Happy Workers

From the January 2012 issue of Panic Moon.  Slightly expanded.


Some people say that 'The Macra Terror' is about holiday camps, but I think there’s more to it than that. The Colony is obsessed with work. It organises communal entertainment, but this seems to consist of revues about how great it is to be worker. The aim is to make people “happy to work”. These people are not on holiday.

The surveillance and brainwashing suggests totalitarianism, but the area where Barney provides makeovers looks less like Russia and more like a health spa or a salon on a Western high street. Polly is told she’ll win a competition that sounds like Miss World (which the U.S.S.R. disdained until 1989). The Pilot sits at a desk attended by a secretary, looking like a sitcom businessman. Ola’s guards look like the kind of American or British riot police who were, by this time, often being seen on the news, clashing with demonstrators.

.The key to understanding this strange tale is the fact that, by 1967, a lot of people saw tyranny on both sides of the iron curtain. In the 60s, Western society was largely prosperous but also lived in the shadow of the bomb, of Vietnam, of racial and sexual discrimination. There was inequality, protest and repression. In 1967, the turbulence was just about to peak. The media might have presented Western culture as happy, free, even ‘swinging’, but the counter-culture began to critique mass advertising and P.R. as methods of thought control. Trendy theorists like Herbert Marcuse identified totalitarian currents within capitalism and saw consumerism as creating alienation. (It's interesting, in light of this, how often Doctor Who - a product of the 60s after all - combines its strongest hints at a critique of capitalism with the aesthetics of totalitarianism, i.e. 'The Sun Makers', 'The Happiness Patrol'. This is also interesting in light of the analysis of Stalinism which sees it as a bureaucratic form of state capitalism.)

'The Macra Terror' is perhaps Doctor Who’s earliest attempt to engage with the radical 60s. The Colony is mainstream Britain in denial. The Colony media seems very ‘ITV matey’ but also quite ‘BBC formal’. Both the commercial and state style conspire to keep the drones chirpy. The main work is gas mining. In 1967, Britain was switching over to North Sea gas. It was all part of Britain’s prosperous future, if everyone would just pull together, work hard and keep smiling. The protestors and hippies were just spoiling things.

The big problem with Medok is that he isn’t happy. He talks about the Macra. They represent the repressed knowledge that something is very wrong with society. They’re everywhere but are unseen. Nobody believes in them but everyone knows their name. People who talk about them are silenced with telling desperation. When the Colonists do see them, they remain uncertain whether they are insects or bacteria… interestingly, the only suggestion nobody makes is that they are crabs. The Doctor calls them germs in the brain of society. They are the unease beneath the fixed smile.

The Macra are the reason why the humans mine gas they don’t need. The implication is that totalitarianism and capitalism not only use similar methods of thought control, but both demand that people work, happily, not for their own benefit but for monstrous, hidden, incomprehensible… possibly even insane reasons. Even the establishment (and the British government in 1967 was Labour) works for them, without realising it.

In the end though, despite the Doctor’s gleeful anarchism, the Colony without Macra seems indistinguishable from the Colony with Macra. The repressed knowledge is faced, the hidden exploiters are defeated, and society remains the same. We can’t help feeling that the colonists will go on obeying rules and whistling while they work. You have to wonder if maybe the Macra weren’t the cause of the problem but just took advantage of it. If they were germs, they thrived in a social wound that was already festering. However, the end of the story seems to endorse the Colony. The wrong people (if we can call them that) were in Control, that’s all.

As the decade progressed, later stories would imply even more radical critiques of Western society, but they’d all come to similar diffident conclusions.


ADDENDA:

1. There is also a view of 'The Macra Terror' which sees it as an apologia for colonialism. The Doctor unquestioningly uses lethal force to protect a colony from natives. I find this unconvincing because, of all the valences the Macra take on, race seems a very muted one... although I don't dispute that the story reflects British unease about the dissolution of its empire in the post-war period. If the Macra are the disposessed natives, the story has a paranoid view of how settler-colonial states work that is borderline terrifying in its lack of relation to reality.

2. I've gone into the Macra in greater detail, with special reference to how they evoke the Gothic mode in a quasi-Weird way, here and here.

Skulltopus 12: Come Out onto the Balcony and Wave a Tentacle

Okay, first a quick (well... relatively quick) recap and a few clarifications... because we've come a long way. And then onto some hot Zygon action.


The Story So Far...

If only 'Pirates of the Caribbean II' had looked this good.

According to China Miéville, the tentacular monster was introduced to Western SF/Horror literature in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by the loose style/affect/trend known as 'the Weird'.  Lovecraft, Hodgson, Machen, etc.  They used various new forms of the monstrous, especially tentacles, as a 'novum', unfreighted with previously accreted meanings and associations, which could express something of the unprecedented, inexplicable, inexpressible catastrophic horror that was engulfing modernity with the onrush of world war, mechanised imperialism and endemic economic crisis.  (There were a couple of important pre-eruptions of the tentacular and Weirdish courtesy of SF pioneer H.G. Wells and 'ghost story' writer M.R. James.)  Mieville says that the Weird represents a way of trying to express anxieties that is alternate and incompatible with the gothic.  The gothic - or hauntological - is an expression of something we already know which has been hidden (or repressed) and which haunts us, threatening to return.  The Weird is what we don't - and perhaps cannot - know, erupting without precedent and confronting us with our own incomprehension.  Consequently, the gothic and the Weird exist in "non-dialectical superposition", oscillating back and forth... something which shows in the almost total absence in Western monsterology of the skulltopus, a fusion of skull (gothic) and octopus (Weird) which, on the face of it, would seem to be quite an obvious synthesis, especially given that the central hub of an octopus's body is decidedly skull-like in shape.

Much later, long after the process in Western literary and graphic monsterology that Miéville describes, and long after tentacles had been thoroughly assimilated into the mainstream of Western Horror and SF, tentacles begin to make their presence felt in Doctor Who. In the early days, most of the tentacles that appeared in the show did so courtesy of Terry Nation. For instance, he adroitly selected an octopus as a meaningless plot-device monster in 'The Chase'. He may have done this because the octopoidal carried a residual charge of blankness or meaninglessness. Also, Nation seems to have repeatedly associated a tentacular or Weirdesque monster with economic exploitation. The Brains of Morphoton have stubby tentacles and run an entire economy on hypnotism, making scarcity seem like material abundance; the Slyther turns up when the Daleks are forcing people to mine for them and black-marketeers are taking advantage of the situation. This may be a co-optation of the 'blankness' of the tentacular inherited from the Weird. It may also be that, because the modernity that filled the Weird writers with such nebulous horror was capitalist modernity, there is something in their pre-eminent monster-type that naturally lends itself to expressing horror at economic exploitation. (They themselves would probably have rejected this, most of them being reactionaries... though, interestingly, Lovecraft - who was a disgusting racist, living in dread of 'miscegenation' - once identified himself as a supporter of FDR and the New Deal, even calling himself a 'socialist'.) In any case, surprising as it seems - and I find this as unexpected as you probably do - Nation seems to have laid the groundwork for a semiotic connection within Doctor Who between tentacles and capitalism that later appeared, fully-fledged, at the start of the 70s.

Chiming with Miéville's ideas, while also working differently to the process he describes, there is a peculiar dialectic that gets started in the show between the gothic and this half-remembered version of the Weird.  'The Macra Terror' is the harbinger of what is to come.  It uses a recalled version of the Weird by using monsters that are crabs (the Weird is very maritime; Hodgson employs giant crabs a lot in his stories) and yet also undefined and/or overdescribed to the point of incoherence (this is also a trait of Weird monsters).  At the same time, however, the same monsters are deeply hauntological in that they literally haunt the Colony, representing repressed fears, their very existence denied by even those who have seen them lurking in the shadows.  This happens, I think, because 'The Macra Terror' is the first major attempt by Doctor Who - up to that point - to engage with some of the radical ideas of the 60s.  Like The Prisoner, which it anticipates in some respects, it frets over an apparent convergence between the underlying political structures of the 'democratic' West and the 'totalitarian' East.  The Colony is a political tyranny with capitalist features.  There is brainwashing, surveillance, a secret police force... co-existing with a Holiday Camp style atmosphere, leisure time, makeovers, beauty contests and an ideology of cheerful team-spirit.  This is a very 60s anxiety and ties in with currents of radical thought of the time.  Haunted by this idea, which cannot be openly acknowledged, the text resorts to radically obscuring its hauntological monsters by co-opting aspects of the Weird.

The most politically loaded image in 'Doctor Who'.

Not long after this, at the start of the 70s, Robert Holmes wrote a story with various elements that seemed to converge upon capitalism as a source of exploitation, alienation and hierarchy... and even to connect capitalism with imperialism, racism and sexism.  (I know, you think I've gone mad... well, click the following link to see my reasoning...)  'Spearhead from Space' contains this potential because it concentrates on a capitalist factory, upon the process of production, upon wage labour, upon products and commodities alienated and fetishized to the point of hostile autonomy.  Its monsters - the Autons - work as emblems of alienation and commodity fetishism as described by Marx.  They are hostile commodities, invested with a life of their own, confronting people as an external and dominating power.  They alienate the human image from humans.  They are made in the capitalist factory, by workers, several of whom are Asian women working for a white man making white dolls.  The Autons themselves are white - whiteness seems to be the Nestene idea of the typical human, the 'vanilla' human if you will.  The Autons are expressions of Nestene imperialism; the Nestenes explicitly describe themselves as colonialists.  The Nestenes merge their Autons with the human shopping centre and with a pantheon of white Western political oligarchs displayed in Madame Tussauds (with some non-white opponents of white imperialism - Ghandi, MLK - also on display, for counterpoint).  The plastic replicas of the ruling class stalk out of Tussauds to take over the country.  Meanwhile, the Autons attack in the high street, wearing price tags, gunning people down amidst adverts and logos and shop signs.  It's well understood that George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978) is a 'satire of consumerism' because it features zombies staggering mindlessly around a shopping mall.  Indeed, it's pretty much a cliché to mention the fact.  It's time people realised that, once again, Doctor Who got there first - only more acutely.  However, at the figurative centre of 'Spearhead from Space', at the heart of the factory where the Nestene entity itself is being produced, Holmes seems to evade the convergence of these themes by the sudden introduction of radically incoherent tentacles.  The threat was that the themes and signs of the story would converge lucidly upon the capitalist system as a generator of modern nightmares.  The tentacles - harking back to their original Weird blankness - are a redaction, a scrambling, an obfuscation.  Doctor Who relentlessly concentrates upon the modern nightmares that are generated by capitalism - industrialised warfare and imperialism, biological racism, fascism, etc. - but cannot openly acknowledge capitalism as the hub from which they emanate, owing to its status - the children's own programme that adults adore - within the established culture industry.

The ironic thing is that this semiotic evasion almost instantly became a semiotic association.  This may express an inherent instability within any sign that is pressed into the service of the inscrutable or inexpressible.  Evasion of meaning is fundamentally not what signs are supposed to do.  Evasion of truth, sure, but not of settled significance itself.  Such a sign hunts around for a meaning, so to speak.  It must find a telos, even if the one it finds is the very telos it was supposed to be evading.  (This is not idealism, by the way.  When I talk about the sign 'doing' things, I'm actually talking about the people using it... just as one might say that a car 'cruises' when in fact it is the driver doing the cruising.)

In 70s Who, the tentacular sign is employed to evade capitalism, and instantly starts to signify capitalism.  It would be easy to see this connection between the tentacular and capitalism as a mere empty recapitulation of continuity when it reappears in Holmes' sequel, 'Terror of the Autons'... if it weren't for almost immediate appearance of 'The Claws of Axos', which is a development and intensification of the connection, written by different writers.  Echoing the process described by Miéville - and that's what this is: an echo - the tentacular in Doctor Who is, almost from the first, enmeshed in an antagonistic dialectic with the gothic, the show's better-established mode. For instance, in 'Claws of Axos' the tentacular elbows out the gothic (while taking on a hauntological charge). The story was originally about a space 'vampire' in the shape of a giant skull; it became instead about a huge bag of strange, spectacular, writhing, incoherent flesh.

Later, the tentacular is so integrated into the internal sign system of 70s Who that it just rides in on an association with capitalism, even when there's nothing that needs obscuring because free trade-style capitalism is being presented as implicitly good. But even at this point - roughly speaking, 'The Curse of Peladon' - it still continues dancing with the gothic. In 'The Curse of Peladon', Arcturus is very nearly a skulltopus because he's both capitalist (a representative of the Federation with all its trade and progress, counterposed to Pel feudalism) but also a protectionist reactionary who wants Peladon to stay a feudal backwater. (This, it need hardly be said, reflects the arguments about free trade vs. protectionism which flurried around the UK's entry into the 'Common Market' roundabout the time 'Curse' was made, i.e. the dawn of neoliberalism.)

Astonishingly enough, this character...
[SPOILER WARNING!!!]
...turns out to be evil.

This skulltopusization can occur because 'Curse of Peladon' is a distant echo of the process described by Miéville; a televisual atavism in the 1970s of a process originally found in literature and graphics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The gothic/Weird dance continues, with tentacles always erupting whenever capitalism appears in the show as a systemic presence, throughout the rest of the Pertwee era. In 'The Green Death' - the last Pertweean gasp of the Weird - there is a tentacle which appears at the start, almost as an obligatory afterthought, and there are the Weird-esque maggots. Still, the gothic clings on alongside this recycled, processed version of the Weird. The gothic keeps trying to reintegrate. 'Green Death' works like an M.R. James ghost story, with its material 'hauntings', linked to technological modernity. It will be recalled that Miéville identified James as one of the precursors of the Weird. Reading James, one usually encounters not spectral ghosts but slimey, hairy, icky, chitinous things, or things that seem oddly to emerge from modernity - haunted prints, designs or train tickets, for example. This sort of thing is very apt to happen in Doctor Who because its version of the gothic has always been very material and materialist. 'The Green Death' is a perfect example, with its Jamesean 'ghosts': slimey, hairy, icky, chitinous monsters that emerge from a chemical factory. As James prefigured the Weird even as he wrote in the gothic, so 'Green Death' partially integrates the Weird and the gothic. It joins the Whoish 'material gothic' to its new habit of using the Weird as a way of evading/signifying capitalism. Even its title illustrates this dialectic, with the slimey, gooey 'Green' grafted onto the gothic 'Death'.

And so, we arrive at the Tom Baker years - always spoken of as quintessentially gothic. 


Broton's Zygotic Mynci

"Go away.  You're always hovering.  It makes me nervous."
"I just want to be near you."
"I've told you - not at work!"

The first appearance in the Baker era of anything even faintly Weird or Weird-esque (and it is faint) arrives (as already hinted) in 'Terror of the Zygons'.  The Zygons are covered in suckers.  They live underwater and control a sea monster.  So they're well maritime (as mentioned above, the Weird is frequently maritime in its concerns).  The Doctor even refers to them at one point as having tentacles, which is a bit of a stretch on his part, but still...  Moreover, they are shape-shifters.  This is another of those things which is actually rarer in Doctor Who than one might immediately think.  Apologies for the tautology, but the essence of the shape-shifter is indeterminacy of form. Here, once again, we have incoherence and the tentacular. I don't want to overstate. The Zygons are hardly inscrutable. They state their plans very clearly. They are most obliging with their freely-offered exposition when they capture Harry. There is little to misunderstand about them. They are a terroristic advance-guard of a fleet of imperialistic nomads. But they are tentacular (just about) and they are unstuck from a fixed physical form. Most especially, the inside of their ship is organic in a way not even hinted-at in the show since 'Axos'. With their great, domed foreheads, their name (which sounds so much like 'zygotes'), their ability to 'become' adult humans and their apparent loathing of doing so, their dependence upon the "lactic fluid" of a much-larger organism and their warm, snug, pulsing, fleshy, veined base of operations, it's hard not to notice that they are disquietingly infantile. Monstrous babies were much in vogue in Horror in the late 60s / early 70s. Rosemary's Baby, It's Alive, Eraserhead, The Omen... the original idea of the writers of Alien was that the monster should be like a "monstrous, deformed baby". This is a digression (gee, how unusual here!) but the point is that their ship recalls Axos, though in a much less wild and spectacular form.

The semiotic connection between the tentacular and capitalism is being continued, albeit it in a faint, garbled and undeveloped form. 'Terror of the Zygons' features rigs owned and run by an American oil company which is traumatically bringing on the collapse of an old, feudal way of life in favour of new capitalist development. Seven centuries of 'service' seem not to count "these days". All Forgill's servants leave to work for the rigs. Huckle's men trespass upon Forgill's lands, showing no respect for feudal land ownership in their pursuit of capitalist accumulation of a fossil fuel that will power modern technology. As in 'Green Death', the eruption of the Weirdish occurs in something of a gothic manner - the hidden erupts from beneath - as a result of the intrusion of modern, explicitly capitalist technology.

It's tempting to say that the Zygons are associated more with the 'old ways', the feudal aristocracy. Broton disguises himself as the Duke of Forgill and the Zygon ship is linked to the land by a tunnel that leads up into the dusty old library of Forgill Castle. Speaking in his Forgill persona, Broton seems convincingly to voice the resentment of the obsolete aristocrat in the time of the oil corporation. But this is to impose a clear-cut distinction where in fact there are complex interrelationships. The real Duke's ancestors would probably have been among those making 'improvements' to the land, i.e. enclosing it and evicting people from their homes to make way for sheep. This actually happened to land around Loch Ness. These were among the first steps in the rise of modern capitalism in Scotland. Huge tracts of private land used for bourgeois farming and/or rents, leading to the filling-up of industrial towns with displaced new proletarians and/or the expansion of the 'New World' colonies, vital because of their roles in the slave trade and production of commodities like cotton, or coal - the oil of its day.

Similarly, the Zygons plan a massive exercise in invasion and colonialism... chiming with the invasion and annexation of Scotland by England (re-enacted in a miniaturized, comic mode through UNIT's invasion and takeover of Angus's inn... a process he resists by loudly playing the bagpipes at the occupying, armed Sassenachs). But we can't straightforwardly associate Zygon colonialism with English colonialism. The Zygons are also refugees, driven away from their home and seeking a new one. They plan to colonize Earth using the slave labour of the humans. A great many of the Scottish Highlanders driven out of their homes by the Clearances ended up in the Carolinas in America. The Carolinas were, of course, slave states. If the Zygons work as the echoes of English domination of Scotland, they also work as an echo of the forced migrants who ended up dominating the New World. (Meanwhile, we can't straightforwardly assume a connection between Forgill's old-fashioned Scots aristocratic posture and Scottish nationalism. A lot of those dukedoms were created by the English crown.)


Recycling Experiment

Interestingly, some of these same dynamics - the interrelationship of feudal wealth and modern capitalism, the complex conception of colonial conquest - reappear in Robert Banks Stewart's other script for Hinchliffe and Holmes, 'The Seeds of Doom'.

The National Trust will have something to say about this.

In that story, Harrison Chase is a modern millionaire with a private lab and salaried employees, including a personal botanist and an enforcer with a gaggle of naff private thugs. Chase is entirely immersed in modernity. He is surrounded by modern technology - his private lab, his private plane, his huge climate-controlled greenhouse, his peculiar electronic organ (ooo-er missus), etc. He is also immersed in commodification. He buys officials, information, loyalty, etc. He owns people "body and soul". He owns and buys things constantly. He haggles over and buys a painting on screen during the story. He effectively buys the rights to the pod and everything that comes from it. That's how he sees it anyway. But he is also a relic of feudalism. His is evidently an old family, and his money is evidently old money. His house dates from the time of the Wars of the Roses ("charmingly named") and is haunted by Sir Bothwell Chase. There doesn't appear to be a contradiction here. The one form of power seems to bleed seamlessly into the other. Indeed, it might even go back farther than that. As the lord and master of cultivated grounds, as the Abbot of a "green cathedral", as a landowner and employer of a private army, Chase is almost like an echo of the earliest ruling classes that arose with the coming of agriculture. He's like one of the administrators or priests who came into existence when a new way of making a living - settled growing and reaping - brought surplus and, with it, social hierarchies... along with organised war, which suddenly became worthwhile once there were settled civilisations whose crops and plants you could seize. Chase and Scorby are like the descendants of these first lords and warriors, still fighting over ownership of the greenery all these centuries later. Feudalism and capitalism both seem to have carried this same violent and piratical hierarchy, in turn, down to the present. Chase is like a palimpsest of all these rulers. He's the Abbot, the lordly landowner, the modern businessman - all in one.

Also, there is much talk of 'revolution' in the story, and the inversion of power relationships... caused by an invasion and colonisation. Chase conceives of plants and flowers as being an oppressed group, as though they stand in a colonial relationship to animals. Even from the first, long before he seems to be 'possessed' by the Krynoid (not that he ever really is, if you ask me), he whinges to Dunbar about the "mutilation and torture" of plants in the practice of Bonsai, the favouritism allegedly shown towards animals by the World Ecology Bureau and the unnatural criminality of creating hybrids. Later, he talks of animals like a tyrannical ruling elite, about to be conquered and enslaved by the coming of the Krynoid, which he appears to see as a huge, plant-version of Che Guevara. The invasion and colonialism of the Krynoid is like the ousting of a native ruling class. He almost anticipates the doctrine of 'humanitarian intervention' - invade and conquer to (supposedly) free the oppressed - but for the fact that it isn't the humans he wants to save.

It's open to doubt whether 'Zygons' and 'Seeds' work this way because the show is still trying to evade noticing capitalism as a generator of modern nightmares. It feels more like the recapitulation of a settled sign, almost as a matter of habit. It also feels as though the studiedly gothic atmosphere of the Hinchcliffe / Holmes era is squeezing the Weird tentacles into an increasingly small corner. First there are tentacles that are not really tentacles (arms and legs with decorative suckers), then there are tentacles that are actually vines and creepers and roots. Capitalism still tags alongside these almost-tentacles (or is it the other way round) but in a decidedly muted, faint and compromised form. It appears mixed up with feudalism, in a very tangled way.

There is very little else in the Hinchcliffe years which qualifies as Weird or quasi-Weird or even almost-Weird. The tentacular returns with a vengeance, however, in the more political Williams era... just in time to notice that the world is changing, neoliberalism is flowering, class struggle is waning, Thatcher is rising and capitalism no longer anything to be worried about - at least not officially. Consequently, by the near-end of the Williams years, it no longer feels right to wrap capitalism in tentacles. But, as I say, this only happens after the tentacular/capitalist semiotic connection re-erupts... in ways that range from the furtive to the ambiguous to the angrily and hugely explicit.


CORRECTION, 28/09/12:
In the text above, I say that "A lot of those [Scottish] dukedoms were created by the English crown." That's just plain wrong. Factually inaccurate. Sorry. Thanks to Jennings for pointing this out.

Skulltopus 6: Macra Revisited

According to China Miéville, the classic, early 20th century haute Weird of Lovecraft and Hodgson is the nebulous, meaningless, reactionary scream of incomprehension that greets the onrushing horror of modernity.

I think that, for 70s Doctor Who, a resurrected and processed form of the Weird is what the show draws upon when it finds itself haunted by repressed knowledge that it cannot face: the knowledge that the modern nightmares upon which it dwells are generated by capitalism.  When the themes of a 70s Doctor Who story suggest the possibility that capitalism could be noticed and indicted in systemic terms - particularly in terms of the exploitation of the worker, race and/or imperialism - the show tries to jettison the hauntological (realising that it is itself being haunted... nay, stalked) in favour of the Weird.

I intend to justify these outrageous claims in a forthcoming post.

In my last post - here - I casually asserted that the Weirdish ab-crabs in 'The Macra Terror' are a "prelude" to the connection the show will make in the 70s between the tentacle and capitalism.  It occurs to me that I need to expand a bit on my Skulltopus post about the Macra - here - in order to make myself clear on this point.

I think that the Colony in 'The Macra Terror' is a picture of mainstream Britain in denial during the radical late 60s, of a prosperous capitalist world that runs on repression, oppression, obedience, media conditioning, hierarchy.  The Colony strongly hints at being capitalist in various ways, not least the Butlins vibe that everyone talks about, the Pilot's sitcom businessman manner, Barney's salon and spa, etc.

Most explicitly, the story concentrates on the mining of gas... and Britain in 1967 was right in the middle of switching over to North Sea Gas.  In the story, the gas (a toxic substance that humans don't need and which actively endangers workers) is mined for the benefit of other, hidden, possibly insane reasons/persons - in this case, the Macra.

The Macra, as I noted elsewhere, are extremely hauntological (in that material/pseudo-materialist way that things are hauntological in Who) in that they actively and literally haunt the Colony while clearly representing something that the characters all know must be denied.  In the January 2012 issue of Panic Moon, I hint that this repressed knowledge is the knowledge that they are exploited - specifically and explicitly as workers - by an irrational tyranny, and that this ties into the way that the radical currents in the late 60s were popularizing a critique of Western consumerist capitalism as tyrannical and alienating.

And so, whether it be cause or effect, we get Weirdish monsters.

They are giant crabs, as in some classic Weird fiction... except that, when you listen to the story (especially since you have to listen to it) they are also categorically indeterminate, big/small, crab/non-crab, insect/spider/bacteria things that people have trouble perceiving clearly, even - especially - when they see them.

Moreover, the Macra's own mentalities are extremely contradictory, incoherent, self-denying... to the point of bordering on psychosis. They are so desperate to deny that the Colony's happy and prosperous capitalist world of makeovers and mining (i.e. of productive industry and leisure industry) exists to serve their needs that they end up frantically denying their own existence!

The hysteria of the Macra's screams of "Macra do not exist!  THERE ARE NO MACRA!!!!" (over a TV screen, lets not forget) sounds, to me, very much like the way that mainstream media in capitalist society will go round the houses - sometimes to farcical degrees - to steer conversations, debates, discourse and criticism away from the central economic facts of our society (on the rare occasion that anyone liable to raise them in the first place ever gets on the media).  The Macra deny their own existence, just as capitalist media culture tries to make capitalism vanish into 'democracy' and 'the West' and 'free trade' and 'the economy' and many other euphemisms.  Capitalism tries to make itself invisible, and to make its exploitative core invisible, via its hegemony over culture (back to Gramsci we go) and through the obscuring of class consciousness by various forms of alienation and commodity fetishism (back to Lukacs we go).

Once again, the social wound in which the Macra breed is all to do with hierarchy and exploitation, it operates through productive work for the benefits of people other than the workers, it guards itself using a leisure industry and a hegemonic system of ideas that touts notions of social cohesion, cheerfulness, pulling together, altruism, team spirit, the state as honest broker, enjoy your time off, etc... and all this, not in a totalitarian state (when people say that the Colony is totalitarian they are totally missing the point) but in a society that strongly hints that it is capitalistic even while it uses methods of thought control and repression.

Of course, the production draws heavily upon the semiotics of totalitarianism - most particularly the Cartier/Kneale TV adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four - but it also subverts them and... well... de-Sovietizes them to a large extent.  There's a makeover salon and a version of Miss World for Polly to enter.  The holiday camp thing has been noted many times... but the really important thing about that is that holiday camps look like (to use Miles and Wood's phrase) "a little bit of Eastern Europe just outside Cromer".  The regimentation, the smiling authoritarianism, the moral puritanism, and the solidly working class background of most guests, makes the holiday camp an ideal - almost inevitable - way of commenting on the way capitalist Britain and communist dictatorships had certain eerie similarities.  In the late 60s, when people like Herbert Marcuse were suddenly selling lots of books, this was a notion whose time had come.  People were starting to see tyranny on both sides of the iron curtain.  This is why 'The Macra Terror' prefigures The Prisoner.  In that show, Number 6 is never sure which side is holding him.  The unspoken horror of it is that it could be either or both.  It doesn't really matter.  As one of the Number 2s says, both sides will one day regard each other and realise that they are "looking into a mirror".

That's why 'The Macra Terror' (which came before The Prisoner, let's not forget) was near-the-knuckle stuff.  I know this sounds like a strange thing to say about Doctor Who at the best of times... but all the same, this was about as close as mainstream popular TV could get to noticing that capitalism was pretty bloody horrible, not as an exception but as a rule.

The way in which the Macra are radically obscured (Weirdified) is the camouflage, the misdirection.  They - and many of the other Weirdish monsters in Who - arrive when the show itself is being haunted by repressed knowledge that it cannot notice or accept without ceasing to be what Doctor Who is (that is, a staple aspect of the culture industry catering for children in capitalist Britain, existing within that cultural hegemony).  The show, via its materialist or pseudo-materialist gothic dynamic, is constantly drawn to the nightmarish effects of capitalism, often unable and always reluctant to notice that they are capitalist effects, occasionally drawing on the fundamentally non-gothic monster (while still, paradoxically, using the non-gothic in a hauntological way) as a method of escaping from or fudging the conclusions it is edging towards, the conclusion... or perhaps realisation would be a better word... that industrial war, modern imperialism, modern slavery, fascism (all repeatedly addressed by the show) all have their roots in the same system.

Panic on the Streets of London...

The January 2012 issue of the extremely good, fetchingly illustrated, conveniently pocket-sized and infeasibly cheap print fanzine Panic Moon will be released soon and is now available for pre-order. Click here.

This month the Editor has taken the existence of the publication very much into his hands and granted me even more space than usual.  I have no less than three pieces in this forthcoming issue, looking at 'The Macra Terror', 'The War Games' and 'Invasion of the Dinosaurs'.

I see all these stories as milestones in Doctor Who's engagement with the radical movements and ideas of the 60s.  'The Macra Terror' is a much-misunderstood starting point which came just before the protest movements peaked, 'The War Games' a subversive high point which came just after the ferment of 1968 and 'Invasion of the Dinosaurs' marks the ambivalence and disillusion brought by the subsequent downturn in struggle.

There's loads of other stuff in the fanzine besides me, so don't be put off.

Skulltopus 3: Yes, We Have No Macra

If any monster in the history of Who was ever a gothic, hauntological thing embodying the 'return of the repressed', it was the Macra.

All the ostentatious happiness of the Colony is there to cover unease.  They know there’s something wrong, otherwise why deny it so desperately?  Why would the Colony go to such lengths to contain and silence Medok unless he was speaking the unspeakable truth that everybody else wants to deny?  The Macra haunt the Colony, scuttling around at night, hiding in the shadows, unseen then glimpsed and then disappearing.  They haunt the people, who all know about them (even down to having a name for them) but claim to disbelieve in them.  They represent repressed knowledge that is insisting upon being remembered.  This is pure gothic.

But... they’re also a bit Weird, in the sense of the ‘Weird fiction’ of early 20^th century horror (something I've discussed in previous Skulltopus posts).  William Hope Hodgson, one of the greatest Weird writers, used giant crabs a lot in his peculiar and deeply unsettling maritime tales.  As previous noted, the author China Miéville has written that the Weird (at least classic, 'haute Weird' of the late 19th-early 20th century) was an attempt to express the meaningless and unrecognisable, and that it thus stands in "non-dialectical superposition" to the gothic (or  the ‘hauntological’), which is about the buried secret, the thing we recognise but refuse, that which we know but wish (need) to deny.  The tentacled thing is the quintessential Weird monster type… a type unprecedented in Western fantastic fiction before the Weird.  But Hodgson's tentacled things co-exist with giant crabs.  I'm not sure how precedented giant crabs were in the Western uncanny.  Certainly, people in the West had seen crabs before... but then, as Miéville acknowledges, they'd seen tentacled things too.  It's not about unfamiliarity so much as literary unprecedentedness, as an absence of semiotic baggage and any tradition of previous meanings.  In any case, whereas the haunting thing is frightening because we recognise it, and recognise that it means something, the Weird thing is frightening because it is something meaningless and incomprehensible, stalking us for no reason that we can ken.

The Macra are TV monsters from 1967... and this is very different to literary monsters in 1917... but that's a minefield I'll try to traverse in another post.  But, shunting that massive problem to one side just for now, the Macra genuinely do seem to me to be Weird, but also to be hauntological.  They haunt because, as noted, they are recognised and not recognised, seen and denied, fled from because of the repressed knowledge that they represent.  On the other hand, they are not spectral or phantasmic, for all their elusiveness.  They're giant crabs for heaven's sake.  Or are they?

Because here’s the really strange thing: the Macra don’t really seem to be giant crabs at all!  The original titles of this story were 'The Spidermen' and 'The Insect-Men'.  The characters in the story are uncertain what the Macra are, even – especially - when they see them.  They don’t call them crabs.  Nobody actually says the word “crab” during the story!  The characters ask: “are they insects?”  They ask: “are they some monstrous form of bacteria?”  The Doctor thinks they’re germs.  It’s unclear how literal he’s being.

Okay, they look like crabs in the few pictures we have left… which is perhaps why this story is, after all, better (or Weirder) heard but not seen: not because the monster props were bad (though, in all honesty…) but because they were too recognisably one type of thing.  Unseen, the Macra retain an indefinability, a categoric indeterminacy.  Mind you, seeing the giant crab while the characters don’t recognise it as crablike but instead suggest other descriptions… this might be even Weirder.  The giant crab may have precedents in classic weird fiction, but the giant quasi-crab or un-crab or ab-crab (it is both crab and not-crab) is even more in the style of the Weird.  The creature of unstable form and type, the creature that is overdescribed using incompatible terms (it’s an insect and a germ, it’s a bacterium and it’s huge, it’s a crab but it also isn’t), the creature that is indeterminate and protean and incomprehensible… that’s genuinely reminiscent of Lovecraft’s radically unrecognisable, incoherently over-described, unknowable ‘Old Ones’ and Shoggoths.

This effect is heightened by the experience of listening to the audio, having the crab image in your head from the CD case and the stills you've seen, but hearing the characters unable (or unwilling) to perceive what the bloody things are.  It's enough to make you hope they never find the footage.  It's certainly enough to make you abjure the recons (though I've never been a recon kind of guy anyway).  'The Macra Terror', by being unseen, becomes a bit more literary... or acquires something of the non-visual, descriptive, imaginational (yes, that is a word - I should know, I just invented it), hallucinogenic quality of literature that demands of us that we should visualise the fantastic and unreal.

Also, the Macra’s mentality and psychology is almost as opaque as their form.  They seem to be both rational and irrational.  They speak, as the voice of Control… but this seems like a ‘normal’ human voice.  It’s an untreated voice.  There’s no audio effect in use, no vocoder, not even after the voice has been revealed as the voice of the Macra.  We have to imagine that voice emanating from one of those Volkswagon-sized un-crabs, sitting behind a mic, skulking out of view around a corner.  The incongruity provokes derision and unease simultaneously.  The voice is plummy and pally, sometimes authoritative, sometimes sneaky… sometimes hilariously over-emphatic, evincing terror and irrational hysteria.  This chimes with their behaviour during the story.  They seem to be utilitarian, machiavellian, ruthless, exploitative, secretive, furtive… but also communicative, dependent, oddly reluctant to order killing, bad planners, bad improvisers, beneficiaries of an unnecessarily fragile set-up, etc.  And they are scared: of being discovered, of being defeated, but also of themselves, of their own existence, of being.  Oddness of oddnesses, the Control voice (the voice of the Macra) is at its most frantic, its most insanely frightened and irrational, its most screechingly emphatic, when it is denying the existence of the Macra.  It denies its own existence, again and again, in an escalatingly loud series of increasingly unhinged, pleonastic reiterations.  It sounds desperate to convince everyone, including itself, that it does not exist.

Of course, with the tapes junked, the Macra have achieved a kind of spectrality.  They don't exist anymore, except as a voice, as the incomprehension in the minds and voices of the characters who encounter them, as depthless CGI reincarnations in another story, and as moment when pulp kid's TV seems to have genuinely approached a belated and partial merging of the Weird and the gothic.


NOTE, 11/04/13:
It's been pointed out to me that the assertion made above that "Nobody actually says the word 'crab' during the story!" is incorrect.  Polly calls them "crabs"... though she does couple the word with "or insects", retaining the air of indeterminacy I was remarking upon.

Abide With Me 2.0

This is an edited and partly-rewritten version of something I posted at the old site.



In a world in which 99% of all TV is 99% predictable 99% of the time, ‘Gridlock’ seems like an impertinent rejoinder to everything else on the screen, as though the Doctor Who production team are blowing contemptuous raspberries at the people who churn out all the beige wallpaper that constitutes most modern telly. ‘Gridlock' hammers every bit of mass-produced, by-the-numbers, formulaic drama that clogs up the channels. Then, just for good measure, it laughingly refuses to play by the rules of Doctor Who, old or new.

There is no invasion and no tyranny to topple; there are no corridors and no captures (well, there’s one… sort of) and no escapes; there are no fascist guards, no rebels, no evil masterminds; there is no ticking time-bomb, no race against time, no evil plot for the Doctor to foil. Other writers might have made the story about the Doctor trying to stop everyone dying because of the BLISS patches. In ‘Gridlock’, RTD has the Doctor arrive when this is all over and almost everyone is long dead. Imagine what ‘The Ark in Space’ would’ve been like if the Doctor had arrived years after the Wirrn had already eaten almost the whole of the human race… mind you, even then there could’ve been a Doctor-and-rebels-fight-monsters tale. In ‘Gridlock’, there are no monsters in the proper sense. The cat people are both nice, the Face of Boe is without malice. Even the Macra are not allowed to take over the script or be this week’s baddies. Their fate is not even alluded to at the end. The Doctor’s priority is to clear the gridlock. The death of the Macra that feed on the exhaust fumes is a by-product of his main aim (one assumes that some of the unscrupulous entrepreneurs of the undercity are going to get rich selling lots of crab meat). Some fans have criticised what they perceive as the way the Macra were underused… but really, did we need another story about the Macra running a colony of slaves? I know the original Macra tale is sadly missing, but a story that was all about CGI Macra being naughty wouldn’t have brought it back. Besides, ‘The Macra Terror’ is a tale of its time, expressing the anxieties of the 60s generation about brainwashing, conformity and consumer culture. Putting the Macra at the centre of ‘Gridlock’ would’ve made ‘Gridlock’ a story about the Macra, yet another bad old monster stomping about.

‘Gridlock’ is almost unrelentingly surprising, even to people me who, let’s face it, watch far too much telly. Not only is ‘Gridlock’ unpredictable, it’s tricky too. It deliberately leads you down blind alleys and then presents you with a basket of kittens. Just when you think it’s going to be about urban guerrillas kidnapping Martha, the urban guerrillas turn out to be a nice guy and his pregnant girlfriend who just needed an extra passenger. Just when you think it’s going to be about a dystopian tyranny in which the nasty old government is deliberately keeping people in a jam, the government turns out to be long dead. Just when you think it’s going to be about the Doctor leading the oppressed to revolt, the oppressed tell the Doctor they’re not going to help him because they’ve got the kids in the back. Just when you think it’s going to be about Novice Hame getting her revenge, it turns out that she has found redemption. Just when you’re sure that the fast lane is reserved for cars with three passengers so that the Macra can be sure of getting enough meat per can… it turns out that the three passengers rule is just an archaic leftover of when the motorway actually worked and the Macra are just getting lucky. Just when you think it’s going to be about the Macra setting up a system and manipulating their human slaves (yawn, just like last time), it turns out that the Macra are parasitic upon a situation not of their making. The script keeps setting you up for some revelation of structured conspiracy and instead produces another layer of morbidly absurd accident… which is, in case we hadn’t paused to notice and appreciate this, the exact antithesis of almost all TV and movie sci-fi since The X Files made paranoia the dominant fantasy mode.

‘Gridlock’ not only has a narrative texture like little else seen before but also a visual texture to match. Even its antecedents ‘The End of the World’ and ‘New Earth’ look tame by comparison. Moreover, the episode’s riotous visuals are coherent in that they stem from and complement the story being told on both literal and metaphorical levels. For once, the whole thing looks multicoloured and multitextured for a reason. The reason is that this twofold.  Firstly, the episode wants to portray the epilogue to the end of civilisation, so it uses the visual style of the pastiche associated with what's called 'postmodernism'.  Secondly, the episode is an extended celebration of human variety and multiplicity, contrasted with the nightmares of a cityscape gone wrong: dilapidation, drabness, and congestion. “Change and decay in all around I see” as the lyrics of ‘Abide with Me’ put it.

The only glimpses of the outside world we see (until we’re two thirds through the episode) are of the “undercity” and the subterranean motorway. The undercity is a rotting urban wasteland which seems to service the travellers when they can briefly disembark at a layby (this is, presumably, when they pick up food, fuel and other essentials; the mood sellers in the back alley imply a whole underground economy parasitic upon the gridlock in very much the same way as the Macra). The denizens of the undercity are personified by the smock-wearing pharmacists and their black-robed customer/victim. People don’t want to live in this shithole, that’s why they’re prepared to live for years in a traffic jam instead. They’re hoping for something better, all hoping for a better life somewhere else. They’re not on the motorway for fun. They’re escapees, pilgrims hoping to make it to Sugarcandy Mountain. Their occasional foraging/shopping trips in the undercity must only strengthen their resolve to keep going and get away, to make it all the way to the better life that they half know is impossible to reach. The rest of their lives are spent inching forward in their aircars inside a tunnel of poisonous smoke... but when they think about the undercity, it must seem worth it. Escape must seem so good. Of course, like drugs and religion (two other temptations in which they dabble), their escape is fake. But, all the same, it must just feel good to be going somewhere, to be moving, to be heading away from the bad stuff, to be making plans for the kids to have a better life. Years spent in a car would be a tiresome life, but preferable to eking out an existence in the City of Last Things.

And they can always buy some moods for when they weaken. The city itself is the only advert for their wares that the pharmacists need; a familiar syndrome to anyone who knows anything about the link between drug abuse and urban poverty. The black robed girl is content to buy some complacency from an unscrupulous mini-capitalist on a street corner. Those little patches are symbolic of booze and junk and TV, of all the things we pay for to help numb the boredom and the pain instead of doing something about them. Interestingly, the pharmacists don't just sell pleasant moods, they sell ANGER too. Any emotion is preferable to numbness, emptiness and boredom. Within the jam, inside the cars, things are different. The drabness of the undercity is left behind. A whole panoply of human social existence is thrown at us. The different colours and styles and shapes, the different takes on life, the sheer strangeness that we can encounter just by dropping into somebody else’s personal space.

Also, ‘Gridlock’ revels in the sexual diversity of humanity. We have a straight couple but we also have an elderly lesbian couple (one of whom is yet another of RTD’s affectionately drawn geeks) and a woman who’s had a litter of kittens by a cat/man. To talk about a “gay agenda” seems redundant when confronted by ideas like this. It's a human agenda.  In this story, even animals aren't off-limits, as long as they’re old enough, sapient and bipedal. The lesbian couple in ‘Gridlock’ are extremely important because the portrayal is utterly free of the exploitative muck that usually clogs up representations of girl-girl relationships. They’re not young and glam, a turn-on for the lads. Nor are they miserable and stunted, a comfort to the bigots. Positive images of human sexuality in many variations.

The production design employs pastiche (or blank parody, to use Frederic Jameson's phrase) to further emphasise the cultural post-apocalypse and the paradoxical diversity of human social life. The people have only the fragmentary ruins of culture left, but - and this is crucial - they've either decided to trust the ruins or turn them to use.  Source after source is ransacked and jammed crazily into Russell T. Davies’ postulated future, a future of scrambled history and recontextualised images. Brannigan’s flying jacket, the police shield, Sally Calypso’s hairdo, the old ladies’ china tea set, the towering cityscape and the posters inside the car owned by the two Asian girls (which recall Blade Runner, another film that used pastiche to create an image-soaked, post-apocalyptic, po-mo future of bunched-up history and decaying consumerism… with techno-blimps booming “a new life awaits you in the offworld colonies…”).  This represents the condition of moderntiy in decline and fall, but also opens a field of opportunity for the refugees.

Grant Wood’s American Gothic is pulled into service, providing us with the couple at the start, instantly conjuring up ideas of a society built by hardy settlers. Wood’s famous and much parodied image is a lightly-ironic but affectionate paen to the descendants of those Americans who travelled (sometimes for years, stuck in little caravans that they made into moving homes) to make a new start in the wilderness. New New York is a rebuilt and reimagined version of old New York, the city we know, that was created by waves of settlers and immigrants. Like settlers, immigrants always think that things are better and more free somewhere else, somewhere over the horizon. Let’s not forget that New Earth itself is the place where humanity made its new home after the destruction of the old. It’s a new world, built by settlers, colonists, people who (presumably) trekked through the wilderness of space and carved out a recreation of home… very much like the antecedents of the people in Wood’s famous painting.

(I used to think the guy in the suit was a reference to Magritte.  I don't read 2000AD, you see.)

The concentration in image and representation is significant.  In a way, the gridlockers are trapped in a giant representation.  Motorways lead somewhere, this keeps you circling. You’re not on a journey, just in a picture of a journey. You’re not in a city but in a pretence of a city. You’re not in a society, you’re on someone’s Friends List.

Ah, is that what ‘Gridlock’ is about? The internet? Maybe the apocalypse that decimated New New York came from computers rather than drugs, or some strange mixture of the two. Perhaps it was software patches and a computer virus. The language is ambiguous. And the gridlock seems worryingly familiar to any internet junkie. Like the motorway, the internet is a fake escape... an 'e-scape', if you like. All of us shut up in our private boxes on the “information superhighway”, all sat at control consoles, looking at screens, communicating via technology with the people on our Friends Lists and shutting ourselves away from the daylight… while beneath us, the monsters of the repressed stir in the waste (technological, cultural, material) that we create. There are, as we all know, monsters lurking within the internet, feeding off it; predators who claw for the straying sheep. Is that the significance of the black wolfwoman and her two chained female captives?

Which leads us to the monsters. The monstrousness in ‘Gridlock’ is the monstrousness of the by-product. This whole story is full of monstrous by-products. The virus is a by-product of the patches and the patches are a by-product of the rampant apocalyptic unease. The gridlock is a by-product of the virus. The toxic smoke is a by-product of the gridlock, as are the creatures that live within it. As soon as the Macra appear we assume that they created the gridlock for their own purposes… but like the society of New New York, the Macra have devolved from the highpoint of their civilization. They’re there because of the gridlock, not the other way round. The monsters (both of the literal and figurative variety) aren’t at the centre of this tale, they’re at the edges, emergent properties of the malfunctioning, dying society of New Earth. Is it any wonder that the Macra live in the filthy smoke belched out by the motor city? Carbon fumes are the ultimate by-product of our civilization, a by-product that is destroying our world.

If you view ‘Gridlock’ on its own, the Macra are inessential; make them giant slugs and call them the Zargoids and it wouldn’t matter. However, if you remember their first story they suddenly become thematically perfect for ‘Gridlock’. Even in their first appearance they were bacteria as much as crabs or insects, germs breeding in the body politic, infections in the social wound. They’re our antithesis (they breathe what poisons us) but they depend upon us, upon our industrialisation. In ‘The Macra Terror’, they lived on the fossil fuels mined by a smiling, happy, consumerist totalitarian state that played the community card and then sent its citizens to the loony bin if they uttered unorthodox thoughts. A very 60s nightmare. A nightmare that reflected a Britain of holiday camps, of commercialised rebellion, of North Sea oil, of politicians invoking the Dunkirk spirit. In ‘Gridlock’, a very 2007 nightmare, the Macra are living on the noxious fumes of a motor society that now exists to keep people alive by stranding them in a futile and absurd merry-go-round. They’re living on the lead and carbon monoxide. But, as ever, this isn’t about the future. It’s about us. It’s about the hidden killers that live in the exhaust fumes (literal and metaphorical; gaseous and psychological) of our absurd society.

However you look at them – as the dark side of the digital information age, as the toxic by-products of industrial civilization, as the harbingers of killer climate change - the Macra in ‘Gridlock’ are the monsters of the repressed, waiting to devour us if we face them.  They're the hidden things at the back of our minds that we don’t want to think about; unpalatable facts that we dismiss as “air vents”.  This, by the way, makes 'Gridlock' very gothic.  The gothic is all about being confronted by that which has been repressed. 

Thatcher said “there is no such thing as society, only individuals and families”. Separated from society, staying as individuals or families, staying safe in gridlock, we can cheat the monsters and pretend they’re not there. But get three people in a car and suddenly that’s not a couple, that’s beginning to look like a society. The temptation of the fast lane is too much. And then they get us. And then we see what our world has really become, a breeding ground for monstrosities that breathe our pollution. 

The Doctor guesses that the people in the traffic jam know (on some level) that their civilization has vanished, that they are alone and going nowhere, that the places they were trying to reach are as gone as the places they left. Why else would they be so discomforted by his questions?  If they didn’t know they were trapped in a representation, they wouldn’t have to stop off to buy mood patches. They’re stuck in a quest for a better life over the horizon, a quest that they all know is doomed to failure. Their only option is to stop, but they can’t because they’re committed to the journey. In a sense, since the jam was their only possible destination, they’ve already arrived but can’t disembark. They can’t stop. They can’t go up. That just leaves down, into the fast lane where they meet the things they were trying to blot out with hope, hymns, drugs, isolation and wilful complacency. Down in the fast lane, they meet the by-products of the jam: the smoke from the exhaust-pipes and the deadly, snapping, carapaced truths that lie within it.

Is ‘Gridlock’ a religious allegory? It is possible to read New New York as a picture of some kind of crude religious cosmology. A gleaming Heaven above, Purgatory in the middle and a Hell full of monsters below. But, if you read it that way, you soon notice that 'heaven' is empty. No God to be seen. There may be a religious theme here but there's no mysticism. The Face of Boe might sacrifice himself to save the gridlocked people but he isn't then resurrected. He doesn't convince as a Christ figure. Besides, you can just as easily decide to read 'Gridlock' as a Freudian picture of the mind by substituting Heaven, Purgatory and Hell with superego, ego and id.

Some people have suggested that 'Gridlock' is a religious allegory because the people in the jam sing hymns. But that’s a bit like saying that because of the mood patches, the episode is a drugs allegory. Okay, the patches clearly denote drugs (legal mood stabilisers and anti-depressants as much illegal stuff) but they’re just one part of the picture. In a way, the religion on display is a drug too. An occasional fix of hope and camaraderie.

This story is more about alienation.  It approaches this via a depiction of faith as a social product and a social expression.  Startlingly, it fits directly into the classical Marxist view of religion.  Marx called religion “the opium of the people”, everybody knows that, but he wasn’t just sneering. He also said, before the bit about opium, that religion is “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation.” Religion is subjectivity constructed to express and fend off alienation. Alienation, for Marx, is the syndrome whereby people are robbed of their subjectivity in a society that takes their labour - and the products of their labour - away from them and then uses it to dominate them in the form of capital (i.e. technology that is not used for the satisfaction of real human needs, etc.)  This is absolutely implicit in 'Gridlock'.  The people of New New York are tyrannised by the effects of the technological product, communicate via technological products, live in technological products... technological products have destroyed their society, destroyed even its capacity to produce anything but waste products and/or monstrous by-products.  Capitalism has eaten itself alive... the only remnants being the petit bourgeois mood traders.  Even the upper reaches of the system, the government, has been desolated by the maximum socia/technological entropy generated by the system.  Marx once ironically described "the heaven of the state" where all must appear just and fair and right and good, so as to disguise the squalid reality of a system based on exploitation.  Well, in 'Gridlock', the council chamber is a ruined heaven, decimated by the runaway processes that it once presided over.

But Limbo is still there and people are making the best of it.  Inside their little cars, the people have created colour, texture, comfort and meaning.  Domesticity on the move, family life within a small space, prayers of communal determination, hymns to the eventual salvation, a pilgrimage to the promised land. Their pseudo-journey has taken on religion as the heart of their heartless world, a construction of meaning from meaninglessness. Escape is their real religion and their real drug. Like both religion and drugs, their escape is an illusion. But their lives are not illusions, their children and relationships and friendships are real. Domesticity may be an escape, and a compromised one, but it also has value in itself. E. M. Forster wrote novels about this sort of theme… though, admittedly, none of them had giant crabs in them.

No, ‘Gridlock’ isn’t Doctor Who’s answer to Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress... but it does show people trying to use religious ideas as a guide and map, just as in Bunyan.  But crucially, in ‘Gridlock’, the pilgrims don’t make any progress, at least not on the pilgrimage road. They have mistaken the map for the territory. 

‘Gridlock’ is a humanist allegory because human social life, in its successes and failures, is depicted as the source of all meaning. ‘Gridlock’ features hymns as human social defences against despair, not messages to a mystical God. The story isn’t starry-eyed about people. It depicts them as sometimes unscrupulous, predatory, complacent, self-deluding and lonely… yet what hardy and stubborn determination they have to find colour, life and meaning in their relationships and in their own selves. Even locked away from each other in little boxes, people refuse to be squashed and isolated entirely. Even when trapped inside an absurd system, people find ways to make sense out of senselessness.

There is a reason that this episode features hymns so prominently, desides the depiction of alienation and solace. What are hymns but attempts to unite a congregation in communal meaning. And ‘Abide with me’ is well chosen. To “abide” means to live, dwell, endure. Live with me. It isn’t a hymn of praise but rather a plea for God’s companionship. In this context, ‘Abide with Me’ signifies not only the human instinct to construct meaning, but also our desire to live in community and communality, to dwell together, to comfort and be comforted. Hymns might be expressions of delusion, alienation, protest... but they’re also an expression of togetherness. ‘Gridlock’ itself is an agnostic hymn to the social, to the manifold follies and possibilities of human communal existence.

Walter Benjamin once wrote that perhaps Marx was wrong about revolutions being the locomotive of history.  Perhaps revolutions are what happens when the passengers on the train pull the emergency cord in order to stop the train careening towards a disaster.  He saw the system as rushing onwards to catastrophe.  To escape the catastrophe, you have to stop the onward rush.  Well, the people in 'Gridlock' didn't manage to pull the cord in time (neither are we managing this, so far) but they did manage to escape the crash.  The next thing for them to do is to break out of their limbo, to break out of the continuum in which they are stuck (to use another of Benjamin's favourite metaphors).  They do this, with a little help from the Doctor.

This is, of course, the Doctor’s journey too. The Doctor is stuck in gridlock, running away from a dead home, running on escape and bliss and forgetfulness, travelling in absurd circles inside a box, always moving but never getting anywhere permanent. Now that Rose has gone he’s reverted back to the lonely man he was when we met him again in ‘Rose’. He doesn’t want to talk to Martha, to tell her the truth, to properly engage with her as a person, to take her on more than one trip, to do anything more than just show off to her. And there’s no wonder he finds New Earth so attractive. It’s a recreation of a destroyed world, recreated by the survivors. He’d like something like that for himself. He’s attracted to the idea of surviving and rebuilding, as anybody from a destroyed home and a dead race would be. It’s very apt that as he rescues the gridlocked people from their absurd and accidental apocalypse, as he makes social life possible for them again, the Face of Boe finally tells him that he is not alone.

After all, isn’t that what ‘Gridlock’ tells all of us? That we are not alone.

Troughtonite Revisionism

I reposted my Hartnell stuff from Timelash II pretty much as it originally appeared. I've rejigged the following Troughton stuff a fair bit, however, so you'd better read it all over again very carefully, in case you miss a syllable of my searing insight and sage wisdom.


'The Underwater Menace'

I could easily tear this story to pieces, yes? And feed the pieces to my pet octopus, yes??? But this story has sense of humour! I too have sense of humour!!!! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha haaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!

Look, if you think this story is any more silly than any other Doctor Who story... well, it isn't.

Look at the amount of thought that went into the costumes and sets. Polly spends a lot of the story with a detail from a doric column on her head! Look at the detail in which Atlantean society is depicted. There's a throne room, a temple, a lab, a hospital, a market... there are priests and acolytes, beggers and traders, slaves and workers, guards and orderlies... there are intimations of popular dislike for the forces of the state... Look at the variations in the personalities. Look at the way people change - from the king to the sadistic doctor to the disillusioned priest... And our heroes team up with two marooned sailors and a brave servant girl to form a little multi-ethnic band of rebels who instill industrial action... a strike that wins! And helps to bring down the government!

Yeah, I know... it's daft. But it's no dafter, fundamentally, than 'The Caves of Androzani'. Yes, 'Caves' is infinitely better in many ways... but that's not the point.

This has been called the Doctor Who version of Plan 9 From Outer Space... which is wrong, wrong, wrongarama. We laugh at Ed Wood movies because they're badly made. This isn't badly made. Actually - if you look at the verve and pace of Episode Three, the detailing of the designs and costumes, the wit of the dialogue, and the technical achievements - it's rather superbly made!

The great underwater strike ballot ballet is amazing for the time, given that they probably made it in the cupboard at Lime Grove in 14 minutes on a budget of 2 shillings and fourpence. Yeah, you can see the strings a couple of times... but so what? Would you've thought it was all real but for those glimpses of wire? Is it really - I'm saying REALLY - any more fake looking than the CGI in most Hollywood blockbusters? Does that really - I'm saying REALLY - look REAL? Nope, of course not. And in addition to looking unreal it looks plastic, computery, synthetic... whereas the fish people's underwater stuff looks physical, looks touchable, looks human. It's like Ray Harryhausen animation. It's obviously fake, but it has a beauty and a reality that goes beyond mere realism. It looks like its happening underwater! There are even bubbles! Yeah, they're some form of obvious effect - but they look fantastic anyway! And the amazing, defamiliarizing music! It's spooky, weird, discomforting. It screams MODERN in a sublimely 60s way... and I'm not talking about the naff version of the 60s that we're all supposed to laugh at now. I'm talking about the 60s way that still screams of daring and iconoclasm. This stuff was made by eccentric geniuses using old bits of tape! Give me this over all the boring, bombastic, synth-emo, film score pastiche, bow-wow bombast that Murray Gold can belt out. A thousand times, I say this.

Also, we laugh at Ed Wood movies because the deluded no-hopers who made and starred in them had no sense of the irony of what they were doing. Watch Episode Three (tragically, the only surviving episode) and tell me the cast didn't understand the irony of what they were doing... except that makes it sound like they're sniggering up their sleeves. And they're not. The disillusioned priest sounds genuinely disillusioned. The Doctor sounds genuinely appalled by Zaroff. Zaroff sounds genuinely mad. They're playing it straight, but within the confines of the outlandish, outrageous, daft, way-out adventure serial mode. The cast are pitch perfect. Also, they're clearly enjoying themselves. Watch the scene where Ben and Jamie pretend to interrogate the disguised Doctor in the market. How can you not share their pleasure at what they're doing?

Yeah, this recycles all the tropes of the Flash Gordon style B-serial... but without the glibber-than-glib characterisation, the swaggering jingoism, the cheaty cliffhangers. It does that B-serial thang... but with people who seem to think and feel, albeit within the confines of utter nonsense. But what is inherently trivial or stupid about nonsense? I reject that idea utterly. Nonsense can have integrity. 'The Underwater Menace' has oodles of integrity. The integrity of delight. If you can, without delight, contemplate Anneke Wills in a surgical smock, indignantly saying "you're not turning me into a fish!" to Colin Jeavons with huge fake eyebrows, then... well, may the wrath of Amdo engulf you.

And Zaroff is utterly priceless. I love the bit when the Doctor asks him (in a wonderfully patient voice) why he wants to blow up the world and he responds "you as a scientist ask me why?" as if the Doctor has asked him a self-evidently ludicrous question... and then there's the hysterical laugh that infuses his voice as he says "you demand? You demand?" at King Thous. It's a great performance. Of course, Zaroff is *just* a mad scientist. But so is Davros. So is Sharaz Jek.

I'm happy to read stuff into Who. It's one way in which I enjoy the texts and I refuse to apologise. But I'm quite happy to enjoy the supposed trash on this level too. Why not?

This story shows that even at its silliest, Doctor Who literally cannot help itself. It cannot help noticing the complications involved in how people feel about religion, socially useful myth though it may be. It cannot help noticing the contradictions involved in the scientific project in a world of power structures and apocalyptic weapons arrays, divided between a "West" and an "East" that blame each other for everything. It cannot help noticing that it is the product of an impoverished backwater that used to be an empire and still can't move on. It cannot help itself noticing oppression, tyranny and the power of people to combine to escape and/or defeat the rulers (though, sadly, the King survives and tritely mends his ways). It cannot help itself noticing the colour and texture and freedom of communal social life. It cannot help noticing the irony of its own status as a text. It cannot help itself being wonderful.

I adore this story. There, I'm out and I'm proud.


'The Macra Terror'...

...is, in its adorably schlocky way, a jumbled statement of the anxieties of mid-60s Britain. A world of holiday camps where the working classes went for sojourns consisting of enjoyable humiliation and cheerfully-totalitarian regimentation. (Thanks to Miles and Wood for saying smart things about the Butlins vibe.) A world in which a new generation were questioning the friendly platitudes of an older set who seemed, at times, like a benevolent and philistine dictatorship. A world conscious of prosperity built on North Sea gas, full of politicians appealing to "the spirit of Dunkirk", i.e. the paradoxical appeal to freedom through conformity, and prosperity built on the burning of toxic substances.

'The Macra Terror' is also the precursor to The Prisoner. Now, The Prisoner is altogether more radically odd and suggestive... and The Prisoner probably wasn't influenced by 'The Macra Terror'... but they're both expressions of similar things that were aloft in the cultural air... and, the fact is, 'The Macra Terror' got there first.

'The Macra Terror' is also the precursor to 'Gridlock', which is still the masterpiece of nu-Who. 'Gridlock' doesn't just slot in the monsters from the old story, it actually develops the ideas and ambitions of the older story. 'Gridlock' is a statement of the anxieties and absurdities of its times, just like 'The Macra Terror'. In both stories, the Macra are germs in the social wound, parasites on industrialisation, parasites on human effort and cultural malaise, embodiments of repressed knowledge.

It's telling that nu-Who is at its very best when also being most thematically faithful to the classic series. Both Macra stories illustrate that the show is at its best when it tries to do things that you don't see anywhere else, when it gleefully dives into semiotics, when it gives itself freedom to indulge in satire and metaphor, when it is unabashedly political and when it free-associates with language and ideas.

The Colony, unlike most of the bog-standard Troughton-era bases, is an entire world in miniature. The authority figure is not gruff and unstable... he's the soul of calm and courtesy. He's in just as much 'denial' as, say, Jarvis or Robson... but, in this story, so is everyone else. The base is under seige but, as Simon Kinnear once put it, everyone has decided to pretend it isn't happening.

The only man who admits what's going on is labelled a lunatic and subjected to trippy brainwashing. When somebody tries to defend him from the authorities, they insist that he's "as cheerful as any of us!" (not sane or harmless) as though cheerful acceptance is the only test of social acceptability.

Even those who see the Macra remain unsure about what they are, almost as if they can't bring themselves to see them properly. Are they insects, crabs or giant bacteria? Or all three? Even their name - evidence of real, free-associating thought on the part of the creative team - could be a riff on "macroscopic" or on Macrocheira Kaempferi (which is the latin name for the Japanese Spider Crab, the largest known arthropod). Of course, the latin for crab is "cancer"... which is kind of what the Macra are, a cancer in the body politic.

Further evidence of the linguistic cleverness is to be found in the name of the Colony's leader - he's "the Pilot", as though he's descended from the pilot of the ship that brought them, or the captain of the 'ship of state'. Of course, pilots just steer; they're not navigators. In the same way, the Pilot of the Colony doesn't decide for himself, he obeys Control. Which brings me to the near-constant riffing on the word "control". The word is used in all its senses - as a location (i.e. the Control room), as a state of being, as political power, as control over ones own mind, sanity, perceptions, etc. Sometimes each sense is used in the course of a single scene. And lets not forget that "control" is something you do to infections and infestations and pests.

Medok is the most Doctor-like character (hence his name?) in a story that sees the Doctor - gloriously - become a kind of instinctive, anti-authority troublemaker. Troughton's Doctor is at his most bewitchingly, lovably mischevious in this story. He walks into a world of neatness and insists on staying scruffy. He stays awake at Sleep Time. He breaks the rules on principle. He teases authority at every turn. He makes disobedience a point of honour and wisdom, stating his inherent distrust of all power as a kind of manifesto. He's an expert in confusion.

This story contains one of my very favourite Doctor-moments in the whole series, old or new. The Doctor, upon hearing some horribly happy little totalitarian work-ditty, groans and says "Did you hear that rhyme? The man who wrote that should be sent to the danger gang, not us!" It's utterly delicious. The Doctor as an ironic, sardonic enemy of both tyranny and the ugly aesthetic banality that accompanies it.


'Tomb of the Cybermen'

Here's what I wrote about it elsewhere:

"No attempt has been made to make this story make any kind of sense on any level, with the Doctor’s actions being so illogical and contradictory as to make him inexplicable. But I could live with that… were it not for the sexism and racism with which this story is larded. Victoria is the locus of a casual sexism in this tale that is noticeable even by the standards of the time. The main human villains, Klieg and Kaftan, are without context, provenance or proper ethnic identity – they are just foreign, in the most generic way possible. Toberman – the only black man in the story – is a semi-mute, backward, violent lummox. The other humans may be foolish but they’re all essentially well-meaning and sane – presumably because they’re all Western and Caucasian. This is all the more unforgivable because other Cyberman stories from the same era (i.e. ‘The Tenth Planet’ and ‘The Wheel in Space’) manage not to connect non-Caucasian ethnicity with evil."

This stands.


'The Dominators'

I'm very conflicted over this one. The political subtext is reactionary bordering on offensive... which put this into my list of top 10 hates.

But... I'm very tempted to feel that everything else about the story is so bad it goes all the way round and comes out at good again. The Quarks are so ridiculous they become charming, the Dominators are so extravagantly unpleasant and stupid that they become an unwittingly great pisstake of all fascists (using the term loosely, in the manner of Rik from The Young Ones), the Dulcians are so hilariously rubbish they become endearing, the plot is so aimless and repetitious that it starts to look like a deliberate tactic to make a statement about the futility of all action. So bad it's good? It's almost so bad it's Sartre!

And - perhaps best of all - we have a heroic, brave, inquiring, sardonic, witty guest hero... who is tubby and balding, has a stupid name and is shown to fail with girls.

Even the politics can be viewed another way, if you squint determinedly. One way, it's a sneering attack on pacifism and any notion that rational debate and humane scepticism is how to confront aggression... another way, it's about fuddy-duddy oldsters who sit back and let fascism win while the kids fight it out. Totalitarian militarism confronts bourgeois complacency and the two tesselate perfectly... meaning that only the youngsters throwing stones can save the world.

I'm confused now.

(A poster at Gallifrey Base - who goes by the semi-accurate handle of 'Mickey the Idiot'... his name really does appear to be Michael - posted this interesting observation about this story:

"I really like some of the design of it. Discussing this recently, the idea occurred to me that it's really about a Classical Art planet being invaded by a Modern Art planet. Maybe sometime the story isn't just what's in the script? Turn off the sound and it's all about a race of Ancient Greeks who believe in proportion, the Golden Section, and how their life gets turned around when Pop Artists with Brutalist shoulders introduce them to the Machine Art of Eduardo Paolozzi."

Brilliant!

Yet another poster at Gallifrey Base raised Gareth Roberts' famous and 'controversial' comments about this story and asked - rhetorically, I imagine - what those who dislike this story's politics think should be done to combat people like Al-Qaeda.

Personally, I think this is a rather tenuous analogy. I mean, I must've missed the bit in the televised story where it comes out that the Dulcians had been arming and funding and training the Dominators for years in order to set them against a rival planet. Maybe it's in Ian Marter's novelisation which, I confess, I haven't read for ages.)


'The Mind Robber'

Just one of the best things ever, this story is a gloriously trippy metafictional journey into Doctor Who's own status as a text.

'Robber' picks up the Troughton era handbook for writers, stamps on it, scrawls insulting and anarchistic slogans upon its pages, rips it up and sets fire to the pieces. There is no isolated base, no croaky computer, no catalgue of disposable characters who are laser-beamed to death, no unstable authority figure, no creeping infiltration, no standard fight sequence for Jamie, no scene where someone goes into a bonkers tirade and storms out of a control centre... instead we have a deeply trippy ride through sheer weirdness; a totally unpredictable variation of content, style and pace from episode to episode; an intelligently created elllision of symbolism and literalism; a classic surreal quest narrative drawing on Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland yet beholden to neither.

The Doctor and his friends leave their universe and enter a non-spatial, non-temporal buffer zone... and this buffer zone is a world of fiction. An empty nothingness until imagination works upon it, it soon fills with robots and unicorns and princesses and forests of words.

They've landed in a metaphysical space instead of a physical one, and the threats they encounter are metaphysical too - they run the risk of being translated into other identities, of losing their faces, of being turned into bit players in other people's stories, of being made into fiction themselves (which, as this story constantly reminds us by constantly saying the opposite, they already are).

They are stalked by the ultimate variety of faceless, functional, baddie goons: toy soldiers. As if to swipe at the mechanical nature of so much scriptwriting, these goons have got dirty great wind-up keys sticking out of their backs. In this story, the ultimate threat is to become the functional plaything of the desperate hack writer. The soldiers not only hunt our heroes, they also represent what our heroes are threatened with (both literally and figuratively): being clockwork cyphers who just 'go' when the lazy writer winds them up and sets them off.

And this is the central threat, even of the somewhat contrived Earth-invasion plot that surfaces towards the end. Mankind would become fiction. Ironically enough, via the creative imagination, we'd all be stripped of our free will. We'd be crushed inside the pages of a book by a domineering Master Brain that controls even the writer with a stentorian bark that is channelled through his own mouth. That's what it would be like to be a character in someone else's book, or a fact pushed around by someone else's editor, or a mortal pushed around by a god (which is exactly what a writer looks like from the point-of-view of a character).

This is Doctor Who investigating its own nature as part imagineering stream-of-consciousness fantasy, part lumbering and mechanical genre hack-work. This is Doctor Who investigating its own origins in myth and legend, in children's fiction and historical romance, in satire and allegory. The Doctor wanders around in a pseudo-Narnia. The Doctor solves the kinds of puzzles to be found in kid's annuals. The Doctor becomes Perseus. The Doctor co-writes a face-off between a succession of heroes and villains who are part historical reality and part fictional confabulation (Blackbeard, Cyrano, etc). And the Doctor meets Gulliver.

It cannot be an accident that Gulliver is one of the Doctor's own antecedents in fiction: a restless traveller who finds himself banked on foreign shores where he encounters strange people and uncanny creatures representing human foibles and political follies. Swift's story is often mistaken for pure escapism for kids, but is packed with the bitterest and darkest satirical comments on human politics and behaviour... very much like Doctor Who, though ironically enough not for most of the Troughton era up until this point.

Perhaps, above all, the thing to admire most about 'Robber' is that it triumphantly makes the best of its behind-the-scenes problems. An extra episode needed at the last minute? Just get Derrick to write a new Episode 1 featuring only the regular cast! Result? One of the most unusual and sinister openings of the show's history. Frazer's got the lurgy? No trouble, just write a temporary change of actor into the script! Result? One of the most amusing, memorable and strangely unsettling events ever depicted by the series.

Now that, we must surely all agree, is the sheerest of sheer class.


ADDENDUM:

It occurs to me that 'The Mind Robber' can also be read as being about aliention and reification in the Marxist senses of those words.

The Master of the Land of Fiction is clearly offering the Doctor a job when he asks him to take his place. He even refers to it as a "responsible position". He (the Master) is clearly the servant or employee of the Master Brain. He was also a paid employee of Ensign magazine, churning out thousands and thousands of words for them to print and sell. In other words, he was (and still is) a worker. He toiled to produce a product, was paid a wage and (presumably) watched as others pocketed the profits. Whatever the Master Brain (and the power it represents) gets out of running the Land of Fiction, the Master clearly doesn't see any of the coin.

You can argue about whether writing stories constitutes "socially necessary labour" (I'd say that it does, personally... human culture is in many ways based on stories and it's pretty clear that we need them in order to be fully human... they're part of what the young Marx called our "species-being"... which is something that the Land of Fiction implies by its very existence) but clearly the Master spends much more time than he really needs to churning out all those words. His labour creates a surplus which is pocketed by the publishers... or a profit of some kind that is taken by the Master Brain.

Moreover, the necessities of the market demanded that he write a certain type of story, commercial adventure stories which may not really express his full creativity. (Certainly, the story as a whole strongly hints at a feeling that trite adventures involving handy swords and with-one-bound-he-was-free endings are highly unsatisfactory. It hints at this in an ironic and self-aware way, as it must.) Similarly, in the Land, the Master tries to construct a story about the Doctor and his friends that pleases the power he serves... a story that the Doctor resists being a part of, partly by rejecting handy swords.

On Earth, his stories would have risen up to confront him as a vast block of printed type, as piles of magazines, as things outside of himself or his control... that's what happens when workers make things under capitalism. They are not expressions of his creativity exercised for its own sake; they are not the produce of an unexploited person and a free producer... unless the person happens to be lucky enough to be a financially independent artist or something like that. Similarly, the work he does in the Land is not an expression of his unalienated self-expression. He works for the Master Brain and works to produce the effects it desires. (You could almost see the Master Brain as a personification - thus a reification, in the Marxist sense - of the market itself, which is so often treated or spoken of as a kind of infallible god which should be allowed to rule society for our own good.)

In short, the Master fits (broadly) the Marxist picture of the worker who is alienated from his species-being and from the products of his labour.

He is clearly a slave to the Master Brain. As such, he's really as menaced by the Land of Fiction as the Doctor. He is confronted by products of human intellectual labour in the form of books, characters from books, characters from folklore (the telling and retelling of legends is a human production as much as anything else), wind-up soldiers, etc. In the Land, words (themselves human productions) confront humans as things outside of human control, as trees and forests. Books - commodities produced by labour - attack and threaten to swallow you. If that isn't a way of depicting alienation, of humans estranged and menaced by the products of their own labour, then I don't know what is.

Capitalism materialises the labour of humans into commodities with use-values and exchange values (i.e. books and magazines), thus reifying human labour time. The Land of Fiction takes it further, continuing the process of reification until the characters (themselves commodities and products of labour) are fully materialised, to the point where they walk about and speak for themselves. Again, alienation is depicted when the product of human labour materialised in the form of the Karkus attacks the Doctor and Zoe.

Alienation appears in another way when Zoe and Jamie are "turned into fiction" and appear before the Doctor as blank, empty cyphers who get stuck in the grooves of their dialogue. They've been alienated from their human nature by being made into a commodity (fiction being a commodity, remember). They start behaving like stuck records, like people on an assembly line suffering from line hypnosis.

All this might seem like a helluva stretch... but you have to bear in mind that all the books alluded to, all the legends invoked, all the proverbs cited, all the characters who appear in the story... they're all products of human labour of one form or another.


'The Invasion'

Easily the best ever televised Cyberman story, because it largely sidelines the Cybermen and concentrates on a human villain who is both well written and well acted.

The implication that the Cybermen fit neatly into Vaughn's worldview because he's capitalist who believes in standardisation, technology and quasi-fascist leadership (and a megalomaniacal psychopath) is kind of prescient of the modern analysis of the corporation to be found in the work of people like Joel Bakan. Again, Simon Kinnear said some very clever things about the corporate way in which the Cybermen behave in his article 'Money, Money, Money!' (DWM 410).

Vaughn is almost a personification of the corporation. He controls politicians, puts computers to work answering phones, exploits the labour of scientists, employs muscle when necessary (in the real world, corporations don't need private armies... they're quite happy to use the public-funded armies of the nation states in which they live as their hired muscle), smiles and charms and lies his head off. Moreover, he has neither body to punish (bullets don't hurt him) nor soul to damn.

Sadly, this story continues the trend of having the Doctor cosying up to human establishment figures. Also, Isobel is absolutely hateful. Still, nothing's perfect.


'The Krotons'

Very good, on the whole. This is Troughton's version of 'The Savages', only less po-faced. Mind you, Bob Holmes hasn't quite found his leavening wit or his gift for characterisation yet... but he's already showing an instinctive grasp of what makes the show tick.

'The Krotons' is a politico-mythic fable with a satisfying mix of adventure and high-concept ideas. Crystalline aliens that can dissolve into a liquid suspension - how cool is that?

David Maloney's direction is excellent, filled with imagistic concepts that heighten the drama and enrich the ideas. The dot pictures that resolve into the Doctor's face; the fish-eye lens; the moment when the chain snaps, etc.

This is a very 60s production concerned with themes of obedience or rebellion against authority, the control of education, the rationing of knowledge, student revolt, the utilisation of talent by power that views humans as resources and nothing more. It's easy to see why, in 1969, someone with satirical and political sensibilities would be writing about angry students rebelling against faceless authorities that control information and ruthlessly supress dissent. It is this very satirical and political sensibility that will, once melded with an emerging feel for characterisation and dialogue and humour, see Holmes emerge as the greatest Who writer.

For now, 'The Krotons' is probably the most direct engagement with the revolutionary mood at the end of the 60s yet found in Who... of course, 'The War Games' is not far away.......


'The Space Pirates'

Why is story so often forgotten? Or used as an example of how even Almighty Bob started badly? Two obvious reasons:

1. The only episode we still have happens (natch) to be the crap one. The Doctor’s hardly in it and Caven – the superbly vicious villain – isn’t in it at all. It’s mostly comprised of scenes in which the moronic Space rozzers trade insults with the irritating Milo Clancy. Rubbish American accents abound. Moreover, two of the episodes for which we now only have audio (1 and 6) are highly visual and do not work well on CD, even with Frazer Hines’ helpful commentary. Thank you once again Pamela Nash.

2. No monsters. It’s been the downfall of the reputation of many a good story.

And ‘The Space Pirates’ is a good story. One of the better late-Troughtons in fact, and infinitely more enjoyable than many a highly praised base-under-siege runaround. Compared to the story that came before it - Brian Hayles oddly uninspired ‘Seeds of Death’ - ‘Space Pirates’ shines like polished argonite.

Hermack and Warne are militaristic, organised, square-jawed, macho/camp representatives of officialdom. Like most such people in Robert Holmes’ world, they are clueless dorks. They’re more than just a narrow mickey-take of Star Trek. Apart from anything else, as far as most Brits were concerned, Star Trek hadn’t been invented yet. Even if Holmes had seen it, his Space Corps bods don’t act or speak like Kirk and his mates. In fact, when Hermack (old hammy Brit) booms chummily to “Ian” (respectful American subordinate), it’s more like Picard and Riker... but, tempting as it may be to credit Holmes with the astonishing feat of satirising TNG twenty years before it was created, I don’t think this can be anything but coincidence. No, the Space Corps wallies are prototypes of a classic Bob Holmes riff: the authoritarian control freak who fails to control anything and gets all his guesses wrong. The way in which the representatives of law and order are depicted as dumb time-wasting losers, while all the real thinking and constructive action comes from the Doctor and the raggedy old-timers, is quite delicious.

Is it a space Western? Only partly. In fact, only the character of Milo Clancy bears much resemblance to anything to be found in Westerns. He’s an old-time prospector; he dresses and talks like one. Too much like one, in fact. Supposedly, Gordon Gostelow even changed loads of the dialogue to sound more yee-har, howdy-ma’am, what in tarnation, darn-tootin’ cowboyesque. I’m sure we’re all grateful. If Dudley Foster had gone by the Gostelow Method, Caven would’ve had an eyepatch, a parrot, a wooden leg and would’ve said things like “Ha-harr, splice the mainbrace Mr Dervish, ye scurvy swab, or I’ll send ye down to Davy Jones’s locker!”.

Which brings us to what the story is really about… Pirates! In fact, there’s a fairly big clue to this in the title. All the same, many people miss the fact that this is, fundamentally, a pirate story. Caven is far more like a Blackbeard archetype than a cattle rustler. Argonite might be like Californian gold… but it could just as easily be pieces of ate. The space pirates go about “preying on defenceless cargo ships” rather than sticking up interstellar mail trains or robbing galactic banks. Hermack and the Space Corps are far more like 17th century British Naval officers, patrolling the Caribbean waters on behalf of His Majesty’s Revenue, than frontier lawmen. (Here, I acknowledge a direct debt to Miles and Wood.) By understressing these links to the pirate genre - and by not being as thunderingly literal as, say, Douglas Adams – the story scores big points.

Also, we see in ‘The Space Pirates’ the first twitchings of Bob Holmes’ liking for vast, implied backstories and backhistories. He hasn’t yet got the economy of his later work, in which he can conjure up colossal swathes of off-screen history and context in just a few lines… but it’s a start.

But the best thing about this story, as we might expect from Holmes, is the characterisation. It’s very strong indeed. Caven is brutal and ruthless but also loquacious and cynical. He has some great moments ridiculing the orthodox morality of others. Dervish has been blackmailed into complicity; he has a conscience but lacks courage. Unlike the gutless Fewsham in ‘Seeds of Death’ he doesn’t suddenly grow a backbone when the script requires it. The astoundingly thick, pompous and inefficient Hermack is Holmes’ earliest foray into parodying the sheer uselessness of authority figures… but even he is more than just a caricature. He flirts confidently but unsuccessfully with Madeleine, showing that he was meant to come over as both vain and inept. Milo – though irritating, owing to Gordon Gostelow’s silly performance – is an appealing character: a benign but cantankerous old refusenik who will not respect authority. Madeleine Issigri has believable motives. The scene in which she learns that her father is still alive is highly affecting, as is the scene in which Milo tries to reawaken Dom Issigri’s memories of their shared past.

That’s a key success of this story. The central guest characters (beyond the Space Corps buffoons) seem to be people with pasts, with shared histories about which they can reminisce, with emotional links to each other, with memories, with feelings. For once, there is real pathos underlying the usual capture/escape/corridor shenanigans.

Even Zoe is in character this week. She’s a savant from a futuristic technocracy… so she’s as good with science and technology as the Doctor but doesn’t know about candles.

Okay so there are some rubbish lines (“he’s liable to explode like glyceriltrinitrate!”) but there are also some marvellous ones. “You mean I’m disqualified?” sneers Caven when Sorba complains about him shooting a man in the back, “Don’t you want to play anymore?”

The single worst thing about the story is probably the ending. We are denied a tender scene in which Maddy is reunited with her father; instead we get a naff gag and everybody guffaws like they’re on Scooby-Doo. Or drugs. For ages. Of course, these days we’d get a ten minute reunion scene during which Murray Gold would do everything to make us cry short of actually coming round to our homes and squirting lemon juice into our eyes.

My favourite thing about the story? Hermack’s call sign: “V-Master”. I always think it sounds like one of those gimmicky food slicers that are advertised on early morning Sky TV. You know; the ones that people buy for twenty quid, use once and then stick at the back of the kitchen cupboard for a decade before they throw them away. A bit like one of those newfangled solar toasters.


'The War Games'

Somebody on the DVD documentary calls this a "light anti-war story" or something. But I don't think its an anti-war story at all. After all, the Doctor is perfectly happy to let Carstairs shoot people all over the place in order to protect the Ambulance, or for the Resistance to fight and kill the guards. His explicit aim is to organise the scattered Resistance groups into an army with which to fight the aliens. But this is not only (usually) self-defence, it's also revolutionary violence. It's war against the aggressor and/or against the system that runs the war games. This isn't an anti-war story; it's an anti-imperialist story.

Here's what I wrote about this story as part of a different post:

"Soldiers are workers... The guys at the front, bearing the brunt, are usually not (for the most part) the sons of privilege. The cannon fodder is drawn from the ranks of the poor and propertyless. On the ground, the Iraq war was kids from American urban wastelands devastated by domestic neoliberalism vs. reluctant Shia and Kurd conscripts. ‘Twas ever thus. And the soldiers we meet in ‘The War Games’ are clearly workers (or peasants). Okay, Carstairs and Lady Jennifer are posh, but the rest of them are common as muck.

From bluff Yorkshireman Russell to the defiant black Northern soldier Harper, the kidnapped soldiers are the workers of the world. They’ve been duped and brainwashed by their cynical leaders. They’re pawns on the chessboard of the ‘Great Game’."

...the 'Great Game' that we're still playing over control of Central Asia, the Middle East and the attendant advantages in access to fuel wealth... as the tortured and slaughtered people of Afghanistan can testify...

"And the players of the game? The English General Smyth (“the Butcher”), the German von Weich, the Confederate (also von Weich – are they clones? ...well, the Generals are all the same!) who sneeringly calls Harper 'boy'… The commanders on all sides are actually allies in a conspiratorial abuse of the workers who are fooled and forced into fighting each other for no reason but to further imperialist ambitions. The real war is the war waged by the rulers against the people.

But the people see through the conditioning (or some of them do – Lenin would’ve probably called them a vanguard) and form the Resistance. Black and white, all nationalities… even Arturo Villa joins his bandits to the cause. Scared kid Private Moor saves the day by fragging the officer. Jamie and the Redcoat with whom he’s imprisoned join forces despite their natural mistrust and escape together. In the end, the War Games are stopped by this international union of soldiers in revolt.

And when was this made and shown? 1969. The year that the worldwide anti-Vietnam protests reached a crescendo."

(Wise words from me there.)

The late 60s were indeed revolutionary times. In '68, the Tet offensive saw American imperialism in Vietnam on the defensive... students tore up Paris, French workers held a general strike and then a wave of workplace occupations... strikes swept Britain... the black American olympians turned their backs on the Stars and Stripes and gave the black power salute... West German students marched with pictures of Rosa Luxemburg and Hungarians rebelled against Stalinism... anti-war protestors lay siege to the Democratic conference...

How does ex-communist Mac Hulke respond to all this? We'll never know, but it seems possible that his lefty sensibilities infected Terrance Dicks' story about people put on a game board (one of Dicks' favourite stories). 'The War Games' is certainly the most direct response to the times, after a reactionary run at it in 'The Dominators' and an oblique take on student revolt in 'The Krotons'. It's also the most radical. Even the Doctor goes back to being (at least partly) the old anarchic trickster (bluffing Gorton, fooling the War Scientist, etc) and then organises a guerilla war against the imperialists!

No more deluded by reaction
On tyrants only we'll make war
The soldiers too will take strike action
They'll break ranks and fight no more
And if those cannibals keep trying
To sacrifice us to their pride
They soon shall hear the bullets flying
We'll shoot the generals on our own side.

Some more things I wanna mention:

Smythe keeps his evil, secret, alien communication screen behind a portrait of King George. Von Weich keeps his behind a portrait of Kaiser Wilhelm.

"I believe they call it the 'war to end wars'" says the Doctor. The same dishonest rationale is hinted at by the War Chief later in the story.

The fog of war. The soldiers get engulfed by a fog or mist when they try to stray beyond their set boundaries. It causes them anxiety, befuddles and confuses them.

The semiotics of spectacles. Distorted eyes, distorted vision of the world. Desk-bound bureaucratic murderers like Himmler. Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four in which he describes the party man with the spectacles that catch the light and make him look like he has blank discs for eyes.

Court Martials like the one Smythe conducts actually happened. A lot.

Jamie teams up with a redcoat... but goes back to attacking them on sight once the Time Lords have wiped his memory. He has lost the things he learned through struggle. And the Doctor laughs. Mind you, the English bastard does try to shoot him in the back... and Jamie has the right to chase the invader out of his country.

Ransome. His big gripe with war is the paperwork. And the subalterns who don't fill in the forms. "Do you realise," he tuts, "in the last push, we lost 10,000 shovels." I wonder if they 'lost' anything else in the last push?

As a depiction of imperialism... isn't it all a bit conspiratorial? Vulgar Marxism? Well, as someone said, vulgar Marxism explains most of what happens in the world. And Rumsfeld's "stuff happens" is an even less acceptable diagnosis of reality.

Rumsfeld wore glasses, didn't he. And Cheney. Might explain Hitchens. Brainwashing. "You heard the evidence my dear, it's all proved... I'm afraid he has got WMD and is in league with bin Laden."

The vertigo of anachronism. Romans charge you... and it's scary because you can't wind the car up fast enough.

The scene where Smythe and Von Weich play Risk with counters and a board, laughing as they joke about turning each other's flanks. Of course, they're laughing about sending men to kill and die. But then, people like that do.

The anti-imperialist struggle even involves in a lecture to Pancho Villa about the equality of women.

The Doctor bursts into the op-art Hell of the Interrogation Room and says to the guard "Don't you point that thing at me!" Outrageous, glorious little bastard!

We really should see the human soldiers team up with some alien guards who realise that they are exploited too.

Beyond all this metaphor stuff, nice though it is, the end of this story makes you think to yourself "...but they'll end up back in the wars they came from when they get sent back home..." which leads to the further thought "...so are the people sending them to fight the real wars any better than the War Lords?... or the Time Lords?"

The Time Lords are utter hypocrites to mindwipe Jamie and Zoe (and, by implication, Carstairs, Russell, etc). They've condemned the "brutal methods of mental processing" used by the War Lords, but then proceed to mentally process people themselves. But the liberals are always the murky reflections of the fascists... and imperialism is the process within (or effect of) capitalism that reveals the fundamental connection between them. At the Nuremburg and Tokyo tribunals, where "liberal" and "progressive" and "democratic" values passed judgement on the relics of defeated fascism, Nazi or Japanese war criminals were absolved of guilt (or simply not charged) over crimes that the Allies had also committed, i.e. horrific bombing of civillian population centres.

We run into problems for the anti-imperialist theme precisely because the Doctor's ultimate aim in the story is reformist, i.e. to put things back the way they were but with the worst excesses curbed, for which he needs to collaborate with Power. The abducted humans can't simply take over the War Lord's planet and rule it themselves (for some reason), so they need to be restored... but, of course, this means restoring them to the world that was sending them off to kill and die, the world that resembles the War Games near exactly. Reformism in a nutshell. But, by the end, the Resistance has won by itself. It has stopped the war and taken over the control centre... though the logic of the story makes this a coup by a small band rather than a mass movement. All the same, it always seems to me that the humans would probably be better off staying put than going home. But that doesn't get Troughton regenerated, does it?

You could interpret the Doctor's plea for the Time Lords to get involved and help people as being congruent with the position of the "humanitarian interventionists", you know, people like Nick Cohen and Hitchens who think you can expect British and American imperialism to work for humanitarian ends... but for that analogy to work, the Doctor would have to be making his plea to the War Lords, not the Time Lords. See the problem? Stitch that, Euston Manifesto.

The first new face the Time Lords offer him appears to be Karl Marx.

That is all.

Vive la Resistance!