Getting into a Lava

Posting this for something to do.  It's a tweaked version of something I originally wrote for Shockeye's Kitchen.  It's been rewritten to be more politically correct.


Several of the characters in 'Planet of Fire' are orphans (either literally or figuratively). Turlough and Malkon are literal orphans. You can look at the Sarns as the orphans of the vanished Trion colony. Peri also seems like an orphan in some ways. Her father is absent (dead?). She tells her stepfather Howard of her plan to travel to Morocco but doesn’t appear to have any plans to tell her mother about it. She goes to Howard for support and money, not to her mother. But Howard is too close to Peri’s age to properly serve as a father figure. Moreover, Peri seems attracted to him; she flirts with him by talking about "the God of love and fertility" and obliquely refers to the fact that he goes around displaying his washboard. Her decision to bunk off to North Africa with a couple of guys she’s just met is obviously a bid for Howard’s attention. Feverish after her brush with death, Peri has an intense dream about Howard abandoning her – a dream so powerful that it causes Kamelion to adopt Howard’s form.

(BTW, I dunno where this thing about Howard abusing her came from but there's precisely zilch in the televised story that either suggests or supports that reading.)

Talking of Kamelion, he’s actually a kind of nexus where the story’s themes meet.

He’s another orphan. Like the ancient artefacts that Howard and Curt dredge up from the sea, like the crumbling buildings and technology of the Trion colony on Sarn, Kamelion is an artefact left behind by a decaying civilisation riven with internal conflict. Kamelion is being torn apart from within by conflicting influences and allegiances… just like Turlough and Malkon. Just as Turlough fights his inner tendencies towards cowardice and selfishness, just as Malkon fights the orthodox conditioning of Timanov, so Kamelion fights his connection to the Master. Kamelion’s inner struggle takes the outer form of a literal struggle for identity, for form.

The fractured families depicted in the story mirror the fractured social connections. Sarn is a decayed Trion colony. The planet’s society and geology are both running amok because the Trions are no longer there to control either. The Trions used technology to control the volcano and siphon off the power of the numismaton gas (just like all colonial masters, their primary interest was in the theft of natural resources). Without this control the volcano becomes periodically unstable and the Sarns use myth to explain it. Sarn was a convenient place for the Trions to dump their unwanted elements (like Australia for the British Empire). Religion was probably used by the Trions from the outset. The tales of Logar took on their own life in the ruins left by the Trion withdrawal, much as Roman religious practices degenerated into new cults once the legions departed Britain. The Sarn legends of Logar, the Chosen Ones and the Outsiders are corrupted memories of Trion activity – vulcanology, arriving spaceships, etc. 'Planet of Fire' depicts religion as a degeneration of rational understanding, a sign of cultural decline and a force for social control.

"Since my father’s time," Timanov tells Malkon, "unbelievers have been put to the flames." So human sacrifice is a relatively recent development, a response to the increasing instability of the planet. Timanov doesn’t just burn unbelievers because he’s a mean old religious zealot; he does it because he believes that Logar must be appeased. Timanov explicitly blames the unbelievers for the degradation of their society into "a primitive settlement on the verge of extinction." This is a convenient diagnosis for an embattled leader: every oligarchy (or, in this case, theocracy) likes to use dissenting groups as scapegoats. Social order is maintained by saying that heresy is the cause of strife. The social crisis caused by the fall of the Trion colonial civilisation is blamed on the whims of a supernatural being, as are the caprices of the volcano. As Howard pointed out (though he was talking about Eros not Logar): "the personification of natural forces in an anthropomorphic deity." Social forces too.

'Planet of Fire' is bursting with references to religion. Sorasta seems to be named after Zoroasta, the founder of Zoroastrianism. The Doctor makes a crack about the Master wanting "to be born again". The flame that purifies, the flame that does not burn… both refer back to the Old Testament. In one of his few impressive moments, Anthony Ainley seems to be taking the piss out of American televangelists – note the wonderful body language accompanying the "Wretched citizens of Sarn!" speech. For the most part, however, the references centre on Judaism. The mountain upon which the Sarns live is reminiscent of Mount Zion, especially when you consider the resemblance of ‘Zion’ to ‘Trion’. The Doctor, when planning the evacuation of the Sarns, says "we’ve a full scale exodus to arrange".

And then you have the Misos Triangle, a symbol made up of two overlapping equilateral triangles. Rearrange it slightly (and hollow out one of the triangles) and you’ve got a star of David.

Who exactly are these "very special people" who were persecuted by the Trions? Were they criminals, dissidents or a religious/ethnic minority?  Perhaps the Misos Triangle can be seen as an echo of the Nazis forcing the Jews to wear yellow stars. If so, the transportation of the Trion "undesirables" recalls the lunatic scheme (briefly considered by the Nazis) to deport Jews to Madagascar. At the end of the story, the Sarns are a colonised people without a homeland, a race of refugees. If the Trion exiles were the Jews, the Sarns seem to have become the Palestinians... except that the Sarns don't seem interested in continuing to crush, exploit and humiliate them.

 

Peter Wyngarde portrays Timanov with dignity and sincerity which emphasises his contradictory qualities. His desire to kill the heretics seems at once a matter of convenience and conviction. Timanov’s belief is sincere but his motives are often far from pure. Timanov uses his ability to improvise with religious explanations for his own political advantage. He is not above bullying Malkon to retain his influence, even though his affection for the boy is obviously genuine. He interprets Logar according to his own wishes. Interestingly, Malkon learns this trick and turns it back on his teacher, aborting a burning because he claims that "by sending us the Outsider, Logar has shown his favour".

In the end, Timanov chooses to die rather than accept the new reality that dawns for his people. ‘Logar’ removes his helmet to reveal a heretic underneath. The irony is bitter and Amyand’s compassion is moving. But Timanov cannot relinquish his delusions or his power. He prefers to die; a gesture that mixes the noble with the cowardly.

I also really like Turlough’s leaving scene. Turlough is visibly shamefaced, stricken by the Doctor’s coolness. The Doctor is sceptical about Turlough’s motives. "Better to go back while you’re a bit of a hero, eh?" he suggests.

This is exactly the kind of homecoming that the Doctor refused in 'The Five Doctors'.

For all that, 'Planet of Fire' is undeniably marred by moments of inexcusable gormlessness. For example: if Kamelion/Master isn’t hurt by a kick in the shins, how can it/he be knocked out by a bit of falling masonry? The clanging sound you hear isn’t just the brick hitting Kamelion’s bonce, it’s also the sound of some very basic plot logic being carelessly flung by the wayside.

The wonderful Barbara Shelley is wasted - they really should have scrubbed Amyand and given all his lines to Sorasta. Having a prominent older female character might also have made the whole thing slightly less intensely gay (though that isn't a problem in itself).

And I’m still puzzled as to why the Trions took it into their heads to imprison Turlough in a public school. That is real judicial sadism if you ask me.

The element that fails most completely is the Master. The necessity of including him hamstrings Grimwade’s script. Grimwade does his best… the idea of an incapacitated Master using Kamelion as an avatar is a fundamentally good one, but it should have been because the Master was once again in a regeneration crisis, withered and decaying. The Doctor’s glib remark about the Master wanting to be "born again" would take on new pertinence. But, as it is, we get Mini Master. To put it bluntly, the whole thing sucks. For a start, why didn’t the Tissue Compression Eliminator turn him into a dead Action Man like everybody else?

The reduced Master’s threats to Peri, as she glares down at him from on high, are absurd. Is even the Master mad enough to threaten somebody 15 times taller than him? Luckily for him, Peri succumbs to a fit of sneezing and is unable to splat him with her shoe, which is clearly her intention.

(It is, of course, a well known fact that women are always seized by sneezing fits whenever they encounter small, scampering mammals… I’m surprised Peri didn’t leap onto a stool, scream "Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeek!" and try to swat the Master with a broom.)

The image of a young woman, chasing a 4 inch high man, declaring "There you are!" in a dominatrix voice and trying to squash him with her shoe is a sad commentary on the vagaries of 80s Doctor Who and the dubious subconscious desires of Peter Grimwade.

"There you are!"

Freud would’ve had a field day. "So," I imagine Freud saying as he gazes across at Grimwade, lying on the couch, "you fantasize about being chased and tvatted with shoes by gigantic vimmen, jah? Hmmm, interesting… vell, you know, many men who call zemselves ‘Master’ turn out to be neurotic about being too small…"

Oh well, sometimes a Tissue Compression Eliminator is just a Tissue Compression Eliminator.

One problem for this story (as it has been for several good stories) is that there are no monsters. There’s no indelible image of evil; no Emperor Dalek, no half-mutated Keeler, no bitchy trampoline. This is because 'Planet of Fire' isn’t about evil or monstrousness. It’s about abandonment, delusion, disillusion, social strife, cultural degeneration and scepticism versus faith. At it’s heart, it’s a serious, earnest and thoughtful story. Which is why the Master, parachuted into it, sticks out like a (very small) spare prick at an orgy.

Oh. Yes. One more thing.  I'm a socialist, which - as far as I'm concerned - entails feminism as a baseline requirement.  I try to be as much of a feminist as a man can be.  But there are limits to how much control the intellect (still less the political conscience) can exercise over the inner beast. Nicola Bryant in a bikini? Well, it's needless, exploitative, gratuitous, a perfect example of the 'male gaze' in the framing of a shot (despite being directed by a woman)... but all that being granted, I don't exactly dread the scenes in question and avert my pious eyes.

No.  No picture.

Rolling the Boulder

It's JN-T Day!  In honour of the late and much-maligned Mr Nathan-Turner - who rescued Who from the stylistic doldrums, produced a slew of stone classics and stuck around longer than he wanted to because he knew his departure would mean the end of the show - here is my Timelash II stuff on the stories usually called the 'Black Guardian Trilogy'.  Much undervalued, all three of them.

For John Nathan-Turner.



'Mawdryn Undead'

Once you get past the Billy Bunter bibble of the opening (and even that is pleasingly unexpected) this develops into a highly satisfactory bit of concept-driven sci-fi, cleverly using time travel (never a major concern of the old-style show) as part of a complex but admirably clear plot, aware of itself as myth-reiteration (immortality as curse, the Flying Dutchman, etc.) and with a submerged political sense in its depiction of crime, power, unscrupulousness and luxury.

It engages with the Who mythos without being enslaved to it, using concepts from the show's backstory to create a genuinely dramatic conflict situation in the characters' here and now.

You can see everyone's point of view here, even if you don't like the way they're behaving. There are no clear goodies or baddies except for the jarringly satanic Black Guardian, but even he works as a figure on the sidelines trying to manipulate and influence events through his conflicted avatar Turlough, who constitutes a bravura bit of experimentation: the companion who is unsure whether he's bad or not!

The production design is superlative... with the mutants' ship, the obelisk, the transmat capsule, the crystal, the stolen gallifreyan machine, the hall of portraits, etc., all impressing and lingering in the memory.

The acting is very good, with David Collings giving it the full RSC and Nick Courtney very carefully and skillfully delineating the differences between the alternate versions of the Brig. Davison is never better than when called upon to play the Doctor as thinking through events and figuring out his situation... and this story plays to that strength... also allowing him to bring an almost suave air of intelligence, particularly when he tosses the crystal back to Turlough with a look of sardonic calculation.

And you have to admire the sheer off-the-wall combinations. A public school comedy that develops into a story about time travelling mutants on a luxury cruise liner, featuring an alien teenager (though obviously played by a grown man) and one of his teachers being split into two personas... well, we've come a long way from stomping monsters invading Southern England every week.

It may not be as spectacular as some of the other stories from this era, but if this is the 80s show chugging along as normal then they're obviously doing something very right.



I make no apologies; I love ‘Terminus’.

It’s almost relentlessly cold, austere, alienating, unsympathetic, brutal and nihilistic, set in an explicitly godless universe which is depicted as teeming with sickness, decay, cowardice, failure, pettiness, selfishness and great crashing waves of existential boredom.

There’s hardly anyone or anything to cheer for. This is no morality tale. There is no clear Good or Bad anywhere (even the Doctor is being a survivor rather than a moral force). There are just loads of people trying to make do and survive in a hostile world not of their own making; people subject to all the frailties of the flesh and of the intellect and of the spirit.

In this way, it's a very realistic story.

Like so much Who it’s obsessed with entropy, everything is decaying, from Terminus’ engines to Kari’s power pack to Nyssa’s body. Like so much of this season, it’s obsessed with the crushing tedium of immortality, with how eternity becomes nullity.

If ‘Warrior’s Gate’ was about bursting out of the nightmarish continuum of history, Steve Gallagher’s second story is about how sometimes history just seems to judder to a halt, leaving people stranded in a seemingly eternal Now.

The Garm is stranded by the control box, unable to leave or stay and do what he wants to do. The Vanir are stranded by their ignorance and their sickly addiction (hydromel is clearly a drug rather than a medicine), unable to leave or stay and be humane. The raiders are stranded, unable to raid or escape. Moreover, these people are stranded by their own ideas and assigned roles… that’s why the story makes such a fuss over people (from Olvir to Valguard to the Garm) renegotiating their roles and changing their ideas. The lazars are stranded, apparently dependant upon a crudest form of make-or-break treatment before they get shipped who-knows-where by the company. Even Terminus Inc. is stranded in its crazy vicious circle of shipping slaves and lepers about the universe. It isn’t just an ‘evil corporation’ like the Usurians; it’s an expression of the futility of moving in circles without getting anywhere.

Terminus itself is stranded at the centre of the universe (which must be a metaphysical position since it obviously can’t mean anything spatially) and at a nonsensical everywhen. It must be eternal (even its construction can’t really be said to be its beginning, if you think about it) and that’s why it seems so still and silent; it is bereft of history, of the passing of time. Everybody there gets stuck in the stillness and the silence… and the boredom of eternally rolling the boulder up the hill.

This is why the reworking of the Norse myth works so well, because those myths are obsessed with people guarding things forever… and endings are always just smotherings and silencings rather than real conclusions.

It’s quite wrong of the writers of About Time vol. 5 to say that this should’ve been done as Wagnerian opera… it’s not about heroism or villainy or anything grand. It’s about the alienation of working for a cause that you don't control, for masters you don't see, in ways you don't choose. It's about the drabness and tedium and smothering silence of stopped time, of neverending routine and mindless circularity… which is mirrored by the mindless circularity of the paradox at the heart of the story. The universe itself is the endlessly circulating trap in which people get stuck.

Of course, you can break out of loops, as the raiders do, as Valguard does, as the Garm does… but, in this story, it’s hard. What Biroc does heroically and comparatively easily in ‘Warrior’s Gate’, the people in ‘Terminus’ have to do slowly and painfully and reluctantly. It’s a gruelling learning process for them, and for Nyssa, who volunteers to be stranded at the end… but only so she can break out of her own loop and help others break out of theirs.

Does it make for friendly, accessible, thrilling, inclusive family viewing? Nope, I couldn’t claim that it does. Did it alienate viewers? Dunno; maybe.

Do I care? In a pig’s arse.



'Enlightenment'

Gorgeous, unexpected, sophisticated, ambiguous, textured, flowing, poetic, witty....

Easily one of my all-time favourites. It's a quality production, with some great guest actors (who really *get* it), lovely music, lovely production design, lovely model work, lovely costumes, lovely dialogue... it's almost too lovely, actually. The tone is opulent, louche and semi-comic... at times, almost farcical. It’s a panto [oh no it isn’t], but a very rich and strange one...

‘Enlightenment’ is an entirely fitting finale to the ‘Black Guardian Trilogy’ because it brings the running themes of existential tedium, immortality-as-curse and stopped-time to a head with its depiction of the Eternals as semi-tragic, atemporal, bored sociopaths… but it also seems like another of those occasional, thematically-linked stories about the nightmare of history as we know it… the history in question being the history of hierarchy and exploitation.

The Eternals almost seem to embody the various ruling classes that have plagued humanity. All through the history of class society, the priests and administrators and warlords and kings have controlled the means and technology of production, and have hoarded the surplus wealth that people produced through those means… a bit like the captain of a ship who keeps the prize when the ship was powered by the labour of the crew!

Such rulers have always felt more real than the little people (when the exact opposite was usually the case) and more entitled to be amused and pampered and served. They’ve always built temples to themselves, greedily hoarded knowledge (enlightenment) and always convinced themselves that they were immortal, little gods on Earth… and sometimes their immense power made that effectively true, but it also left them contemptible (though our own equally class-ridden culture tends to fawn over their memory).

All through the history of class society, Power has always used and abused the little people. The Eternals masquerade as a selection of ruling class and/or criminal bullies, employers and slavedrivers from Earth history. The very bosses who used the people as commodities to be owned and used. The party, with its congregation of the various overlords from every era (“the masters of sail”) always reminds me of the opening of Chapter One of The Communist Manifesto, with its litany of struggling classes. I suppose it's questionable how Wrack's pirate vibe fits in with this picture... but what were pirates (indeed, what is all organised crime) but the mirror image of all 'legitimate' mercantile capitalist enterprise? The pirates that Wrack copies were the outlawed cousins-under-the-skin of the imperialist navies that hunted them... though they were ultimately responsible for much less violence and theft than the official fleets of empire, or the seagoing mercantile thugs of international trade.

The Eternals quite clearly depend upon us, on the little people... though they get unusually animated when fiercely denying this. Their exploitation of the ephemerals for their imaginative abilities is analogous to the way ruling classes have exploited the labour (physical and mental) of ordinary people for the surplus it creates… always brandishing their stolen power as proof of their putative superiority, always angrily claiming that they are the ‘wealth creators’, not the helots or serfs or working classes who actually make and do everything real.

None of this is a moral question about villains and their dastardly deeds. It’s about history and the forces of production… well, I’d love to get deeper into historical materialism, but we’d be here all day. Suffice it to say that it works beautifully that the Eternals are just cogs in an impersonal machinery of usage rather than villains, with even Wrack being best described as a cat toying with mice. Even the Guardians seem more like the balancing counterweights in a system, despite Dyall’s “nyah ha ha!” moments.

This story presents itself as a straightforward morality tale, of a fairytale of Good vs. Evil. The chess board at the start points the way... but chess is also about something else. It's about social classes. Kings, priests, knights (i.e. titled thugs and enforcers) and pawns.  And its about usage. It's about the powerful gameplayers who use the pawns as... well, as pawns in their game. Just like the Guardians. Just like the Eternals. This isn't really a fable about Good and Evil so much as a meditation on history and class and exploitation and usage... about how there is a system that runs on these things, almost impersonally, and which can lead to great Enlightenment if the game is played out... but what’s Enlightenment? It’s the end of the game... and the opt-out clause from the system. It’s the choice to not buy power with someone else’s life, to not be a king sacrificing a pawn, to not buy "whatever you wish" by trading in another's life, to not treat another living person as a commodity.

The style is postmodern (which is simply to say pop-modernist), concealing some very sophisticated thematic machinery under an outer shell of pastiche, eclecticism and pseudo-cod moral philosophy. Even the inner cogs and wheels don’t really add up to any kind of complete or conscious Marxist parable (which would have to involve the ephemerals shaking off their chains and collectively freeing themselves). But all the same….

Sadly, it marks the end of another of those great little runs of consistently excellent/interesting stories. 'Snakedance' to 'Enlightenment' is a kind of mini-return to the great form of 'Full Circle' to 'Kinda'. It's over now though. But what a way to close!



All in all, it's astonishing how well these three stories form a thematically consistent whole, each of them meditating on immortality as a curse, on time as a trap, on the boredom of alienated existence, on stranded people, on the nightmares of history and on people used as commodities... themes that resound through all the better stories of this era, and even some of the worse ones.  Stuff this thoughtful doesn't come along too often.  If we (i.e. fans) had more sense, we'd be prouder of it.