I'm a Weird Kitty

Here's what the Weird Kitties are.

Here's my short Weird Kitty review of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel The Buried Giant, which is eligible for Best Novel in the Hugos.

Here's my (new) short Weird Kitty review of China Miéville’s story 'The Dusty Hat', which is eligible for Best Novelette in the Hugos (scroll down to find my bit).

Furiosa and Furiosa

Well, it's basically a two-hour chase sequence with a few pauses... but yes, it's amazingly well done.  Old hand George Miller takes advantage of all the modern techniques - hyper-fast editing, CGI, etc - but he uses these things for storytelling purposes, not to show us how fast he can edit or how good his CGI is.  He never sacrifices the clarity of the visual storytelling.  The production and costume design has a gnarly, knotty detail and complexity.  The brazenly ironic and stylised salvagepunk visual world of the movie makes it like an 80s auteur film made on a vast budget and with modern techniques.  The result is jaw-droppingly good.  It instantly makes just about every other blockbuster movie of recent years look quaint and windy.  Mad Max: Fury Road makes Avengers: Age of Ultron look like a Cameron Crowe movie in which the assembled twee, privileged assholes play with action figures and make "boom" noises.

I'm not going to go into much political detail.  I've junked most of what I've been trying to write about this movie, largely because of this article at Jacobin, which says everything I was groping for, and lots more of interest.  It's really good... though there are bits where I think the writer, Stephen Maher, goes too far.  (There are also a few snafus which suggest he didn't quite pay enough attention to the plot.)

Read it?  Okay, then here are some caveats:

I don't think Maher gets it exactly right.  The film certainly does buy into an orientalist narrative about the supposed sins of pre-modern and/or anti-modern civilisation, and yes this is inevitably tinged with Huntingdonism and Islamophobia.  In the film, patriarchy comes complete with a built-in death-cult, tribal masks, and a harem of the type sheiks always have in racist, orientalist Western fantasies.  But I think the film is less a defence of 'our' modernity in the face of such things and more an attempt to implicate modernity in the same supposed sins.  The death cult of the suicide bombers uses Northern European religious ideas (Valhalla), urges itself on with thrash metal music, and Joe decorates himself with Western-style military medals, etc.  Plus the Mad Max movies' usual anxious appropriation of the camp and performative hyper-masculinity of biker culture.  It's like the film is saying "see how awful we'd become if we degenerated in the face of a civilisational crisis... it's buried inside our civilisation, waiting to creep back out... the seeds are already there, around us".  This is all problematic in itself, but maybe not quite as bad as the review above makes it sound.

It's still an awesomely entertaining movie (reason enough to see it and enjoy it) with reasonably good gender politics.

Much of a meal has been made of the gender politics of the film, usually through the medium of stories about assorted reactionary bumwipes crying about how it's a feminist lecture instead of a manly movie filled with manly masculine manliness.  Firstly, this is crap.  Max gets to be incredibly masculine in all those stereotypical ways.  He drives really fast.  He punches people.  He shoots guns.  He's very effective, very tough, very heroic.  Tom Hardy practically sweats testosterone.  Etc.  Secondly, there are no feminist lectures in the film... unless you count the odd statement from a character that women and their babies shouldn't be considered the property of men.  To me, that's not a feminist lecture.  That's a baseline statement of what should be obvious fact.  Admittedly, feminists are often the only people remembering such truths, and bothering to say them publically... but, truth be told, if such a basic statement is enough to raise your male hackles, you're probably some kind of malignant dickwit whose opinions are worthless and who should never have any attention paid to you.  It's only in a twisted world like ours that a movie would be considered controversial or radical by anyone for having a woman lead character who is depicted as tough, brave and competent.  It's only in a twisted world like ours that a movie would be considered controversial or radical by anyone for having 'don't keep women as sex-slaves and/or unwilling baby-making machines' as an ethical underpinning. This stuff isn't radical.  At least, it shouldn't be.  And, as annoying as it is to see reactionaries raging against this movie like it's a dramatisation of the SCUM Manifesto, it's also quite annoying to see the liberal end of the mainstream media fawning over it for being the second coming of Mary Wollstonecraft.

This isn't, by the way, to say that Mad Max: Fury Road doesn't have some good gender politics.  It does.  But it seems obvious to me that the correct assessment of this film's gender politics is an appreciative "well, it's not perfect but it's really quite impressive by the standards of the kind of film it is".

Pyramids of London ('Deep Breath' 1)

I've realised who Strax reminds me of: the policeman from 'Allo 'Allo.  But not as good.  That's a cheap shot, but I do have a serious point to make.

Strax, you see, is essentially a funny foreigner.  You know, with his allegedly hilarious misunderstandings and all that stuff.  Moffat evidently imagines that Strax's misunderstandings are a rich and continuing source of humour, since he stops the plot of 'Deep Breath' for a few minutes so that he can (once again) run through all the same Strax jokes he's already done several hundred times in other episodes.  (This, by the way, is another way in which Strax resembles a character from 'Allo 'Allo - he is the same joke, repeated endlessly, over and over again, with the laugh demanded - upon recitation of a well-known catchphrase - from an audience supposedly trained via pavlovian technique.  If you object to my singling out 'Allo 'Allo here then, really, I agree with you.  How about we use Little Britain as our example instead?)

Of course, the funny foreigner - with all the imperial contempt and jingoistic chauvinism that is built in to it - is a very old, traditional, endlessly recurring character in British comedy.  Shakespeare, for instance, relied upon it heavily, with his nebbishy Welshmen Fluellen and Dr Evans, his amusingly touchy Irishman MacMorris, and his randy preening French vanitycase Dr Caius, etc etc etc.  So we can't be too hard on Moffat here.  He is, after all, simply doing (yet again) something very old, venerable and respected, despite it being unfunny and based in national chauvinism.  Can't really blame him, can you?

As I say, however, Strax isn't as good as the policeman in 'Allo 'Allo... because the policeman in 'Allo 'Allo (you remember, he used to come in and mispronounce his words - it was terribly amusing) is actually a jab at the English, at the English habit of imagining that, rather than bother to learn foreign languages, all you have to do is speak English at foreigners, but with an attempt at their accent, and in a loud voice, and they'll get it... because English is the only proper language, and people who don't speak it are thus functionally the same as the mentally disabled, and everyone knows that people with mental illness just need to try harder.

I don't mean to attribute attitudes like that to Moffat.  But its a shame that he falls back on a comedy trope that is so incredibly dodgy.  Though, in fairness, the employment of dodgy foreigner stereotypes (comic or otherwise) is not exactly unknown to pre-Moffat Doctor Who.  And Strax isn't overtly supposed to represent any particular non-British nationality.  He's supposed to be an alien.  And here we stumble across another complicating factor: the alien in Doctor Who has always been based on a kind of racial essentialism, a fear of the other, etc etc etc.  Strax could arguably be said to be considerably less dodgy than, say, Linx, because he represents a condition of mutual acceptance.  He is the other, sure, but the other muddling along amongst us and basically on our side.

But here we run into yet another twist in the story... because this alignment of the other with 'us' is worrying in itself.  This recurring team - Vastra, Jenny and Strax - worries me.  It represents the reconciliation of the antagonist with 'us'.  They don't just live with humans, they live in Victorian London, and this seems to me to be the most blatant possible way of integrating them into a kind of aggressively middle-class, twee, cutesy, ostensibly lovable, yet aggressive and insular and ressentimental Britishness, a Britishness at its most iconically imperialistic and hierarchical.  Victoriana is the heavy drapes and elaborate dresses and cravats and top hats of the middle-classes.  Victoriana is the coughing, shivering, gin-swilling street poor as an essential background decoration, a set of tropes to locate us.  Victoriana is brown derby-wearing police inspectors (probably called Lestrade) who consult toff private detectives because, being working class, they're too thick to do their jobs themselves (the implicit goodness and necessity of the police is never questioned in Victoriana - something that wasn't true amongst common people in actual Victorian London, who often saw the bobbies as incompetents at best, violent spies at worst).  Victoriana is empire as backdrop.  Queen and country.  Big Ben.  Smog, gaslight, cobbles, hansom cabs, etc etc etc.  This is the milieu that Vastra, Jenny and Strax have assimilated themselves into.  Vastra even challenges the bad guys "in the name of the British Empire!"  This sort of thing no doubt seems desperately cute to Moffat, and all those people who write those rubbishy Jago & Litefoot audios for Big Finish, but its only our historical amnesia to what the British Empire was that allows this kind of desperate cutesiness to subsist.  The subsistence of it, in turn, allows the amnesia.  And boy, do we love our symptoms... hence our desire to inflict them on everyone and pull everyone, and everything, into them.  The Silurian and the Sontaran, for instance, have joined us in our adorable, pop-Conan-Doyle-inflected national fantasy of a penny dreadful past of wonders and horrors.  The horrors are all safely in the past (things we've cured now) and the wonders remain as a kind of nostalgic longing for the lost times when, right or wrong, he had confidence and lush gothic cliches galore on our side.  Vastra - the representative of a displaced people who are perpetually denied redress and justice (umm... imperialism? colonialism?) - has isolated herself from her people and integrated herself into imperial Britain.  She has ceased to be any kind of rebuke to 'our' world, or 'us'.  And 'we' have become the national gestalt that once lived in the United Kingdom of Sherlock.  Strax - the representative of a culture of militarism and conquest - has similarly integrated himself.  His imperialist attitudes are turned into cute, amusing misprisions which allow him to sink with ease into the warm slippers of imperial Victoriana.  The militarism of the Sontarans is no longer a rebuke to 'our' militarism.  The Sontaran may not be a threatening other anymore, but he is now no longer, in any sense, a mirror reflecting our own nastier values back at us.  He's not a reflection that attacks.  He's a stooge who safely reminds us of our foibles by being sillier than us, and then puts on the uniform of a servant and takes his place in the pyramid.  The good pyramid.  'Our' pyramid.  The pyramid we all fit into somewhere, nicely and neatly.  The pyramid that even the comedy tramps fit into.  The pyramid in which the chirpy cockney maid voluntarily calls people "ma'am" and serves them their tea, as an empowered life choice.  The pyramid of contextless, gutted, sanitised tropes.  This is partly why our representations of the Victorian era are so tropetastic... because tropes slot neatly into each other (hence all the Victoriana crossovers, i.e. Holmes vs Jack the Ripper, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, etc), arrange themselves into pyramids of perceived cultural weight, and start to resemble a vertiginous but orderly class structure, a sort of naturally-occuring periodic table of the social roles, which is the ideology of Victoriana that we are sold by every bit of culture the tropes come from.  This is why 'actually existing steampunk' (which 'Deep Breath' appropriates in predictable fashion, Moffat having been pulling at this particular thread for some time) is so pernicious.  Because the iconography of the high era of industrialisation, imperialism and colonialism is reduced to contextless fetishized commodities, sumptuous archaic kit, and safely de-conflicted social classes.  And even the identification of the cogwheel and the top hat with villainy nevertheless makes no apology for the joy we're supposed to take in the sheen of the 19th century machine. 

Of course, once again, we shouldn't be too hard on Moffat.  He's just doing what lots of people do.  He's just going along.  And he's not doing anything worse than Robert Holmes did in 'Talons of Weng Chiang'.  In fact, he's better than that.  His obligatory Victorian chinese person looks right, according to the big book of stereotypes... but at least he was played by an actual Chinese person.  And at least he wasn't being singled out.  At least he was just another brick in the pyramid, another character on the picturesque Quality Street tin that Victorian London has been turned into by our culture industries.  That's what we do now.  We don't do stories about Victorian London in which Chinese people are The Enemy.  The sneer at the foreigner has been displaced elsewhere, translated into code.  Now, we do stories in which all races and classes, all costumes and styles, all tropes, are brought together, all present and correct, all slotted into place.

Is that so bad?  I honestly don't know.  I'm not necessarily arguing that we're looking at a regress.  But I'm pretty sure we're not looking at progress.  And I'm not talking about the paucity of round things on the wall.

Carry On Screaming

Trigger warning / Spoiler Warning


Just watched Peter Strickland's amazing film Berberian Sound Studio.  It stars Toby Jones as Gilderoy, a repressed (or is he just normal for his home context?) British foley artist and sound mixer hired by Italian filmmakers to create sound effects for a satanic exploitation flick.

Berberian Sound Studio is a study of male fear and hatred of women.

The horror movie that we hear (never see) being made is about the undead revenge of women who were tortured and killed as witches.  The slimey director spouts pretentious bullshit about how his film is an important social document, intended to honestly portray and condemn the abuse of such women, to recognise their suffering, etc... yet his film rests upon the assumption that the women who were accused of witchcraft were, in fact, witches.  Otherwise, how could they come back from the dead in satanic rituals?

The torture - involving, at one crucial point, a red hot poker being inserted into a woman's vagina - is shown lovingly on screen... though, as I say, we (that is, the viewers of Berberian Sound Studio) don't see it.  Gilderoy sees it though.  He sees it again and again and again.  He has to wait until the crucial moment to come round on a loop so he can drop fat into a frypan, thus creating the appropriate sizzling sound.  He has to rip the stalks from radishes to simulate the sound of hanks of hair being ripped from women's scalps by the priests.  The film is comic in the way it shows the sound studio repeatedly ringing with the sounds of the hammering, stabbing and general abuse of various vegetables... yet, the comedy decays as we see the mangled fruit and veg decaying in buckets.

Like the tomato soup that gets splattered all over Gilderoy's face as he uses a blender to simulate the sound of a woman being carved up with a chainsaw, the rotting cabbages and melons make us think of mutilated human flesh, dehumanized by abuse and then dumped like rubbish.  Gilderoy, who spends his normal working life in the UK making gentle documentaries about nature rambling, has never imagined such horrors.

In the studio he is surrounded by women who are working for the men in charge of the picture.  It is quite disconcerting to see the women co-operating (if reluctantly, in the probably vain hope of being paid one day) in the production of such a blatantly misogynistic film.  The men, needless to say, are unconscious of any such irony... with the possible exception of Gilderoy, who never manages to raise much resistance despite his qualms.  The only woman who seemed uncowed by the relentless male dominance in the studio is the surly secretary Elena, whose legs and bum Gilderoy furtively stares at when following her down a corridor.  Part of his transformation is when he learns to be rude and dismissive towards her. 

Silvia (one of the voice actresses dubbing the dialogue, hired for her ability to scream) is being sexually harassed by the same director who claims to be making an important meditation on the victims of witchcraft trials.  At one point, she sarcastically equates his wandering hands with the hands of the inquisitors that searched for witches' marks.  She says she is marked.  He has made her feel that way.  The producer harasses her too, bullying her for more realistically terrified screams, ignoring her thoughts on characterisation, putting her down with savage rudeness, suggesting that she gets jobs by performing sexual favours for casting directors, etc.  When she is performing in the sound booth, the producer sneers that one of her screams sounds more like she's faking an orgasm.  He disapproves of his Director 'directing with his dick', but he clearly also blames the women who have to suffer his attentions.  He evidently senses that she's trouble, that she may well refuse to accept more harassment and thus cause them trouble, because at one point he tells Gilderoy that "there's poison in those tits".

Silvia confides to Gilderoy that she has been used and cheapened, made to feel like a whore.  It is implied that she may have been coerced into sex, though she may be talking metaphorically about the way working on the film has made her feel.  (It is also possible that the conversation is a dream of Gilderoy's, since it seems sexually charged in an unlikely way.)  In any case, Silvia rebels and erases the tapes of her own performance before disappearing.  Another actress is hired on the strength of her looks, after the producer and director skip through a series of photographs of applicants (front and side views, so they can judge the women's bodies... despite the fact that they're hiring a voice actress who will not be seen) and see one actress that, according to the director, "would give a dog a hard-on".  The actress, however, proves unable to provide satisfying screams.  The producer tells Gilderoy to go and get her ready by making her cry.  In a moment that represents his tipping point, Gilderoy succumbs to the order/temptation to torture the woman, in a passive and technical way entirely in keeping with his repressed and nerdy character, by sending increasingly loud feedback into her headphones.  Under orders, he turns up the volume, despite her cries.  It's reminiscent of that experiment where, under the comforting impression that scientists (complete with authoritative white coats) were giving them orders, students happily administered electric shocks (as they thought) to other test subjects.  But this isn't just about the brutalising effect of authority upon a compliant subordinate, this is specifically about the exercise of male power over a woman reduced to material.

The whole film is about the men reducing women to bits and pieces.  They are made into their voices, spouting lines written by men.  Their bodies are cut into pieces on the screen, to the bored professionalism of the producer and the salivating delectation of another sound engineer.  Those female bodies, represented in the sound studio, become melons and radishes and cabbages, stabbed and hammered, rotting in a bin.

There are other potentials.  At one point, Gilderoy entrances Silvia by showing her how he can transform her voice... but the moment is immediately squashed by the intrusion of the filmmaking process.  There's another scene when, during a power cut, he reduces the entire company - men and women alike - to gasps of wonder when he makes a light bulb emit the sounds of a UFO.  At home, Gilderoy uses this trick for "children's programmes".  (I can't help thinking about those eccentric geniuses at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop here... especially since the film is obviously set in the 60s or early 70s.)  Again, the moment is sadly curtailed once the lights come back on.  The commercial imperatives of the work make the prolongation of such a magic moment impossible.  The lights come up and the director snaps back to business.

Ultimately, Gilderoy's sympathies with the women - which he, in his passive way, can only express via troubled frowns and quiet communications when the other men aren't looking - come to nothing.  His nightmarish internalisation of the film entails a woman sneaking up on him the darkness of his own bedroom and attacking him, whereupon he overpowers and dismembers her.  He literally takes on the persona of the violent man, suppressing the vengeful woman, whose antics so shocked him when he first saw a clip of the film.  His guiltly co-operation in the exploitation of female bodies and voices has brought him to internalise the terror of female revenge and the fascination with the idea of violent suppression, with the reduction of the female menace via violence.  This, of course, is the whole meaning of the film he's been helping to make... the abused witch/woman returns for revenge (as did Silvia) and this is a terrifying threat that must be put down.

The female scream echoes through the film and through Gilderoy's mind, waking and sleeping... but the effect of this is not ultimately to engender sympathy, or a refusal to co-operate in the film.  Rather the scream becomes Gilderoy's own scream, confronted by women.  He says, early in the film, that he's "never worked on a film like this before".  Does he mean a film that involves being surrounded by women?  Has he ever been in a recording studio filled with young actresses when dubbing those nature films and kid's sci-fi programmes?  It's strongly implied that he's an unmarried virgin who lives with his Mum.  Repeatedly, members of the Italian production team more-or-less force him to consume articles of the fruit that has come to symbolise female flesh.  This is also an echo of the primal temptation, of course, but with woman made the fruit itself rather than the tempter.

There's a problem, of course, in that Berberian Sound Studio, just like the film-within-the-film The Equestrian Vortex, is told almost entirely from the male perspective.  The women characters in Berberian Sound Studio are reduced to the figurative meat in the grinder of misogynistic entertainment and male privilege, just as are the women in the Berberian Sound Studio itself... and just as the women characters in The Equestrian Vortex are reduced to literal meat.



ADDENDUM:

There's a very good review of Berberian Sound Studio here, by my old buddy Simon Kinnear... who is a proper cineaste and who can therefore actually say something intelligent about the film as cinematic art.  Unlike me.

Dreams About Unicorns

On 'The Mind Robber'.  A regurgitation of something originally buried in the middle of an old post.


1. The Review

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.


2.  The Attempt at Marxist Analysis

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.

That Isn't Right

It occurs to me that this post (in which I had a go at 'The Reign of Terror' for giving us a thoroughly reactionary and misleading picture of the French Revolution) should've been called 'That Isn't Right'. So I've given that title to this post instead, which is also about all manner of wrongness in the representation of history.

I wasn't going out on much a limb dissing 'The Reign of Terror' (the acronym of which is TROT, amusingly enough); nobody is terribly attached to it.  'The Aztecs', by contrast, is one of those stories that fan opinion tends to think of as irreducibly Good.  It isn't that everybody likes it, but anyone trying to say that it's Bad definitely has the burden of proof upon them.

I'm not actually going to say that it's bad, as such.  On the whole, it's very well made.  But....


Black and White and Red All Over

"Tell me, Aged Servant of Yetaxa...
do you approve of interracial marriage?"

Firstly, the Aztecs are played by white people.  It's not easy to tell for sure, but it looks like at least some of the actors are 'darked-up' (what would you call it... bronzeface?).  It seems probable, from looking at colour photos of the actors on set, that they've been reddened.  But even if they weren't actually made-up, they were still representing Aztecs one way or another.  Costume, ostensibly 'native' mannerisms and speech patterns, etc.  It amounts to the same thing, or at least something very similar.  Remember, not all blackface involves actual 'darking-up'.  These days, many understand the word and its variants to connote any situation in which the dominant culture reveals its inbuilt privilges (i.e. racism, ableism) by having someone not in an oppressed group representing that oppressed group, whether in overtly parodic form or not.  As China Miéville has observed, the Armstrong & Miller RAF sketches (while funny, at least once upon a time) employ a deeply reactionary verbal "modern blackface" by putting speech idioms associated with young, urban kids (who, if they're not black, have supposedly absorbed aspects of black culture and speech) into the mouths of 'the Few', thus implicitly comparing today's supposedly self-obsessed, aimless, pampered, 'entitled' youngsters with the generation of the "finest hour".  Miéville points out that such juxtapositions (old, white, middle/upper class guys 'putting on' verbal fancy dress such as "innit") are the standard obsession of Radio 4 comedy panel shows.  The more overtly sinister version of these same assumptions was expressed with typically boorish reactionary truculence by Dr David Starkey on Newsnight after the riots in 2011.

While blackface and its variants were on the wane in America from the 50s onwards (even before the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, which of course sharpened such unease), the use of 'darking-up' was less likely to be seen as problematic in Europe when 'The Aztecs' (and other similar historical stories of the same era) got made.  Even so, it's far too glib to say that there was no way anyone at the BBC could have questioned the practice.  It was common practice, but that isn't an excuse.  Lots of things are common practice.  Excluding young women from important jobs was common practice when Sydney Newman hired Verity Lambert.  Admittedly, when early Doctor Who puts actors in dark make-up, it's usually as part of an attempt to represent other cultures with a degree of integrity rather than to outright parody them.  The educational remit was (at least to start with) a kind of guaranteur that other cultures were to be represented more-or-less 'factually' rather than in parodic terms.  Lucarotti is clearly trying to 'play it straight' in both 'Marco Polo' and 'The Aztecs', as is David Whitaker in 'The Crusade'.  It's fair to say that people at the time may have genuinely perceived a gulf between 'appropriate' make-up conventions in drama about 'foreign' cultures and what went on in The Black & White Minstrel Show.  They were fundamentally different projects.  Still, the implicit assumption of 'The Aztecs' is that Aztec culture is 'ours' (i.e. white Europe's) to represent as we will.  This is the implicit assumption underlying all variants of blackface. It is an inherently imperialistic assumption.

It has recently been suggested to me that criticising old episodes on this basis is like criticising them for not having CGI effects: it is anachronistic.  This is, of course, partly true, in that the idea of this being a criticism would not have occured to many people at the time... but it obscures more than it reveals.  Firstly, it's actually just a restatement of the problem.  Secondly, the analogy fails because the concept of CGI was not only impossible but actually inconceivable in 1963.  There were no similarly ontological reasons why the idea of casting Mexican actors to play Mexicans was impossible and inconcievable.  CGI hadn't been invented then; Mexicans had.  (We must, I suppose, add the rider that modern Mexicans - Mestizos - are, unlike the Aztecs, of mixed indigenous and European ancestry.)  The fact that the idea probably didn't occur to anybody isn't an alibi for the series; it is, in and of itself, an indictment of the society of which the series was a product.  In short, it doesn't neutralise the criticism but rather widens it.  It takes us beyond aesthetic nitpicking, moralistic fingerpointing or identity politics, into the realms of broad social critique.

But am I really having a go at such a treasured old episode on these grounds?  Is that okay, even with the alibi that it serves as a 'way in' to wider social issues?  Well, yeah, I think so.  As I say, I'm not moralising (that doesn't interest me) but I am putting forward the 'bronzeface' issue - and its wider implications of appropriation - as a reason to criticise the story.  I think it's altogether too easy and casual the way we tend to toss off phrases like "oh, well, it was of it's time" as though that answers everything and makes it all unproblematic.  I'm sorry, but we're talking about a culture that was genocidally destroyed by Europeans.  Should we really be so sanguine about such sanguinary history?  Isn't there room for a qualm or two about the fact that Europeans are still merrily dressing up as people that Europeans annihilated?  (Yes, yes, I know the Aztecs were themselves conquerors, and Cortés had help from other indigenous Mexicans... that's not the point.  Every imperialist army finds local support and many conquered cultures had their own crimes to answer for... none of that effaces the issue of imperialism itself.  There is a fundamental, quantitative, qualitative difference between, say, the forms of slavery once practiced within Africa and the genocide stemming from the modern European slave trade.  To not see this is to be morally blind.)

There might be a case for saying 'let it go' if we weren't still plagued by blackface and its variants, as well as the social causes which make it seem entirely unproblematic for the dominant (white) culture to represent certain groups as it pleases, without their views being taken into account.  But.  Johnny Depp is soon to appear in redface as Tonto in the new Lone Ranger movie.  Ben Affleck played a hispanic-American character in Argo (which also assumed the right to use Iran as a foil for American moral superiority).  Look up how they celebrate Christmas in Holland, and have a look at Sinterklaas and his little helper Zwarte Piet, a comedy golliwog (played by white Dutch people in black make-up and wigs) who follows Sinterklaas around on a lead, performing menial chores, begging for scraps and generally being comedically stupid.  Even the Telegraph doesn't think it's acceptable.  Relatedly, anybody who wants to know about 'cripping up' in theatre, films and TV (i.e. 'able bodied' or 'full size' people playing the wheelchair bound or dwarves, thus taking work away from disabled and/or dwarf actors) only needs to mention it to Nabil Shaban on Facebook. 

The Aztecs may be gone, but there are still millions of oppressed people in the world who have to watch as dominant media culture appropriates their appearance and culture as it pleases, representing them in ways which range from the excluding to the patronising to the dehumanising. Does it help anybody if I snipe at an old episode of Doctor Who?  No.  But nor does it help to allow oneself to become innured to the cultural evidence of oppression, to the point where one doesn't notice it enough to be uncomfortable.  Discomfort is sometimes a duty.  It's just far too easy to be comfortable with the representation of others, especially for someone like me whose own group is never going to be patronisingly represented by someone else.  There's an argument you hear about, say, the casting of John Bennett as Chang in 'Talons of Weng Chiang'.  It goes something like 'well, they just cast him because he was a good actor who suited the role'.  Well, that way of doing things might arguably be fair enough in a post-racist society.  But we don't live in a post-racist society.  Not by a loooooooooong chalk.  Not by white-cliffs-of-Dover-levels of chalkiness.  At the moment, the privilege of behaving and thinking as if we do belongs to the people unaffected by racism. 


A Clash of Civilisations

Even if the actors in 'The Aztecs' weren't darkened with make-up (on the whole, I think they were but, as I said, it's hard to be entirely sure from the visual evidence) they were still part of a production which goes out of its way to excuse Europeans of responsibility for the genocide of the Aztecs.  Barbara, supposedly an expert, makes it very clear, though she doesn't say it explicitly: Cortés destroys the Aztecs because he is horrified by their practice of human sacrifice. If she can talk the Aztecs out of their barbarism, she can save them.  This is couched in terms or salvaging everything good about their culture... yet we see very little of this.  There is little in the story to support the (in itself patronising) idea that the Aztecs, as a whole, were as good as they were bad.  Even their splendid artefacts are only really shown in Yetaxa's tomb... with the emphasis firmly on a sinister, gothic, skull-like face. 

So... a fairly clear stance being elaborated there, I'd say. 

The story does not even gesture towards the idea that Cortés and his men may have set about the violent subjugation of the Aztecs - leading to their effective extermination - for imperialistic reasons; for gold, conquest, power and the imperatives of religious bigotry.  Instead the story aligns itself with an excuse seized upon by the conquerors: that the Aztecs essentially doomed their own culture by dint of their backwardness.  The Spanish demanded conversion and obedience.  In this way, the Aztecs would be 'saved'.  Similarly, Barbara's project is to socially re-engineer Aztec society (from the top down, naturally) so that it loses those aspects supposedly most repellent to the Europeans, i.e. the civilised people.  That is how the Aztecs can be delivered.  The Spanish told themselves they were fighting the Devil.  Barbara is fighting History.  But the logic is the same.

Barbara's struggle is underwritten by the implicit assumption that European civilisation doesn't practice barbarism like human sacrifice.  With reference to the Conquistadors, this is so wrong it's almost funny.  Spain, and other European powers, slaughtered and tortured and enslaved their way through the 'New World' with unrelenting ferocity.  Even if we take this to be some kind of aberration, we need only look at what was going on in Europe itself at the time.  When Cortés arrived in Mexico, it was barely thirty years since the Alhambra Decree, by which Castille and Aragon had formally expelled all Jews unwilling to convert on pain of death.  (A clue that this didn't stem from barbaric practices, that Barbara might have tried to make the Jews renounce, lies in the fact that the expelled Jews weren't permitted to take any of their gold or silver with them.  Go figure.)  This genocidal cleansing was part of the Spanish Inquisition.  It was well underway when Cortés found himself shocked by the Aztecs.  The Spanish Inquisition, contrary to myth, was actually far more careful, sparing and legalistic with torture than most European courts of the time... they only used torture rarely, unlike just about every other legal system in Europe.  Also, the Spanish Church itself never executed anybody.  With Christian piety, they'd hand you over to the state for public burning (or garotting then burning, if you confessed and repented).

Let's imagine a Doctor Who story that never really happened.  'The Spaniards' by Johnvid Whitcarotti (broadcast 32nd Octember 1963½).  Hartnell, Hill, Ford and Russell arrive in 16th century Spain.  Torquemada is played by Dickie Henderson (thus doing Torquemada a disservice, to be honest).  Would the story have been about Barbara trying to convince the Spaniards to change their ways so that Napoleon wouldn't be so shocked by their backwardness and feel the need to invade and spread the Enlightenment by force?  Or would the story have been about the need for the heretics to change their evil ways and thus not incur the righteous wrath of the inquisitors?  I somehow doubt the fuck out of it.  It's usually fairly predictable which victims will be blamed and which will not.

Going back to the supposed binary character of Aztec culture, the dichotomy between their noble side and their savage side remarked upon by all the white, 20th century European characters and the aliens that look and act like white, 20th century Europeans...  Look, I'm sorry, but what culture in human history since the rise of settled civilisation hasn't been capable of both immense goodness and immense cruelty?  It reminds of 'The Visitation', in which the Doctor claims to be baffled that the Terileptils love both art and war... as though this is something unusual.  The unspoken assumption there is that there are cultures which, in distinction to the culture of England in 1666, get their moral priorities mixed up to the point where they can't tell the difference between civilisation and savagery.  To his immense credit, Saward subverts this rather crass implicit assumption by having the debate then swing back and forth, with the Terileptil pointing out that the humans also consider war honourable, whereupon the Doctor retorts that they (unlike Terileptils) have the excuse of not being from a technologically advanced culture.  It turns out that the Doctor's puzzlement stemmed from seeing a highly advanced civilisation still fixated on the 'honour' of war.  Now, the characterisation of any group as "primitive" is troubling, but at least Saward is talking about Europeans, not a culture decimated by Europeans.  Lucarotti, on the other hand, is dragging imperialist baggage along in his brain... and even in a text that bears hallmarks of being a 'labour of love', it shows.


Terror of the Autlocs

Even with some gestures towards Aztec spirituality, history, teaching and law, human sacrifice is still depicted as the central fact of their culture, the keystone to it.  It's hard to see how this stems from anything other than the European obsession with it.  It was undoubtedly a very important aspect of the Aztec worldview... and the story deserves a lot of credit for trying to show their cultural priorities.  However, sacrifice seems as unintegrated as it is dominant.  Its social hegemony doesn't seem to apply to everyone.  Meanwhile, we are given clear guidance as to with whom our sympathies should and shouldn't lie.  Autloc and Cameca are the Nice-But-Then characters (see here) in implied sympathy with the detached, modern observer in front of the TV.  They supposedly stand for us in their moral qualms.  Autloc in particular, in that he tells Tlotoxl that "the rains will come even without sacrifice".  He is something of a proto-sceptic and empiricist.  He accepts Barbara's assertion that people shouldn't be punished for breaking laws with which they're unfamiliar (a doctrine that even today we will not implement).  He regrets the violent punishments faced by Susan and Ian.  He is Barbara's champion and friend precisely because he is humane and rational, unlike his fellow Aztecs.  As Ian says "Autloc is the extraordinary man here", the civilised man, the man who can be saved.  The others are write-offs, utterly resistant to the reasonable words and moral teachings of European conscience.  Barbara's project of humanitarian intervention fails because she meets only one Autloc.

By the way... am I the only person uncomfortable with how much lying Our Heroes do to Autloc and Cameca in this story?  The Doctor manipulates Cameca's love for him and only her own perspicacity brings her to realise that he's going to jilt her.  Autloc, meanwhile, faced with the prospect of making himself a pariah by standing alongside Barbara when she forbids sacrifice, movingly pleads that she not prove false... and she lets him go on believing that she's the reincarnation of Yetaxa so that she can count on his support.  In the end, the Doctor asserts that Barbara has "saved one man" and helped him find "a better" faith.  Well, Barbara's own bad faith is itself a minor illustration of the hypocrisy and self-righteousness of this.  Her absolution of the Conquistadors and her victim-blaming of the Aztecs are the major illustration... with their impending extermination always lurking in the background, undermining any valid way in which superior European morality can possibly stand up as a notion.  Autloc, meanwhile, has lost his friends, his wealth, his position, his house and his religion, and ends up wandering alone, a social outcast.  I hope Barbara never helps me, that's all I can say.

This leads me to consider what is, I think, the biggest aesthetic flaw in 'The Aztecs', the flaw that either spoils it or comes pretty close (I fluctuate on this point).  Tlotoxl.  Everything else I've been moaning about in this post can be put aside, at least for a while, for the pleasure of watching the story.  I do that sort of thing all the time.  Indeed, the vast majority of capitalist cultural production is so multifariously offensive and repellent that, if I weren't capable of just pushing political qualms aside in order to simply enjoy things, I'd probably never be able to switch on the TV, log on to the internet, open a book or go outside.  No, no.  The thing I have most trouble with in 'The Aztecs' is the portrayal of Tlotoxl. 

Tlotoxl is the High Priest of Sacrifice and is supposed to be the representative of Aztec barbarism, opposed to Autloc who is the High Priest of Knowledge.  Well, okay, there's a problematic notion right there: that Aztec 'knowledge' was in some way distinct from, and contradictory to, Aztec religious practices.  I think part of the point is that they weren't antithetical.  But, we'll let that pass.  The point here isn't to critique the episode's inbuilt assumptions (that's what the rest of this post is for) but to track its internal, dramatic consistency... what makes it or breaks it as a coherent and enjoyable story.  So, Autloc and Tlotoxl are set up as antithetical.  Well... that's a problem dramatically.  Isn't part of the whole point of the story that sacrifice cannot be easily detached from the rest of Aztec culture, the 'good bits' so to speak?   If the place of sacrifice in Aztec culture were so separate, so totally bound up with one individual and his prejudices and power base, then wouldn't it be much easier for Barbara to combat?  Just as Tlotoxl tries to discredit her isolated ideas by impugning her and her friends, so she could attack his dogma by isolating him.  She cannot do this.  She doesn't even try.  The episode seems to be trying to have its cake and eat it.  Sacrifice is at once an integral and indivisible aspect of Aztec culture and the pathological ideology of one man and a few loyalists.  (Part of the problem, as ever, is that we're getting history from above, as something that occurs within the minds and maneuvers of the ruling class, without 'the people' being involved, or even much represented.)

There's a rather pleasant irony in the way Tlotoxl becomes a sceptic towards an apparent manifestation of the gods.  Autloc, the man of knowledge, the proto-empiricist, credulously assumes Yetaxa's reincarnation, while Tlotoxl, the man of faith, becomes a sceptic about it.  The man who charges others with heresy becomes a heretic.  The man who questions divine intervention becomes a villain in a story which revolves around the idea that people should be sceptical of apparent divine influence in the natural world.  We are meant to boo him for being a religious zealot and an opponent of Barbara's truth... yet he spends the entire story trying to prove her a liar (which she is) for pretending to be a god when she isn't!  These ironies, by themselves, aren't the problem.  The problem lies in the way Tlotoxl is depicted.  Tlotoxl is machiavellian.  

"I've got a hunch you're not really a god."

John Ringham plays Tlotoxl in full Richard III-mode.  Tlotoxl is hunched, insinuating, greasy, snide, etc.  He even adopts a clipped, sneering manner of speech that seems reminiscent of Olivier's movie performance as Richard.  This is something we're all so familiar with that the randomness of it seldom gets remarked upon.  Why?  What possible need is there for a Richard III-esque villain in a story about the Aztecs?  Of course, it isn't really Ringham's fault.  He takes his cues from his costume (he gets that sinister line of make-up across his mouth, messy dark hair, darkened eyes, etc) and from the rest of the production, including the script.  When first seen, Tlotoxl is loping around in a corner like a crookback.  He is made visibly different from the other Aztecs, to the point where Ian and the Doctor can immediately tell - just by looking at him - that he's "the local butcher" (that one-man pathology again).  This, in itself, isn't much like Richard III (most people in Shakespeare's plays tend to initially find Richard quite plausible) but Tlotoxl as scripted recalls Richard in other ways, especially in his villainy, his manipulativeness, his plotting, his promises of advancement to allies, and his theatricality.  He distorts others around him with his showish puppeteering.  Tonila and Ixta both get drawn in and set on sneaky courses that otherwise they'd probably have avoided. (It should be added that, though drawn from Richard, Tlotoxl is considerably different in that Richard is a kind of just punishment upon a set of people who have devoutly deserved him... something often not realised by people unfamiliar with the earlier plays in the tetralogy.)

Let's be clear: this is rubbish.  It does great damage to the whole narrative thrust of the story, which is supposed to be about a people inextricably both noble and cruel.  Whatever we might think of that characterisation, or the project of characterising an annihilated culture that way, that's still what the story is supposed to be about.  Instead, we get a culture that looks like it would probably be pretty much okay if only it could be rid of the evil, sneaky, oily, crafty, religious fundamentalist limping around the margins.  Just think how much more powerful 'The Aztecs' would have been if Tlotoxl had been a character of integrity, of dignity, of honest faith.  The tragedy here is that, dramatically, Autloc and Tlotoxl should be different aspects of one man.  At the very least they should be close friends who like and respect each other, more similar than different.  That would not only resolved a deeply jarring dramatic problem, it would also have resolved some of the thematic problems with the story, taking away the idea that Aztec 'knowledge' was antithetical to Aztec belief, taking away the easy Nice-But-Then character, etc.

On the whole, however, even a 'good' High Priest of Sacrifice would still leave us with the problem of Autloc as the one "extraordinary man".  Indeed, it might even exacerbate it.  At least Tlotoxl of Gloucester, the emblem of sacrifice as a lone villain, might be seen as undermining the idea that Autloc is unusual.  Tlotoxl looks like the extraordinary man instead... extraordinarily evil.  But, in that case, why did Barbara fail?

You see, much as I'm not in favour of human sacrifice (no more than anybody else anyway), I'm kind-of on Tlotoxl's side.  Who precisely is this person claiming to be a goddess, lying, cheating, undermining the law, foisting her alien values upon his society, endangering (as Tlotoxl and most others would see it) the continued favour of the gods and, thereby, the survival of the people?  Why does she know better than him and the rest of his society?  Of course, Barbara doesn't articulate why she assumes her greater wisdom.  But the story has its implicit assumptions about this (see above) and I don't like that the one guy who stands against them is depicted as a villain.  (Of course, from another angle, Tlotoxl is a member of the Aztec ruling class and, as such, I'm against him.  Historical materialism... which is one way of describing my outlook... requires this kind of flexibility all the time.)


Resistance was Futile

In the end, it's History that dooms the Aztecs.  All historicals are inherently conservative because they all have the immutable writtenness of History lurking in the background.  Even when the story doesn't tilt on the axis of changing or preserving history, there is always a shape to events that cannot be changed.  Owing to its educational remit and supposedly rationalist stance, the show cannot (Inglourious Basterds-style) change the pre-written plot and go against what Teacher Says at School.  In historicals, The Way It Happened (or at least The Way We Think It Happened) is always a limiting factor.  It patrols the boundaries.  It limits the perimeter of the possible, must as capitalist realism limits the range of the thinkable within the mainstream media.  This may be the reason why the psuedo-historical was invented.  Dennis Spooner chose the classic example of school history (1066 and all that) and stuck a time meddler into it, threatening to erase all the books.  But 'The Time Meddler' is the story that proves the rule.  No matter how cheeky or satirical it is about the whole concept of representing History (knowingly showing us the TV strategy of cliche, employed even in the 'straight' mode) it cannot escape the overriding imperative to stick to the established arc.  There is literally no escape from this innately conservative impulse within the bounds of the historical... and the inevitability of aligning with the history books creates a dramatic effect whereby those doomed by History come over as inevitably doomed, inescapably trapped.  They were always doomed.  Coupled with the implication of progress (to which all those Nice-But-Then characters implicitly attest) and the imperialistic appropriation involved in representing non-European cultures, you get an effect whereby There Is No Alternative but for the conquered to be conquered, the exterminated to be exterminated.  You can't have the Saxons beat back the Normans.  You can't have the French Revolution succeed against reaction and counter-revolution, thus becoming able to fulfill its promises.  You can't have the Aztecs escape the swords of the Conquistadors.  As the exhausted cliche goes: history is written by the victors... so you end up with an acceptance that you can't rewrite the judgements of the powerful, of the conquerors, of the imperial culture.

Not one line.

Apparently they were also noble and artistic.

I know I complain a lot... but I don't think I've ever gotten over just how much wasted promise there is in the fact that one of the very first things the series did was have a young person reading a school textbook about the French Revolution and declaring "That isn't right!". 

Those who currently rule are however the heirs of all those who have ever been victorious. Empathy with the victors thus comes to benefit the current rulers every time. This says quite enough to the historical materialist. Whoever until this day emerges victorious, marches in the triumphal procession in which today’s rulers tread over those who are sprawled underfoot. The spoils are, as was ever the case, carried along in the triumphal procession. They are known as the cultural heritage. In the historical materialist they have to reckon with a distanced observer. For what he surveys as the cultural heritage is part and parcel of a lineage which he cannot contemplate without horror. It owes its existence not only to the toil of the great geniuses, who created it, but also to the nameless drudgery of its contemporaries. There has never been a document of culture, which is not simultaneously one of barbarism. And just as it is itself not free from barbarism, neither is it free from the process of transmission, in which it falls from one set of hands into another. The historical materialist thus moves as far away from this as measurably possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.

- Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History.

When Titans Clash

Spoiler Warning


Prometheus tries to evoke the aesthetics of Alien in a way that is borderline obsessive. Even down to making sure there are cream-coloured leathery/cushiony pads on the spaceship corridor walls. Still greater attention is paid to replicating H.R. Giger's design concepts for the derelict alien ship, cockpit and pilot from the original film. The really weird thing is that, even as Prometheus deliberately and slavishly tries to evoke and/or copy the aesthetics of Alien, it completely overlays them with an entirely different, clashing aesthetic sense.

Look, why is this image so powerful?

There are, I think, a number of reasons.

Most importantly, it's because it is just explicable enough to make sense while also being inexplicable enough to unnerve.  We are plainly looking at a navigator or pilot in a cockpit.  We understand this.  We are also looking at something inhuman and estranged, something that evades any attempt on our part to relate to it directly.  The 'Space Jockey' (as it is sometimes called) is a pilot, evidently, but it is also a giant, a fossil, a mammoth, a skeleton, a statue, a cyborg, a petrified outgrowth of flesh embedded within a colossal machine.  We cannot separate the entity from the artifact.  The ribs of the creature flow outward into the cables of the chair.  The trunk of the face flows down into the workings of the mechanism.  We cannot disentangle organism from system, animal from engine.  They are fundamentally akin, interchangeable, interpenetrating, symbiotic.  This was always the intention: to suggest something that was inextricably both biological and technological.  The cockpit and the pilot are not discrete things but are conjoined to the point of identity.  They were one flesh, until the flesh peeled away.  It's entropic in both an organic and mechanical way simultaneously.  It's the ossified cadaver of a wrecked bio-machine.

It's also beautiful, but not in a straightforward way.  It's not pretty.  It's hideously, ominously, unnaturally, grotesquely beautiful.  It's beautiful in the same way as a scorpion, or the bleached skull of an ox lying in a parched gulch, or a pile of rusted flywheels that was once a graceful machine.  It has the troubling, terrible beauty of wreckage, of the predator, of the insectile, the dead, the decayed, the destroyed, the deadly.

And it's fucking scary.  It's a great big skull-faced monster in a huge black room made out of what looks like loads of bones.

Now, look at this:

This is pretty.  It's the cockpit from Alien... decorated with shimmering CGI lights and swirls and spirals and graphics and glowing planets. It's like someone stuck gold stars all over one of Goya's 'black paintings' or inserted some watercolour daffodils into a Max Ernst canvas. Well, why am I dancing around this? It's like putting pretty, computer-generated patterns all over a picture by H.R. Giger. The design and CGI rendering is perfectly nice in and of itself, but in this context it looks like a tawdry, clashing embellishment. It neutralises the uncanny effect of the setting. For all the familiarity that popular culture now has with Giger (thanks largely to Alien) his imagery remains fundamentally inscrutable. The image above plasters extremely familiar, almost routine imagery - CGI computery prettiness - over this fundamentally inscrutable image. It wouldn't be so bad if this were meant, in narrative terms, to be human technology inserted into the context of the alien ship, as with the floaty red probe things... but the display above is actually supposed to represent the technology and culture and design sense of the pilot-type aliens themselves.

This is more than just an aesthetic problem.  The technology of the beings that Shaw calls 'the Engineers' is recognisably similar to the technology of the humans as we see it in the film.  Suddenly, the mysterious and unknowable culture of the gigantic skeletal bio-mechanical thing from Alien is explained, demonstrated and shown to be easily understood in conventional futuristicky/SF terms.  The aliens have computers just like the humans.  They have holographic displays just like the humans.  They have navigation charts just like the humans.  They have cryo-beds just like the humans.  They have chairs around button-covered consoles... on which they leave their flutes!  They suddenly have doors that open and close (think about it - there's nothing like that in the derelict from the original film).  They have cargo bays.  The cockpit chair turns out to be just that - a chair in which a humanoid sits.  He didn't grow out of it.  He sat in it.  Wearing a spacesuit and a helmet.

This helmet thing is a big deal.  The skeletal face of the alien pilot, with its ossified veins, its cavernous eyes and its trunk-like snout... turns out to be a helmet, just like the head-like helmet of the aliens in Independence Day.  Like many crappy sci-fi films post-Alien, Independence Day tried to ape Giger's influential design concepts.  So ID4 had bio-mechanical stuff in it, but in a processed and banal form.  Now the Alien series reclaims its appropriated design concepts... and recycles the lazy, banal variants already used by inferior films.

And what is inside the helmet?  We get to see.  Not only is the pilot's eerie, inscrutable, alien face revealed to be a piece of perfectly explicable human-like technology, with its trunk a kind of hinged flap, but we see it removed, and beneath there is...  a guy.  An odd-looking guy, for sure, but a guy, nonetheless.

Moreover, these guys have comprehensible motives.  We may not be told why they created life on Earth and then decided to destroy it, but these aims are comprehensible in and of themselves.  The 'Engineers' can be communicated with, spoken to.  Their thought processes are apparently akin to those of humans.  It is no longer that The Company wishes to utilise the Xenomorphs (if we must call them that) as weapons... apparently they always were weapons, or outgrowths of weapons.  The Engineers created them as such, wittingly or unwittingly.  The Engineers are capable of military strategy then, along with fear, rage, the desire for revenge, and other such all-too familiar states of mind.

Again, there's nothing wrong with this in and of itself, but it is appended onto the imagery of the derelict craft and its silent, inscrutable, lonely occupant in Alien... and it represents a fundamental misprision of why those things are so interesting.  Put crudely, to explain the Space Jockey is to make it less mysterious (of course) and therefore less powerful.  It was always a Titan.  It's just that Alien allowed us to believe in the Titan by making it unknowable.  Prometheus makes the Titans less titanic by making them simply larger versions of us.

X Marks the Shit

‎"You need to see X-Men First Class Jack, you'll love it, I promise!"

Nope. Sorry.

Fassbender spends the movie auditioning to take over from Daniel Craig. Kevin Bacon excepted, none of the others can act at all.

The Cuban Missile Crisis is fidgeted with to the point of incomprehensibility. The Russians send missiles to Cuba despite a full US Naval blockade... because one general has been threatened... and this makes the entire politburo accede to nuclear suicide? Well, I guess that's why their culture produces mutants that look like Satan.

It's the usual reactionary farrago of lies.

The standard crap about how homo sapiens wiped out the Neanderthals is repeated yet again. It's an obsession of pseudo-thoughtful pop-culture and it's a lie. Nobody knows how homo sapiens and Neanderthal man interacted. There is no data. That the null hypothesis of capitalist culture is that homo sapiens went on a genocidal killing rampage tells you more about capitalism than about homo sapiens.

And the Nazi war criminal goes to work for the Russians, which is another lie. The ex-Nazis all went to work for the West. West Germany was run by ex-Nazis, a couple of cosmetic dissidents aside.

And, once again, evolution is depicted as teleological and going in 'stages' and quantum jumps, which is barely-disguised social darwinism. What makes this all the more revolting is the moralising about Magneto's supposed evil... for doing something so scandalous as to defend himself when attacked! Oh, what a twisted bastard!

And what exactly is Raven/Mystique's problem? So, her default setting is blue and scaly... so what? I'd have that as a default setting if I could make myself look however I wanted the rest of the time!

AND this film, which takes a moment here and there to jab at 60s-style sexism, takes every opportunity to get the female cast semi-naked! Fucking hypocrites.

Oh yeah, AND the only black character dies half way through the film - what a fucking shock! That hardly ever happens in movies!

Potterless

I can scarcely believe I'm doing this...



Saw the Potterocalypse.  Well crafted.  I've had worse afternoons in the cinema.

One of the most interesting things about the films is how much better they are than the books.  That goes for all of them.  This last is no exception.

Rowling is a poor novelist but Kloves is an excellent adaptor.  It's quite amazing how he streamlines the windy, pompous, digression-ridden plots so that audiences can follow them without flowcharts. 

Also, the films have always made Harry easier to like than the books, partly because Radcliffe is naturally likeable and partly because cinema can't give us what Rowling insists on foisting upon readers: unfettered access to Harry's every self-obsessed, uncharitable, weak-willed, petulant thought.  Again, in this latest film, Kloves helps mightily by snipping out acres of Potterian sulking and obsessing over irrelevancies, like the ancient and brief moral failures of mentors, etc.. 

Harry's wobbles over loyalty to his dead headmaster go on for faaaaaar toooooo loooooong in the book... and yet, in the film, even after all the set-up from the last film, we get only the briefest hint of Aberforth's resentments before Harry states that he trusted Dumbledore And That's All There Is To It.  Harry doesn't even ask the spectral Dumbledore about it in the dream/afterlife bit (which is filmed in a pleasingly 2001: A Space Odyssey-ish way).  I'm not complaining about this, but it's odd how breezy is the treatment of the whole Dark Dumbledore Backstory in Deathly Hallows Part 2, given how much attention the set-up stuff (i.e. conversations at the wedding, Rita Skeeter's book) gets in Deathly Hallows Part 1.  This is an odd but ultimately minor stumble, largely because this subplot is fundamentally uninteresting and they are quite right to sideline it. 

One of the worst of Rowling's many, many, many flaws as a novelist is that she doesn't understand her own characters.  She knows who she wants them to be... no, hang on... a better way of putting it would be that she knows how she wants her readers to view them, but this often fails to jive with how they actually behave.  For example, she damn-nigh instructs the reader to love Harry because he's kind and brave and heroic and full of love, etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum, but actually depicts him (especially in the final book) as a thoughtless, selfish, grumpy, maudlin, indecisive, clueless little irritant.

Now, there's nothing wrong with having a flawed hero - especially if that hero is a teenage boy, since they're usually pretty damn flawed - but it becomes a problem when the authorial voice fails to percieve the flaws, and has the embodiment of moral authority in the books (Dumbledore) treat Harry as though he's a ruthlessly efficient intellectual humanitarian.

But then the embodiment of moral authority is deeply flawed too.  His actions make him - to any disinterested observer - a cynical, calculating manipulator with a revolting streak of sentimentality and an outrageously brazen habit of indulgent and permissive favouritism towards certain of his pupils.  Again, the author fails to notice this... to the point where, when she suddenly wants to introduce some fatuous 'darkness' into the character for the last book, she doesn't just ask us to ponder the manipulativeness that the character already gives off in waves, but instead invents a baroquely overcomplicated backstory, of tenuous necessity to the main plot, in which she implies that Dumbledore was once briefly tempted by world domination because of a (to add insult to injury) youthful gay crush.

Kloves and Yates (and their actors) are more perceptive about Rowling's characters than Rowling. 

We see this in the movie of Half Blood Prince, which allows us to occasionally see Dumbledore as a manipulator, makes the Slughorn subplot work by subtly shifting him so that he becomes a fundamentally decent but lonely old man instead of a crass and venal twerp, and borderline-miraculously makes the Harry/Ginny romance seem credible by making Ginny resemble a human being with an independent moral identity which guides Harry back from the brink.

In Deathly Hallows Part 2, Kloves and Yates try to do something similar with Snape... however, for me, it doesn't quite work.  Or rather, it works... but it's not particularly interesting.

In the final novel, Rowling pulls her usual trick of depicting the character one way through his actions but then implying ('commanding' might be more accurate) that the reader should judge him in a way that is inconsistent with them.  We already know - from Half Blood Prince (the novel) that Snape informed Voldemort about Sybil Trelawney's prophecy... which led Old Voldy (in a rare moment of proactivity) to hunt the Potters, believing that their infant son was a possible future nemesis.  In Deathly Hallows (the novel), we learn that Snape is distraught by this because he loves Lily Potter.  (In Rowlingworld, you meet the love of your life when you are both pre-pubescents and never waver from this.  According to her, I should still be in love with a girl called Angharad who lived across from me when I was 7.)

But the thing is... Snape is bothered only by the danger to his beloved Lily.  He doesn't care about her husband or infant son getting killed.  It's clear that he wouldn't care at all if Voldemort had interpreted the prophecy differently and gone after, say, the Longbottoms and baby Neville.  In other words, he's a selfish and callous shit.  Rowling, however, seems to believe that a doglike devotion to one particular person redeems you, even if that person is dead and you care nothing for anyone living.

Now, Deathly Hallows Part 2 does not refer to the fact that it was Snape who told Voldemort about the prophecy.  This strikes me as very important.  The film goes all out to make the Snape story into a heartrending tragedy, so it has to whitewash him.  It is impossible to go for the same intended effect of the book (i.e. poor Snape, he was a sad case really, he saw the light and bravely became... etc., etc.) while retaining one of the most crucial aspects of the book's story.  Snape's culpability is actually first revealed in Half Blood Prince (novel), but the film version of HBP doesn't mention it either.  It has to be suppressed so that the films can carry off their avowed intent of making Snape a tragic hero. 

The trouble is that whitewashing Snape's worst crime and the selfish character of his subsequent regret, thus allowing audiences to percieve him as a tragic hero, actually squanders an opportunity to yank something genuinely interesting, possibly even challenging, from the rubble of Rowling's mediocrity.  Well-crafted as this final Potter movie undoubtedly is, most especially in the affecting and nuanced performance given by Rickman, it contents itself with being a mere tearjerker. 

What if Kloves and Yates had shown us Snape's full culpability, and refused to flinch from depicting the purely selfish nature of his regret?  What if they had also refrained from mustering all the rhetoric of cinema to instruct the audience to feel sad for him?  They could have avoided Rowling's confused take on the character, offered a gargantuan audience something other than cliche and said something very unRowlingy on the subject of love. 

You see, to Rowling, love - in the most simplistic form imaginable - conquers and excuses all.  But for Snape - although Rowling seemingly never realised it - love was a selfish ravening monster and a form of moral myopia that paradoxically lead him to betray the leader who, in all other respects, was his perfect master.

Veto Axons

This is a round-up of my Timelash II stuff on Series 3... well, those bits of it that I haven't already posted elsewhere.  The 'Smith and Jones' bit is a tweaked version of something from the old site.  There's nothing about Axons in here, I just found myself amused by the anagram.


The Runaway Bride

The Doctor cold-bloodedly kills the Racnoss children... and the episode tries to have its cake and eat it by both giving the Doctor 'no choice' and implying that he 'went too far'. The probably unintentional implication is that neocon logic is unpalatable but inescapable, that we need people who will ruthlessly kill on a massive scale in order to protect us from the forces of unreasoning hostility.

We're a long way from "massive weapons of destruction" being a lie from a politician with an evil, greedy alien baby inside him. 



Smith and Jones

Russell reuses many of the ideas and techniques that made ‘Rose’ work as an introductory tale. There is a frenetic opening scene which introduces Martha, her family situation and her workplace. As in ‘Rose’, the new companion meets the Doctor at work and, as in ‘Rose’ he is already in the middle of an adventure. As in ‘Rose’, the Doctor and his new friend form an instant connection which takes the form of banter, intelligent co-operation in the midst of a crisis, lots of running and lots of holding hands. As in ‘Rose’, the new companion saves the Doctor’s life. As in ‘Rose’ we see her enter the TARDIS at night, in a London backstreet and immediately run out again in surprise (the only naturalistic way to portray a reaction to the TARDIS). Bits of the first Torchwood episode are reused too.

But there's also a lot that's different. Instead of beginning with the Doctor and showing us Martha from his P.O.V. or holding the Doctor in reserve and letting Martha encounter him at a moment of high drama (as in ‘Rose’), the episode instead allows him to pop up both after and before any of us were expecting to see him! Some of us might have thought he’d be in Scene One. Some of us, gulled by the opening scene’s echo of the structure of ‘Rose’, might have expected him to appear only when Martha needs rescuing from the Judoon. But instead he pops up when none of us were expecting him, does something entirely inexplicable, and then walks off.

Of course, it would have made sense to bring the Doctor in as soon as possible because the audience knows him whereas they don’t know Martha. But a pre-title sequence featuring the Doctor would destroy that Year Zero vibe that RTD is going for. For the moment, he wants us to feel like we’re beginning again. This is essential because he’s trying to make Martha - a brand new character in another character’s show - the central audience identification figure. Let’s pause for a moment to consider how incredibly difficult that is.

His strategy is still to ground the series in everyday life before zooming off into space opera. He makes Martha’s life instantly recognisable, introducing a different family member per phone call and allowing each to offer their own perspective on the same event, the brother’s birthday party. The device of the multiple phone calls is zesty, if slightly contrived (though can we really complain about contrivance in a show like Doctor Who?) and the sequence more competently fulfils the same function as the opening montage in ‘Rose’. The opening salvo of ‘Smith and Jones’ is far more confident and it introduces more characters.

By the time the Doctor appears, we already know Martha. She has a fractured family full of inwardly pointed tensions; she seems to be their nexus, their relay and their peacemaker. In the debate about whether Martha’s family is too soapy, its easy to miss just how much information Russell feeds us about these people in such a short space of time. We are told many things about Martha’s family in the space of two minutes, through a combination of snappy dialogue and detailed visual storytelling. We learn that Martha’s parents are acrimoniously separated, that her mother is an intelligent and acerbic professional woman, that her brother is an easygoing guy with a female partner and a baby, that she is very close to her less diplomatic sister, that her father is well-off and undergoing a midlife crisis and that his girlfriend is primarily attracted to him because of his credit card. Soaps are not generally skilful or ambitious enough to pull off such rapid feats of narrative athletics. On the contrary, it is part of the remit of soaps that they should be slow and plodding. This sedate pace is part of the hypnotic effect of soap operas. Even old-fashioned glam soaps like Dynasty unfolded at a pace that is glacial by the standards of modern drama programmes. Moreover, there is little need for soaps to blast their viewers with information because their viewers will already know the backstories of the characters from interminable previous episodes. Soap operas don’t use characterisation as a means to propel or contextualise a wider plot. In soap, the personal problems and domestic conflicts of the characters are the plot (at least until ratings start to fall and, as a result, jumbo jets start doing likewise onto pubs). If they fired information at us as quickly as ‘Smith and Jones’ does soaps would exhaust themselves before getting started. Soaps need to develop their characters slowly because in soap that is the whole show. In Doctor Who you need the characters established quickly so that you can get on with the stuff about space rhinos. Even when a spaceship did show up in Dynasty, it was there to remove a character, not to give a character something to do.

There's a confidence of judgement all through this episode. Russ makes the Plasmavore an internal shape changer and so resists the temptation to let her transform into a Big Impressive CGI Vampire for the hell of it, which would have both deprived the sublimely sinister Anne Reid of screentime and left the audience scratching their heads and wondering why she/it didn’t just morph into a pseudo-Judoon.

The Judoon are great because they're not trying to do anything so tedious and Krillitane-like as take over our planet or suck out our minds… they've been hired to do a job, enforce a law and apprehend a criminal. They had jurisdiction. While it lasted, they did everything they felt was necessary (in their own brutal, unsubtle yet fundamentally non-malicious way) to complete their task. That makes them more than monsters. That gives them a psychology, a mindset. A familiar one too. They are recognisable, like the personality types we meet in Martha’s family. They make aesthetic sense, something best illustrated by the contrast between their paramilitary demeanour and the black markers they use to catalogue you.

I also truly loved the “Ro bo sklo fro mo!” scene and the way in which they then assimilated the English language. I remember being fascinated by just such linguistic playfulness in Doctor Who when I was a kid, revelling in making up my own versions of the Androgum clan names and the bureaucratic serial-number nomenclature of the Caretakers.

Justice isn’t a political ideology for them. They’ve been hired to do justice and woe betide you if you get in the way… and yet they don’t abuse their power. Justice isn’t simply what they say it is. They are clearly following a rule book. Phsyical assault is punishable by death. They didn’t kill that guy because they wanted to. They did it because the rule book stipulated it as the appropriate response. The Judoon are more like a SWAT team with a few rules and regulations. The best bit of the episode was when Lead Judoon (or Big Chief Rhino Boy as the Doctor called him) gave Martha her compensation. They'll execute you on the spot for hitting them with a vase but if they push you up against a wall and it turns out you’re "innocent" they'll give you some vouchers to say sorry!

I’ll finish off by looping back to the central facet of ‘Smith and Jones’, the Doctor’s time travel demonstration for Martha. The Doctor’s “cheap trick” is, in many ways, the cleverest thing in the episode… which is rather clever in itself: pulling off a narrative stunt like that (something that only Doctor Who could do and which, nowadays, it does far too often and to little import) and having your main character, the one who pulls it off, refer to it as a “cheap trick”. But think about it for a moment… in the programme we’re talking about, the main character, at the end of the plot, travels back to the start!

Now, we can look at that in purely literal terms (the Doctor travels in time, big deal) or we can look at it as a vertiginous feat of pure narrative, narrative unbound and free to loop back upon itself, to eat its own tale (if you’ll pardon the shameless pun). In the old days, the revelation of a temporal paradox would be the Big Sinister Episode Three Cliffhanger. In modern Who, it’s a “cheap trick” harnessed to the service of character development. That sounds like a criticism… it even feels like it ought to be a criticism as I write it, but if you’ve seen The Terminator or Twelve Monkeys or even ‘Day of the Daleks’ then you’ve already seen the Big Sinister Time Paradox story! You surely don’t need to see it again! What you haven’t seen before is a moment when a character makes a completely believable decision to accept time travel as a reality before they step out onto Platform One or meet the Tribe of Gum. Well, you’ve seen it now!

Its a significant advance on ‘Rose’ in which our heroine believes the TARDIS can travel in time simply because the Doctor says it can and, by that point, she’s ready to believe anything. But who would believe such a thing until it was proved? Until you saw it work? Someone who just believes in time travel because they are told about it? In my book that’s far more unlikely than the MRI Scanner of Doom. In ‘Smith and Jones’, the proof of time travel is offered to Martha before the assertion is made, before she even knows that the assertion will be made and it’s the proof that starts her on the journey towards the moment when she will ask for proof... which is really the ultimate way to prove time travel, isn’t it! In other scripts, the characters travel in time. In ‘Smith and Jones’, the script itself travels in time, overtaking itself before it starts running. This, in its own quiet and flippant way, is remarkable and mind-bending stuff.

Oh, one last thing... am I only person amused by the idea that if Doctor Who is resurrected for 3D HeadPlug Interactive Cybervision in 2047 and a whole generation of kids, entranced by the new stuff, go back to the scratchy old episodes from 2007, they'll all be wondering what the hell Martha means by "Planet Zovirax"?


I've covered 'The Shakespeare Code' and 'Gridlock' in other posts.  Lets just say that 'Gridlock' is one of the greatest TV shows ever made and 'The Shakespeare Code'... umm... isn't.


Daleks in Manhattan / Evolution of the Daleks

I so want to like this. It's got the right Who vibe within it, unlike so much of, say, Season 2. It's got a sense of politics and myth. It's got characters who vaguely resemble human beings. It attempts to have a sense of history.

There's lots of good stuff. There's a representation of poverty and inequality and injustice. There's an exuberance to the production. There's an attempt to have the Daleks merge with and emerge from the art deco decor of the building, as though they mesh perfectly with the aesthetics of the monstrous, imperial, vainglorious demonstration of wealth and power amidst misery. The musical number is cute. The idea of Daleks meshing with humans has potential.

Sadly, it doesn't really work at all. Tallulah isn't in it for any reason. Racism is glossed over. There is some terrible dialogue (though there is also some great dialogue). There is no interest in the actual mechanics of evolution or mutation or genes... which wouldn't be so bad except that the episode doesn't even attempt to make its own inaccurate version of evolution (which appears to be about mutations of the soul caused by lightning or something) work consistently... Also, the episode once again peddles the idea that personality (Good or Evil) is directly encoded in the genes, which is very reactionary and very simplistic. It would be easy enough to avoid all these nasty subtexts and an incoherent, flailing plot by simply dropping the scientific terminology and using some bit of sci-fi nonsense... which is what David Whitaker did when he did the same story better in the 60s.

And the direction is clumsy in the extreme. Good direction might have been able to make the script work, even when it calls for the Daleks to fail to notice the Doctor though he's standing directly in front of them in plain view... good direction might have been able to make it look less ridiculous when the Daleks crowd around the Doctor screaming "EXTERMINATE!" for the umpteenth time but then don't exterminate him. But, no.


The Lazarus Experiment and 42 were too boring to sit through, let alone write about.


And I shall be addressing Human Nature / The Family of Blood seperately at some point.


Blink

The story that won Timelash II.  The best, apparently.

Well, look... obviously this is overrated... but that's understandable given the immediate effect of its bravura construction and wonderfully gothic monsters.

It's actually not that overrated.

Moffat certainly does take sitcom situations (comedy nakedness) and sitcom characters, some of whom border on social/gender stereotypes... with geeky Lawrence entirely crossing the border.  But he subjects them to narrative contortions and grotesque experiences that characters actually in sitcoms never have to cope with.

In so doing, he manages to turn the episode into a surprisingly careful, sympathetic, compact and poignant study of the passing of time and the achievement of emotional maturity.

Shame about the business whereby a woman ends up marrying a man who just decides to follow her, thus seemingly endorsing stalking as a romantic wooing strategy.

And it's also a shame that the Angels are explained as much as they are.  It overcomplicates them and dullifies them... though nowhere near as much as their follow-up appearance.

Also, why don't the characters just close one eye at a time?

The one thing that no aspect of this should ever have been was any kind of template for the show as a whole.

Oh.


My confused thoughts on the closing trilogy may be trudged through here.