42

"Freedom at last!" says Kimus.  Because he's flying in an air car.

"You're not free yet," the Doctor reminds him.

Kimus observes that he's "free to think", yet doesn't seem to be doing so.

They chat about how Kimus' world works.  It has mines that function by themselves.

"What happens when they run out?" asks the Doctor.

"The Captain announces a new Golden Age of Prosperity and they just fill up again."

Kimus notices a certain reserve in the Doctor's manner.

"You don't think that's... well... wrong?  Do you?"

"It's an economic miracle," says the Doctor, "of course it's wrong."

What actually happens, of course, is planetary piracy.  Or, to give it another name, imperialism.  Kimus' planet ("Zanak" as Romana or Mula would helpfully remind us) materialises around other planets and then mines them down to a tiny, crushed pulp, killing anyone who happens to live on them in the process.

Real imperialism is considerably more complex than this... but the basic picture is essentially right.

Much as the people might stagily cry "hooray!" for the Captain whenever he announces another Golden Age of Prosperity, they are not the ones he serves.  Their tyranny is one which gives them fine clothes and jewels to kick around the street, but that's a by-product.  The crushed planets are fed into a system to keep an ancient queen alive.  Stuck forever at a moment of near-deathly stasis, her need for energy is nevertheless immense... and growing.  The energy flows in from the crushed planets to the ravenous centre of the system.  And the hunger at the centre only grows.  The more it gets, the more it needs.  The real dividends always fall.  The crisis looms, and the only way to fend it off is to extend further and further, to accumulate more and more and more.  And with every extension, the hunger grows.

Harry Potter and the Labour Theory of Value

Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. 

- Marx & Engels, The Communist Manifesto

In this post, I noticed that Star Trek portrays the society of the future as essentially capitalist (in all but name) despite the fact that the people of the Federation have 'Replicators' that can summon material objects out of pure energy. Such a development of the forces of production ought to have banished scarcity of any description, thus also banishing any need for the exploitation of labour, the extraction of surplus and the existence of class, along with many other features of capitalism which persist (open or half-hidden) in the Roddenberry/Berman utopia.  In short, given the technology it possesses, the Federation ought to look a lot more like 'the Culture' of Iain M. Banks' (though, actually, the Culture is as much a liberal vision as it is socialist or anarchist... with its dependence upon the benevolent dictatorship of super-smart AIs and its liberal imperialism... but that's a different essay).

There is a similar problem for the 'wizarding world’ of Harry Potter, for all Rowling’s hasty and hamfisted improvisations about it being impossible to magic-up food. We know that magic allows wizards to transform goblets into rats.  Why then do 11yr old wizards, preparing for their first year at Hogwarts, have to go to Diagon Alley and buy rats (or cats or toads or cutsey owls) from a shop?  In a world where magic washes the dishes, there can be no need for labour.

If one can make things without labour, why labour?  Why produce, distribute and exchange?  Why teach?  Why make or do anything?

Labour - making things, doing things, thus changing your environment - is perhaps the most essential aspect of human nature.  In the wizarding world, this essential human quality is degraded and potentially denied.  Maybe this is why so many of the inhabitants of the wizarding world seem to empty and sterile and dull... they are deprived of any real meaning and content to their activity as human beings.

Yes, I know it takes a lot of work to make a potion in Professor Snape's class... but the question remains: why not just magic-up a potion from thin air?  Or just magic-up the desired effect of the potion?  Is this impossible?  Okay... then the immediate next question is: why?  The wizards can magic-up light from nowhere by just muttering "lumos".  Light is material, remember?  Why is this material summonable ex nihilo while others are not?

The cynical answer is to do with J. K. Rowling being a lazy hack.

The cuddly answer is to do with it just being a bit of fun for kids (okay, fine... but somebody please remind Rowling, yes?)

The interesting answer is that there is no answer and cannot be.  In a world in which magic is possible, nothing could ever really make any kind of practical sense.  Such a world would be slippery to the point of being uninhabitable.  That's the tautological and anthropic (and true) reason why magic isn't real.  Any world that could produce real magic, couldn't actually be a coherent world capable of processes like, say, evolution.  Magic isn't real because it isn't... and any world in which it was wouldn't produce people who could even ask the question.

Less cosmically, the whole concept of rules and cheating becomes meaningless in a wizarding world.  Take Quidditch.  Wherein lies the skill that makes a Seeker?  How exactly does one exercise prowess on a broomstick?  You don't pedal it.  It doesn't move by physical laws.  You don't have to know about aerodynamics.  Aerodynamic laws would make it plummet to the ground immediately.  Your ability to be a great Seeker seems, in Rowling's world, to stem from two factors: whether you have it in your blood and how expensive your broom is.  Harry is a great Seeker because his Dad was (yes, a fucking family of tedious jocks - I know the types) and because various fawning adults keep giving him expensive brooms (spoiled little teacher's pet).

But this leads to the question of why is one brand of broomstick better than another?  What are the qualities of the expensive one that make it better than the cheap one?  It can't be anything technical, since there's no technique anywhere to be seen.  They're not 'operated'; they're sat on and commanded.  Moreover, it can't be to do with the quality of their design or construction, because their flying abilities do not stem from thence.  They're not like machines, i.e. efficient to the extent that they are well designed and constructed to obey and exploit the physical laws of the universe in the performance of certain tasks.  They fly because they're magic.  Magic, by definition, is the breaking of the physical rules.  Why cannot a cheap broom be endowed with greater magical properties than a pricey one?  Just twiddle your wand and impart some extra magic to the budget model!

I expect something like that would be considered to be in some way 'cheating'... like when Hermione thinks Harry has given Ron the luck potion just before the big match.  But what can 'cheating' possibly mean in this context?  Ron's 'cheating' because he's taken a luck potion?  But isn't that kind of 'cheating' THE WHOLE FUCKING POINT of potions?  Of all magic?  Isn't Qudditch itself ALREADY ENTIRELY DEPENDENT upon such magical cheats?  Magic broomsticks, for instance?  Magical being-good-at-Qudditch-family-blood?  Magic flying balls with wings?

And if rules and cheating are meaningless, why have rules at school?  Why have school?  Why learn?  Take a potion instead!  Why frown on those rule-breakers like Voldemort?  Why work the long way round for anything?  Why, as I was asking before, labour?

People do seem to work in Potter's world.  They have jobs working for banks.  Mums do housework.  And so on.

Incidentally... Mrs Weasley washes the dishes... by casting a spell that makes them wash themselves.  Okay.  But where do the dishes come from?  Are they magicked into existence?  Or are they physically produced, the way dishes are in our world?  Does that mean there are factories with people doing physical productive labour, despite having magic wands in their pockets?  In fact, we know that there are workplaces in Potterland, though they seem to be the kind where middle-class professions are pursued.  Teaching.  Banking.  Ministerial bureaucracy.  Etc.  Or they tend to be small businesses.  Petit bourgeois traders abound, with a panoply of pubs and shops.  We do see some people in lower status jobs.  There's a moronic bus conductor who later turns to evil.  Hagrid is a gamekeeper.  But notice something.  Even the lower status jobs aren't about manufacturing.  The only people in the stories who actually seem to make anything are... yes, you're ahead of me... the Elves.  And they're non-human slaves.  In other words, working-class productive industry has been, to a large extent, edited out of the picture... just way money has been edited out of Trek.

The answer to the question 'why work in a world where work is not needed' is that, in Potterland, work that is directly productive seems to either not happen at all, or to happen off stage.  It's hidden.  This is essentially because the necessity of productive work is being implicitly denied.  The answer is a denial of the premises of the question.  The only kind of work that is acknowledged and praised is distributive, bureaucratic or academic.  The need for production is endlessly deferred, like a dreaded chore.

And yet there is wealth.  There are commodities.  There is even conspicuous consumption... though it is viewed with a certain distaste, some of the time.  The emphasis upon the quality (expensiveness) of things like Harry's Quidditch kit clashes markedly with the professed moral disapproval of material wealth in the stories.  Draco Malfoy is constantly depicted as a despicable little shit precisely because he thinks he (or rather his father's money) can buy status, success, respect, power, etc... and yet Harry is also wealthy and also gets loads of unearned help.  He wins using a sooper-dooper broom and that's dandy.  Draco tries the same and we're meant to hate him.  The difference appears to lie in their social class.  Harry is a nice, middle class boy.  Draco is an aristo.  The implication is that Harry's money was earned by his parents (though not through production, natch) whereas Malfoy Snr's was inherited.

There are few examples of Harry using his stash of gold in Gringotts to benefit others, or even to benefit himself. The nicest is in the first book, when he buys the entire sweet trolley for him and Ron to share, simply because Ron doesn't seem enthusiastic about his sandwiches.  He gives away his prize money from the whole Goblet of Fire clusterfuck... but he does this because he feels that the money is tainted (by having been earned?).  It's telling that Fred and George use this money to become shopkeepers, hence the book's approval.  In short - the validity of using money to gain advantage is smiled upon only when the money has been not inherited, not generated by finance, not directly earned through work, but used in or created through small-scale enterprise and initiative... the petty bourgeois ideal.  Ironic, given what BIG business Potter became.

Actually, there are creatures in the stories who make things - the Goblins - but their productive activity seems to be entirely in the past.  They are said to have a peculiar and inhuman view of property relations.  To them, the person who makes something, owns it.  Quelle horreur!  They don't consider that somebody owns something just because they paid for it.  Now, can you imagine anything more threatening to the middle-class, petit bourgeois world (wizarding or otherwise) than doubts about the validity of property based on payment rather than production?  Essentially, what the Goblins doubt is the whole concept of the commodity.  And the commodity form is the basis of bourgeois society.

And yet, these days, the Goblins are not productive workers but bankers.  They are presented as ruthless, acquisitive, greedy little hoarders.  Their near-communistic failure to understand and appreciate the human truth of the commodity form doesn't translate into a refusal to engage with money... indeed, if money is, as Marx said, the 'universal equivalent', then this makes a strangely perverse kind of sense.  If the Goblins do not comprehend the nature of the commodity (i.e. the concept of the exchange of value) then they see the world of commodities from an - as it were - money's eye view.  Money is fundamentally unreal.  It is the commodity that stands in for all others, that can represent all others, that can be equivalent to all others.  It undermines the reality of distinctions between commodities.  From the point of view of money (so to speak) all commodities are the same... so the idea of exchanging one for another looks meaningless, irrational, even insane.

However, I think Rowling's reasoning is cruder than this.  I think hers is a classic, confused, petit bourgeois distrust of 'finance' as being, in some way, conspiratorial... while also attributing an unhealthy cast to any failure to understand and embrace the eternal validity of trade.  It's interesting.  I seem to recall another group of people - real people in history, I mean - who were accused, nonsensically, of being both communists and conspiratorial capitalists and bankers.  It's worth remembering that, to the extent that it was a mass movement, fascism was always a movement mainly of the middle classes and petit bourgeoisie.  Hitler had good machiavellian reasons to target Jews - he could sell them to disaffected workers as evil capitalists and to irritated businessmen as evil Marxists - but he genuinely believed his own vile piffle... and his vile piffle was heavily influenced by classic middle class / petit bourgeois distrust of financiers and bankers and bigshots.  The European petit bourgeois distaste for finance goes all the way back to the idea of moneylending and usury as a kind of unnatural procreation (money auto-breeds)... and the association of this kind of thing with Jews goes right back too.

This is a bit of a tangent... so let's loop back to what we were talking about earlier: the inconsistent but unavoidable way that things in the Potterverse seem to acquire value literally by magic. If we take 'magic', in Rowling's model, to be equivalent to what Marx called use value (i.e. the actual ability of the commodity to satisfy some need or desire) then, in the wizarding world, value ceases to have its basis in physicality and becomes something idealist rather than materialist, something that humans can imagine into existence, that they can create and confer at will out of thin air.  Use value collapses into a blobby sameness with what Marx called exchange value (i.e. the quantity of value imparted to the commodity by humans) except for one vital distinction.  For Marx, exhange value was created through labour; it was the amount of socially necessary labour time that went into the creation of the commodity.  In the wizarding world, labour is unnecessary and nobody is ever seen doing any productive labour... or the place of productive labour is taken by magic wand waggling.  Exchange value vanishes into use value and use value is magically generated.  Labour gets no look in.

If the Goblins are the guardians of money, they become the arch-representatives of exchange as a magical process.  (Marx, by the way, was profoundly hostile to the commodity form, of which money is the ultimate example, precisely because it is so immaterial, so unreal, so anti-sensual, so 'magical'.)  This is probably why the Goblins no longer produce anything, despite once having been makers of artefacts.  Aside from the way Rowling draws on old petit bourgeois anxieties about 'big finance', it's probably why they also have this threatening lack of comprehension of the validity of exchange.

In other words, Harry Potter is bourgeois to the core.  It's central premise - of a world which has commodities that are bought and sold for money after their one value (utility) is created out of nothing without the involvement of work - is essentially bourgeois. It denies the role of labour in the creation of value, thus degrading humanity by removing their essential nature as productive creatures.  It sees value as one blob - utility - that comes from needs externalised rather than work crystallised.  It treats the commodity form as eternal and squares the circle of the immateriality of the commodity - especially money - by treating all value as immaterial.  It fetishizes commodities (swanky broomsticks, invisibility cloaks, etc.) while editing labour out of the picture, or showing it only as either willing serfdom (the elves) or as petit bourgeois enterprise (Diagon Alley) or middle class professional activity (everyone else).  It recycles old shopkeeper fears and prejudices about finance and aristocracy.

There is a fundamental misunderstanding of humanity at the heart of all this.  What's missing is an awareness of humans as, essentially and fundamentally, producers rather than simply 'actors'.  Arguably, this same mistake is at the heart of many reactionary views of the world, including the bourgeois economic theories that the metaphysics of the wizarding world mirror so amusingly.

The serious point here, the thing that should worry us, is not that Harry Potter is reactionary... it's that bourgeois economics is based fundamentally on magical thinking.  In this worldview, advantage and success and moral superiority flow from utility, which comes from the conjuring skill of the economic actor... from the 'wealth creator', you could say.  It doesn't make any difference that economic structures like that would actually be as impossible as natural selection in a world where magic was real.  For capitalism, economic miracles seem to be just that: miracles.

Economic Miracles

This is my Timelash II stuff on the subject of Graham Williams' tenure as producer... it's a bit thin because I've either posted about several stories from this era elsewhere or because I'm planning to.  Also, to be honest, some of the stories simply don't yield much grist for my mill.  That isn't to knock the Williams era, which contains some of the most politically interesting Who stories ever made (which is partly why they needed - or need - posts all to themselves).  Notice, for instance, how the stories glanced at below seem obsessed with fuel, economics and questions of prosperity vs. austerity... s'what comes of making Doctor Who in the context of the late 70s I guess...


I've written about 'Horror of Fang Rock' here and 'Image of the Fendahl' here.


'The Sun Makers'

This is from elsewhere on this blog, but it's part of a wider article.  I thought it could tolerate repeating... especially since 'Sun Makers' is a favourite of mine, for reasons which should be obvious.  I don't think, by the way, that this story has ever been more relevant than it is now.

Some idiot once wrote that, in this story, the rebels are worse than the baddies. I dunno what story he was watching, but it ain’t the one I know as ‘The Sun Makers’. The Others might be a motley and even unsavoury lot but they’re hardly as bad as the planet-enslaving Collector and his pet Gatherer. Mandrel makes nasty threats that he doesn’t try very hard to make good on. The Doctor, ever a keen judge of character, doesn’t seen worried by Mandrel even when he’s waving a red hot poker in his face. Leela has some choice words for them that are very pertinent. She calls them cowards and that, essentially, is the trouble with them. Mind you, you can’t blame them for running away from life in Megropolis 1.

Some other idiots have occasionally argued that ‘The Sun Makers’ is a right-wing allegory because it depicts a tyrannical state and rails against taxes. Well, that’s fine if you’re dumb enough to buy the bullshit lie that conservative politics really is all about defending personal liberty from big government and punitive taxation. In fact, ‘The Sun Makers’ couldn’t be clearer about its political sympathies (even if you stick your fingers in your ears during the playful misquoting of Marx). The tyrannical state in this story is the Company. They are effectively one, or the Company exercises such control that they might as well be. This isn’t a big state stifling the liberty of free enterprise and free consumers. This is a big state as a vehicle for corporate domination. The Company is a private concern, engaged in “commercial imperialism”. The Company has, essentially, carried out a hostile takeover of the government. This is one big state that’s been privatised.

The icons of modern conservatism (i.e. Reagan, Thatcher, Bush, Bush II) are usually, for all their populist anti-government rhetoric, ultra-statists. They might reduce bureaucracy here and there (usually by cutting public services, etc.) and deregulate business, but they always strengthen the state’s machinery of enforcement, regulation, control and surveillance of its citizens, i.e. the poor schmoes who do all the work get spied on and arrested more. Meanwhile, we have de facto economic planning in the hands of radically undemocratic and monolithic organisations. We just call them corporations, but they act like states within states. And they get more and more powerful all the time.

Was the Iraq war a state affair? Well, the costs were pretty much covered by the state (i.e. by the American taxpayer) but the opportunities and profits were tendered out to the companies that swarmed in like vultures. Neoliberalism wants to turn the state into a heavily armed enforcement service that monitors and controls and taxes the population while acting as a munificent pimp for corporations, farming out every other task of the state to them, garnished with massive subsidies (i.e. corporate welfare).

The state gathers and the Company collects.

This is pretty much what Bob Holmes wrote about in ‘The Sun Makers’. His income tax bill seems to have got him thinking about the future of neoliberalism. Strange but true. Maybe he was looking at Chile and General Pinochet’s great experiment in merciless Chicago school ultra-monetarism, which he inflicted on his people via brutal repression. How else did he manage to write a Doctor Who story in 1977 that can be read as a companion text to The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein?

But the key thing is the way the workers are portrayed as changing in the course of the struggle. The Others are clearly former workers who’ve opted out. Mandrel’s grade status and former workplace even become plot points. Cordo is the lowest of the low; a timid, despairing and bankrupt drudge, the son of a lifelong corridor sweeper. But they end up uniting across the grade barriers, across their former differences. The Others go from cowardly hiding and petty criminality to leading a general strike. Cordo goes from contemplating suicide to jubilantly leading a revolution. Bisham is an executive grade whose moment of curiosity lands him in detention; initially, he lies back and accepts his doom.. but he ends up uniting with B and D Grades to topple the government. The workers with hand and brain.

Okay, they need the Doctor to get them started, but in this story the Doctor is almost like a personification of Information itself. He tells them things. He makes them curious. He makes them angry. He poses the right questions. He turns off the gas that makes them anxious and passive (surely this is thematically linked to his taking over the TV station and the news service?) and thus gets the ball rolling. It isn't long before he wanders off with Leela and leaves the united workers to pursue the revolution on their own.

The Doctor’s role as catalyst notwithstanding, this is a full scale workers’ revolution. Moreover, it’s explicitly linked to industrial action in the scene where Goudry and Veet incite the strike. It’s idealised, sure, but the portrayal is not without sceptical irony or some healthy moral ambiguity. Mandrel’s former colleagues Synge and Hackett obviously join the revolution from fear rather than immediate enthusiasm (though they seem to end up happy enough to help), and Marn simply switches sides when she sees which way the wind is blowing.

And then we have the matter of the Gatherer and his little tumble... Well, you can wring your hands about him if you like. I have to do my own tax return so, frankly, I’m not feeling merciful. 

'The Ribos Operation' is examined in scarily extensive detail, here.


'The Pirate Planet'

There is a satirical aspect to Douglas Adams' debut Who story which anticipates the satire inherent in much of Hitch Hiker's... but whereas Hitch Hiker's presents a kind of farcical search for God and/or meaning in a universe of comic incompetence and small mindedness, 'Pirate Planet' seems more directly political in its preoccupations: at times its almost like Adams is having a go at imperialism through the analogy of piracy.

In 'Pirate Planet', Zanak is a culture of indolent and complacent and unquestioning people who kick jewels around their streets whenever their leader simply announces a new golden age and the mines just fill up again... and all because their world grabs others, crushes them, sucks them dry of their wealth and then moves on. The people don't know because they don't care to know. Rome never looks where she treads, as Kipling put it. You don't get political comment quite like that in Hitch Hiker's (at least not until Infinidim Enterprises arrive in the last novel); you're far more likely to get satire at the expense of bumbling bureaucracy and plodding literal mindedness (one of the preoccupations of 'Shada' a little later, once Adams has found his voice).

In 'Pirate Planet', a young man with lots of talent is writing his early, angry stuff... and instinctively fitting in with the ethos of a series that almost reflexively critiques Power in moral terms. Trouble is, Adams is rather too flippant to quite make this story work as a polemic... though he is plainly influenced by Bob Holmes' way of creating witty and knowing stories that let political comment ride along happily with jokes (i.e. 'Carnival of Monsters' and 'The Sun Makers').

Still, it contains one of my all-time favourite one-liners from Who.  Asked if he thinks it's "wrong" for mines to just fill up with minerals all by themselves, the Doctor replies: "It's an economic miracle; of course it's wrong!"

Tom Baker (in one of his greatest late performances) both revels in the smartass comedy and latches onto the underlying seriousness of some aspects of the story. By doing so, he creates an opportunity for himself to turn his great 'angry scene' into a moment when, for all the multicoloured glitz and jokey dialogue, he portrays a man genuinely aghast at a crime almost too awful to comprehend. And it's riveting stuff.


'The Power of Kroll'

Robert Holmes might’ve been pissed off about having to write about a very big monster, but he was (apparently) even more pissed off about the treatment of Native Americans, racism and big business exploiting the environment. This could have been disastrous if it weren’t for the fact that Holmes is also intelligent about these things. Nothing is all that simple in this story.

The Swampies (or the People of the Lakes, if we’re being PC about it) are more than just victims. We are invited to sympathise with them and direct parallels are drawn with the plight of Native Americans when the Doctor calls their moon a “sort of reservation”. Now that their moon looks commercially exploitable, they’re liable to be forcibly evicted again. But, while clearly the victims of an historic injustice, they’re not portrayed as particularly virtuous or wise. Unlike the Kinda (who have the whiff of gift-shop dreamcatchers about them), the Swampies are flawed and naive. This is rather refreshingly unpatronising. Ranquin is a blinkered religious bigot who is not above using Kroll as a means of getting his own way. Nor is he above a spot of politically-expedient murder. He even has his own face-saving political myth about the Swampies leaving Delta-Magna of their own accord.

It’s interesting to see how Holmes deliberately makes the humans and the Swampies into mirror images of each other. Thawn and Ranquin are both the same kind of deceitful, callous, bullshit artists. Also, Fenner and Varlick are similar types. Both are happy to sanction killing when they disapprove of the victim, but neither is without conscience. They are both troubled by their leader’s behaviour but grumble and procrastinate while still obeying.

The treatment of racism is also intelligent. Thawn is clearly a racist but, when accused of hating the Swampies by Fenner, he denies the charge and simply restates his economic imperatives. This is right on the nail. The motivations behind all organised persecution of minorities is always fundamentally economic. The supposed ethnic and cultural difference of Africans was merely a pretext that was fashioned into a political ideology of slavery; the underlying motive was commercial. The supposed savagery and primitivism of Native Americans was simply an ideological justification for imperialistic conquest and theft. Modern racism has its roots in economics as much as in any deep-seated xenophobic impulse. Nobody in ‘The Power of Kroll’ mentions the fact that the Swampies are green (apart from the Doctor, ironically enough) but Thawn is constantly on about the fact that they’re in his way.

Meanwhile, the exploitation of the natural resources of the lake creates an unforeseen ecological effect; the awakening of Kroll is caused by the Refinery raising the lake’s temperature and shooting off orbit shots. I’d hesitate to call Kroll a metaphor for environmental disaster, but all the same… he is a runaway by-product of the refinery.

Also, the nonsense spouted by Ranquin and Varlick’s growing realisation that Kroll is nothing but a big animal, constitutes another poke at religion… though not without putting the Swampies religious narrative within a political context of oppression and alienation, and entirely without portraying them as inherently culturally backward.  This guy was a natural radical, whether he knew it or not. To think he used to edit John Bull Magazine! (Sometimes I see strange similarities between Holmes and Orwell. Holmes was a copper, wasn't he? Just as Orwell was a colonial policeman in Burma.)

Meanwhile, we have Tom Baker giving one of his best performances. No, I’m serious. Is there any moment during his tenure more blissful than his deadpan inquiry to Thawn: “Will there be strawberry jam for tea?”. Watch the way he looks embarrassed when asked stupid (to him) questions about the refinery. Watch him glare at Thawn’s treatment of Mensch and smirk at Fenner’s unironic use of the all-purpose word “progress”. Then there’s the “aren’t you going to say ‘don’t make any sudden moves?’” scene. This Doctor is a bumbling fartaround, a dilletante, a muckabout, a sophomoric clown... but with a deep, ingrained sense of rage at injustice and cant and bigotry. He's a satirist of the powerful and callous; he allows the despicable to write him off as a looney. This is my Doctor. None of that lonely god rubbish. No burning at the centre of time like fire and ice and blah blah blah. Just a rogue radical, a wry scientist, an activist eccentric. He quite simply rocks.

Yeah, okay, the Swampies look stupid and their chant is rubbish… and yeah, the monster looks utterly fake… and yeah, Episode 3 is nothing but the stupid creeper-execution thing and loads of conversations about “viscosity levels”… but hey, it’s got Philip Madoc in it, for chrissakes!

And its heart and brain are both in the right places. It has possibly the most fair and unprejudiced portrayal of native, tribal people that I've ever seen in sci-fi. It attacks racism, capitalism, environmental destruction and religion... and from a radical challenge position rather than just a hand-wringing liberal critique. It contains none of the sentimentalised patronising attitude to be found in, say, Avatar (yeurch), while also containing ten times the anger.


I'm planning to post something seperate and self-contained on the subject of 'City of Death'.