The 1917 Zone - Part 1: Tim Nice-But-Then and the Curse of Downton Abbey

The first in a new series of posts looking at the way Doctor Who has tackled World War One.


Looked at from a certain viewpoint, 'Human Nature' / 'The Family of Blood' makes all the right noises.  All the proper sounds issue from it when it is tapped.  It notices social hypocrisy about war, perhaps even moralising about it.  For instance, while the young boys at the school are taught how to be good little soldiers, a veteran of the Crimean war is to be found begging outside the town hall.

There is also an acknowledgement that war is unpleasant.  The boys tremble and cry when forced to actually point weapons at an approaching enemy, with even the odious Hutchinson is seemingly relieved at the realization that they've been shooting at empty scarecrows.  Joan lost her husband at Spion Kop (a battle of the Second Boer War, which would've been a British victory but for the farcical incompetence of the British generals).  The Headmaster has his speech in which he describes using his dead mates as sandbags.

There is an attempt at balance, at the dramatic demonstration of values rather than the elaboration of a didactic authorial point-of-view.  Yet, the characters' values are not allowed to go uninterrogated.  Irony is much used.  So the Headmaster rounds up his boys to fight, responds with angry self-righteousness to the taunting of Baines/Son, and so on... but also evinces sincere horror at the idea of allowing what he thinks of as a little girl to be caught in the crossfire.  Of course, there's another irony there because he's prepared for male children to be sent into the line of fire.  Females, especially working class females, are to keep silent (presumably unless cheering you on your way to the carnage).

There's an awareness of open sexism and racism in the episodes, issues that other forays into the past - 'Daleks in Manhattan' for instance - have almost entirely ignored and effaced.  Baines and Hutchinson look down on Martha and Jenny and make their nasty little racist joke.  John Smith assumes that Martha's talk of aliens is a case of "cultural misunderstanding"; a primitive failing to comprehend the difference between fiction and reality.  Joan scoffs at the idea of a black maid training to be a doctor, apparently finding this concept even more immediately and self-evidently ridiculous than time travel or aliens.


The Class Struggle in Trumpton

There's quite a common fad nowadays in TV drama, perhaps best exemplified by Mad Men: setting a story in a past era allows lots of implied sneering at crass, blatant, old-style sexism, racism, etc... all underwritten by a kind of tacit, back-slapping awareness of how much better we are than the people back then, now that we're all enlightened liberals, cured of such silly shibboleths.  In 'Human Nature' / 'The Family of Blood' there is at least an awareness of class as a factor, though 'classism' is depicted as just another category of prejudice alongside racism and sexism.  This representation of 'classism' arises through the implicit contrast of the Trumptonesque community that is depicted - Mr Farmer, Mr Baker, Miss Maid, Mr Teacher, etc. - with the willingness of the story to notice inequalities in the way people are treated.  Class is thus effaced via the Trumptonisms while also hinted at as a way in which a minority group of scullions are ill-treated and disadvantaged; a safe way of noticing inequality that permits liberal clucks of disapproval while leaving real class struggle obscured.  There is no inkling that class society may be the fundamental problem, that this may even be the reason why the society of Britain in 1913 has an Empire into which it will soon be feeding an entire generation like steak into a mincer.

Nor would one expect any such inklings.  This story is an artifact of mainstream entertainment production.  It is to be expected that it will fit snugly into the hegemonic ideology of the industry.  It occupies the liberal mainstream and takes the standard approach to the national past: it interrogates aspects of that era which we think we can now look back on with a degree of condescension, disavowing elements of the past that we have supposedly progressed beyond, thus salvaging and embracing wider notions of national identity and heritage which thus seem to have weathered necessary critique.  The solution is implied by the critique, thus rendering the critique a form of support for the wider notion of national progress, of a national virtue more fundamental than the transient flaws.  This is a strategy very much used in such mainstream entertainment, a way of representing our 'national' past (and, in a slightly different mode, our present).  Look at 'The Empty Child' / 'The Doctor Dances' for an in-Who example.   The sexual morality of 1940s Britain is subjected to critique by aspects of the story (i.e. the implied abuse of children co-existing in a society that stigmatizes very-young unwed mothers, different levels of acceptance towards gays at different class levels) but the "damp little island" emerges vindicated by the mending of the central fractured relationship and the surrounding context of progress triumphant, i.e. the supposed national heroism of fighting Hitler, and the promise of social safety nets in future ("don't forget the NHS").


Missing the Target

I think the most telling scene in 'Human Nature' may the one where Tim Latimer is forced to practice using the Vickers gun against some dummies.  It shows the story's highest moments of critique but there is a gaping hole in the scene which shows, by its very near-absence, the issue upon which the story tries to foreclose, partly unsuccessfully, as it turns out... (something I'll write about later).  The scene emphasizes that boys are being taught warfare at school.  Imperial warfare, yes, because the Headmaster says that their targets are "tribesmen from the Dark Continent".  The Head overrides Tim Latimer's qualms about shooting people armed only with spears in the most condescending terms, telling him that he hopes that the boy will one day have a "just and proper war" in which to "prove himself".  This brings on a flashforward in which Tim sees himself and Hutchinson engaged in that very future war, seemingly about to die (as it turns out, the Head is right about Tim "proving" himself... the moment he forsees here is the moment that, we will later learn, both prompts and endorses his decision to take part in the war, instead of being a conshy Red Cross volunteer as in the novel).  Tim hesitates and consequently gets a beating from the sneeringly sadistic Hutchinson, with Smith's approval.

Everything about this scene screams at us that we are supposed to disapprove.  The way the scene is evidently expected to surprise most viewers (those not public school educated) by depicting children being taught how to use machine guns, the incongruously youthful-look of the actor playing Tim, the bluff and blimpish attitude of the Headmaster, the idea of him actively hoping for a war, his notion of war as a proving ground, the overplayed loathsomeness of Hutchinson, the shock of seeing Smith (the quasi-Doctor) consent to the corporal punishment of a child, the stony-faced Joan as she looks on in evident disapproval, the racism inherent in the reference to Africans, the foreshadowing of the horrors of the trenches, etc.  It's all calculated to make the average early-21st century Western liberal everyperson squeal with disapproval, even down to the "beating" that Tim is condemned to.  Is there anything more likely to cause gales of outraged horror than the idea of pulling down a young boy's trousers and thwacking his bottom with a stick?  The scene wields this like a triumph.  'See how horrible it was back then?'

More seriously, we are quite evidently expected, as audience members, to empathize with Tim's moral scruples.  Yet notice what is not said.  Tim doesn't object to shooting at "tribesmen" on the grounds that he has no business being in their country.  He objects on technical grounds, on the grounds that the level of weaponry is mismatched, that such an uneven conflict is unfair.

Of course, we wouldn't expect anybody in such a situation, in that place at that time, to object on anti-imperialist grounds or anti-war grounds.  Nobody in a British public school in rural England in 1913 would be likely to interrupt a lesson to object to imperialism in the manner of the radical Left of the time (indeed, when the crunch came, the majority of the European Left shamefully accommodated themselves to imperialism, nationalism and war).  Nor would anyone in such a context be likely to enunciate objections that reflect our widespread present-day liberal embarrassment over the Empire (bearing in mind that, these days, even apologists for the Empire like Niall Ferguson have to admit that it entailed much that was morally dubious).  However, the scene avoids only the crassest possible method of inserting modern concerns/attitudes into the mouths of characters (the Walking to Babylon method, one could call it, after the novel in which a Victorian male and some ancient Babylonians think like modern Western liberals so that Benny can like them).  If it aims to present a snapshot of the past untainted by our desired attempt to see our own concerns reflected in the thoughts and actions of the characters, it fails.  It succeeds in rejecting modern ways of thinking only to the extent that it rejects any focus upon the issue of British imperialism.  The scene forecloses noticeably upon this issue, while openly addressing other (more mainstream, less radical) modern moral concerns.  It shows us, quite clearly, the problems of the past by which we ought to be shocked... and imperialism doesn't figure, except perhaps as an implied by-product of racism (which is a reversal of the real sequence).  Racism is among the targets of the scene, certainly.  However, this very proffering of racism as an evil of the past effaces both present-day racism (which we like to think of as a rare departure from the norm... which it isn't) and any further investigation into why the Headmaster would characterize the practice dummies as "tribesmen".  He does it because he's a bit of an old racist.  End of.  Gosh, they were politically incorrect back then, weren't they?  Tim's objection to shooting the "tribesmen" despite their lack of modern weaponry is forcefully waggled in our faces as evidence of his (apparently natural and intrinsic) moral extra-sensitivity, his ahead-of-his-time-ness, his like-us-ness, for which he will be martyred to the cane by the posh barbarians of nearly-a-century-ago.


Marching Onwards and Upwards

We are plagued by Downton Abbey syndrome these days: the past re-imagined and sanitised to make it palatable to modern sensibilities.  There are various methods.  The most extreme method is to simply ignore things (for instance, it would surely have been very unlikely that Solomon in 'Daleks in Manhattan' would be able to walk around 1930s New York without anyone discriminating against him on the grounds of race).  Otherwise, aspects that seem unfortunate to us are depicted in a way that makes them seem like aberrations, or as atavistic holdovers amidst the whiggish march of liberal progress.  The real barometers of History are an enlightened few - those most forward-thinking, those most like us, those furthest forward on the upward curve of liberal cultural evolution - grieve over these aberrations and try to combat them, or at least flout them.  They are in the story to represent us in the past.  To be nice - like we are - but back then.  The nice-but-then characters anticipate and/or champion a modern liberal social outlook, despite being decades (or centuries) away from the historical period in which it will develop.  Thus Garrow's Law (a kind of Judge John Deed in period costume... I promise you, it's every bit as ghastly as it sounds) has the 18th century lawyer William Garrow feeling political sympathy and romantic empathy for a persecuted gay couple, thus mapping 21st century liberal notions of sexuality and political morality onto a past era which would've found them incomprehensible.  

Downton Abbey itself is based on this kind of retroactive moralising, but from a deeply disingenuous and outright Tory point of view (in the sense of 'benevolent' patriarchy and one-nation paternalism, not the really-existing-conservatism of ultra-freemarketeering rhetoric).  Downton Abbey's portrayal of class takes in the Trumptonesquerie of the 'we're all in it together, and we all have our role to play' view, mixed with a half-amused (oh-ho-weren't-they-politically-incorrect?!) and half tutting presentation of cultural mores and manners.  The attitudes are depicted so as to simultaneously shock and titilate modern sensibilities.  Class is manifested in terms of cultural attitudes that are funny in their old-fashionedness.  Magge Smith's character is the tell-tale marker of how we're meant to see things: she's outrageously snobbish but her snobbery is evidently supposed to be likeable for its outrageousness, its truculent pig-headedness, its obstinacy.  The old battleaxe is lovable for the very attitudes which are presented as the quaint eccentricities of a noble relic.  She, and the past she comes from, are ultimately absolved.  Meanwhile, Hugh Bonneville is the essence of the benevolent patriarch of one-nation Tory myth.  He's the nice guy who happens to have a duty of care for everyone thrust upon him by his elevated position.  The presentation of the 'Great War' in DA takes a similar route.  It was a catastrophe that engulfed everybody in Trumpton... sorry, Downton, equally; there were some horrible things like shellshock; some of the attitudes of people during the war were amusingly/shockingly 'of their time'; the root cause was cultural rather than structural; the ruling class had a duty of care and, by and large, they made good, etc.  The show even tries (ludicrously crudely) to depict some of the social changes brought about by the war, by having the upper-crust characters suddenly interact far more intimately with the below-stairsers.  The whiggish march continues as His Lordship enjoys a tortured bromance with his valet, etc.  In many ways, Grantham (the Earl of) is a nice-but-then character.  He's not 'the same' as us, but he's one of those who paved the way for the world to reach our wonderful plateau of tolerance and equality... indeed, by the Tory standards of his show, we may have gone to far down that road as a society.  He's a lost ideal that we should aspire to emulate: the man who made drastic class divisions work for everyone, the way they were 'supposed to', without our modern excesses.

'Human Nature' / 'The Family of Blood' is not as bad as DA, but it has a bad case of nice-but-then syndrome.  In just the Vickers-gun-practice-scene, both Tim and Joan are nice-but-then characters.  What the nice-but-then characters disapprove of is very telling.  It is a way to measure what the text expects (so to speak) its audience to disapprove of.  It is a measure of the normative assumptions that the text's creators take for granted.  What they are given to frown at is a way of measuring the parameters of the politically conceivable within the text.  The scene we've been looking at acknowledges the issues of racism, jingoism, blimpishness, physical brutality in education, etc., but, as noted, it forecloses upon the issue of imperialism.

Moreover, even those sins it notices are safely packaged away within the past, within the bad-old-days that may be acknowledged as bad to the extent that bad things like these happened then.  We, from our position of modern-minded, liberated, liberal, tolerant, progressive, humane nowness, can afford to tut at the silly and unpleasant behaviour of the people of 1913.  We can compare ourselves to them and (especially when we see ourselves vicariously present and stony-faced in the persons of the nice-but-then characters) feel mighty good about ourselves.

Of course, this sort of thing didn't begin with Mad Men or Downton Abbey.  The nice-but-then character is not a new invention.  In 60s Doctor Who, just off the top of my head, there's the guy in Nero's court, freeing slaves because he's a secret Christian (don't get me started).  Indeed, the nice-but-then character may be embedded in every foray Doctor Who takes into the past.  It may literally happen within the narratives of 'An Unearthly Child', 'Marco Polo', 'The Aztecs', etc., with Ian and Barbara - the 'civilized', late-20th century Westerners - trying to explain friendship and human rights to the savages, Easterners and natives of yore.

*

Lots more of this to come, I'm afraid.

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.

Three Act Tragedy

And so it came to pass that Series 3 ended with a trilogy.  And Jack looked upon the trilogy.  And Jack saw that it was... umm... er...


'Utopia'

Good stuff; the Master's return at the end is the least of it.  We have to put up with some of the obligatory "gee, aren't humans just neat?!" stuff from the Doctor, but it passes soon enough. Yana is a touching, melancholic figure. Chantho is one of my favourite characters in all Who. The scene where the Doctor and Jack finally discuss Jack's immortality is beautifully scripted and acted. The desolated conglomeration is beautiful.

The whole set up is pregnant with intricate, sombre, uncomfortable implications. At the end of everything, with even the galaxies disappearing... amidst a wasteland, haunted by a dead city and one lone survivor (who still clings to her obsolete cultural norms)... amidst all these things, there are two groups of humans... the unreasoningly fierce and cruel "futurekind", with their gnashing sharp teeth, their flaming torches and their mindless desire to destroy... and the refugees who huddle together for warmth; who value family and friendship; who have created structure and purpose out of bits of scrap, food and dreams of impossible deliverance... and the Futurekind want to smash these aspirations for no real reason, while the refugees keep building even as they near the point of maximum entropy.

This is 'Gridlock' part II... but it's less comfortable than 'Gridlock'.  More bleak.  More gloomy.  More fully liberal.  Hence, more reactionary.

The faith of the refugees is in a better world, like the faith of the gridlockers... but they refugees have given it a name that has political rather than religious associations. 'Utopia' is usually thought of now as representing some age-old impossible dream of social perfection and total human equality.  In the mainstream discourse, to be Utopian is to share the putative mistakes and delusions of the founders of the 20th century totalitarians. Lenin wanted to make a paradise; that's why he ended up making Hell on Earth. (This isn't my view, by the way. It is as simplistic and ahistorical as it is popular.)

'Utopia' is one of those stories that I love despite the fact that it's highly open to a reactionary reading (like 'Frontios' for example, with which it shares some ideas).

In 'Utopia', the supposed dual nature of humanity is externalised in the form of two seperate tribes (who fight for no reason, as tribes always do in this view of the world), one of which is 'civilised' and one of which is 'barbarous' for no real reason. There is no reconciling this 'clash of civilisations'. The nice people, who are associated in the text with science, technology, modernity, family life, democracy (via the concept of Utopia itself), must fight and/or escape the barbarians (with their medieval ways)... or be destroyed.

In the end, they simply have to leave the Futurekind behind (to die) as they blast off in search of Utopia. At least this story holds out some hope that Utopia (i.e. some form of social/political optimum) might be reachable... an avenue of hope that 'The Last of the Time Lords' closes decisively and brutally.

It isn't hard to see what all this points to. RTD is far too influenced by the Dawkins/Hitchens/Hari axis-of-liberal-culturalism for my liking.

But ambiguity isn't a bad thing per se. This story is very interesting and rich, so (as with 'Midnight' next season) the fact that it carries connotations that I find open to a reactionary political interpretation doesn't spoil my enjoyment.

In the end, the greatness of the story lies in the perfection of its construction. Every time I watch it I find myself wondering how it's possible to create a script that functions with such clockwork perfection without also creating something that ever feels mechanical. It has a organic feel to it. Every event grows from the events before. Every character moment similarly. Casual lines of dialogue kickstart psychological chain reactions that result in major plot eruptions.

It's a thing of beauty. It's very apt (on several levels) that the major emblem of the story should be a watch. A watch symbolises time. And structure. And technology. And the human desire to control the universe into which we're born. And it also stands as a pretty good metaphor (precise yet graceful) for the workings of the plot itself.


'The Sound of Drums' / 'Last of the Time Lords'

I still feel very ambivalent about these episodes. I've never really been able to resolve my feelings about them. This is a deeply mythological story which also expresses a great many political ideas. The Master in ‘Sound of Drums’ / ‘Last of the Time Lords’ is not just the Anti-Christ, bringing the tribulation and controlling mankind through their own follies, he is also a Blairesque opportunist who flashes his fake smile at the TV while using the state apparatus to arrest innocent people and scheme for war.

Trouble is, it's also highly steeped in both genre/cult mediocrity and self-referential/reverential Whoness. And the political notions are incoherent and self-contradictory.

The episodes hint at issues to do with propaganda, media manipulation etc. (even down to the Master commenting approvingly on the Teletubbies having TVs in their bellies). Are we to interpret the Archangel network as an expression of how modern technological media functions as a tool of power? How our media has now burrowed deep into us and become part of our being... this is psychologically true, and is on the brink of becoming physically/biologically true. A meshing of man and media/machine is a future dream/nightmare that many Who monsters express, not least the Toclafane.

Okay... but it essentially boils down to brainwashing, or rather hypnotism... which makes it hard to read the story as being an attack on the system itself, or even a reactionary whinge about stupid, ignorant voters giving their assent to dodgy characters (which would at least link up thematically with the Utopia thing).

But in this story, the system is usurped by a man who murders the real politicians... and he hasn't secured the consent of the electorate, just hypnotised them! Seems to me, everyone is let off the hook... despite some potential which we glimpse in the Cabinet session scene (a scene that seems all the more pointed in these days of the ConDem Coalition). It's all very well for Martha's dad to shout accusations at people on the streets... but even this scene, which potentially could've been extremely powerful and edgey, is rendered essentially meaningless. People voted for the bad guys that take away innocent people in unmarked vans... because they were brainwashed. So... what? This story seems to determined to assert that we're all guilty while also absolving us.

There is a determination in this story to acknowledge that people get deeply hurt by violence, tyranny, etc... there is an attempt at showing emotional trauma... there is an attempt to show people profoundly changed by long, hard struggles... there is a depiction of emotional/physical domination (especially with Lucy)... and an attempt to depict such emotional/physical cruelty as having sources beyond pure evil. However, people also behave in ways that are as convenient in plot terms as they are inexplicable and unbelievable. And there is a great big cheaty Reset button which sets everything right... except that it doesn't because, for some reason, some people don't get time reversed and have to live with their pain. Which seems a bit confused.

The Master is shown as a sort of wounded, vicious, sniggering, narcissistic baby... his triumph is the triumph of madness and delusion superimposed on reality by power. Yet John Simm plays him, at least for large sections of the time, as just an irritating pratt. And much of his immaturity is expressed in pointless villain posturing and/or equally pointless continuity references.

The cliffhanger to 'Sound of Drums' is a summation of the Master's malicious madness, a vision of the apocalypse reiterated in terms of technological alienation, a savage swipe at the dark inner sociopathy of necon messianism, etc... but its also a tired, wheezing genre cliche... not to mention the exact same mechanical-monsters-swoop-down-from-the-skies-and-kill-people-for-no-apparent-reason scenario as we got at the same point in Season 2 (still, at least this is only the second time we get it... I'm looking at you, 'The Stolen Earth').

And the dark heart of the story is the business of the Toclafane being the humans of the future. This continues the pessimistic, arguably reactionary message of 'Utopia'. Attempt to reach Utopia (the word carries unavoidable political connotations, even without the concentration of the rest of the story on politics) and you end up with tyranny, totalitarianism and mass murder under the auspices of a mad, opportunistic demagogue. Humans, in this view, are inherently savage creatures that will become sadistic monsters if just given the right push by the right kind of lunatic... and don't such ruthless loonies always tempt "us" with the promise of Utopia? This is political philosophy as practiced by Andrew Marr or Jeremy Vine. It's a perfect expression of 'original sin' as a political concept, of the idea that "we" are in some way collectively responsible as a species for tyranny and destructiveness.  It's as mainstream as it is cretinous.  As orthodox as it is ahistorical.  As thoroughly a foundation of liberalism as it is of elitism, authoritarianism, neoconism and even fascism.

This is why the sniping at the politicians and the Americans is so unsatisfying... because it's hypocritical.  We're obviously supposed to despise the sharp-suited politicos and the hubristic US Prez for their arrogance and untrustworthiness... and yet the story that lampoons and slaughters them backs a view of people and society (the classical liberal view of individualism = freedom / collectivism = destined to end in tears) that has just as much contempt for ordinary people.  Beneath all the superficial rhapsodising of humanity, the best they can do it find a saviour to pray for. 

Yes, the people of Earth find their 'better' side and express it... through the very technology that enslaved them and turned the future humans into the Toclafane. So, is technology our salvation or our damnation? I suppose it depends what we do with it. But we can't choose what to do with it if we're brainwashed, can we? Is this story about political opportunism and public gullibility (hence Utopia leading to Toclafane evil and the Master's dictatorship)? Then why is the brainwashing needed in the first place? The Archangel network business really does balls things up.  It even ballses up the reactionary interpretation!

Also, the Christianity of the thing becomes smothering. The Master must be defeated, and we get there via prayer, resurrection and forgiveness. It's recast in technobabble... but it's still evidently prayer, resurrection and forgiveness. The Doctor's hubristic and morally meaningless decision to forgive on behalf of others is exactly the same as Christ's. So, pray to the saviour and he will rise to save you from your misery, misery that stems from your own sheeplike haplessness in the face of power... and/or your guilt in bringing that misery upon yourself (we haven't quite worked out if you're guilty or innocent yet - see above)... and he will then make everything better and forgive your oppressor on your behalf, despite himself being deeply culpable in your suffering.

So, we're all guilty... and we're all innocent... collectivism (i.e. Utopia) leads to Hell... but collectivism (i.e. prayer) also leads to salvation... and we're all forgiven, whoever we are and whatever we did...

In the end, this trilogy is cast as a 'three act tragedy'.  The greatest tragedy, however, is that it could've been so good if the writer had only worked out what he was trying to say.