Bertrand Russell defended “the process by which the American continent has been acquired for European civilization”.  There’s plenty more where all that came from.  ‘Settler-colonial’ states always tended to use some combination of ethnic cleansing, apartheid and extermination against the people already there.  Liberals have often (usually, even) been found defending such measures, or at least their outcomes, in the name of the progress of civilisation.

One wonders how much room there will be for the “primitives” once Winton’s colony thrives and spreads.  Maybe, after a few million years, Uxareius will be renamed New Earth (which was portrayed as a neo-America built by refugees).  Why then didn’t we see any Uxareians in ‘Gridlock’?  Probably because the few that survived the progress of civilisation ended up crowded into reservations or some equivalent of the Gaza Strip.  Like battery hens.

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

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

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


Evidence of Absence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


What's Good For IMC...

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

He's actually very nearly a skulltopus.

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

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

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

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

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

Skulltopus 7: Tentacle, Plastic and Bone

The first fully-fledged tentacular monster in Doctor Who - in the senses of being both properly cephalopodic and of being a central monstrous antagonist of the Doctor's - is the Nestene entity at the end of 'Spearhead from Space'.  That's seven years in before the show does a proper tentacular monster with real plot significance.

Apart from 'Image of the Fendahl' (which we'll get to one day) and the Cyber-head in 'The Pandorica Opens', 'Spearhead from Space' is also the closest Doctor Who has ever come to merging or (horrid word coming up, but needs must...) juxtaposing the skull and the tentacle.  If you don't know why I think that's significant, please go back and read my other Skulltopus posts, starting here.

The Nestenes manifest as a tank full of tentacles...

Yes Jon, pull a comedy face and go cross-eyed.
That's the perfect way to express mortal terror.

...inside which we can see a pulsing, vaguely obscene-looking anus/oesophagus/lung thing.  Meanwhile, the same story's main images of the monstrous are unfinished-looking plastic replicas of human beings.  There is something faintly but definitely skull-like about their faces, especially when they're not wearing wigs.

Note especially the empty eye-holes,
a detail lost in subsequent appearances.

If I were writing an Auton story now, my first priority would be the creation of a way for the tentacles and the plastic to co-reside in the same entity.  This never happens in 'Spearhead', but the Autons do stand and wait in the room where the Nestene tentacled thing hides.  At the end of the story, Channing reverts to a cruder Auton-form (once again making the Auton face skull-like, in that its appearance is linked to death in the more sophisticated Nestene replicas).  A line of green matter is spattered on the dead and reverted Channing's plastic face.

Bless you.

This is the closest that the plastic gets to merging with the alien flesh.  The proximity of the plastic skull and the green organic squidgy creature is tantalising.


It Adds Up

Doctor Who - because of its (spurious) materialist/empiricist/educational remit - has a set of internal rules that generally make the explicitly supernatural off-limits.  The show tends to have been made with the intention of at least outwardly championing the Enlightenment values and certainties.  As I argued here, this self-imposed attempt to foreclose upon the supernatural guides the show towards material (and materialist) monsters.

However, owing to the converging influences of children's fiction, mythological narrative (to which both SF and kid's adventure fiction are much indebted) and the gothic (usually mediated through 20th century popular horror, most especially Universal and Hammer monster flicks), the show simultaneously inherits an underlying magical conception of reality and a tendency to make its monsters metaphorical and hauntological (if not usually spectral in the full sense), i.e. haunting us with the 'repressed'.

Add the influence of 'soft' social SF literature, the prevailing 'lefty liberal' ethos among BBC creative types (which Barry Letts has spoken about) and the social context of pre-Thatcher Britain (in which there prevailed a broad 'liberal' socio-economic consensus), and you get a show that ends up representing this or that material nightmare of modernity in a great, mostly-liberal, allegorical morality play for kids.

We end up with loads of stories about hi-tech war, totalitarianism, industrial genocide, biological racism, commercial slavery, etc.  Yet these are all modern phenomena, products of the industrial age, thus - in the analysis that I accept - products of capitalism... and that's without going into how capitalism actively generates and even needs them.

The show keeps harping on about issues that, in the end, trace back to the capitalist system... but this issue is usually not noticed and certainly should not be acknowledged, even when it becomes - as it sometimes does - imminent.

The show is, ultimately, a product of capitalism, even if, for decades, it was relatively  independent of the stifling atmosphere of commodification produced by the system, owing to its being produced by a relatively independent 'public service broadcaster' with a social remit other than profit.  (By the way... this was always partial and compromised.  The Daleks saw to it that the show survived because they were an instant hit and were thus instantly marketable.  We all know that merchandise has been produced off the back of Who by the truckload.  The BBC was never any kind of pure, totally non-commercial attempt at a functionalist, benevolent, state-run industry.  Only people ill-informed enough to think 'socialism' means state control of society could imagine that such a creature had, for good or ill, ever once existed at Broadcasting House.)   

Doctor Who is part of the capitalist culture industry, with a very distinct niche within it.  Moreover, no amount of 'liberal' socio-economic consensus or 'lefty liberal' internal ethos can, on their own, amount to a deliberate, radical, structural critique of capitalism.  However, there can come a point where the liberal complaints and anxieties stack up in such a way that capitalism becomes the elephant... or perhaps, the giant squid... in the room.


Vernacular Tentacular

I think that, starting with 'Spearhead from Space', Doctor Who starts bringing the tentacular into play when it can no longer entirely put off a confrontation with something that it usually avoids and omits, something that it doesn't want to face but to which it keeps being lead back... namely, capitalism.  Not greedy individual capitalists, not evil businessmen, not corrupt businesses, not evil corporations... but capitalism as an exploitative social system.  70s Doctor Who, uses the tentacular monster as a way of semiotically evading - and, in a dialectical / paradoxical way, also meaning - capitalism as a system which links and/or causes different forms of oppression.

In a children's adventure series, one which fulfills a very distinct role in the culture industry and in mainstream mass popular culture, there are certain things which cannot be talked about... capitalism as a systemic whole, with exploitation, racism and imperialism woven inextricably into its essential structure, is untouchable and unmentionable. And yet, obsessed as it is with the mightmares of modernity, how can Doctor Who always manage to leave it unmentioned?  It frequently finds itself sliding towards this danger zone.  In the 70s especially, when this happens, tentacles usually appear.

According to China Miéville (see my account here), tentacles entered the Western tradition - ushered in by that style / affect / trend known as the Weird - as a deliberately incoherent, unprecedented and unfreighted 'novum', a scream of meaningless horror and incomprehension at the oncoming collapse of enlightenment certainties brought by the crises of late 19th / early 20th century modernity.  Doctor Who somehow misappropriates the tentacle.  The Weird use of the tentacular is, by Miéville's account, as a signifier for the meaningless, the indescribable, the incoherent, the incomprehensible, the unrecognisable.  Who creatively misunderstands it, pressing it into service as a way of obfuscating capitalism whenever it starts to notice that it is a systemic generator of modern nightmares, whenever its own metaphorical and hauntological style threatens to produce metaphors that are too penetrating about where modern nightmares come from.

Tentacles and capitalism become temporarily linked in the internal language of signifiers which constitute Doctor Who.  This continues as a fully-fledged semiotic connection throughout the 70s, dying out somewhat but occasionally recurring in a reduced form during the 80s and onwards.  I've looked at 'The Creature from the Pit', suggesting ways in which it can be seen as terminating the semiotic connection, here.


Pre-History

I've looked at some of the early history of the octopoidal in Who here, suggesting that Terry Nation may have been responsible for laying the groundwork for a connection between tentacles and capitalism, partly by using the tentacular in something akin to its Weird 'blank' mode, partly by invoking tentacles at narrative moments where people are being exploited for labour and/or commodities.  (The Animus in 'The Web Planet' is a whole different kettle of ballgames which I'll get around to one of these days.)

As times changed, protest and class struggle erupted and the swinging 60s became turbulent and, at times, revolutionary.  In 1967, Doctor Who tries for the first time to engage with some of the new notions that are rocking Western society.  The result is 'The Macra Terror', which features monsters which seem to genuinely experiment with merging the gothic and the Weird (see here) and which seem to express some unease with British capitalism (see here).  This is the prelude.

In the high-point of the show's engagement with the radical 60s, 'The War Games' puts forward an anti-imperialist message... however, it falters into a weak reformism at the end and, crucially, fails to bring in capitalism in any way. 


Automatic for the Products

And then came 'Spearhead from Space' by Robert Holmes.  Holmes had already shown anti-authoritarianism of 'The Krotons' and done some riffs on mining corporations and piracy in 'The Space Pirates'.  'Spearhead' is more radical than both put together - possibly even more radical (in the sense of getting to the root of things) than 'The War Games' - even though the radical implications are almost certainly unconscious and show through very obliquely and elliptically.

I've gone into all this here, and suggested that the eruption of the tentacular at the end of 'Spearhead from Space' might be a sign of the show in flight, as it were, from a thematic convergence towards a critique of capitalism as systemically alienating, soaked in commodity fetishism, exploitative, oppressive, racist and imperialist.  (If you now think I've gone mad, click the above link and see my reasoning.)

This use of the radically incoherent tentacular at the end of 'Spearhead' is reinforced (though only just) by the sequel.  'Terror of the Autons' simultaneously develops and softens much of the unease about capitalism that is submerged in the original Auton story.  The implied critique of mass produced consumer culture and a representation of alienation through hostile commodities is carried over. The death in this story emanates from mass produced products, from consumer goods. 'Terror' lacks the immensely potent and oneiric spectacle of the shop-window dummies springing to life, smashing out of their windows and, bedecked in finery and price tags, strolling down the consumerist high street, surrounded by shop signs and brand names, slaughtering workers and shoppers...

...but it generalises the same nightmare.  If the attack in the high street was the spearhead, this is the reign of terror.  Everything plastic, everything produced, every commodity, is now out to get you.  Even the promotional gifts are now likely to kill you.  'Spearhead' didn't suggest that the baby dolls made at Auto Plastics were literally dangerous.  In 'Terror', the toy will spring to life and lunge at your jugular, the novelty inflatable chair will eat you alive... even your phone will strangle you.  To the Master, all this death is just his way of "trying out a new product".

Where was the director, that's what I want to know.

While wider in scope, the threat in 'Terror' seems almost comic in its clutter.

As in ‘Spearhead’, the evil nestles and coils in the factory and the businessman's office. As in ‘Spearhead’, the factory owner / manager is enslaved by mind control and colludes with the Nestenes as they mesh with his means of production.  The Nestenes want to mass produce themselves and takeover the market. They also find a way in under our noses by disguising themselves within the context of policemen and police cars. Ask these bobbies where they’re taking you and you’ll find blank-faced, eyeless horrors lurking under their latex masks. They’re there to stop you opposing the immanent ascendency of the evil commodities.  Even more than in 'Spearhead', uniformed officers are protectors of property.

However, the Master takes the edge off them as villains.  And the way the Autons speak like robots makes them less sinister and more comprehensible.

As in 'Spearhead' hierarchy and class show themselves.  The Master disguises himself as a workman; he asserts power over Rossini by pointing out that he is really Lew Russell; he hypnotises people all over the place (a new detail at this point).  Rex Farrell is dominated by his father.  McDermot is murdered by the Master (the title itself shows that Holmes associates evil with hierarchy) when he will not keep to his place in the company pyramid.  Farrell interprets his slaughter as "termination of employment".  Waged work is again much in evidence.  The scientists take tea breaks and have packed lunches.  The Doctor mistakes Jo for the tea lady and so treats her contemptuously, meanwhile he uses his supposedly greater intimacy with "Tubby Rowlands" to intimidate Brownrose (!).  "Wrong sort of chap getting into your department these days".  We all know what this is supposed to mean.  Red brick oiks infiltrating the corridors that should rightly be the province of those who drifted down from the dreaming spires.  (You don't have to share Paul Cornell's assessment that this makes the Third Doctor a Tory... though, in some respects...)  And, of course, this kind of British class hierarchy is very much to the fore when the Doctor is visited by the Time Lord.  He is dressed "incognito" as a stereotypical Threadneedle St / Whitehall toff and needles the Doctor by referring to his degree.

There are even, once again, hints that the story has noticed the racial order of capitalism.  Whitey runs the factory, the radio telescope... even the circus!  Meanwhile, Roy Stewart is asked back to play essentially the same racist stereotype he played in 'Tomb of the Cybermen' but this time the character - Tony - is almost a parodic version of Toberman: he is written as a circus 'Strong Man' who "don't say much"!

However, this very comic mode makes it hard for the character to have the same uneasy impact as the Asian workers making white plastic babies at the factory in 'Spearhead'.

In fact, the over-the-top, grotesque, gaudy, comedic air of the whole piece tends to soften the impact of much in the story.  The Autons still look like products of human labour confronting humans as something hostile and alien, but the potential for them to form part of a systemic critique is diluted even as it is generalised.  At the end of 'Spearhead', a story that seemed so quietly and unconsciously preoccupied with alienated labour, hierarchy and consumerism - and which even hinted at imperialism, and at racial and gender hierarchies - the Nestenes manifest as an incoherent but undeniably substantial mad box of tentacles.  When the Nestene entity arrives and hovers over the radio telescope dish at the end of 'Terror', it retains the outline of the squid but lacks solidity and sharpness.  It is less needed, so it is kept as unfocused as the rest of the story.

The fact that they couldn't afford to do this onscreen

 may also have had something to do with it.

But then along came 'The Claws of Axos'... but that's for another time.


Dem Bones
As I've said, I think the tentacles that appear at the end of 'Spearhead' mark the moment when Doctor Who tries to obfuscate a conclusion that is haunting it.  Just as they haunt us with their submerged associations, so the Autons haunt the show through which they stalk with the same associations.  With their skull-like faces, they are very gothic, very hauntological (in that material way that Who does hauntology).  Yet the end up serving the quasi-Weird, the incoherent tentacular.  They get close to their octopoidal master but never merge with it.  As China Miéville predicts, the skull (gothic) and the tentacle (Weird) cannot merge, even when they try.  The tentacle rejects the haunting message of the skull.  And yet, tentacles keep turning up in 70s Who when the show notices capitalism.  I've written elsewhere about how 'The Creature from the Pit' terminates this connection.  Well, there's something else to note about that: there are skulls in that story.  Indeed, they litter the pit in which the creature is kept.  Organon uses as skull as a candle holder.

Maybe he was just pleased to see them.

It's almost like the gothic is reasserting itself even as the quasi-Weird is shown the door.

Anxiety Satellite

The indefatigable Mr. Oliver Wake has put together and released the latest issue of the print fanzine Panic Moon.  It can be ordered here.

It contains (amongst other things) a judicious appraisal of the 'Day of the Daleks' Special Edition, a look at the way Hartnell's shade has taken to haunting the recent series, a clever thing about the way Daleks always seem to get some new physical ability in first episodes, an interesting look at the pre-Who 60s Pathfinders serials which are now out on DVD and an excellent analysis of 'The Sun Makers' which identifies some of its roots, going beyond the usual stuff about Bob Holmes being annoyed by a tax bill.

Once again, I've contributed two articles.  In one, I identify a blind spot in the lefty-liberal creds of 'Colony in Space' and try to tease out some of implications of this, leading me to briefly consider something badly amiss with liberalism itself.  In another article, I have a good old ramble about the various ways Doctor Who has creatively misrepresented evolution, often using it was a way of re-encoding mythic themes or addressing political concerns... though there is, I argue, one story that really is about evolution itself.

It's good, so... umm... buy it.  Please?

(No career in advertising awaits me, I know.)