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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so on and so on and so on forever.

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

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

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

A Presumptious Dilettante's Five Belated Eggs

The more I think about it, the more I think a humble, sympathetic, non-domineering, non-entryist engagement with the anti-oppression movements springing up around issues of gender identity (i.e. Trans issues) is going to be absolutely crucial for the Left in the coming years. 

This isn't just a moral imperative.  Sure, the Left must stand with the oppressed.  Always.  By definition.  Otherwise why bother being on the Left?  Otherwise, what does 'The Left' mean?  But it's also a tactical imperative.  The system must be attacked at its weakest points.  The righteous and rightful rage felt by many on the axis of Trans oppression is absolutely one of the system's weakest points.  It hits people where they live: in their bodies.  Bodies are oppressed, disciplined, punished, curtailed, invaded, wounded and even dissected by capitalism... and it behoves the Left to realise that this happens in arenas outside the sites of direct capitalist production.  This is one of those things that everyone formally 'gets' and then puts to one side.  That's not good enough.  Capitalist oppression is total, hegemonic, far-reaching and omnipresent.  It is intimately and demonstrably bound up with oppression along lines of personal identity, bodily autonomy, bodily identity, sexual identity, gender, sexuality, and race.  This is why intersectionality is a crucial concept that's only going to get more crucial.  The task will be to relate all these issues to class.  Not so that they can be subsumed, assimilated and/or digested, but so the analysis wielded by the Left can be enlarged, educated, made stronger and more inclusive.  That is an end in itself - if we know what our ultimate goal really is.

The good news is that class is as intimately bound up with these things as the Left thinks it is.  The bad news is that we have to stress the importance of class without playing 'issue trumps' (i.e. our preferred axis of oppression is more crucial or 'primary' or 'causal' than yours... and, by the way, how dare you stress the issues that hit you where you live before the issues that we think of as theoretically more important???). 

But there is more good news.  We can stress how capitalism, and thus class exploitation along lines of work and wage exploitation (which is basically just another way of saying 'capitalism'), generates and exacerbates such oppression... for the simple reason that it bloody does; it's the currently regnant form of class society, and we can adduce powerful facts to show how the structure of class society generates sexism, female oppression, gender essentialism, the reduction of people to categories, the reification of socially constructed categories into hegemonic 'facts of life', etc. 

That's why this is so good.  There isn't anything in there that constitutes new and startling revelation, but it's a great little summary/primer/starting-point, from the perspective of a totally 'on-side' Marxism.  I found it so anyway - speaking as someone who personally embraces the elderly Goya's maxim "I'm still learning".

One (related) crucial issue to remember... and here I'd proffer the great work of Silvia Federici... is that the oppression of women is not an optional extra with capitalism, nor is it a by-product of capitalism.  It is certainly generated and exacerbated by capitalism (part of the argument the Left needs to make) but is also a precondition of capitalism, intimately bound up with the creation of capitalism, and partly capitalism's parent. 

The oppression of women existed before capitalism, because capitalism is a form of class society built on top of previous forms of class society (in Europe, feudalism)... just as the capitalist states are forms adapted from pre-capitalist states.  And the rise of capitalism in Europe was absolutely and fundamentally bound up with the further domestication, persecution and economic subjugation of women (see Federici, among others).  There really is very little wiggle room here to say that one caused the other.  They are two sides of the same coin.  And 'causality' or 'primary position' loses its meaning in a truly dialectical (i.e. a truly Marxist) analysis.  Besides, its an academic question.

LGBTQIA+ oppression is, once again, related.  (BTW: please forgive my using the long acronym as shorthand if you don't like the 'lumping together' effect, or if you're on the other side and worry that trying to be that inclusive accidentally implies that anything not covered is, by definition, not included... and also, please don't construe my raising of LGBTQIA+ oppression as an afterthought.)  LGBTQIA+ oppression is intimately connected with the issue of women's oppression, and not in the sense of being a 'product' or 'by-product' or 'side effect' of it, but rather as another aspect of the suffocating enforcement and reification of gender that class society entails, relies upon, and by which it is partly produced.

3

"Not so much of that oatmeal, girl," says Meg to one of the kitchen drudges, "It's only pikemen we're feeding, not horses."

They're in Irongron's castle, somewhere in the century or so following the Norman Conquest.  Sarah is undercover, cooking Irongron's stew.

"Don't the guards on the gate get stew?" she asks, wanting to know in which pots to drop the Doctor's knock-out potion.

"What, meat for those common creatures? I should say not. They'll have oatmeal the same as the rest of us, and lusty enough they are on that. So you watch yourself if ever you take out that skillet."

So class is, perhaps, a more fundamental division than gender, but gender oppression brings its own particular problems.

"I'm not afraid of men. They don't own the world."

Well, they kind-of do... but Sarah isn't discussing actual property relations.  She's talking about the way the world should work, with no one group 'owning' it.

"Why should women always have to cook and carry for them?" she demands.

"What else should we do?" asks Meg.

"Stand up for ourselves. Tell the men you're tired of working for them like slaves."

"We are slaves," says Meg.

Wow.  No mincing words there.

"Then you should set yourselves free," says Sarah.

None there either.

"Oh? And how should we do that?"

That's a trickier question.  It always is.  But surely the first hurdle, before the plan, has to be the will.

"Don't you want to be free?" she demands.  Essentially, this has become workplace agitation.

"Women will never be free while there are men in the world, girl," says Meg, "We have our place."

You still hear stuff like that today, albeit filtered through layers of code.

"What subservient poppycock!  You're still living in the Middle Ages!"

Yeah.  We are, in many ways.  We're meant to laugh at this outburst, but there's no question in my mind that we're also meant to be on Sarah's side.

There are all sorts of problems with this story.  Sarah is - at least in conception - a stereotypical 'wimmin's libber', all touchiness and naivety.  The Doctor is deliberately (more) sexist (than usual) in her presence, and we're meant to think this is funny.  She's made the butt of much sexist behaviour, apparently for our amusement.  For instance, there's the bit quoted above about the "lusty" guards... it's obviously supposed to be cute, even as it acknowledges the particular dangers faced by women in a class hierarchy.  And so on.  Someone wants to say this story is irredeemably broken by sexism?  I'm not going to argue.

But the fact remains, Sarah responds to a woman who is by demonstrably smarter than the men she serves -  and aware of the fact that she's a slave - by saying "set yourselves free".

It shines out amidst the crap.

27

TW


Adelaide screams at the sight of Palmerdale's dead body.

Leela slaps her across the face, silencing her.

This is horrible.  It's one of the relatively few examples of serious, realistic, non-Fantastic, gendered violence in the show.  Companions are captured by monsters, etc., but this kind of thing happens rarely.  It is better in some places.  Worse in others.  In 'The Time Meddler', Edith's implied-rape is in there simply to tick a box of genre tropes.  Yeurch.  In 'Vengeance on Varos', Maldak slaps Peri across the face to assuage his bruised ego.  It's utterly gratuitous and revolting.

But this is a woman slapping another woman.  (That's not worse... except in the sense that the representation, authored by a man, alibis male involvement in violence against women by ostensibly disappearing its gendered dimension.)

More than that - it's Leela slapping another woman.  Wonderful Leela, who has never done anything like this before.  Okay, she's a ruthless killer in battle... but slapping a 'hysteric' like she's James Bond or something?  Normally, though she dreads weakness in herself because of her self-identification as a warrior, she is gentle and kind to the weak, to the scared.  This is part of her warriors' code.  She will be back to her real self in later stories.  She's even kind to Adelaide later in this story.

What has actually happened here?

Somewhere along the line, Leela - or perhaps I should say, the character of Leela - has internalized the male attitudes of the time in which she is a visitor: the Edwardian era.

None of the male characters from that period physically abuse Adelaide, but Adelaide is secondary to almost all of them.  To Palmerdale, she is a secretary and, probably, a mistress.  Harker has no doubt about that, dismissing her as "the owner's fancy woman".  Skinsale evidently desires her sexually, and also desires her esteem, yet finds her frustrating because she resolutely refuses to like him more than her boss.  His delight whenever she becomes dependant upon him is evident.  Vince Hawkins is the only person to whom she can feel comfortably superior, treating his bashful attentions as the services of a instrumentum vocale.

This story is all about class in many ways... but it is also about gender.  In many ways, it's quite good on the subject.  It depicts male attitudes in a non-exculpatory fashion.  Leela is a forceful presence, crossing gender boundaries by putting on "men's clothes... working clothes", etc.  Leela's actions and personality imply that Adelaide isn't just a dishrag because she's a woman; she's like that because she has been trained in a particular kind of social role owing to her gender and class... a role that involves men looking upon her with varying degrees of objectification and contempt, looks which they train at Leela but which bounce off her.  There are other hints at these themes.  Women as property.  Reuben keeps pornographic pictures under his bed, for example.

But there is still a problem with that slap... which is that it comes from someone outside the Edwardian class system (this is, by the way, a depiction of the dynamics of that system that easily outclasses Downton Abbey or 'Human Nature').  The slap comes from Leela, who transgresses Edwardian sensibilities in so many ways.

Using what is sometimes charmingly called a 'real world point of view', this is probably to do with the fact that some 'Edwardian attitudes' had been internalised by the author of the story.  (That this is going on in 1977 tells us a lot.)  Employing a strategy I'm usually wary of - the redemptive reading - Leela's slap can be seen as evidence that even she starts to absorb psychological/ideological aspects of a heavily gendered oppressive system simply by being surrounded by it, by being locked in with it in a cramped space.

That's hegemony for you: you don't have to agree with the ideology in order for it to work on you.

The Obligatory Returned-Episodes Post

Hurrah, etc.

As Lawrence Miles says, there's no point trying act all cool at a time like this.  It's great news and I'm very happy about it.  Sincerely.  You'd have to be a miserablist of a more perverse and determined stamp than I not to be as pleased as punch.

Of course, I could whinge about some things.

And will.

This blog has a USP after all.

I could, for instance, mention the way Nigeria - where the episodes were found - has suddenly swung briefly onto the mental radars of people who, until a few days ago, probably had only a dim idea that it existed at all.  It's ironic because, at more or less the time when those missing episodes were made, the Wilson government was helping the corrupt Nigerian military dictatorship crush Biafra.  Britain continued arming the junta for years, despite government denials.  The regime was engaged in a longstanding war against the Ogoni people - one of the forgotten persecuted peoples in the world.  Shell's exploitation of oil reserves in their region has had untold environmental and human costs, making the Niger Delta one of the most petroleum-impacted regions on Earth.  In 1995, the Nigerian government - utterly in thrall to and bound up with Shell - began a campaign of ruthless repression against the growing anti-Shell protest movement.  The 'Ogoni Nine', including Ken Saro-Wiwa, were arrested and executed, causing a (brief) international outcry.  Nigeria achieved formal democracy in 1999 but the corrupt government still wages war against the living standards and rights of the Nigerian people in the service of international oil profits.  Indeed, as in so many places, this war is a condition of IMF debt relief and loans.  The American government occasionally declares itself troubled by the rigged elections and violence in Nigeria, but Nigeria supplies them with large amounts of oil - the country is up there with Saudi Arabia when it comes to oil exports - so they never do anything beyond the pious declarations.  The crippling economic situation in Nigeria, with a huge portion of the population living in slums, is the root cause of ongoing ethnic and religious violence.  Even the BBC is capable of making the connection between the violence and the poverty rate (above 60% and rising).  Boko Haram, an Islamic fundamentalist group responsible for many attacks - including this last month - are based in the predominantly Muslim north-east, hardest hit by poverty.  Go figure.

But they also had 'The Enemy of the World' and 'The Web of Fear' on a shelf somewhere, so I guess its swings and roundabouts, yeah?

Back in what I like to call my TARDIS Whingeorium, I could also mention the relative importance given by some to the release of these old episodes and the wanton sell-off of Royal Mail, which was announced on the same day and which constitutes a swindle on the taxpayer to the tune of millions, possibly billions... with much of the benefit available only to huge international 'sovereign wealth funds'.  And that's without mentioning all the inevitable good stuff that always comes with privatisation (i.e. downsizing and spiralling inefficiency, etc).

On the subject of huxterism and profiteering, there's also the BBC's grubby co-operation with iTunes (*spit*) and the cynical decision to release the episodes as DRM-laden m4v files before the hasty (and reputedly extras-thin) DVD releases which will shortly follow, and which fans with disposable income will buy even though they already downloaded the eps from iTunes.  Shame about anyone without access to iTunes.  Luckily, however, the internet is one commons that can never be entirely enclosed, so torrents of people will get to see the stories anyway, one way or another.  Meanwhile, the BBC suck on Steve Jobs' nasty, hard software and swallow the money shot that ensues. 

Buuuuuut... sooner or later I'm going to drop all this bellyaching and start talking about the episodes themselves, right?  I just have to run through stuff like the above to make myself feel better about it... as you, Constant Reader, know full well.  We know each other pretty thoroughly by now, don't we?


The Enemy of the World

Capitalism.  See above.

Har-de-har.  Sorry.  I'm such a kidder.

The Enemy of the World

Okay, 'The Enemy of the World', as in the Troughton serial in which the Troutmeister plays two roles: the Doctor (as usual) and machiavellian mariachi Salamander, dictator-of-the-world-in-waiting.  

Well, first things first.  Troughton is darked-up to play an evil Mexican who, natch, dresses in quasi-Mariachi clothes and says things like "da son he don fall oudda da sky".  So.  Um.  That's unfortunate.  Especially since there are no non-evil Mexicans in it.  (This isn't the first time we've had a problem regarding the portrayal of Mexicans.)

Also on the racefail radar is Fariah.  She's... debateable.  She's there to bolster the serial's attempt - in quintessential 60s style - to depict the future as an international melting-pot.  Because racial equality is a dream to aspire to, a distant and way-out possibility, the next generation's project, something to put off until we have hovercars and moving pavements.  But kudos for i) putting a black person on TV at all, ii) putting a sympathetic black person on TV, and iii) finding an actual black person to play the black person on TV.  It's sad that such bare minimums should warrant kudos but they probably do.  She's a bit of an Angry Black Woman, but her resemblance to the stereotype is actually pretty tenuous.  The ABW thing rests on the notion that black women are domineering ballbusters whereas Fariah is shown to be clearly in the power of Salamander.  But this does lead us into the most serious possible objection to the character: she's a slave.  A black slave.  A black woman represented as still trapped in that role.  Asked what she does, she replies "I serve".  This could be seen as an acknowledgement of racism continuing even in the future.  After all, we're not meant to pass over her servitude without a qualm, the way we clearly are with Toberman.  She's not happy about it and the story supports her discontent and rebellion.  The anti-racist reading is a bit compromised by the fact that her 'master' is a Mexican (and not a real one at that) and also by the way nobody actually seems to notice that she's black.  That cuts both ways.  It pushes the idea that, in the future, race is no longer an issue... which seems progressive, within limits.  However, it also undercuts the idea that institutionalised racism is why she's in a subordinate position.  In the absence of this critical notion, her enslavement starts to just look like a black woman's destiny.  Hmm.  Also, like so many black supporting characters in TV/film, she dies.  She at least makes it a good way through instead of dying almost immediately (of course, you could say that about Toberman).  The other potential issue is that she's a victim of blackmail.  We don't find out what she did wrong (if anything) because the Doctor, charmingly, instantly comes to her defence when she is questioned about it, saying "we're none of us perfect".  It doesn't end up looking like a smear on her character so much as a facet of her character.  On the whole, I think that there are problems but that they're not egregious, certainly not by comparison with a lot of other TV - Who included - from the same era... or ours.

Fariah is a Strong Female Character™, despite her victim-status, as is Astrid.  Astrid is, in many ways, the hero(ine) of this story.  (Mary Peach is great, but what a shame Astrid couldn't have been played by the equally good Carmen Munroe instead... indeed, the fact that the role of Astrid goes to a white woman and the role of Fariah goes to a black woman - as a matter of course - is the clearest indication of an underlying problem.)  Astrid is, wonderfully, defined by her ethical/political commitments... which makes her quite different to most Strong Female Characters™ today, most of whom are defined by their ability to sassily kick ass, and their slavish emotional dependence on a wonderful impossible man.  So, things are fairly good genderwise, I think.  Of course, Astrid does wear unnecessary skin-tight PVC trousers... in fact, the back view of those skin-tight PVC trousers is pretty much the first thing we see after the TARDIS-arrival scene on the beach (by the way, how 'bout them longjohns?).  But today the Doctor would spend all his scenes with Astrid indulging in innuendo about her plastic breeches, so I guess progress goes both ways.

Of course, I'm a white dude, so I'm not going to take upon myself to tell anyone that there definitely aren't any serious problems here.  I don't want to whitesplain or mansplain if I can avoid it.  My positionality could well make me wrong. 

On the subject of Fariah... her death is one of the many scenes which is definitely enhanced by having the visuals.  It comes over as genuinely savage and tragic.  Carmen Munroe gives a good performance, as does Milton Johns as the loathsome sadist Benik.  Completing the scene is Elliot Cairnes as Benik's Guard Captain.  He gives an excellent little performance as a man reluctant to obey the nastier orders of a superior he obviously finds contemptible.  He looks on as Benik enjoys tormenting the dying woman and objects to the more wanton cruelty... but then what good is that?  The man is decent enough to be bothered by it but not bothered enough to do anything?  (Plenty of those guys, of course.  We all fall into that category sometimes.  I haven't personally done much about Nigeria or Apple lately.)  It's a lovely touch from David Whittaker, yet another example of the social texture that runs through this story, the concentration on character.  And the Cairnes does it well... something that you only really realise when you can watch him.

Milton Johns too is fun to watch.  He plays Benik like a rat with oedipal issues impersonating Josef Goebbels (which is a bit redundant actually because 'a rat with oedipal issues' is just a description of Josef Goebbels).  His lank hair flies about as he gets more and more excited by any opportunity to hurt people.  He simpers over Salamander and clearly relishes the smile of gratitude he gets when handing him Fedorin's file (again, this scene is enhanced immeasurably by being able to see the performances).

While we're talking about performances, we have to pause to crawl on the floor making 'we are not worthy' gestures towards the shade of Patrick Troughton.  This is an ensemble piece but, when Troughton's on screen, you can't look at anything else.  His Salamander is totally different to his Doctor (he reminds me a bit of Tony Montana from Scarface... I always half expect him to conclude one of his threats to Fedorin with "... you fockin' cuckaroach").  Of course, the Doctor and the Leader are both larger-than-life characters painted in broad strokes... but that sort of thing isn't necessarily easy to do just because it is BIG.  It needs an accomplished character actor to pull it off.  Fortunately, they had Patrick Troughton, who is pretty much the definition of an accomplished character actor.  Charlie Chaplin pulls off very much the same trick in The Great Dictator (an obvious influence on this story) but that was comedy; Troughton has a harder job in some ways - he has to play it nominally straight.  And he does.  He doesn't send it up.  And he gets away with it.  Think about that: he doesn't send up this material and he still gets away with it.  Phil Sandifer has pointed out (amidst loads of other good points) the brilliance of Troughton in the scene where the Doctor has to improvise a hurried impersonation for the benefit of Bruce.  It takes a helluvanactor to play a non-actor acting just well enough to pass muster.

The visuals are, for the most part, enriching rather than embarassing.  You have to take the dated style as read, of course, but that shouldn't be a problem for us.  Like other stories from this era, 'Enemy' is decorated with deliciously overripe op-art pop-futurism.  And yet, there's an awareness of history in various instances of something archaic being repackaged or held-over into the future.  The most striking is Astrid's kinky PVC Regency costume (already mentioned), but there's also the entropic mansion in which Salamander stays while in Hungary, Griffin's old fashioned kitchen, the disused and rotting jetty, the monitor screen in the Records Room which looks like a submarine periscope, etc. Something similar is seen in the previous story 'The Ice Warriors'.  This seems to be an idea that was around at the time: the future as built upon and around the remains of the past.

Some of the visuals are astonishingly confident.  There's a lovely bit where Jamie approaches in the distance... and he's part of the back projection!  Salamander's speech to the UN (or whatever it is) and his journey down into his secret bunker are strikingly well done.  You get a true feeling of depth and verticality in the depiction of the shuttle going up and down the mine shaft.  Sadly the bunker itself could've been done better.  It's altogether too roomy and bright, and the people down there are far too clean and healthy-looking.

All in all, though, this looks damn good.  Barry Letts treats it like the character-piece it is, letting the camera get close in on faces at crucial moments of drama.  The snappy editing helps too.  Both techniques (combined with Troughton's performance) contribute to adding a genuine dramatic frisson to the scene at the conclusion when Salamander swings round to see the double (whose existence he has deduced... though nothing much is made of this in the story) standing behind him.  Holding back the meeting between the Doctor and Salamander until the end is very effective.  It's all over a bit quickly, but it has an impact above its fleeting, tacked-on position.

Beyond the visuals, there's a real sense of a global society here.  Of course, we're mostly concerned with the relations between various members of what I'd call the ruling class.  Kent, Salamander, Denes, Fedorin, etc are all global politicians or ex-politicians.  Benik and Bruce seem to be global policemen.  But we do have Fariah and the wonderfully miserable Griffin representing the lesser-mortals caught in the midst of it all, and it helps that they're both such vivid individuals.  There's a texture of character and social relation in this story.  Even the baddies' coppers seem like real people.  Even a guard is likely to have a repressed conscience, a tendency to roll his eyes at superiors (another little present that the restored pictures give us) or a name and a penchant for charmingly-inept chat-up lines.  It brings the proceedings above much of the James Bond stuff on which they so clearly riff.

Politically, it ain't progressive, to be honest.  As in 'Power of the Daleks', Whittaker's depiction of politics is nebulous, deliberately vague, all about structure rather than ideology or policy.  Less of an allegorical space is opened by such vagueness in 'Enemy' than in 'Power', sadly.  This global society is hierarchical, run by professional politicians and policemen, formally utilitarian, prosperous and apparently based on some kind of workable settlement of imperial competition.  In a way, the specifics don't matter much.  This is a pretty simple story about one man's (or two men's) corruption and lust for power destabilising a more-or-less smooth functionalist framework.  As such, it fits happily into a nice, simple bourgeois schema of political normality and villainy.  Things are pretty much okay until a Salamander comes along ("like Napoleon" as Victoria puts it, recalling a symbol of revolution who became an Emperor) promising things, giving charismatic speeches, getting popular with the people by giving them stuff, manipulating the paranoia of a dissatisfied minority (the bunker people), etc.  The absence of democracy in the Zone system doesn't seem to be a problem for Whittaker as long as the people have the good sense to like the right boss (Denes) rather than the wrong one (El Mariachi)... which, sadly, can't be counted upon.  Just look at the peaceniks isolated in their little bunker.  Deluded by a cynical political machiavel, they pass judgement on the nuke-using world and, with callous self-righteousness, set about their own revolution from below.  In so doing, they turn the world into a fiery mess and help bring a populist dictator to power. It's not their fault, of course... the swarthy firebrand outsider has tricked them.  The Mexican bastard.

This is, essentially, a response to the ferment of the 60s which says "calm down guys, there's not going to be a nuclear holocaust and we're gonna work things out for the best... there's no need to throw hierarchy and bourgeois order out of the window... and there's certainly no need to be idolising any Latin revolutionaries because they'll just become the new boss, worse than the old boss".  We were just talking the other day about how 'The Space Museum' opened up a potential within Doctor Who for revolutionary energy... well, much as I love it - and I genuinely do adore it - 'Enemy' doesn't grab hold of that potential, I'm afraid.

Luckily it has all the good stuff already mentioned, plus a pacey plot and lots of lovely, crackly dialogue like:

"Whatever made you take a job as a food taster?"

"She was hungry."

and

"You must have been a nasty little boy."

"Oh, I was.  But I had a very enjoyable childhood."

Back in the Whingeorium... why wasn't more of Season 5 like this? 

Oh, and did you see how the BBC blew the plot twists in the trailer they released?  Okay, people like me have listened to the CDs about 40,000 times... but what if there'd been someone watching who didn't know?  Y'know, a kid or something.  Boo.



The Web of Fear

The Web of Fear

Blah blah... sets the stage for the UNIT era... blah blah... first appearance of the Brigadier... blah blah... the audience at the time didn't know he'd become a regular goodie... blah blah... he's supposed to be suspicious... blah blah... London Underground refused them permission... blah blah... so they built their own sets... blah blah... London Underground found them so convincing that they... blah blah blah.

Less thrilled by this one, though I'm delighted to have most of it back of course.  This is considerably less interesting, less fun and - despite some bravura Camfieldian effort - less well done than 'Enemy'.  Lots of it is just people in dull uniforms discussing technical stuff about train stations, or walking around in the dark.  It doesn't really matter that the Yeti look daft (though their new, big, round, bright eyes look appropriately like train headlights) but it does matter that we spend two episodes too many watching them wandering around doing nothing much besides looking daft. 

When they do swing into action, things get better.  There's a superb battle sequence in Episode Two.  Camfield stages it beautifully - with lots of quick cuts and even what looks like some very modern shakey camera stuff - and adroitly choses some excellent stock music which really enhances things, the way adroitly chosen stock music sometimes can.  Some of the bits where soldiers get webbing full in the face are quite effectively nasty.  It's great to have this stuff back.  The brightly lit outdoor battle set-piece later on works less well because you can actually see the Yeti properly.

It's a shame that Episode Three is still missing.  Episode Three has Troughton, unlike Episode Two (when he was on his hols), and Two is paddingtastic.  Two does have that first Yeti battle I mentioned though, and the spooky cliffhanger with the foam pulsing in the Underground tunnels.  I'm a sucker for spooky London Underground stuff (i.e. An American Werewolf in London, Creep) so this pleases me.  Episode One is the best of the bunch, with the scenes in the museum at the start, accompanied by Bartok... but we already had that one.

On the subject of Episode One, I suppose we have to talk about Julius Silverstein.  Well, there, I've said it.  Julius Silverstein.  Just saying it covers it.  Makes Fariah look breezily unproblematic.

On the subject of offensive stereotypes, we also have to talk about Evans.  I must confess that I've always been a bit dubious on this one.  I've never been aware of a particular stereotype about the Welsh that they're cowardly.  Of course, there is more to it than that.  Evans is still a comedy idiot, boyo-ing and there's-lovely-ing it all over the place... which ties in with the perennial patronising infantilisation and quaintification of the Welsh in English culture, the culture of the nation that conquered Wales.  Indeed, such depictions of the Welsh as hilarious "baa lambs" (to use Arnold's phrase) were the favoured way of degrading them before jokes about sheep-shagging and the chavviness of Splott were discovered.

Thing is... Evans is kind of my hero (at least until he actively starts trying to sell other people down the river).  Yes, I know he's untrustworthy and selfish, just interested in number one, but there's something Yossarian-esque about him too.  He's the little guy, utterly unimpressed by the conception of duty and honour peddled by the stiff-upper-lip brigade, or the obedience of their willing subordinates. 

"You're just trying to save your own skin!"

"Well it's the only one I got!"

Too bloody right, mate... especially since the whole situation turns out to be a personal grudge match between two big wheels, the Doctor and the Intelligence.  If the little guys of the world all just got some chocolate and pissed off and let the big wheels duke it out... well, the world would be a better place.  The lunatics would have no asylum to rule, no pawns to play chess with, no troops to send into battle against each other.  I realise that the standard, piss-obvious objection to this would be "well, what if all the little guys had refused to fight Hitler?" to which it might be responded "well, what if all the German little guys had refused to fight for Hitler in the first place?"  Don't get me wrong, I'm not putting this forward as a practical plan for ending war; it's just that there is a part of my soul that is incapable of not cheering for a Private who tells a Captain or a Colonel to get stuffed when they order him to risk his neck for them.

Next to Evans, the most authorially frowned-upon character is Chorley, the reporter.  The script tries to tell us that he's despicable.  However, while I'm no fan of slimey, sensationalist journos (see the above picture), nor am I a fan of the axiomatic assumption that the Press should keep out of anything the military says is none of their business.  I like the way that the Robin Day/David Frost analogue Chorley is ostensibly a populist but betrays an elitist contempt for Anne because she's a "smug little red brick university..." something-or-other.  But I'm supposed to hate this guy - and automatically suspect him of being the traitor - because he has the temerity to be down there trying to get the story for me to read about?  Piss off.

As I say, a lot of this actually looks a bit dull... though it's worth having the visuals back for three scenes that are heavy with effective character stuff and great acting.  The first is the lovely scene where Anne Travers deals with Knight's rather awkward, cheesy and patronising attempt to chat her up.  Who never did enough of this kind of thing.  (Anne, by the way, is another Strong Female Character™ from the 60s who puts modern ones to shame.  She has some scenes after the Yeti attack on HQ that get perilously close to sobby dishrag territory, but otherwise she's a forceful, expert and necessary presence all the way through.)  The second is the strangely affecting scene where Professor Travers meets Victoria and Jamie again after 40 years.  Who never did enough of this kind of thing either.  The third is the scene where the Intelligence, in possession of Professor Travers, abducts Victoria.  Troughton and Hines react splendidly, with Hines giving a particularly passionate rendering of anger and distress.

End of the day, this is saved from being just another Season 5 base/monsters runaround by the sheer arbitrariness of it all.  Yeti.  In the London Underground.  Armed with cobwebs.  I'm not the kind of dickhat who says things like "they must've been on drugs when they wrote this" about classic kids' TV, but there is a hallucinatory randomness about much of what goes on here.  It has the jumbled quality of a dream... which even holds true for the silly reveal of the arbitrary and illogical traitor. 

Also, it contributes to the overall feel of stream-of-consciousness free-association that the actors playing Captain Knight and Driver Evans look uncannily like the young Terry Jones and Michael Palin.

*

So there you go.  There's my response, for what it's worth.  My response now, that is.  When the announcement was made, my response was simpler: pure delight... and, everything above notwithstanding, it fundamentally still is.



EDIT: Thanks to Al No for reminding me that Splott has two 't's.

Vixens and Saxons

Some disjointed thoughts about 'The Time Warrior'.  Is it sexist?  Is Linx really a girl?  And what is the correct Socialist attitude to Irongron?


1.  Men Are From Earth, Sontarans Are From... umm... Saturn?  No, couldn't be.  'Saturn' is an anagram of 'Rutans' for a start...

'The Time Warrior' is the chronicle of a failed romance.  Irongron and Linx.  The odd couple.

Made for each other.

The initial attraction. The slowly dawning mutual realisation that they have much in common. They take turns helping each other out. Terms of affection pass between them: Linx is Irongron's "brother" and will be his "general". Physical intimacy follows, as Linx allows Irongron to see his face then almost takes his arm as they leave to deal with the android knight. Irongron gives Linx a familiar nickname (albeit a rather unkind one).  Then the inevitable falling out. Linx feels disappointed. He questions Irongron's commitment. They squabble. There is a physical fight. Violence always changes a relationship irrevocably. An uneasy aftermath. Awkward attempts to rescue and preserve the friendship. "Thanks good toadface... er, good Linx". Irongron helps the bound Linx in an act of residual solidarity. They stand face to face, close together, Irongron fascinated by Linx's visage.  "I was struck down from behind," says Linx, not wanting to lose face in front of Irongron, but also sounding almost as though he is pleading for sympathy and solidarity. Then there is the final drunken argument.  Linx is ready to move on but Irongron doesn't like the idea of being dumped.  He does the dumping, he doesn't have it done to him.  "For the last time Linx," says he, "let there be no more talk of leaving!"  But Linx makes it clear, his spaceboots were made for walking and that's just what he'll do.   Then, of course, the ultimate break.  Linx was going to leave and destroy all Irongron's stuff in a final act of scorn.  The drunken, spurned Irongron tries one last time to delay the dumping.  He gets physical again.  Linx puts him down.

They were made for each other, but that itself is what makes their union impossible.  That and the inevitable social stigma against same-sex and different-species relationships (talk about a double standard!). 

Am I actually arguing for a gay subtext?  No, perhaps not.  But there is something unusually... well, 'relationshippy' about the way Irongron and Linx come together and then fall apart.  Linx even tries to get rid of Irongron's friends, or at least to push them out of an inner circle which increasingly includes just him and Irongron.  Irongron, meanwhile, does a lot of tipsy complaining to his best mate about how unreasonable Linx is.

"My Sontaran doesn't understand me."

2.  Sexism and the Citadel

I've argued elsewhere that 'The Time Warrior' is actually fairly good on the issues of feminism and sexism (everything being very relative, of course).

The most cogent objection to this is to be found, unsurprisingly enough, in Philip Sandifer's post about 'Time Warrior' over at the Eruditorum.  Sandifer argues, firstly, that the show goes out of its way to make the Doctor more sexist simply in order to give Sarah (the feminist) something to vocally object to... meaning that the actual effect of the attempt to engage with feminism is to make the show more sexist rather than less.  I don't quite buy this, not fully.  I think it depends on underestimating the amount of sexism inherent in pretty much all previous depictions of female 'assistants'.  They're not perhaps always as bad as folk memory would have it, but they're still pretty damned awful a lot of the time, as is the Doctor's usual underlying attitude.  It seems to me that if the Doctor is more overtly sexist in 'Time Warrior' this is a matter of more honesty than more sexism.  The new thing here isn't the sexism, sadly, but the openness about the sexism.   This is an inadvertant irony rather than evidence of a change of attitude, but I still think the point stands.

Secondly, and more damningly, Sandifer indicts

the extended sequence in Episode Two in which Sarah's complaining about how Irongron and company are sexist is played for laughs, where part of the joke is that Sarah hasn't figured out that she's gone back in time and so is complaining about sexism to people who cannot possibly understand what she means and genuinely don't care. In other words, feminism is played for laughs - har har, look at how the dumb feminist gets it wrong and complains that the medieval brutes are sexist. She's so dumb.

Again, I'm not fully on board with this.  Thing is... that isn't really what's happening in that scene.  Firstly, I'm not all that sure that the scene in question is "played for laughs".  The moment when Sarah realises that she is in actual physical danger from Irongron is rather chilling and Sladen's face conveys real shock.  Secondly, Sarah's not being overtly feminist in that scene, she's being a person from 1973 (or 1980 if you want to round up) who suddenly finds herself in... well, in whatever year 'The Time Warrior' happens in (I'm not going to consult L'Officier or Parkin... you can do that yourself if you're bothered).  She really says nothing about women's rights, feminism or sexism in that scene.  The closest thing in it to a remark from Sarah touching upon these issues is her casual, grinning reference to "buxom serving wenches".  This isn't a scene about how silly feminists are.  This is a scene about rationalisations coming crashing down.

The scene moves forward from the shock moment I mentioned to illustrate a certain savage disregard of women, revealingly shared by Irongron and Linx.  For Linx "the girl creature" is "secondary", evidence of "an inefficient system".  For Irongron, women are there "to do the lowly work."  There is something of the titilation of reaction here, the invitation to be amused by the flouting of right-on standards.  These days we'd say it was 'deliciously politically incorrect' (if we were idiots).  We are probably meant to be amused by Irongron's open sexism.  'The wimmin's libbers wouldn't like that - tee hee!'  You could certainly relate this to Sandifer's point about the increased sexism being an ironic by-product of the engagement with feminism.  Holmes is using 'the Middle Ages' as a contrast to Sarah's attitudes.  He's put in medieval sexism (which seems like an inherently daft phrase but I'm at a loss to think how else to put it) so that Sarah can react to it.  We've got an openly feminist character and, as a consequence, we immediately get a panorama of unusually open sexism.  This seems unarguable.  However, as I said, I think this is a refiguration of something already present rather than a new development.  This is the standard sexism of "stay here Polly, this is men's work" and "leave the girl, it's the man I want" recast in an explicit form.  And, on the whole, I think the actual effect is that 'Time Warrior' becomes aware of patriarchy to the point that is ends up evincing, admittedly by default, a certain sympathy for feminist ideas... or rather, for what it imagines (rather dimly) feminist ideas probably are.  Okay, it concieves them negatively: as the antithesis of something... and of something caricatured and comic and extreme.  Still, it's surely an improvement to have these matters being deliberately pondered from a broadly sympathetic position.  It's got to be better to make Linx's fascination with Sarah's gender difference a thematic point, a resonance with the extreme gender inequality of human society, than to just unthinkingly have the aliens refer to "the human female" as usual, as though femaleness is an adjunct to the term 'human', which thus means 'male' unless specified otherwise.

There are certainly problems with 'Time Warrior'.  Holmes undoubtedly pokes fun at Sarah's youthful idealism and naivete... but I think it is explicitly her youth and naivete that is being mocked when she is put into situations that bamboozle her, or even (as in the scene mentioned above) her displaced position in history.  Her political convictions emerge relatively unscathed... though this may be partly because they are expressed so vaguely as to escape outright contradiction.  She is certainly shown to get the wrong end of the stick frequently, and to be rash, etc... but is this actually any worse than poking fun at Jo Grant for being clumsy and unqualified, or at Zoe Heriot for being emotionally stunted and intellectually arrogant?  (Again, we have to decide if we're watching an actual increase in sexism or just a greater degree of openness about the sexism... not that there isn't something problematic in the technique of being openly sexist in order to throw feminism into relief.)  Of course, her feminism is associated with her youth and naivete, and yes the depiction of a feminist could have been much better... I mean, feminism as an actual set of ideological convictions is absent, replaced by vague stroppiness and bossiness... but, as I was hinting before, there is a negative case made for Sarah's viewpoint via the way the story takes pains to showcase (albeit in a watered-down form suitable for Saturday tea time) the sexism and misogyny of medieval society.  Yes, this can be read as a paradoxical upping of the sexist ante in response to a feminist character... but, in addition to the question of whether this really means more honesty rather than more sexism, there is also the issue of whether what we're seeing is itself sexist or a depiction of sexism (though I wouldn't want to be taken as saying that there is always a hard and fast division here).

Look... the common women in this story are shown to be a sort of slave caste, lower even than most of Irongron's 'dogs'.  Lady Eleanor is a different matter (thus showing, as does the business of the guys on Irongron's gate getting no meat, that social class is as profound a division as gender) but even she is specifically shown as being reliant on the say-so of her considerably less impressive husband, reduced to giving "orders for dinner" when he refuses to act on her counsel.  Later, of course, she persuades Sir Edward to let her send Hal to assassinate Irongron, an act of initiative that earns her a specifically sexist insult - "narrow hipped vixen" - from her intended victim.

There are moments when, as mentioned, there's a sexist charge to this ('This is all very un-right-on, isn't it?  Snigger snigger!') but, as I was saying, I think the overall effect is to acknowledge a context (i.e. centuries of institutionalised patriarchy) to Sarah's nebulous and stroppy discontent.  This is clearly less than perfect, but it strikes me as an advance on almost anything pertaining to this issue yet seen in the show. This is, after all, the same programme that thought describing 'Kingdom' as "hard, efficient, ruthless" would mean that the audience would splutter with astonishment when it turned out that 'Kingdom' was a woman.

It may be a crude measure, but it's a fact that there are no less than two strong female guest characters in 'Time Warrior, both of whom are manifestly smarter than the men around them.  One of them even gets to say the words "we are slaves".  Of course, in just about any other context, a group specifically described as slaves in a Doctor Who story would be likely to end up freed by the end (though less reliably in the Pertwee era, tellingly enough, c.f. the Functionaries in 'Carnival of Monsters')... but the failure to address this slavery is less about this specific story and more about the conventions of its genre.  After all, the women are not the only subjugated group in this story to have their subjection entirely ignored - or even tacitly approved - by the Doctor.  This is down to the fact that History has an unalterable inner structure in stories like this, a status quo that cannot be altered, a 'writtenness' that cannot be overwritten.  Indeed, the whole objective of the Doctor in this story (as in other historicals and pseudo-historicals) is to protect the status quo, the writtenness, the established structure, of the past.  This implicit conservatism of the historical genre provides a context to the Doctor's failure to react against the enslavement of the women, just as it provides a context to his failure to react against the subjection of the Anglo-Saxons by the Normans (see below).  That his disinterest applies to both sets of slaves is evidence that this is a structural matter, stemming from the rules of this established genre.

"Mmmm... potatoes!"

As it happens, the women do better than the Anglo-Saxons in 'The Time Warrior'.  Their subjection is at least acknowledged (something which illuminates how much it matters when something is openly mentioned rather than just being routine background hiss).  And, crucially, Sarah gets that scene later on when she explicitly recommends to the female drudges that they set themselves free.  The phrase "set yourselves free" carries a brief but real incendiary charge whenever it is spoken in our culture, even in this context.  Whatever else may be wrong with this story, and this scene, the fact remains that Sarah says the phrase "set yourselves free".  Irongron's chief female scullion pours scorn on Sarah's words, yet she is clearly the cleverest of the castle's normal residents.  If Holmes' sin is to be cynical about feminism on the basis that many women are indoctrinated into patriarchy despite being intellectually superior to the men who rule them... well, that's actually fairly good going.  For Doctor Who.

Of course, things are rather spoiled later on when the Doctor and Hal make an effort to warn Irongron's men about the imminent explosion of the castle without bothering to tell the female servants.  For all we know, all the women die in the big bang at the end of Episode Four.  Unhelped, unmentioned and unmourned. Sarah, who was just exhorting those women to free themselves, never even asks about them as she watches the castle reduced to smoking ruins.  That's a BIG fumble.

By the way... Irongron's and Linx's mutual scorn for women ties in to the (mostly) unserious things I was saying earlier about them being engaged in a kind of romance.  Irongron makes a singularly unconvincing remark about Sarah being "not un-comely", which is telling in its very half-heartedness, in the way it is structured as a hedgy double-negative - so unlike his usual forthright manner.  He uses animal metaphors for women a lot.  As mentioned, Lady Eleanor is a "vixen", Sarah is a "little chicken".


3.  All Their Cadets in One Basket

Interestingly, Irongron uses an animal metaphor to describe Linx too.  He calls him "a broody old hen".  An explicitly female animal, referring to the incubation of eggs... appropriate enough since Linx had just been talking about Sontaran cadets "hatching".  But it indicates an ambivalence towards Linx's gender status, an ambivalence that is justified because, despite everyone in the story referring to Linx as "he", it seems clear (from his speeches in response to encountering Sarah) that 'he' is actually... well, the terminology defeats me.  He (I'll continue using the conventional personal pronoun for the sake of convenience) isn't hermaphroditic or androgynous since he evinces no sign of explicitly male or female traits.  I suppose the best word would be 'asexual', but in the scientific sense.  He's not a gendered-being that shows disinterest in sex so much as a gender-neutral being from a species which breeds via the asexual reproductive technique of cloning.

This isn't explicit in 'The Time Warrior' but is implied by Linx's remarks about human sexuality, coupled with his remarks about "hatchings of a million cadets at each muster parade" at "Sontaran Military Academy".  It seems strange to say that this kind of jargon implies cloning... yet the implication is buried in there, along with others.  The Sontarans have "been at war for millennia" and they value efficiency in reproductive matters.  Their reproductive cycle sounds as though it is organised by and conducted through their military training establishment.  To breed is to breed new soldiers.  To breed is to breed new cadets.  The Military Academy breeds the kids because that's what the kids are for: sending to Military Academy.  (Not, by the way, that far removed from the way feudal lords and kings would've viewed the production of sons.)  This all sounds like a state of emergency, as though the need for a constant supply of fresh troops has overridden all else, even biologically-evolved sex.  True, Linx boasts to Irongron that "there is not a galaxy in the Universe that our space fleet has not subjugated" but this is self-evidently a silly claim, revealed as such by its very implausible hugeness.  I think a truer glimpse of the state of Sontaran life comes in an unguarded comment Linx makes later, that one about rejoining "our glorious struggle for freedom".  The Doctor misunderstands this remark, understandably enough (it's the sort of thing conquerors say), because he instantly comes back with a non sequitur about there being "no such thing as the super-race".  But, coupled with the remarks about Sontaran reproduction, which make it sound like a production line under the control of the military, it's a justifiable reading of the story to see Linx as a representative of a race under threat of defeat and extinction... perhaps even as the victims of Rutan aggression.

We never find out which race started the Sontaran/Rutan war.  Whichever race the Doctor is talking to, Sontaran or Rutan, he needles them by saying that they're losing.  However... while we might doubt his taunting assessment of the Rutans in 'Horror of Fang Rock' as "defeated", there's better reason to take seriously his factual statements, since the Rutan doesn't quibble over them.  The Rutans "used to control the whole of the Mutter's Spiral" (a much more plausible notion than Linx's claim - made to someone he thinks of as a gullible savage who can't possibly know any different - that the Sontarans essentially still rule the entire universe). The Rutan itself refers to his peoples' "empire".

Moreover, the behaviour of the two races makes it look somewhat like the Sontarans are reactive while the Rutans are aggressive.  Their respective debut stories both feature lone representatives who fall to Earth, but while Linx finds a buddy (almost a soulmate) and hides out, the Rutan goes on an all-out murder spree.  Linx lands by accident too, unlike the Rutan who is a scout and has back-up on the way to nuke the planet.  All Linx wants to do is leave.  (Of course, later stories bugger this up.  However, even in 'The Sontaran Experiment' Styre and his Marshall are planning to invade an unoccupied planet, and then seize on a feeble excuse to call the whole thing off at the first sign of opposition.  You could say this is just evidence of their slavish adherence to procedure, something set up by Linx's parroting of official military assessments in 'The Time Warrior'... but then slavish adherence to procedure at the expense of action is itself a sign of timidity.)

Also - and this is very significant - the Sontarans have names while the Rutans don't.  This makes the Rutans far more akin to the monster type that includes the Daleks, Cybermen, etc., rather than the type that includes the Silurians and Ice Warriors.  Names matter.  The possession, articulation and/or recollection of a name means a great deal in these tales.  There are 'good' Silurians and Ice Warriors.  Such things are possible.  Those races have arguments, differing perspectives, personal free will, individual autonomy... they at least have the possibility, the capability, of ignoring orders or rejecting the group will.  I'm hoping to post something else later about the issue of monsters with and without individual names.  Here let it suffice to note that Sontarans have individual names and nowadays we have nice Sontarans, but no nice Daleks or Cybermen.  It turns out to be possible for Sontarans to be nice individuals (much as I personally think it sucks unwashed donkey balls).  This, I think, is because the possession of individual identity which is implied by names is part of Doctor Who's conception of 'freedom', whereas namelessness (often linked to a mechanical or cyborg nature) implies an eternally unfree collectivism (connected to notions of 'totalitarianism') which in turn is often linked to aggressive conquest.

Bearing that digression in mind, let's run with the idea that the Rutans were an aggressive collectivist empire who started the war when they attacked the Sontarans as part of their programme to control the Mutter's Spiral.  The Sontarans became a race ruled by military necessity, to the point of changing their reproductive system to a form of mass cloning based on the needs of the military for new recruits.  However, they haven't fully neutered themselves, much as Linx might seem 'asexual'.  If the single Sontaran reproductive system involves laying eggs... can't it be reasonably said that, in a sense, the whole race has become female?  At any rate, all this renders their status distinctly unstable within the gender dynamics at work in 'The Time Warrior'.  It may be the inner reason why Irongron can have a relationship with Linx which, in some ways flippantly outlined above, is structured like a romantic entanglement... but without there ever being any real and tenable sense that the relationship will bear a 'gay reading'.  Linx is not a male.  Indeed, beyond his formal asexuality, he is better described as a default female... at least when looked at from one angle.  Irongron senses as much and expresses this when he refers to his buddy as a "broody old hen".  In the society of the Middle Ages, Linx is disorienting for the men surrounding him.  He is clearly not a 'man' yet he reflects - even down to his spacesuit which resembles a suit of armour - their own intensely male warrior culture.  You can't have a gay romance between a man and a non-man.  But, by the same token, you might be able to have something with the shape of a romance between a man and a representative of a cloned species.  After all, cloning is all about eggs.

But there's another point here, already hinted at above...


4.  1066 and All That (or Robin Irongron and His Merrie Band of CHICKEN HEARTED KNAVES!!!)

We've reasoned that Linx may be a member of a race fighting for survival, struggling (in his words) "for freedom".  We've conjectured (not without tenable if tenuous reasons) that the Sontarans may have been attacked by the imperialistic Rutans, that the Rutans were the original aggressors.  The invaders, perhaps.

Well, this suggests another reason why Linx would get on very well with Irongron and his cronies.  Irongron, you'll remember, can "make nothing" of Sir Edward's "Norman scribble".  Irongron and his mates are, in short, Anglo-Saxons.  Sir Edward and his bunch are evidently Normans.  Moreover, going by Sir Edward's full name, we're in Wessex - the patch on which the first English (pre-Norman) kingdom was founded.  This is Norman power dominating the old stamping grounds of King Alfred and the base of his successors.  Sir Edward is the local Lord and Irongron is the outlaw surrounded by a band of followers.  In short, they are Sir Guy and Robin Hood.

That's what the Robin Hood legend is about: the conflict between Norman power, imposed from outside after the Conquest, and popular Anglo-Saxon resistance.  It is, at least, a kind of fantasy wish-fulfillment story of Saxon resistance, told by a crushed native people ruled by foreign occupiers.  If Linx's people were invaded and/or conquered by the Rutans, Irongron could probably relate.

(This will hardly be the last time Robert Holmes will riff on Robin Hood.  Just look at 'The Ribos Operation' for instance.)

The conflict between Normans and Saxons is one area where the story is not really very ambiguous at all.  It wholeheartedly supports the Normans against the Saxons, the conquerors against the conquered.  The Doctor immediately sides with Sir Edward and his wife, calling them "civilised people".  And, within the frame of the story, this is only too understandable, since Irongron and his gang are vicious marauders.  The oppression of women is mentioned but the oppression of Saxons by Normans is not.  The Normans seem passive, peaceful, the victims of Saxon aggression.  (Though, interestingly, it's the Anglo-Saxon women who clearly have the worst of the whole arrangement.)  On the whole, the story makes the Saxons into the invaders, aggressors, occupiers.  "I took this castle by force of arms.  Those who stood against me I slew."  This is the Norman picture of someone like Robin Hood.  Irongron is Robin as the thief, outlaw, terrorist, killer.  This is the Iraqi Resistance as described by the Americans.  This is in the tradition of storytelling that has the peaceful settlers always the objects of the unprovoked aggression of the Indians, that has the Israelis as the victims of the Arabs.  The roles of invader and invaded, of oppressor and oppressed, are reversed.  (And while the inner structure of the historical or pseudo-historical does provide a basis for this, as I said above, it's also true that 'Time Warrior' - like 'Reign of Terror' - goes above and beyond the call of duty in excusing the Doctor from the need to side with oppressed groups of humans.  It's not just like when he ignores slavery in the Roman Empire during 'The Fires of Pompeii' because History and the historical genre can't allow him to change it.  In 'Time Warrior' he doesn't just ignore the oppression of the Saxons, the oppression of the Saxons isn't there to be noticed.  On the contrary, it the Saxons doing the oppressing.  At least the story doesn't do the same thing with sexism and depict the Middle Ages as a time when men were oppressed by women.)

I'm not saying that there weren't thoroughly nasty Saxon outlaws, nor am I suggesting that the thigh-slapping, Errol Flyn, jolly-nice-chap version of Robin bears any relation to historical reality.  However, without ever forgetting that Robin is a myth, we can still appreciate the power of what he represents.  And we can still take sides.  This is not an insignificant issue, politically speaking.  The awareness of what the Norman conquest meant echoed down the centuries to the radicals of the 18th century, like Tom Paine.  It was the foundation of the English aristocratic and monarchical system as they knew it.  Even today, sadly, there is plenty of relevance for us in the story of the invaders and occupiers, and of the social outlaw who robs from the rich and gives to the poor.

The Doctor sides with the Normans and the story sides with the victors' version of history.  It sides against the people's myth of Robin and with the Norman rulers' myth of themselves as the embattled representatives of civilisation, of the people they rule as savages who must be put down and kept down.

It makes me remember that, in 'Horror of Fang Rock', the Rutan can be heard referring to the Sontarans as "rabble".  Well personally, I'm always on the side of the ones that get called rabble.  That's why the proper socialist attitude to Irongron would be to support his right to date whoever he wants, oppose him when he oppresses the women in his kitchen, but support him when he fights the Norman imperialist invaders... and, it must be said, their pet wizard.

Lady Eleanor is not amused.