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

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


The Story So Far...

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

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

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

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

The most politically loaded image in 'Doctor Who'.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Broton's Zygotic Mynci

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

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

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

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

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


Recycling Experiment

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

The National Trust will have something to say about this.

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

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

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

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


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

Green Day

This is a slightly-tweaked version of something originally published in the January 2011 edition of Panic Moon.  Back issues of this excellent fanzine (now, sadly, on hiatus) are still available, here.


Plant monsters. That’s an old one. Where does it come from? Maybe it’s about the Venus Fly Trap, the cactus or the thorns on the stem of a rose. Maybe it’s about the faces that we see in the gnarled bark of trees; the faces that gave us generations of tales about tree folk. We see this in 'The Seeds of Doom', in the initial humanoid shape of the monster, in its booming threats, in its communion with Chase, in the way that the Doctor keeps calling it Keeler ironically, having chided Sarah for referring to the transformed Winlett by name.

Maybe it’s the sheer unnerving silence and mindlessness of things that nonetheless seem to have flesh and veins and skin, that nonetheless grow and move and breed.  We see this in 'The Seeds of Doom', with all the emphasis on skin, blood and pain… and Chase’s obsessional desire to “see what happens when the Krynoid touches human flesh”. We see this in the way the Krynoid moves, unfettered by roots. The way it seethes and crawls. The way it is tentacular, like the octopoda or squid monsters that pervade 20th century literary/cinematic/political monsterology, standing
for the threatened global reach of the powerfully, shapelessly, amorphously unknowable.

Maybe the Krynoid is an echo of the trauma of the first humans to discover that sometimes delicious-looking vegetation gives you agonizing stomach ache… or kills you… or causes terrifying hallucinations. We can see this fear demonstrated in Stevenson, mesmerised by his pod… and Winlett and Keeler so “taken over” that they literally transform into nightmare images of the insane roots that have taken their reason prisoner.

Maybe it’s guilt at tearing up and eating beautiful, living, growing things; we see this in Chase’s later ideological hatred of “animal fiends”. Maybe we can’t help see it - on some level - as exploitation, hence the Doctor’s word: “revolution”. Maybe it’s guilt at the way we wipe out plant species with our industrialised carelessness, guilt that makes us imagine them turning on us. We see this in the existence of the World Ecology Bureau, and Chase’s accusation to Dunbar that the endangered plants are ignored because of a pro-animal bias.

Maybe it’s about ancient history, about wars between peoples over cultivated land covered in crops; organised violence that had been unknown to hunter-gatherer societies for thousands of years until the development of agriculture. Maybe it’s the old and persistent nightmare of the classes of priests and administrators who started to rise once agriculture came, who hoarded the surplus grain and used it to wield power over the people. We see these fears demonstrated in 'The Seeds of Doom', with Scorby the violent capturer of coveted plants, with Harrison Chase (the sole proprietor and abbot of a “green cathedral”) lording it over everyone else because of his wealth, owning people “body and soul”.

Maybe it’s to do with the way vegetation encroaches upon human civilisations, almost like an invading enemy, unless carefully held in check. We can see this in 'The Seeds of Doom', with its beautiful gardens and hothouses suddenly crawling with green enemies, with an outpost of human order in the howling Antarctic wilderness decimated by plant-life within hours of its introduction.

Maybe it’s the sheer terror of inversion, of a system upon which our world depends (in this case, the consumption of the vegetable by the animal) being inverted. Maybe it’s linked to the stunning changes that humans have suddenly had to face throughout history: warm climates turning icy without warning, for instance. We see this in 'The Seeds of Doom', with its very title, with all its apocalyptic talk of a global reversal of the natural order, of man consumed by vegetation. We see this in the way the Krynoid grows, becoming a man-shaped thing, and then a hill-sized thing, and then a house-sized thing. Humans have seen such runaway environmental processes before and we’re seeing them again now, possibly presaging the doom of our species. We’ve seen worlds end. We’ve seen the ruins of once-impregnable citadels swallowed by forest, mighty ziggurats smothered in moss, crumbling empty granaries engulfed by vine and creeper.

Maybe it’s our seemingly innate tendency to imagine monsters, to co-opt anything co-optable for the construction of chimeras made from bits and pieces. Maybe they just hadn’t done a plant monster yet. Maybe they remembered The Thing From Another World or The Day of the Triffids or The Little Shop of Horrors when they were deciding which schlock movie to raid next. Maybe Bob Holmes remembered falling into stinging nettles as a child. Maybe Robert Banks Stewart just hated sprouts.

Do Panic

The new edition of the fanzine Panic Moon is just out...

...featuring two little articles by myself, in which I ponder 'The Mutants' (soon to be out on DVD) and 'The Seeds of Doom' (out recently). 

But don't let that put you off, there's plenty of other stuff... including a very interesting article by Oliver Wake (also the Editor) about Don Taylor, Sydney Newman's first choice to be Who's producer.

Details here.

A Critique of the Gothic Seasons

Yes, I know I've already done that joke... but it's too good not to overuse.  Here's my stuff from Timelash II for the first three years of Tom's tenure, generally regarded as the "golden age" (or something) of the old show.  Not much extra stuff.  Sorry.  Oh, one warning: at several points in the essay below I will be going into gush mode.  You have been warned.



‘Robot’

Dafter than the Rt. Hon. Lady Daftetta Daftington-Dafton of Daftwood Hall, Daftfordshire. A robot that grows to the size of King Kong (and starts acting like him)... a disintegrator gun kept in pieces and scattered in different locations... a government think tank that turns out to be a cover for fanatical right-wing scientific 'progressives' who think a good way to take over the world would be to destroy it first... umm, well actually the last ten years or so have made that last one seem quite plausible.

This is set in a world in which 'bad' scientists are spottable by their evil suits and ties, their evil black armbands and their evil black leather gloves; meanwhile 'good' scientists all work on renewable fuels, have bottle-end spectacles (as distinct from the evil little Himmler spectacles worn by 'bad' scientists) and cardigans and wildly unkempt hair.

But all that is nothing compared to the idea that, as Wikipedia puts it: "to ensure peace, the governments of Russia, China and America decided to give the locations and launch codes of their nuclear weapons to a neutral country — Britain — for safekeeping".

Words fail me.

As in 'Invasion of the Dinosaurs', people who have an ideological desire to make a better world are portrayed as deluded, ruthless, callous fanatics.

Of course, you can simply decide not to worry about any of this (just as you can decide not to worry about the fact that the giganticized robot spends a lot of time carrying a wobbly doll and attacking tonka trucks) and enjoy this for the utter hokum that it is.

This is the last gasp of the detumescent Letts/Dicks comfy-cosy-nicey-wicey-matey-watey style (complete with the usual bit of largely-fatuous liberal/moralistic political comment). There's something melancholy about watching a story with the Brigadier, Benton, UNIT HQ, Bessie, etc... but no Pertwee. I understand why they did it that way: if this new guy drives Bessie and the Brig calls him "Doctor" then he must be the same guy. But it just feels wrong somehow. And the style is past its prime. It's done good service for a few years but now is clearly the time for it to be retired... which, fortunately, is precisely what happened. There are some eras that feel truncated wheras others end right on time, and 'Robot' is evidence that the Pertwee/Letts era was one of the latter.


I'll post something about 'The Ark in Space' seperately, and I've done 'Genesis of the Daleks' here.


'Terror of the Zygons'

Brilliantly done hokum. The direction is some of the best in the series: stylish, pacey, scary, beautifully cinematic (especially the location sequences which are amazing - they could be from a movie). Superb, eerie music. Great creature design: the suckered-foetus look of the Zygons is effective and memorable. Great Harryhausen-style monster, only actually embarassing when filmed as a puppet rather than animated.

Sarah gets to be a journalist again; 'Harry' gets to be evil; the Doctor gets to wear tartan; the Brigadier gets a lovely comedy moment that Courtney absolutely aces.

The Zygon shape-shifting stuff is well done, neither neglected nor overused. Nowdays, you'd have to have a scene where one of the Zygons impersonates the Doctor and/or Brigadier... but you don't need it. The point is made and is used to advance the plot when they impersonate Harry, the Nurse, etc. No overkill.

Downsides? Bit too much infodumping, especially from Broton when talking to Harry. And Scottish stereotypes galore. Och aye, pass the haggis Morag, etc.

Lovely touches abound, however. The psychic landlord stops playing his bagpipes the moment the Doctor walks into his inn.  And I love the whole queasy baby vibe going on with the Zygons. Zygons sounds like "zygotes". And they have big, domed foreheads. And live in a womblike ship. And live on the Skarasan's "lactic fluid", i.e. milk.


‘Pyramids of Mars’

Without the extended confrontation scenes in Part Four, this would be a solid bit of Hammeresque gothic fun (albeit tainted with the orientalism inherent in all these stories about ancient evil Egyptian curses and fanatical Egyptian acolytes).

With the extended confrontation scenes in Part Four, this is something extra-special. The awesome mask, Gabriel Woolf's terrifyingly quiet and cultured psycho voice, Tom's amazingly committed performance... it all does great service to the scripted exchanges, which are potent and thrilling.

There's something about the things the Doctor says here. "I renounced the society of Time Lords. Now I'm simply a traveller." No grandiose boasting, no messianic showing off, no fetishised superman posturing, no trembly-lipped emoting. Just a simple statement. It's one of the best Doctor-characterisation moments in the whole series.


‘The Android Invasion’

The plot of this story depends upon the main guest character failing to notice one of his own eyeballs.

'Nuff said?


‘The Brain of Morbius’

Superlative. Dark, grisly, funny, legendary. A schlock-gothic, politico-mythic, literary/movie-pastiche/parody with terrific verbal texture, hilarious but disturbing jokes and some deceptively big themes. This is raw, pure, quintessential, uber-Who, performed with a perfect combination of knowing wit and grim seriousness by a uniformly excellent cast. Special laurels must go to Lis Sladen for her astonishing performance during the 'blind scenes'.

Time Lords are not just a race of cardboard spacemen but an unseen Power, devious and dangerous, manipulative and unpredictable; when they go rogue they don't just turn into whimsical adventurers, sometimes they lead campaigns of conquest so devastating that they might as well be Daleks. They have war criminals and secret pacts with covens of witches. In short, they are the Greek Gods: phenomenally powerful but subject to human frailties and peccadilloes (but on a cosmic scale).

This is, essentially, a story about the need for decay and death. The Sisterhood have fallen into the trap of immortality. They've juddered to a perpetual halt and, without change and decay, they've become "quaint", weak, ineffectual, backward. They huddle together in ritual and eternal stasis, achieving nothing, blind to deadly danger under their noses. Morbius has fallen into the same trap. He's stuck in his absurd, megalomaniacal dream of continuance; but he's nothing but a remnant. His bid for unnatural survival has left him a powerless, helpless, impotent, raging relic in a jar, at the mercy of a mad servant.

Morbius at the mercy of Solon's whims, yet nominally Solon's Master; Solon needing his crazy mission as a justification for his own fanaticism and failure in life. The relationship of Solon and Condo echoes it in miniature: Condo is Solon's whipping boy for his frustrations (Solon and Morbius) and Condo is at Solon's mercy while he waits for the restoration of his body (Morbius and Solon). The ultimate in co-dependence.

All these sad and silly people, stuck together in a cul-de-sac because they've cheated or denied death and, as a result, lost the possibility of change and progress. How telling that the final battle in the story involves the two antagonists trying to regress each other backwards through their long lives. This scene works beautifully, regardless of whose faces they are on the screen.

As a reworking of Frankenstein (the movies more than the book) this is also an expression of what you could call the ‘industrial turn’ in teratoculture. This shift, which starts with Mary Shelley’s novel and becomes even more pronounced in the 20th century (especially via sci-fi), sees our monsters becoming man-made, or even mass produced; they start to become mechanical or cybernetic or semi-artificial; the monsters change to reflect the rise of industrial and technological capitalism, with all its alienation and destructive by-products, with all its mass production of machinery that seems to live beyond us and escape our control and even to turn upon us. (I’ve looked at Frankenstein a bit and suggested some notions of the monster as product, here). The other way that ‘Morbius’ reflects the modern era is its emphasis on the monster as “war criminal”. Solon doesn’t play god so much as resurrect the ghost of a defeated totalitarian dictator.

How can it be this good when it's the product of a falling out between two writers leading to a ground-up rewrite? Easy, when the two writers are Terrence Dicks and Robert Holmes. All hail Robin Bland - the ultimate Doctor Who writer!


‘The Seeds of Doom’

Never quite seen what all the fuss was about with this one.

Best scene? Scorby picks up a bit of beautiful scientific equipment and, prompted by Keeler’s whine of bourgeois distress (“careful, that’s valuable!”) smashes it to the floor, just for the pure fun of destroying something that someone values.

Meanwhile, the disenchanted Dunbar (lack of promotion is such a realistic motivation for corrupt behaviour) sells his information to Chase, a man so wrapped up in his own id and absurd fetishes that he seems detached from reality.  Chase is a bit gay (so is Scorby actually... well, and Keeler) but that's not why he's evil.  In Who, being rich (and emotionally closed off) is a much more reliable sign of evil than mere campness.

Oh, and I love the way Sarah gets as close as teatime scheduling will permit to accusing Scorby of having a tiny cock.


‘The Masque of Mandragora’

Well, it looks gorgeous. It looks like one of the early BBC Shakespeares, but with nice location footage too! Portmeirion really adds an authentic feel, oddly enough... but then it would because it's nothing but a huge, witty, eccentric, eclectic, pastiched folly, a bit like Doctor Who itself. It looks right at home with Tom Baker striding around in it.

And the acting is largely excellent, especially from Tim Piggot Smith and Jon Laurimore. There's some superb dialogue for the cast to get their thespianic teeth into. "They say there are places where the bat droppings are twice the height of a man!" is a particular favourite of mine.

The mixing of the Hamlet pastiche with the Borgia/Medici/Machiavelli vibe and all the gothic business of masked acolytes sacrificing maidens in caves is rather satisfying.

As for the themes?

Mandragora as the embodiment of superstition. It makes its home in caves, in a ruined pagan temple (which it promises/threatens to resurrect), in ritual and mumbo-jumbo, in blades flashing with moonlight before being used in the blood rituals of old Roman sects. It demands mindless obedience, chanting, fearful submission, etc. It is intellectually what Frederico is politically. Hierarchy, despotism, cruelty, mindlessness.

On the other hand, the Renaissance brought new ways of thinking, new intellectual freedoms and pioneering ideas... reason began to make headway against superstition... men like Leonardo embodied the spirit of the age... more enlightened rulers began to champion such things while old-fashioned despots started to lose traction...

The Doctor stands with the future, with the 'enlightened' ruler who's interested in optics and astronomy and new ideas, who invites scientists to his big party, who doesn't use the torture chamber in the cellar of his palace, who sympathises with the peasants, etc.

Well, Guiliano is very idealised. But there were people a bit like him, who wanted to rule in a more enlightened fashion. Of course, they still wanted to rule.

He's drawn from Hamlet (the young heir who mourns a murdered father, displaced by the uncle who murdered him) and that's apt because Hamlet is an expression of the new Renaissance generation... educated at (Protestant) Wittenburg, ironic, witty, sceptical, bookish, etc., but also torn by his lingering attachment to the old ways.

Guiliano wants to "rule over a land where there is no tyranny", which is an oxymoron if you ask me, but we know what he means. He wants to be one of the new, liberal, tolerant rulers who doesn't slaughter peasants for fun and who encourages the development of science. Of course, in practice, such people wanted scientists to devise new weapons (which Leonardo did) and wanted artists to paint gigantic frescos which would symbolise the power of their own regime (which Michaelangelo did). And people who questioned the status quo would still end up in torture chambers or execution blocks, this time harangued with ingratitude to their new, modern, liberal, tolerant ruler.

Of course, things are soooooo different today, aren't they?

Also, the opposition between science and magical thinking is far too unambiguously drawn. For ages, the people who thought of themselves as modern, enlightened, rational and progressive would still engage in the rituals of the freemasons, or the gibberish of alchemy, or the religious heresies of the Arians or Rosicrucians. In fact, much of the scientific and cultural advances in the Renaissance wouldn't have been possible without magic thinking, without the traditions of alchemy, without the economic and social power of the Church and/or the despots (enlightened or otherwise).

There's a danger with the kind of linear and stagist thinking (backwardness vs. progress; religion vs. science) that this story seems to be based on. It can lead to the kind of ahistorical, culturalist nonsense you hear from people like the Sams Huntington and Harris.

Also, the story fails to even gesture towards the fact that the Renaissance didn't just happen, that it grew from changes in the economy of Europe, from advances in trade and credit and the rise of a new mercantile middle class, about pressure from below, from ordinary people demanding political change so that the could enjoy new freedoms and social mobilities, etc...

But this is all nitpicking. The story gets the gist pretty much right and presents it in a lovely package of semiotics and narrative quotes. It's hard not to love something so sumptuous, especially if its heart is in the right place.


I've posted about 'The Deadly Assassin', here.


‘The Face of Evil’

This is easily one of the best Doctor Who stories ever made. Its method is the classic Doctor Who method: shamelessly raid gothic fiction (of both the literary and B-movie variety) for images and ideas, then combine them with its own peculiar perspective, creating a unique fusion. Its style is the classic Doctor Who style: a kind of halfway house between realism or naturalism on the one hand and discursive theatricality on the other. But the subject matter is unusual, possibly a first in the show: the Doctor himself. About the consequences of his actions, about the effect he has on the places and people he 'helps' and about his own understanding of himself, his own grasp upon his own identity.

The face in the title is the Doctor's own face, and every cliffhanger depends upon an encounter with that face.

The first cliffhanger is an existential one, in which the Doctor sees himself outside himself, as an evil idol, a sick Mount Rushmore (not that the original isn't pretty sick in my book), a trace of his forgotten past, evidence of his own effect upon an entire culture, an explanation of why the Sevateem think he's "the evil one" and an almost Lacanian moment of self-cognition, in which he begins the journey that will occupy him for the rest of the story; a journey into his own reflection.

The second cliffhanger sees rampaging monsters of the id, attacking people, snarling at them... and all of them with the Doctor's face (though Tom Baker's amazing technique is to make these monsters look more afraid than savage). Andor is killed by one of these Doctor/id monsters, little knowing that he is being killed by splinters of the Xoanon he prays to for salvation. And it's interesting to see monsters directly lifted from a gothic, Shakespeare-inspired, sci-fi B-movie as expressions of the id of Xoanon/Doctor... precisely because Doctor Who as a text is built on a foundation of lifted elements from just such other texts!

The third cliffhanger sees the Doctor's sanity under direct assault by his own screaming face, fractured in several parts. An evil, mad, terrified reflection that demands of him "WHO AM I?" (which, rearranged, is "I AM WHO!") in the voice of a child. Looked at one way, that's what childhood is: the period during which we wander around constantly asking everyone who we are. That's where Xoanon is, but he's trying to disentangle himself from his parent in order to find his own identity... but then we all have to do that too, don't we?

Beyond all this psychology (none of which has to actually be true in an objective sense for this story to be subjectively fascinating) we have an amazing, Feuerbachian analysis of relgion. Man builds the totem pole, falls down before it, imagines it to be an expression of something outside of himself and greater than himself... and forgets that he is grovelling before a material expression of his own powers, and a idealised image of his own capabilities. Religion as alienation. Xoanon is an expression of our alienation from both our own technical skills and production capacities (he's an artefact, after all) and our own image, both physical and psychological.

Plus Leela is a great character, a companion who is also an image of the Doctor. A dissident, a free-thinker, a sceptic, someone who has left her static society (by being expelled/willfully opting out) and struck out on her own. Louise Jameson puts across Leela's strength (both physical and intellectual) effortlessly, subverting the sexism inherent in the idea of a companion in skimpy skins, making Leela probably the greatest ever companion.

If sci-fi is about "the relationship between man and his tools", this story shows that relationship very deliberately and consciously. I think sci-fi is more the reiteration of myth and legend in the technological age... and this story shows that happening deliberately and consciously too. And both are shown from the point of view of the machine, the tool, the technology. In this story, the machine itself has lost the difference between itself and its creator, and is deliberately re-enacting mythology in order to express itself. That's where the themes meet, and that's why the story is ultimately so satisfying.


‘The Robots of Death’

Absolutely thrilling. A script that, for once, really is about well-drawn and psychologically complex characters interacting with each other in human, funny, scary ways.

Uvanov's obvious sexual desire for Zilda takes the form of hostility, probably because it is based on class envy and a deep inferiority complex. Poul spends the story circling the others like the thoughtful, reserved, removed, brittle voyeur that he is... and, underneath, he seethes with existential terror... and his existential terror throws a revelatory light upon the neuroses of Capel, who is trying to merge with the robots and control them, thereby neutralising his oedipal terror of the benign, obedient, emotionally blank things that raised him and accidentally screwed him up beyond redemption (just as they seem to have screwed up this entire society).

The unexpected costume and production design suggests an indolent, decadent, aristocratic culture. But these people are workers, in their own way... they need to be there for the minerals to get back to the Company... so... in this culture, where almost everything is done by the robots, to be allowed to work (even a tiny bit) is to be privileged, is to be the aristocrat. The products of human labour have now alienated humans entirely, even from their ability to produce things.

But, of course, the robots are slaves... and the masters are always terrified of their slaves. They're also repositories of human neuroses. Dummies onto which the people project their inner demons. And dolls, toys in the hand of a psychopathic child in an adult's body.

Meanwhile, we have Tom on worldbeating form, playing THE Doctor (this really is, for me, THE Doctor, in a very fundamental way) as a sceptical, sardonic, razor-sharp intellectual whose one-liners slice through ignorance and thuggishness... while showing immense respect for Leela and D84 (surely one of the most lovable guest characters ever). D84 shows the difference between Capel's false revolution (in which the robots just lose one master and gain another) and a real revolution, in which the lowest of the low (a Dum, for goodness sake!) saves the day with an act of self-sacrifice born of friendship.

Louise Jameson is marvellous, playing Leela as a true force, as a character who shapes the story herself. In fact, you really should watch 'Face' and 'Robots' together, as two halves of one story. Not only for Leela's journey but because they cover much the same ground but from different angles.

The guest cast (with one exception) are all excellent. The music, the model work, etc... all superb. The script is full of amazing lines. "Please do not throw hands at me" is the most simple, D84s little poem to the power of the Laserson Probe is the most beautiful... and ironic. A machine, a tool, rhapsodizes the capabilities (for science and violence) of another machine, another tool.

It just doesn't get much better than this.


‘The Talons of Weng-Chiang’

Blissful, pulpy Victorian gothic. Literary pastiche that synthesizes something new and unique out of its borrowed parts. Jack the Ripper, Sherlock Holmes, Jekyll and Hyde, Fu Manchu, Dracula... it's all in there. A sort of voyage into our collective consciousness of pea-souper-ridden Victorian London.  The story and the society in which it is set keep on unfolding in new directions. We keep getting some new angle. The town, the characters, the interactions, the relationships keep shifting and realigning. We have carefully-executed forays into very adult territory. We even have a prostitute and a scene set in an opium den.  Of course, it's a "tissue of quotations", but isn't everything?

Against the psuedo-historical backdrop (and this story really might as well be set in the Land of Fiction), Holmes summons up a vast, complex, convincing and richly-textured backstory of future history in just a few lines of stunning dialogue. In fact, the whole story has a wonderfully extravagant verbal texture. The villain doesn't say "Why am I surrounded by fools?", he says "Your opium-sodden scum are all bunglers!" and "You stupid, incompetent lice! You crawling, mindless dogs!"

Tom Baker is at the height of his powers. The Doctor comes over as a man playing a game that he loves, but also as a deadly-serious tactician. Tom and the superb Louise Jameson (despite their supposed coolness towards each other) have tremendous chemistry. Their characters seem to have mutual respect for each other's powers, and the inherent imbalance in every Doctor/Companion relationship is here transmuted into a Guru/Trainee thing.

Great guest characters. Chang, despite his crimes, is no simple villain; he's devotee of a cause he believes in, a peasant's son seeking status, a man of personal dignity who exaggerates his accent and demeanour on stage to play up to the preconceptions of his Causcasian audiences. Jago is almost Falstaffian; a deeply flawed but utterly lovable old fake whirling around in a verbal tornado of fustian and flim-flam.

I think 'Talons' is clearly a bit racist (no more than many things) but it's a very complex business. I think it represents Chinese culture (or rather a second hand, pastiched and confabulated version of Chinese culture) according to Western assumptions and cultural tropes, i.e. exoticism (which is inherently a viewpoint that is imposed on Eastern culture by the Westerner), decadence, sensuality, enigmatic inscrutability, etc., as well as clearly making it a source of the uncanny, the menacing, and so on. It's a complex text because it imports these sorts of representations from its source texts... Sax Rohmer, etc... as part of its pastiche method, not as part of a political objective. And it problematises its own representations by making the ultimate source of the corruption in the story a Caucasian who has exploited Asians in an imperialistic way and has engaged in the kind of crimes of 20th century modernity that were common to both European and Asian forms of fascism. Moreover, he was overthrown by Philippinos... historically, the victims of a particularly ferocious campaign of Western imperialist aggression that the world has now all but forgotten.

More broadly, it's a shame that all the Chinese characters are either baddies or coolies or nunchucka-weilding thugs. But at least we are shown the racism of the Londoners, from the piggishness of the coppers to the condescending nonsense from Lightfoot about the Chinese being "enigmatic". The Doctor doesn't immediately notice that Chang is ethnically different from the Londoners and the story deliberately has Leela and the Doctor talking about the "tribe" in London known as "Cockneys".