Rolling the Boulder

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

For John Nathan-Turner.



'Mawdryn Undead'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



I make no apologies; I love ‘Terminus’.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do I care? In a pig’s arse.



'Enlightenment'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

Rise Like Lions

Even as I type this, protestors are clambering over the stone lions at the base of Nelson's Column, waving anti-cuts placards while sat astride the petrified leonine relics of an imperial age that is still decaying... and trying to take us all with it.

'Warrior's Gate' came up for discussion at Gallifrey Base today.  It seems almost ridiculously appropriate.  Well, it does to me anyway.

Biroc makes me think of Walter Benjamin’s ‘Angel of History’:

The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.

Benjamin's exegesis was inspired by a figure in a painting by Klee... but, sometimes, when I read that passage, I see Biroc.  To me, Biroc is the angel, haunted by the cruelties of the past and propelled forwards by the inexorable progress of brutality, yearning to pull the emergency cord and stop the train of history, to burst apart the continuum of repetitive exploitation. The media of his travel are the mirrors, the shimmering reproaches that reflect his and his people’s ruin back at him, and allow him through into the past where he can see – and even participate in - the horror of the lost empire that has doomed his people to their turn in servitude, the lions now kings no more, the king’s beasts in chains.

The Doctor walks into the cobwebby, ruined Tharil dining hall and sets right a goblet that was left on its side centuries ago. Later in the story he is taken back to the moment when the Tharils began to lose control of their empire, when they were attacked at the height of their power by the revolution they thought they could dodge forever. Disgusted by their treatment of their slaves, the Doctor pours wine into the very same goblet (but centuries before he first saw and righted it) until … well, until the Tharil’s cup runneth over… and then knocks it over in a gesture of splendid, ironic contempt for their decadence; decadence built on the suffering, servitude, abuse and unrequited labour of those the Tharils call “only people”.

The grand feudalism of the Tharils has crumbled, demolished by the revenge of history, by the revolt of the serfs and their faceless machines of violent liberation… and the industrious serfs have built their own civilisation, which has become mercantile and imperialistic, technological and temporal, perhaps with their time engines based on the looted skills of the time sensitives who used to loot their skills long ago. It’s never stated that Rorvik and his gang are the descendants of the slaves who built the Gundans… but even if they’re not, it hardly matters. They represent the high-technological interplanetary trading society that replaces the empires of castles and banqueting halls and leonine heraldry. In the history of our world, the international slave traders were essential to the rise of capitalism, helping to supersede the world of feudalism and aristocracy.

Biroc is the noble warrior who knows his world is gone - and that it deserves to be gone - forced to represent his people who are now the wracked and stacked and bought and sold merchandise of a philistine capitalist culture, a culture that gives opportunities to cretinous, narcissistic but enterprising bigots who can pay enough bonus-hunters to help them ship the slaves through the gateway, the eye of the needle.

(Rorvik, by the way, is every inch the swaggering Thatcherite of the early-80s... and of today.  He's self-righteous about his own supposed leadership qualities and initiative.  He's all hubristic bibble about "lily-livered deadweights".  He doesn't even understand the Doctor's reference to the Tharil slaves as "poor creatures", interpreting it as impugning their monetary value.  The sublime merely irritates him.  Everything that doesn't serve him, he tries to break.  "Everything breaks eventually" could be the motto of Tory socio-economic policy.)

But Biroc, with a little unnecessary help from the Doctor & Co… who don’t realise that all they have to do is sit back and watch the gears and cogs of history tick by as Biroc and his friends wind them… manages to blast open the trap. And Romana goes with him because she doesn’t want to go back to a static and petty and reactionary world that would never understand a temporal, striving, regretful, angry thing like Biroc in a million years. The words the Doctor uses to say goodbye to her are a cheeky appropriation of Shakespeare, from a story about men who tried to swim against the ruthless tide of history.

The weak enslave themselves. The slaves who do not revolt consent to their condition. The imperialists, lords and slavers all create the conditions for their own dethronement and indenture… in fact, just being a slaver is a kind of indenture, an enslavement to boredom and decadence and banality and routine cruelty. But, if you are sensitive to time, if you understand history, if you can see the pattern of the whole in the behaviour of the tiny random chances, then you can visualise a different possible future and jump for it… and break out of the loop even as it shrinks around you. In other words: if you are sincere, blood vanishes and fear gives way.

Go, protestors!  You'll be superb.  You're the Tharils now.  Rise like lions.

 Tharil Graffiti