A Clarification

If you think this...

...is what Chinese people actually look like, then guess what:

YOU'RE A FUCKING RACIST!

ADDITIONAL:

An explanation is probably in order.  This post is in response to an assertion made on the aforementioned 'Talons' thread, an assertion agreed with more-or-less by several other posters, that one might mistake John Bennett in his yellowface prosthetic make-up (see above) for an actual Chinese person.  Yes, human beings - people with brains and opposable thumbs and everything - actually felt comfortable making that assertion in public... though, they do use pseudonyms on Gallifrey Base forum, so maybe that anonymity helped.  

Some of the people in question have been engaged in inventive games of circumlocution and tactical point-missing around the subject of the racism in 'Talons of Weng-Chiang'.  The usual disingenuous special pleading, most of it.  'There's a stupid white policeman - does that mean it's racist against white people?' and 'I've shown it to Asian friends and they weren't offended!'.  Y'know, the sort of cretinous, spurious, trivial, entitled, privileged, desperate, dishonest bollocks always trotted out when these waaaah-waaaaahing manchildren feel that their untroubled viewing pleasure may be even slightly complicated by being implicated in the injustice visited upon people other than them.

However, the idea that it might be possible to mistake the above image - in all its Fu Manchu-y and rubbery and yellowy inglory - with an actual human being of Chinese descent... well, it's simply breathtaking.  How is one to respond to people who evidently

a) base their notion of what Chinese people look like not upon the actual appearance of, y'know, actual chinese people, but rather upon racist stereotypes conjured into life by immobile, expressionless yellowface prosthetics, and

b) think that their own comfort with this racist elision is itself an alibi against charges of racism?

There's something often said by fans about 'Talons of Weng Chiang': "ignore the rat".  It means, decide to see past the extremely unconvincing giant rat monster in the story (which looks like exactly what it is: a combination of a real rat in a bad model set and a fluffy puppet) so that you can see the quality of the story beneath.  Well, 'Talons' is a good story in many ways... and no guilt need be felt by anyone who watches and enjoys it (another straw man set up by the point-missers club).  But it's devastatingly revealing that any fan should be more worried by the unconvincing rat than by the unconvincing yellowface.  It reveals priorities that are so insular and narrow-minded as to be... and I don't think this is too strong a word... inhuman.  

However, it's yet another quantum leap to the point where you find the rat unconvincing but not the yellowface.  And you're prepared to say so in public.  This reveals a shameless thoughtlessness, a terrifying absence of self-examination, an arrogance born of privilege.  And it also seems to reveal a willingness not simply to be unconcerned by the monstering of a whole race of people, not simply to delude yourself that its not happening in the text (because you've never bothered to avail yourself of the myriad opportunities now freely available to anyone with internet access to educate yourself about how representations of people work in the texts you consume) but to actually think that the representations (of, say, Chinese people as expressionless, rubberfaced bogeymen) are accurate and true to life.  I know that isn't literally what is being said - and the people I'm talking about would doubtless clutch their handbags in offended and petulant injustice (they notice and care about injustice when they think they're the victims of it, natch) at what I'm implying about them.  But it is what their attitude amounts to: that they care more about the travestying of a rat than the travestying of human beings of a different ethnic background.

I'm sick of being nice about this.  Racism is not some abstract concept that people unaffected by it get to define so that they are always absolved of it.  Furthermore, racism is what racists do and racists are those who do racism.  So, if the above image fails to trouble you, especially if it fails to even strain your credulity, then, as I say, you're a fucking racist and, as far as I'm concerned, you can fuck the fucking fuck off you fucking fuck.

It's a whole other order of problem, but a guy was just acquitted of murdering a kid because a jury seemed unable to notice racial profiling when it lead to bullets being fired.  We should be long past the point where we're prepared to tolerate this shit politely.  It doesn't warrant politeness.  Or quiet reasoning.  Or patient explanation.  It warrants anger and contempt.  Even down at this low level.  Even at the level of an old episode of Doctor Who... precisely because, as Dr Sandifer says, that old episode doesn't exist in 1976 anymore; it exists now.  And it is now long past time that we all grew the fuck up.

The Dr Speaks

Against my better judgement, I allowed myself to get dragged into the latest "is 'Talons' racist?" debate at Gallifrey Base. (You'd think, wouldn't you, that this one would've been settled long ago and been filed away in the same drawer with "is the world a sphere?" and "is the Tomorrow People reboot bound to be shit?" but nope, apparently not.)

I won't rehearse it here, since everyone likely to read this blog is likely to be able to imagine exactly what has been (and remains to be) said. 

I just wanted to post this...

...which occured during my (increasingly and pointlessly irate) involvement.  Click to make it bigger.

You know, I disagree with Phil Sandifer about a lot... but the above just made me want to hug him.

Behind the Times

Doctor Who was (and is) frequently racist in its representations.  Probably no more or less than most other cultural products of our society, but nonetheless...

Now, to deal with the banalities first, I don't accuse anybody involved in making the show of being deliberately racist.  I don't generally know much about their opinions.  When you hear about their views, you tend to hear that they were liberals or soft-lefties.  People reminiscing about working with Hartnell tend to raise his right-wing opinions on race (and other things) as though they were considered unusual.  And that's not the issue anyway.  I'm not interested in making personal attacks on this or that writer or producer. 

The show started nearly 50 years ago... so a lot of it is old, dated, the product of vanished days.  This is often raised by fans who see the problems in certain Who stories but, understandably, are eager to defend them.  Nobody wants to feel that something they love is tainted by racism - that terrible bogey word that stops people thinking clearly because, like so many important words, it's been systematically stripped of its context and has become a Bad Thing that menaces society from without.

I 'get' this desire to explain away racist representations in stories we love.  I get it totally... but I'm against the giving out of passes on the grounds that something is 'of its time'.

E. P. Thompson - in a very different context... in his book The Making of the English Working Class - coined the phrase "the enormous condescension of posterity", to refer to the oblivion into which the struggles of ordinary people get consigned by bourgeois history.  It's a great phrase (which I have previously and idiotically attributed to Christopher Hill!) which expresses something about what is arrogantly forgotten when you invoke 'the times' to excuse reactionary representations.


Cyber-Race

In the Hammer film, The Mummy, George Pastell plays the sinister Egyptian who brings the Mummy back to life, which chimes with his role in 'Tomb' (and also with the character Namin in 'Pyramids of Mars', another story in which genre semiotics transmit a representation of 'foreign' cultures as sources or vehicles of sinister, uncanny forces which threaten white Westerners).  As I've argued elsewhere, 'Tomb' is racist largely because it is a reworking of the 'Curse of the Mummy's Tomb' type story.  Klieg is the guy who tries to resurrect the Mummy in order to use it.

Those kinds of stories - gothic colonialist fiction of the 19th century which found its way into 20th century pop-culture via movies - carry certain kinds of baggage with them because they stem from British imperial engagement in Egypt. They're about Brits breaking into Egyptian tombs, finding Egyptian mummies, being cursed by Egyptian curses as punishment. They express - quite unconsciously I'm sure - a certain anxiety about colonialism. Beneath the surface they seem to whisper 'we're barging around where we shouldn't be and we're gonna pay for it'. But inherent in such anxiety is fear of the colonised people and their culture. They and their culture becomes a vehicle for the uncanny, the inexplicable, the terrifying, the punishing. As in so much hauntology, it's 'the return of the repressed', repressed guilt in this case, transfered or projected onto the victims. This is the essence of imperialist fiction. Blame the victims. The Indians attack the wagon train, etc.

Now, if you give 'Tomb' a pass for its implicit racism, how then do you praise 'The Tenth Planet' for having an entirely competent, senior, unstereotyped character who just happens to be black? You have to keep 'the times' in mind, but they don't negate contemporary judgements.

Secondly, the usual assumption is that the "times" in which we need to judge things were worse than ours, less enlightened, etc... which is pretty tricky. True in some ways, unwarrantably self-congratulatory in others. And much of the radical struggle of the past is forgotten (or subjected to something like that "enormous condescension" that Thompson was talking about). So, we should be wary of assuming that 'the times' would provide an excuse anyway.

'Tomb' was broadcast in 1967.  To give it a pass on the racism charge because it's 'of its time' is to make the assumption that people in the past were less morally or intellectually sophisticated than us... that you can characterise 'the times' as (ha!) 'dark ages' compared to ours. When you consider the huge strides being made, through the struggles and protests of millions of ordinary people, in 1967, the idea that we have to make allowances for 'the time' starts looking pretty arrogant of us.  We have to effectively cede 'the times' to people like Enoch Powell, whose 'Rivers of Blood' speech was made the following year, rather than claiming 'the times' for the people fighting bigots like him.

There was lots of casual racist stereotyping when 'Tomb' was made, but there was also the civil rights movement, Black Power, Martin Luther King Jnr., Malcolm X.  There were also millions of people fighting racism, protesting against various forms of institutionalised discrimination, struggling for equality and dignity.  So maybe, looked at another way, 'Tenth Planet' was a little more "of its time" than 'Tomb'! We should give 'the times' their full credit, which is to say that we should give the people of 'the times' their full credit.  This also helps us avoid the smugness inherent in shows like Mad Men, which looks upon the past as a time of crude backwardness compared to our auto-putative present-day olympian liberal enlightenment (while also, by the way, hypocritically sniping at old-style sexism while constantly using its actresses to titilate the audience).

'The Tomb of the Cybermen' is a cultural artifact from a declining imperialist society which represents vaguely-defined Eastern and/or dark-skinned generic 'foreigners' in a negative way (i.e. as fanatical, calculating, deceptive, callous, megalomaniacal, violent, ruthless and/or stupid) in contrast to a host of Brits and Americans who are depicted as essentially well-meaning and some of whom end up the victims of the foreign baddies.  But, just as we'd be wrong to glibly label the 'time' which produced it as backward, we'd also be very wrong to think that our own 'time' is that superior.  Britain is still, after all, a declining imperialist culture with a society massively deformed by racism of various kinds.


Disliking the Unlike

Who frequently challenged - or thought it challenged... or set itself the task of challenging - racism.  It first explicitly set itself such a task in only its very second story, 1963's 'The Daleks'.

Now, 'The Daleks' is a weird one. Looked at one way, the Daleks are Nazis (as externally crippled as they are internally), irrationally trying to destroy the Thals simply because they're different. This is very simplistic. We can't, for instance, equate the Thals with the Jews because the Thals really were the armed and violent enemies of the Daleks, whereas the idea of Jews as hostile persecutors of Germans existed only in the febrile Nazi fantasy world.

Also, as a diagnosis of racism it is very stupid. Racism isn't just fear of the different or the stranger. Indeed, 'The Daleks' makes it clear that it's more than that, despite Ian's speechifying. For instance, as well as making the Daleks and Thals opposing sides in a war that virtually destroyed the planet, the story also has their mutual welfare impossible because of the Daleks' need for radiation.

Besides, the deeper causes of racism (i.e. slavery, imperialism, social inequality, divide-and-conquer policies by elites) remain untouched by the story.

On the other hand, you can look at 'The Daleks' as a story about the evil troglodytes (the Daleks are very deliberately made into diminutive underground dwellers) who persecute the virtuous, noble, enlightened, tall, Nordic types.. i.e. as the Wagnerian, anti-semitic version of Norse mythology. Unpleasant as it may be, the story makes much more sense that way (purely as a text, I mean).

How did this happen? Perhaps because the story is so indebted to Wells' The Time Machine, which is itself indebted to this fusion of Norse myth and Wagnerian opera. (Well, I think the story is more indebted to the George Pal movie than to the actual book... but the movie carefully removes Wells' subtext about the class struggle, thus making the Blondes-persecuted-by-evil-trogs side of things even more obvious.) 'The Daleks' even makes the nasty underworlders into scientists and technicians, which is an Age-of-the-Atom/B-movie reiteration of the Niebelungen/Morlocks as industrious villains, working at fiery forges.

I think it's rather telling that an attempt at a moralistic allegory about racism, from a liberal perspective, degenerates into (at best) a silly parable about inherent xenophobia or (at worst) an accidental social-Darwinist tale with quasi-fascist undertones.


Sacred Bob, 'Talons' and Fish

It's essential to understand that a story can be racist in its representations without either containing any explicit, ideological racism, or being deliberately written with a racist message. Hence, 'Talons' and 'Two Doctors', both of which are problematic texts for anyone bothered by racist cultural representations.  (Parenthetically, I've recently encountered someone who manages to remain unconcerned by racist cultural representations via the simple expedient of disbelieving in their existence... which would be admirably bold if it weren't so obnoxious and idiotic.)

I don't think Bob Holmes set out to do anything but play around with genres, stock characters and familiar associations... but the fact that he could play around with stock characters and familiar associations that carry racist implications (from things like Fu Manchu and Bulldog Drummond and popular stereotypes), possibly without ever realising how some of this stuff could be interpreted, says something about the culture that he was living in, and in which we still live. The stuff we take for granted and see as harmless can be as revealing as the stuff we revile.

We simply take it for granted when evil is depicted as emanating from Asian or African culture in 'Talons' or 'Pyramids of Mars'. We simply take it for granted that the base, impulsive, cruel, primitive Androgums are depicted in terms of racist stereotypes about heavy-browed, big-nosed, red-haired people. I don't think it means that Holmes was a racist, or that we are... but it does mean that we live in a culture that propagates and implicitly tolerates racist representations. But then, this is an imperialistic society, with a cultural inheritance from colonialism. What else can we expect?

I don't think the team who made 'Talons' deliberately sat down to take the piss out of the Chinese. Nor do I think they were ignorant. These are self-evident trivialities and one shouldn't have to even bother to say them.

I think the production team created a story that, like many stories during their era, was a reiteration/adaptation of classic, gothic genre fiction. They'd done Mary Shelley and Rider Haggard (via Hammer) and now they were doing Sax Rohmer/Conan Doyle (again, via Hammer). Thing is, the Fu Manchu novels are racist in their depiction of Chinese culture as a source of criminality, fanaticism, the uncanny, the decadent, the perverse, the sensual, etc. Orientalism; the cultural interpretation and representation of the East as defined by such alien traits, as antithetical to the West in sinister or enigmatic ways. This is a cultural facet of imperialism (and we are still an imperialistic culture... albeit not one generally involved in direct colonialism anymore). And you don't have to be a racist in a straightforward, ideological, explicit way in order to have imbibed some of these assumptions.

In fact, Holmes seems aware that he is skirting around racism in 'Talons'.

Chang is a 'yellow peril' villain, an embodiment of the guilty transference which leads to white colonial cultures creating nightmares about being preyed upon by evil orientals.  Chang abducts loads of young white women and takes them to be murdered, never expressing any remorse.  Moreover, Chang's abductions carry hints of the sexual.  There seems to be no reason, on the face of it, why he and Greel must acquire girls, still less "plump, high-spirited" ones.  Chang abducts a woman who is clearly implied to be a prostitute.  And so on.

But Chang  at least seems like a proper character, which is more than can be said for any of the 'foreign' villains in 'Tomb', or Namin in 'Pyramids'.  Chang is a man of personal dignity and great intelligence who plays the stereotypical 'Chinaman' and replaces his 'r's with 'l's for the delectation of an audience who are enjoying exactly the same 'othering' of the Chinese that the story trades in, with Chang's own collusion. Unlike Kaftan (Kaftan!) and Klieg, Chang has an origin, a context, a background, an identity. His racial predicament is contextualised within the British imperial system, with all the references to "punitive expeditions" and his veneration of "the Queen-Empress".

Holmes makes Chang decidedly more intelligent than many of the Westerners, uses talk of the Chinese being "mysterious" and "enigmatic" as a sign of Lightfoot's silliness, has an explicitly racist policeman, has Chang knowingly and covertly mock the racism of the music hall audience, has the Doctor asking if Chang is Chinese a few moments after Chang has said, drily, "I understand we all look the same", etc.

Also, the central evil in the story is a Westerner, a war criminal from an imperialist European power defeated by "the Filipino Army". The Filipinos are a people devastated by almost forgotten Western imperialist aggression. And Greel is implicated in war crimes common to both European and Asian variants of fascism.

It's a complex matter in 'Talons', unlike 'Tomb' which is really quite crude; but there are similar background reasons for the racism in both stories. Racial tropes piggyback their way in on the backs of the literary and cinema sources being raided and pastiched. In 'Talons' its largely 19th/20th century gothic/colonialist pop fiction, as in 'Tomb'.  But still, the story has no Chinese character who isn't a nunchuk-weilding thug, a snivelling dupe or a white girl-abducting svengali.  And the (very inauthentic) representations of Chinese culture make it clear that it's a source (or at least a vehicle) of the alien, the perverse, the cruel and the vicious. This isn't because Holmes was a racist but because he is creating a pastiche out of genre fiction that was written in the context of racist, imperialist cultural assumptions.

A lot of perfectly nice, liberal/lefty people can be found doing the same thing. Monty Python end The Meaning of Life with a legend asking for all "fish" to live together in tolerance, peace and harmony. The Pythons are/were all nice guys, liberals, etc. Yet take a look at some of the representations of black people in the TV series. There's one sketch in which the 'Batsmen' of the Kalahari play cricket against England and massacre the entire English team. Now, the actual 'Bushmen' are not murdering savages who slaughter white men with spears. The Pythons created that sketch out of racist associations (i.e. black tribesmen are primitive cannibals, etc) that they probably imbibed with the kind of fiction that they all grew up with, and which Palin and Jones later mercilessly parodied in Ripping Yarns.


Barabbas and Bananas; Shockeye and Shylock

In 'The Two Doctors', the Androgums are depicted as an irredeemably inferior and savage people. And this is also represented in racist terms.

For a start, there's the line about monkeys.  This is probably intended to tie in with the story's evidently-deliberate subtext about animals and meat; more broadly, the control of species for use by other species.  However, the line takes on different valences in a tale that slides into saying something about more or less 'advanced' races.  The intent is to push an anti-meat message - one could hardly call it a 'subtext' - by making the Androgums into the embodiment of that aspect of humanity that preys upon other living things.  But, as with 'The Daleks', while the intention is to create a finger-wagging moralistic message, the effect is reactionary.  The business with the monkeys is very clumsy, since it evokes very well-established and hugely unsavoury racist slurs.  The wider implication of the story is to imply that the Androgums are, by their very nature, incapable of moral or intellectual equality with superior peoples like Third Zoners, Time Lords, or even humans.

In light of the way they are characterised, it's all the more unfortunate that the Androgums are depicted as impulsive, base, reflexively cruel, red-haired, heavy-browed, big-nosed, warty, etc. These are racial stereotypes that have been used against many groups, most especially the Irish and the Jews.

Marlowe's Barabbas, for example (the well-poisoning, nun-slaughtering, machaivellian Jew from The Jew of Malta), would probably have been depicted on stage with a big, comedy false nose and a ginger fright wig... as would Shakespeare's considerably more complex and sympathetic Shylock, disconcertingly enough.

Interestingly, Marlowe's play can also be read as an incipient critique of the new, emergent capitalist society... and, in the course of the story, Barabbas' villainy lays bare the hypocrisy of the Christians around him... which chimes with 'The Two Doctors', in which the behaviour of the Androgums has the effect of highlighting the cynicism of the Third Zoners and the Sontarans... and even of the Time Lords!

So, do we see in Shockeye the re-encoding of the stage 'machiavel' of the English Renaissance theatre?  The 'Vice' who is relished for his own villainy but is also a kind of dramatic highlighter, showing up the (often less than pure) moral condition of the other characters?  Is, then, the unfortunate hint of partly-archaic anti-semitic stereotypes a kind of echo of Barabbas and Shylock?  I can't help noticing that 'Shockeye' does actually sound a bit like 'Shylock'.

Nobody seems willing to defend 'The Two Doctors' on the grounds that it's 'of its time'.  No racist TV conventions in the 80s then?  I think you'll find otherwise.  However, what's potentially more interesting is that one might be able to mount a 'defence' on the ground that, rather than being 'of its time', it's actually sorta 'of another time', namely the time of Shakespeare and Marlowe.  Of course, this doesn't ultimately excuse the production team of clumsiness in not noticing what they were saying, but it might just contextualise Shockeye enough to make him interesting again.

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".