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Having devoured Harg, giant green squid monster Kroll is off to the settlement of the People of the Lakes, known to Harg's compatriots by the derogatory name of 'Swampies'. 

Constructed from tropes and white liberal guilt, these green space Indians are still better than the blue ones in Avatar.  They don't get their world back in the end (neither did the Cherokee) and don't get a white man as a leader.

"The Swampies most certainly do have some problems," chuckles Thawn - Company man, racist and boss of the Refinery.

"You know," muses his second-in-command Fenner, a cynical and cowardly man, "I don't particularly like the Swampies... but I can't say that I really hate them."  He is just decent enough to be faintly disturbed by Thawn's open callousness.

Suddenly serious, Thawn says "Oh, I don't hate them Fenner.  I just want them permanently removed.  I spent many years persuading the Company to back this project, and now that we're on the verge of success I'm not going to be stopped by lily-livered sentimentalists wailing about the fate of a few primitive savages."

Thawn is lying, of course.  He hates them.  He thinks they're inferior, worthless... but he never mentions the fact that they're skin is a different colour to his.  In many ways, this story downplays race too much as an axis of oppression... and then, on the subject of axes of oppression being downplayed, there's the fact that there seem to be no women on the planet at all apart from Romana. 

To Thawn, the worst thing about the Swampies is that they're in his way.  They're bad for business.  They sit on resources that Thawn claims, but which happen - irritatingly - to be buried in someone else's land.  So, for the sake of Progress, you have to get rid of the 'savages'.

Thawn and Fenner hold these truths to be self-evident.

Great Disguiser

It's been bad lately.  Loads of great actors have passed away.  Freddy Treves, Peter Halliday, Dennis Chinnery.  In non-Who-actor news, Nicol Williamson.

And now... Philip Madoc.

This is genuinely hard for me to take in.

Philip Madoc was a great actor.  An actor who could bend his whole shape into the character he was playing.  An actor who could move like an entirely different person from role to role... and watch the way he moves.  Solon moves in an entirely different manner to Fenner, who moves in an entirely different manner to the War Lord.  And he was a great vocal actor, able to give every character his own vocal rhythm and tone.

His performance as Solon in 'The Brain of Morbius' is burned into my memories of childhood.  I imagine that's true of many of us Who fans who grew up in the VHS years.

And there's the slimey, posh, ruthless spiv Brockley in the film version of Dalek Invasion.

Later, of course, (later for me, I mean) there was the War Lord.  A totally different entity to Solon.

Solon is flamboyant, jittery, vain, pompous, self-consciously machiavellian (to his own immature delight) and deeply inadequate as a person.  Madoc's performance always dances just on the knife edge of comedy without ever quite tipping over.  Solon is the quintessential jumped-up and zealous servant.

The War Lord, by contrast, is cold, introverted, calculating, quick, almost feline.  The mask of control occasionally slips, showing glimpses of the sociopath beneath.  The quintessential tyrant.  And yet, he is human.  Look at the way he shows quiet outrage over the murder of his incompetent compatriot, the Security Chief.  Look at the little moment, after the Time Lords have tortured him into compliance with their court, when he regains his dignity by straightening his tunic before he turns back to face them.

And then there's the weary, doubtful, morally-queasy yet cowardly Fenner.  Madoc's performance radiates lip-chewing ambivalence and tired timidity masked by the persona of the cynical old pro.  I, personally, am glad he didn't get the role of Thawn.  His Fenner is more interesting.  He gets to spar with Tom Baker over the word "progress".  He gets to look embarrassed when he's left at the mercy of the natives that, quite understandably, hate him.

These are, undoubtedly, among the finest guest performances in Doctor Who.  Including Fenner.  (We'll just gloss over Eelek in 'The Krotons'.  It's fine.  He does what needs to be done with what he's got.  The essence of professionalism.)

But he's also burned into my memories in another way.

In the early 90s he toured with the RSC in Trevor Nunn's legendary production of Measure for Measure, alternating with a stage production of The Blue Angel, based on the 1930 von Sternberg movie which starred Marlene Dietrich.  Madoc played the Duke in the Shakespeare and Professor Raat in The Blue Angel.

I won't go into the details of the productions.  The point here is that the Measure for Measure was the first live Shakespeare I ever saw.

Madoc's Duke was amazing.  He's still the benchmark by which I judge the character.  When I read the play, I hear the Duke's lines in Madoc's voice.  I can precisely recall the way he inflected certain crucial lines.  I can exactly recall the way he modulated his characterisation between empathy, judgement and detached, almost clinical, interest... invoking the psychoanalysts of the Freudian Vienna in which Nunn had set the play.

And I - the fanatical young Doctor Who fan - didn't recognise him.  (I wasn't, at that point, the type to be much interested in the names of actors.)

It wasn't until I next watched my edited-down VHS of 'The Brain of Morbius' that I realised I'd seen Professor Solon in the flesh.

He'd fooled me.  Me, who'd watched him transplant the brain of a war criminal about a thousand times.

That's acting.

Going Native

Avatar is progressive in many ways.  It represents racism towards native people as stemming from imperialism.  It notices that imperialism is about capital accumulation, indicting a corporation along the way.  It shows an 'economy' in which spines can be repaired, but only if you have the dosh.  It metaphorically revisits the violent imperialist foundations of America - and any such settler colonial state - in a forthrightly disapproving way.  It supports the right of native people to violently resist conquest, even when Americans are doing the conquering.

Fair enough.

However, it is also deeply patronising towards native people.  To quote David Brooks' article in the New York Times:

It rests on the stereotype that white people are rationalist and technocratic while colonial victims are spiritual and athletic. It rests on the assumption that nonwhites need the White Messiah to lead their crusades. It rests on the assumption that illiteracy is the path to grace. It also creates a sort of two-edged cultural imperialism. Natives can either have their history shaped by cruel imperialists or benevolent ones, but either way, they are going to be supporting actors in our journey to self-admiration.

And, even better, here's Annalee Newitz at io9.com, on the subject of Avatar and movies like it:

These are movies about white guilt. Our main white characters realize that they are complicit in a system which is destroying aliens, AKA people of color - their cultures, their habitats, and their populations. The whites realize this when they begin to assimilate into the "alien" cultures and see things from a new perspective. To purge their overwhelming sense of guilt, they switch sides, become "race traitors," and fight against their old comrades. But then they go beyond assimilation and become leaders of the people they once oppressed. This is the essence of the white guilt fantasy, laid bare. It's not just a wish to be absolved of the crimes whites have committed against people of color; it's not just a wish to join the side of moral justice in battle. It's a wish to lead people of color from the inside rather than from the (oppressive, white) outside.

Think of it this way. Avatar is a fantasy about ceasing to be white, giving up the old human meatsack to join the blue people, but never losing white privilege.

All true, if old news.

My interest here is in the fact that 'The Power of Kroll', a Doctor Who serial from 1978-9 that could only have dreamt of having a hundredth of the budget of Avatar (and that not even many Doctor Who fans like) did much, much better.

It covers much of the same ground as Avatar politically.  It represents racism towards native people as stemming from imperialism.  It notices that imperialism is about capital accumulation, indicting a corporation along the way.  It metaphorically revisits the violent imperialist foundations of America - and any such settler colonial state - in a forthrightly disapproving way.  It supports the right of native people to violently resist conquest, even when Brits are doing the conquering.

However, it is much better than Avatar - and many such stories - on the matter of native people.

The Swampies - the alien natives in 'Kroll' - are not innocent.  Their existence in a 'state of nature' does not translate into either moral or intellectual purity.  Some of them exhibit dishonesty, self-deception, political bluffing, cowardice, cruelty, callousness, paranoia, etc.  Some are merciful, shrewd, etc.  In other words, they are not cyphers, mere noble victims or symbols of lost innocence.  They are people.  It is their similarity to the humans that is stressed by the characterisation.  The Swampie leader and his second-in-command in many ways mirror their opposite numbers amongst the human colonists.

The Swampies are not wise or mystically enlightened.  They have no access to higher spiritual truths than Whitey.  They are not mysteriously connected to their environment in a sentimentalised, Gaia-hypothesis-sorta-way.  Their conceptions of the numinous are explicitly shown to be wrong; something that some of them realise through observation and reasoning.  Their beliefs are just that: beliefs.  Moreover, those beliefs have a historical context that both predates their oppression and is then effected by it.  In short, they have a history and a culture that stems from their social existence rather than purely from nature via some mystical link.

The Swampies are not untouched.  They have bound books, windows, etc.  Some of them are servants for the humans.  They deal with a gun-runner for human weapons.  There are no glamourous Swampie women (there are no women at all - a serious flaw) for a white hero to shag... but the Swampies have had social intercourse with Whitey.  This might not seem like much, but it bucks the trend of portraying natives as unreachable or undefiled by contact with white civilisation, which is just an expression of cultural condescension of the kind that sees natives as prelapsarian children, while Whitey (for all his faults) is the bringer of adult knowledge.

The Swampies don't acquire a human (i.e. white) leader.  In countless stories about native people, whether they're encoded as aliens or not, the white hero becomes one of them and, very often, becomes their leader, or at least a trusted member of the tribe.  This is all about Whitey's desire to recast himself as a friend of the natives, to assuage the liberal guilt of being from a civilisation that has decimated native peoples again and again.  It is the desire for the victim to smile and say "that's okay, we forgive you".  It is still, however, an expression of the colonizing mission and attitude.  Whitey infiltrates, assimilates some lessons and then succeeds within the tribe, often then going on to lead and save it.  Avatar is possibly the most extreme example of this kind of thing ever made, more so even than Dune.  The Swampies are saved by the Doctor's defusing of the final orbit shot, sure (as is one of the humans)... but neither he nor any other human becomes part of the tribe and leads it to victory.  The Swampies reject the false friend Rohm-Dutt and lead their own attack, killing Thawn all on their little old ownsomes.

The Swampies do not 'win' in a way that relieves the white guilt trip by way of a pleasing fantasy.  Sure, the Refinery will close down because Kroll vanishes, so the Swampies'll probably be able to stay where they are... but they don't particularly want to stay on their 'reservation'.  They're only there at all because they've already been displaced from their home.  Staying there unmolested is their minimum requirement.  What they really want is to return home, but it plainly ain't gonna happen.  The Na'vi get their native world back, in full.  The Swampies never will, anymore than will the Nez Perce.

Sadly, both stories put the onus of responsibility - at least for events within the narrative - onto one villain, who is shown to act conspiratorially rather than as an agent of an imperialist state.

For sure, 'Power of Kroll' is not perfect... but it manages to be at least as angry as Avatar, without also sentimentalising or patronising native peoples, or coming off like a white guilt-relief fantasy.  In Avatar, the sole remaining human on the colonized world ends up physically becoming one of the natives and being welcomed permanently into the tribe as a hero.  In 'Kroll', the sole remaining human on the colonized world ends up encircled by hostile natives who hate his guts, while the Doctor saunters off, leaving the natives to decide for themselves what to do with their unwelcome final guest.  He offers them no advice, no sermon.  He evidently thinks its their business, not his.

That is why Avatar feels like a liberal complaint but 'Kroll' feels more like a radical snarl.

Economic Miracles

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


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


'The Sun Makers'

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

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

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

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

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

The state gathers and the Company collects.

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

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

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

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

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

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


'The Pirate Planet'

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

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

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

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

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


'The Power of Kroll'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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