My. Fucking. Hero.
ideas are icepickproof
Showing posts with label whinge. Show all posts
Showing posts with label whinge. Show all posts
Wednesday, 10 July 2013
A Role Model
In an age when the suffocating omnipresence of the imperatives of neoliberalism has penetrated every single corner of culture - aggressively colonizing even the formely overlooked, underpoliced nooks and crannies where eccentricity and offbeatitude used to be free to spring up like hardy weed - and even the supposedly nerdy heroes have to be marketably thin, sexy and dressed in geek chic, it might do us all good to remember...
My. Fucking. Hero.
My. Fucking. Hero.
Friday, 14 September 2012
How to Write a Steven Moffat Script
TITLES
AMY: Ah, hello oldest and best friend who I've never mentioned before for some reason.
FRIEND: Hello Amy.
DOCTOR: Hello, I'm quirky.
FRIEND: And sexy.
DOCTOR: Yes, and now I will make a double entendre that could just about be interpreted non-sexually by a forum casuist who is trying to win a debate with someone who says Steven Moffat is obsessed with proving that the Doctor is an active heterosexual. Because, however much he wants us to know that he's a sexy shagging randy lad who likes girls and sex, Moffat also has an inner core of nerd.
ENEMY: Hello, here are some evil monks with no heads. They can't be reasoned with or persuaded. Because they don't 'reason' like the evil old Doctor. And they have no heads. They've cut their own heads off. Geddit? So, no brains on these monks. By choice. DO YOU SEE?
RORY: Euuurrgghh...
AMY: Oh my God, they killed my wonderful impossible man who is centuries old and had a box (the Pandorica I mean), etc. I mean Rory even though I seem, for some reason, to be framing my remarks to sound like I mean the Doctor.
FEMALE OBSESSED WITH DOCTOR #2: Hello Doctor, I hate you. I mean I love you.
FEMALE OBSESSED WITH DOCTOR #3: Oh, I know. He's a wonderful, impossible man who once took me to the wedding of Princess Diana (he was best mates with her and may have shagged her) and got some other celebrity historical figures to do something hilarious at the party afterwards, where it is implied he got drunk.
FEMALE OBSESSED WITH DOCTOR #2: Oooh, double entendre.
FEMALE OBSESSED WITH DOCTOR #3. Yes, sexy quip.
SHOOTS SOMEONE.
DOCTOR: Mmmm, I liked the way you shot that guy. That made me stand to attention. By the way, I am also a hypocrite so I will warn you against immoral behaviour that I just approved and also committed. So, don't do it again. Or I'll come after you. And I'm scary. Even scarier than my best buddy ever, Henry Kissinger.
HEADLESS MONK: Yes, the Doctor is scary. And powerful and dangerous.
FEMALE OBSESSED WITH DOCTOR #2: And sexy.
FEMALE OBSESSED WITH DOCTOR #4: And I should know, because I met him when I was a kid and became obsessed with him before I even hit puberty.
FEMALE OBSESSED WITH DOCTOR #2: Yes, so did I.
FEMALE OBSESSED WITH DOCTOR #3: Uh huh. And me.
AMY: Me too.
FRIEND: Yep. And me. In fact, I was genetically designed to be obsessed with him. I have no other purpose in life.
MURRAY GOLD BACKS PROLONGED SCENE OF MATT SMITH LOOKING SMUG WITH BIBLICAL EPIC CHORUS MUSIC.
FEMALE OBSESSED WITH DOCTOR #2: Oh, by the way, I'm the headless monk's daughter or something, because of a time paradox or something.
DOCTOR: I knew that all along because I am now so powerful and all knowing that no mere drama ever threatens me.
FANS: Give this man a vault full of Hugo awards, this is genius.
RORY: I'm alive again.
DOCTOR: Well go and kiss your property... I mean wife.
HEADLESS MONKS ALL DROP DEAD.
DOCTOR: Yay, another alien menace ended by the establishment of heteronormative gender relations!
END CREDITS.
AMY: Ah, hello oldest and best friend who I've never mentioned before for some reason.
FRIEND: Hello Amy.
DOCTOR: Hello, I'm quirky.
FRIEND: And sexy.
DOCTOR: Yes, and now I will make a double entendre that could just about be interpreted non-sexually by a forum casuist who is trying to win a debate with someone who says Steven Moffat is obsessed with proving that the Doctor is an active heterosexual. Because, however much he wants us to know that he's a sexy shagging randy lad who likes girls and sex, Moffat also has an inner core of nerd.
ENEMY: Hello, here are some evil monks with no heads. They can't be reasoned with or persuaded. Because they don't 'reason' like the evil old Doctor. And they have no heads. They've cut their own heads off. Geddit? So, no brains on these monks. By choice. DO YOU SEE?
RORY: Euuurrgghh...
AMY: Oh my God, they killed my wonderful impossible man who is centuries old and had a box (the Pandorica I mean), etc. I mean Rory even though I seem, for some reason, to be framing my remarks to sound like I mean the Doctor.
FEMALE OBSESSED WITH DOCTOR #2: Hello Doctor, I hate you. I mean I love you.
FEMALE OBSESSED WITH DOCTOR #3: Oh, I know. He's a wonderful, impossible man who once took me to the wedding of Princess Diana (he was best mates with her and may have shagged her) and got some other celebrity historical figures to do something hilarious at the party afterwards, where it is implied he got drunk.
FEMALE OBSESSED WITH DOCTOR #2: Oooh, double entendre.
FEMALE OBSESSED WITH DOCTOR #3. Yes, sexy quip.
SHOOTS SOMEONE.
DOCTOR: Mmmm, I liked the way you shot that guy. That made me stand to attention. By the way, I am also a hypocrite so I will warn you against immoral behaviour that I just approved and also committed. So, don't do it again. Or I'll come after you. And I'm scary. Even scarier than my best buddy ever, Henry Kissinger.
HEADLESS MONK: Yes, the Doctor is scary. And powerful and dangerous.
FEMALE OBSESSED WITH DOCTOR #2: And sexy.
FEMALE OBSESSED WITH DOCTOR #4: And I should know, because I met him when I was a kid and became obsessed with him before I even hit puberty.
FEMALE OBSESSED WITH DOCTOR #2: Yes, so did I.
FEMALE OBSESSED WITH DOCTOR #3: Uh huh. And me.
AMY: Me too.
FRIEND: Yep. And me. In fact, I was genetically designed to be obsessed with him. I have no other purpose in life.
MURRAY GOLD BACKS PROLONGED SCENE OF MATT SMITH LOOKING SMUG WITH BIBLICAL EPIC CHORUS MUSIC.
FEMALE OBSESSED WITH DOCTOR #2: Oh, by the way, I'm the headless monk's daughter or something, because of a time paradox or something.
DOCTOR: I knew that all along because I am now so powerful and all knowing that no mere drama ever threatens me.
FANS: Give this man a vault full of Hugo awards, this is genius.
RORY: I'm alive again.
DOCTOR: Well go and kiss your property... I mean wife.
HEADLESS MONKS ALL DROP DEAD.
DOCTOR: Yay, another alien menace ended by the establishment of heteronormative gender relations!
END CREDITS.
Friday, 10 August 2012
Sport, sport, masculine sport, prepares a young man for society...
The Olympics really depresses me.
Not just the horrendous waste of money and the revolting jingoism and the all-pervading ideological reinforcement... but it represents a boat I missed.
Sport. Games. I hate them. But I strongly suspect that I hate them because school trained me to, through social punishment.
In school, sport is a dark ritual soaked in hierarchy and humiliation and hatred and contempt. Win or you're rubbish. Understand and like and care about the right things or you're 'gay' (horror of horrors). Be thin and athletic or know that you are subhuman.
All school is like that. A huge pyramidal structure of power in which the establishment trains its next generation to be drones or managers or lumpen failures salutary for the rest of us. Meanwhile, the kids compete for popularity and cool and acceptance. Learn, children, straight away, that life is a race and the losers are scum. It's all built on the shaming and degradation of anyone different or overweight or awkward or sad or bookish or unattractive or poor or clueless or weak.
That was the context in which I was exposed to sport and games for the first time. I don't remember ever being taught about it. I was just thrown in and expected to prove my aggressive masculinity (at age 7 or whatever!), to jeer at anybody who wasn't as good as me, or accept that it was my place to be jeered at if I didn't have any aptitude or skill.
Inevitably, I reacted against it and became not just useless but actively hostile. I started to define myself in opposition to things like healthiness and outdoorsiness and athleticism.
But I don't really believe that sport is inherently bad or worthless. I was just made to take on that rationalisation because sport in school made me feel bad and worthless.
Not just the horrendous waste of money and the revolting jingoism and the all-pervading ideological reinforcement... but it represents a boat I missed.
Sport. Games. I hate them. But I strongly suspect that I hate them because school trained me to, through social punishment.
In school, sport is a dark ritual soaked in hierarchy and humiliation and hatred and contempt. Win or you're rubbish. Understand and like and care about the right things or you're 'gay' (horror of horrors). Be thin and athletic or know that you are subhuman.
All school is like that. A huge pyramidal structure of power in which the establishment trains its next generation to be drones or managers or lumpen failures salutary for the rest of us. Meanwhile, the kids compete for popularity and cool and acceptance. Learn, children, straight away, that life is a race and the losers are scum. It's all built on the shaming and degradation of anyone different or overweight or awkward or sad or bookish or unattractive or poor or clueless or weak.
That was the context in which I was exposed to sport and games for the first time. I don't remember ever being taught about it. I was just thrown in and expected to prove my aggressive masculinity (at age 7 or whatever!), to jeer at anybody who wasn't as good as me, or accept that it was my place to be jeered at if I didn't have any aptitude or skill.
Inevitably, I reacted against it and became not just useless but actively hostile. I started to define myself in opposition to things like healthiness and outdoorsiness and athleticism.
But I don't really believe that sport is inherently bad or worthless. I was just made to take on that rationalisation because sport in school made me feel bad and worthless.
Tuesday, 19 June 2012
When Titans Clash
Spoiler Warning
Prometheus tries to evoke the aesthetics of Alien in a way that is borderline obsessive. Even down to making sure there are cream-coloured leathery/cushiony pads on the spaceship corridor walls. Still greater attention is paid to replicating H.R. Giger's design concepts for the derelict alien ship, cockpit and pilot from the original film. The really weird thing is that, even as Prometheus deliberately and slavishly tries to evoke and/or copy the aesthetics of Alien, it completely overlays them with an entirely different, clashing aesthetic sense.
Look, why is this image so powerful?
There are, I think, a number of reasons.
Most importantly, it's because it is just explicable enough to make sense while also being inexplicable enough to unnerve. We are plainly looking at a navigator or pilot in a cockpit. We understand this. We are also looking at something inhuman and estranged, something that evades any attempt on our part to relate to it directly. The 'Space Jockey' (as it is sometimes called) is a pilot, evidently, but it is also a giant, a fossil, a mammoth, a skeleton, a statue, a cyborg, a petrified outgrowth of flesh embedded within a colossal machine. We cannot separate the entity from the artifact. The ribs of the creature flow outward into the cables of the chair. The trunk of the face flows down into the workings of the mechanism. We cannot disentangle organism from system, animal from engine. They are fundamentally akin, interchangeable, interpenetrating, symbiotic. This was always the intention: to suggest something that was inextricably both biological and technological. The cockpit and the pilot are not discrete things but are conjoined to the point of identity. They were one flesh, until the flesh peeled away. It's entropic in both an organic and mechanical way simultaneously. It's the ossified cadaver of a wrecked bio-machine.
It's also beautiful, but not in a straightforward way. It's not pretty. It's hideously, ominously, unnaturally, grotesquely beautiful. It's beautiful in the same way as a scorpion, or the bleached skull of an ox lying in a parched gulch, or a pile of rusted flywheels that was once a graceful machine. It has the troubling, terrible beauty of wreckage, of the predator, of the insectile, the dead, the decayed, the destroyed, the deadly.
And it's fucking scary. It's a great big skull-faced monster in a huge black room made out of what looks like loads of bones.
Now, look at this:
This is pretty. It's the cockpit from Alien... decorated with shimmering CGI lights and swirls and spirals and graphics and glowing planets. It's like someone stuck gold stars all over one of Goya's 'black paintings' or inserted some watercolour daffodils into a Max Ernst canvas. Well, why am I dancing around this? It's like putting pretty, computer-generated patterns all over a picture by H.R. Giger. The design and CGI rendering is perfectly nice in and of itself, but in this context it looks like a tawdry, clashing embellishment. It neutralises the uncanny effect of the setting. For all the familiarity that popular culture now has with Giger (thanks largely to Alien) his imagery remains fundamentally inscrutable. The image above plasters extremely familiar, almost routine imagery - CGI computery prettiness - over this fundamentally inscrutable image. It wouldn't be so bad if this were meant, in narrative terms, to be human technology inserted into the context of the alien ship, as with the floaty red probe things... but the display above is actually supposed to represent the technology and culture and design sense of the pilot-type aliens themselves.
This is more than just an aesthetic problem. The technology of the beings that Shaw calls 'the Engineers' is recognisably similar to the technology of the humans as we see it in the film. Suddenly, the mysterious and unknowable culture of the gigantic skeletal bio-mechanical thing from Alien is explained, demonstrated and shown to be easily understood in conventional futuristicky/SF terms. The aliens have computers just like the humans. They have holographic displays just like the humans. They have navigation charts just like the humans. They have cryo-beds just like the humans. They have chairs around button-covered consoles... on which they leave their flutes! They suddenly have doors that open and close (think about it - there's nothing like that in the derelict from the original film). They have cargo bays. The cockpit chair turns out to be just that - a chair in which a humanoid sits. He didn't grow out of it. He sat in it. Wearing a spacesuit and a helmet.
This helmet thing is a big deal. The skeletal face of the alien pilot, with its ossified veins, its cavernous eyes and its trunk-like snout... turns out to be a helmet, just like the head-like helmet of the aliens in Independence Day. Like many crappy sci-fi films post-Alien, Independence Day tried to ape Giger's influential design concepts. So ID4 had bio-mechanical stuff in it, but in a processed and banal form. Now the Alien series reclaims its appropriated design concepts... and recycles the lazy, banal variants already used by inferior films.
And what is inside the helmet? We get to see. Not only is the pilot's eerie, inscrutable, alien face revealed to be a piece of perfectly explicable human-like technology, with its trunk a kind of hinged flap, but we see it removed, and beneath there is... a guy. An odd-looking guy, for sure, but a guy, nonetheless.
Moreover, these guys have comprehensible motives. We may not be told why they created life on Earth and then decided to destroy it, but these aims are comprehensible in and of themselves. The 'Engineers' can be communicated with, spoken to. Their thought processes are apparently akin to those of humans. It is no longer that The Company wishes to utilise the Xenomorphs (if we must call them that) as weapons... apparently they always were weapons, or outgrowths of weapons. The Engineers created them as such, wittingly or unwittingly. The Engineers are capable of military strategy then, along with fear, rage, the desire for revenge, and other such all-too familiar states of mind.
Again, there's nothing wrong with this in and of itself, but it is appended onto the imagery of the derelict craft and its silent, inscrutable, lonely occupant in Alien... and it represents a fundamental misprision of why those things are so interesting. Put crudely, to explain the Space Jockey is to make it less mysterious (of course) and therefore less powerful. It was always a Titan. It's just that Alien allowed us to believe in the Titan by making it unknowable. Prometheus makes the Titans less titanic by making them simply larger versions of us.
Prometheus tries to evoke the aesthetics of Alien in a way that is borderline obsessive. Even down to making sure there are cream-coloured leathery/cushiony pads on the spaceship corridor walls. Still greater attention is paid to replicating H.R. Giger's design concepts for the derelict alien ship, cockpit and pilot from the original film. The really weird thing is that, even as Prometheus deliberately and slavishly tries to evoke and/or copy the aesthetics of Alien, it completely overlays them with an entirely different, clashing aesthetic sense.
Look, why is this image so powerful?
There are, I think, a number of reasons.
Most importantly, it's because it is just explicable enough to make sense while also being inexplicable enough to unnerve. We are plainly looking at a navigator or pilot in a cockpit. We understand this. We are also looking at something inhuman and estranged, something that evades any attempt on our part to relate to it directly. The 'Space Jockey' (as it is sometimes called) is a pilot, evidently, but it is also a giant, a fossil, a mammoth, a skeleton, a statue, a cyborg, a petrified outgrowth of flesh embedded within a colossal machine. We cannot separate the entity from the artifact. The ribs of the creature flow outward into the cables of the chair. The trunk of the face flows down into the workings of the mechanism. We cannot disentangle organism from system, animal from engine. They are fundamentally akin, interchangeable, interpenetrating, symbiotic. This was always the intention: to suggest something that was inextricably both biological and technological. The cockpit and the pilot are not discrete things but are conjoined to the point of identity. They were one flesh, until the flesh peeled away. It's entropic in both an organic and mechanical way simultaneously. It's the ossified cadaver of a wrecked bio-machine.
It's also beautiful, but not in a straightforward way. It's not pretty. It's hideously, ominously, unnaturally, grotesquely beautiful. It's beautiful in the same way as a scorpion, or the bleached skull of an ox lying in a parched gulch, or a pile of rusted flywheels that was once a graceful machine. It has the troubling, terrible beauty of wreckage, of the predator, of the insectile, the dead, the decayed, the destroyed, the deadly.
And it's fucking scary. It's a great big skull-faced monster in a huge black room made out of what looks like loads of bones.
Now, look at this:
This is pretty. It's the cockpit from Alien... decorated with shimmering CGI lights and swirls and spirals and graphics and glowing planets. It's like someone stuck gold stars all over one of Goya's 'black paintings' or inserted some watercolour daffodils into a Max Ernst canvas. Well, why am I dancing around this? It's like putting pretty, computer-generated patterns all over a picture by H.R. Giger. The design and CGI rendering is perfectly nice in and of itself, but in this context it looks like a tawdry, clashing embellishment. It neutralises the uncanny effect of the setting. For all the familiarity that popular culture now has with Giger (thanks largely to Alien) his imagery remains fundamentally inscrutable. The image above plasters extremely familiar, almost routine imagery - CGI computery prettiness - over this fundamentally inscrutable image. It wouldn't be so bad if this were meant, in narrative terms, to be human technology inserted into the context of the alien ship, as with the floaty red probe things... but the display above is actually supposed to represent the technology and culture and design sense of the pilot-type aliens themselves.
This is more than just an aesthetic problem. The technology of the beings that Shaw calls 'the Engineers' is recognisably similar to the technology of the humans as we see it in the film. Suddenly, the mysterious and unknowable culture of the gigantic skeletal bio-mechanical thing from Alien is explained, demonstrated and shown to be easily understood in conventional futuristicky/SF terms. The aliens have computers just like the humans. They have holographic displays just like the humans. They have navigation charts just like the humans. They have cryo-beds just like the humans. They have chairs around button-covered consoles... on which they leave their flutes! They suddenly have doors that open and close (think about it - there's nothing like that in the derelict from the original film). They have cargo bays. The cockpit chair turns out to be just that - a chair in which a humanoid sits. He didn't grow out of it. He sat in it. Wearing a spacesuit and a helmet.
This helmet thing is a big deal. The skeletal face of the alien pilot, with its ossified veins, its cavernous eyes and its trunk-like snout... turns out to be a helmet, just like the head-like helmet of the aliens in Independence Day. Like many crappy sci-fi films post-Alien, Independence Day tried to ape Giger's influential design concepts. So ID4 had bio-mechanical stuff in it, but in a processed and banal form. Now the Alien series reclaims its appropriated design concepts... and recycles the lazy, banal variants already used by inferior films.
And what is inside the helmet? We get to see. Not only is the pilot's eerie, inscrutable, alien face revealed to be a piece of perfectly explicable human-like technology, with its trunk a kind of hinged flap, but we see it removed, and beneath there is... a guy. An odd-looking guy, for sure, but a guy, nonetheless.
Moreover, these guys have comprehensible motives. We may not be told why they created life on Earth and then decided to destroy it, but these aims are comprehensible in and of themselves. The 'Engineers' can be communicated with, spoken to. Their thought processes are apparently akin to those of humans. It is no longer that The Company wishes to utilise the Xenomorphs (if we must call them that) as weapons... apparently they always were weapons, or outgrowths of weapons. The Engineers created them as such, wittingly or unwittingly. The Engineers are capable of military strategy then, along with fear, rage, the desire for revenge, and other such all-too familiar states of mind.
Again, there's nothing wrong with this in and of itself, but it is appended onto the imagery of the derelict craft and its silent, inscrutable, lonely occupant in Alien... and it represents a fundamental misprision of why those things are so interesting. Put crudely, to explain the Space Jockey is to make it less mysterious (of course) and therefore less powerful. It was always a Titan. It's just that Alien allowed us to believe in the Titan by making it unknowable. Prometheus makes the Titans less titanic by making them simply larger versions of us.
Saturday, 28 May 2011
The Big Squib
Acres of irrelevant grumbling about the Series 5 finale.
Oh great. River's back. Again. Un-yippee and un-hurrah. Still, Moffat must have his opportunity to present female characters as self-involved, smug enigmas who lead men around by their noses, put them through hell for the sake of hapless devotion, boss them about and remain pretty little puzzleboxes that men have to try and solve. In these episodes, he does this with no less than two man/woman couples.
The first episode is just loads of portentous narrative procrastination, albeit to a less egregious extent than 'End of Time' Part 1. There is some pleasure to be taken in the cobwebby, Indiana Jones-film look of the underground chamber, and River's pleasantly spooky trip to Amy's empty house... but, really, how generic is all this? A secret chamber under Stonehenge? An ancient artefact that has something scary inside it?
Mind you, they could've turned it around if the contents/purpose of the Pandorica hadn't been so obvious right from the start. I can honestly say that I knew, ages before we were told, that the Pandorica would either have the Doctor inside it, or would be empty and waiting for him (especially since this story seems to owe so much to Alien Bodies). The only thing worse than what we got would've been a gateway into another universe (a universe of evil, natch), which lets loose unspeakable 'Old Ones' or some other 'horror from before time' when opened. So it could've been worse. But could also have been much better.
Sadly, we are soon confronted with a huge alliance of returning monsters who, in line with Moffat's usual disinterest in evil, are trying to save the universe... by locking the Doctor up in a box rather than just killing him. For some reason.
The Doctor indulges in his now customary bit of ludicrous, embarassing and deeply inappropriate macho posturing. What a bad-ass I am, he essentially shouts to a sky full of heavily armed battle cruisers. Laughably, they bottle it rather than just zapping him. This is so dumb it defies description. I mean, I know the Doctor always wins... but surely they don't need to be scared of him when he's standing in plain view under their laser beams, waggling his weaponless hands? Just zap the silly sod! You don't even have to go anywhere near him!
On the subject of that speech... really, when did the character turn into this kind of person? When did this become the point of him? I hate this depiction of the Doctor as a bumptious, boastful, mouthy, showoff incredibly aware of himself as a Hero. I realise the scene in question is meant to show him bluffing, but still...
The Doctor always used to occasionally be a bit big headed (i.e. "he's almost as clever as I am" etc) but it always seemed like self-mockery or good humour. These days the Doctor seems to seek out opportunities to talk like a lame-ass 'tough cop' cypher (i.e. "there's something you never put in a trap if you want to live - ME!").
For a start, is it really supposed to be a good thing that loads of people are scared of him, or think of him as a destroyer. Should he really revel in it?
It's all part of the abandonment of the amateur virtues for the professional vices. The Doctor should be a dilletante, a fartaround, a bimbler... who stands and fights (with his intellect first and foremost) against injustice... not a semi-professional capeless superhero who, when he's not ostentatiously displaying his jumble of contrived synth-eccentricities, is delivering long sermons about how dangerous he is.
Oh, and why don't the assembled monsters listen when the Doctor explains that the TARDIS will cause the cracks - and so, since he's not in it, trapping him will achieve nothing? I mean, that seems like a very, VERY important and plausible remark. At least worth investigating, no? But the Dalek says that only the Doctor can pilot the TARDIS (which they just MUST know isn't even close to being true), so... so what? Even if it were true, why does it mean that the TARDIS couldn't cause the cracks by itself? Still, just go ahead and trust to luck... I mean, it's only the possible universal armageddon we're risking... and it's not like we've invested much time and effort in this massive conspiracy, is it?
Head, meet desk. Desk, this is head. Oh. You've met before.
Weirdly, the alien hoardes seem less scared of him when they are personally right up close to him; when, in other words, he's in a better position to do them serious, personal damage. But they manage to get him into the box, which makes you wonder... oh never mind. Said terrible, portentous, powerful, inescapable box turns out to be easily escapable almost immediately, natch. How many times is it possible for a show to relentlessly undercut its own openly daft logic before viewers start feeling insulted? Quite a few times, it seems.
The second episode is an improvement on the first. Actually, the recap of 'Pandorica Opens' at the start of 'Big Bang' is better than the actual episode it recaps - all the essential plot points and none of the procrasto-padding.
I theoretically admire the idea of having a final episode which largely consists of people fighting the slow death of time and history in an echoey, empty museum... but, really, we are just watching corridor athletics, aren't we?... just set amidst exhibits of old tombs and stalked by stone Daleks... which, again, sounds great until you realise that none of these potentially potent signs and symbols add up to anything.
It kind of reminded me of 'The Creature from the Pit'. I'm not flinging cheap insults. 'Creature' is another story rich with signs and symbols and themes... none of which really connect with each other. They're just sort of there.
The first episode, for all that it was was garbled and naff and empty, did hint at possible developments. The business with the Roman soldiers emerging from a book in Amy's room, etc., hinted that we might be in for some voyage into metafiction... but, of course, nothing of the kind arrived. It's just that the Autons raided Amy's memories. Er, when? And how? And... umm... why? As a trap, it's overcomplicated, random, and works only by sheer chance!
I suppose, if you peer at 'The Big Bang' intently, you can discern some themes about memory and loss... but was anything really done with them beyond playfully batting them around the place and then using them as the basis for a cutesy resolution? A resolution which, ironically enough, was more like Four Weddings than anything in the Richard Curtis episode.
What does it actually say? That remembering things can bring them back from oblivion? Well, I hate to point this out, but... it doesn't. It really doesn't.
Sure, remembering things can keep them alive in some form, i.e. myths and legends... but this story actually undercuts and undermines myths and legends by making them literal. The ancient guardian stops being so potent an idea the moment you find out there actually is an ancient guardian... who is guarding the impregnable box which is keeping his girlfriend alive... for no reason at all. Once you do that, it just becomes plot... and silly plot to boot. As for the characterisation? Rory appears unchanged after his millenia long vigil, even down to resuming conversations he had before it began. Is this satisfactory? Not to me. But it does provide 'romance' of a kind so ridiculously over the top that it actually makes the Amy/Rory relationship less believable, hence less touching.
Oh, and how can Rory wait for thousands of years of history... if history's been erased? Oh yeah, eye of the storm. Like all the other things that need to be saved for the plot to work. I mean, they really are just making this shit up as they go along, aren't they? The stone Daleks are "afterimages" of erased timelines (umm... why weren't they preserved in the "eye of the storm"? ...I mean, they were standing right next to the bleedin' Pandorica, much closer than AutonRory and Amy's corpse!) until they need to come to life, whereupon some Pandorica light can resuscitate them... which kind of works... until you ask why the Pandorica needs to be a life-support system at all!
I can't help but sigh with relief that we're no longer getting the kind of embarassingly hammy, OTT, semi-crazed, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink emo-porn that RTD used to serve up at the end of a season... but, for all that, RTD's better season finales had some semi-coherent Stuff To Say.
'Bad Wolf'/'Parting' (clearly the best) has the Daleks as religious (market) fundies, lurking behind a twisted, but scarily believable, depiction of Western media culture as a giant machine for the grinding up of people into raw material. 'Sound of Drums'/'Last of the Time Lords' has a real New Testament vibe going on and, much as it might personally revolt me to see the Doctor behaving like the resurrected Christ, it packs a genuine emotional punch underneath all the histrionics... and manages to be heavily political in a decidedly unstraightforward way.
Sadly, 'The Big Bang', for all the convoluted mytho-fairytale stuff and self-consciously clever plot dynamics, says zilch to me. Which is quite an achievement. I can hardly believe that somebody made a Who story about the erasure of time closing in on an empty museum, about stone Daleks, about ancient myths coming to life and convergences between story, myth and memory... and I don't like it. How did they manage that?
'Big Bang' is a Rubik's Cube. You work at it, solve it, look at it and think... is that it? Why did I bother?
There's a theme in there about the power of storytelling; about myths and fairytales and the dreams of children, and how they can represent deeper truths...but it doesn't amount to anything more than banalities and stylistic borrowings. And showoffish tricksy plot gymnastics. And, after all that, it still basically relied on a great big cheaty Reset Button, didn't it? As bloody usual.
And how does Amy remember the Doctor back into existence/reality anyway? She hasn't done that with anything before! She says she brought Rory back but she didn't - AutonRory was created by the monster alliance and newlywed Rory is part of the cosmic reboot!
And why does Moffat always try to make wonderful places like museums and libraries sinister and scary?
And I really don't know why Moffat insists on making the Doctor so matey with authority figures (i.e. "your majesty" on the phone). I just hate that. I shall be accused of being ideological again... as though having the children's hero on friendly terms with loads of powerful establishment figures is somehow neutral, apolitical and non-ideological!
Oh great. River's back. Again. Un-yippee and un-hurrah. Still, Moffat must have his opportunity to present female characters as self-involved, smug enigmas who lead men around by their noses, put them through hell for the sake of hapless devotion, boss them about and remain pretty little puzzleboxes that men have to try and solve. In these episodes, he does this with no less than two man/woman couples.
The first episode is just loads of portentous narrative procrastination, albeit to a less egregious extent than 'End of Time' Part 1. There is some pleasure to be taken in the cobwebby, Indiana Jones-film look of the underground chamber, and River's pleasantly spooky trip to Amy's empty house... but, really, how generic is all this? A secret chamber under Stonehenge? An ancient artefact that has something scary inside it?
Mind you, they could've turned it around if the contents/purpose of the Pandorica hadn't been so obvious right from the start. I can honestly say that I knew, ages before we were told, that the Pandorica would either have the Doctor inside it, or would be empty and waiting for him (especially since this story seems to owe so much to Alien Bodies). The only thing worse than what we got would've been a gateway into another universe (a universe of evil, natch), which lets loose unspeakable 'Old Ones' or some other 'horror from before time' when opened. So it could've been worse. But could also have been much better.
Sadly, we are soon confronted with a huge alliance of returning monsters who, in line with Moffat's usual disinterest in evil, are trying to save the universe... by locking the Doctor up in a box rather than just killing him. For some reason.
The Doctor indulges in his now customary bit of ludicrous, embarassing and deeply inappropriate macho posturing. What a bad-ass I am, he essentially shouts to a sky full of heavily armed battle cruisers. Laughably, they bottle it rather than just zapping him. This is so dumb it defies description. I mean, I know the Doctor always wins... but surely they don't need to be scared of him when he's standing in plain view under their laser beams, waggling his weaponless hands? Just zap the silly sod! You don't even have to go anywhere near him!
On the subject of that speech... really, when did the character turn into this kind of person? When did this become the point of him? I hate this depiction of the Doctor as a bumptious, boastful, mouthy, showoff incredibly aware of himself as a Hero. I realise the scene in question is meant to show him bluffing, but still...
The Doctor always used to occasionally be a bit big headed (i.e. "he's almost as clever as I am" etc) but it always seemed like self-mockery or good humour. These days the Doctor seems to seek out opportunities to talk like a lame-ass 'tough cop' cypher (i.e. "there's something you never put in a trap if you want to live - ME!").
For a start, is it really supposed to be a good thing that loads of people are scared of him, or think of him as a destroyer. Should he really revel in it?
It's all part of the abandonment of the amateur virtues for the professional vices. The Doctor should be a dilletante, a fartaround, a bimbler... who stands and fights (with his intellect first and foremost) against injustice... not a semi-professional capeless superhero who, when he's not ostentatiously displaying his jumble of contrived synth-eccentricities, is delivering long sermons about how dangerous he is.
Oh, and why don't the assembled monsters listen when the Doctor explains that the TARDIS will cause the cracks - and so, since he's not in it, trapping him will achieve nothing? I mean, that seems like a very, VERY important and plausible remark. At least worth investigating, no? But the Dalek says that only the Doctor can pilot the TARDIS (which they just MUST know isn't even close to being true), so... so what? Even if it were true, why does it mean that the TARDIS couldn't cause the cracks by itself? Still, just go ahead and trust to luck... I mean, it's only the possible universal armageddon we're risking... and it's not like we've invested much time and effort in this massive conspiracy, is it?
Head, meet desk. Desk, this is head. Oh. You've met before.
Weirdly, the alien hoardes seem less scared of him when they are personally right up close to him; when, in other words, he's in a better position to do them serious, personal damage. But they manage to get him into the box, which makes you wonder... oh never mind. Said terrible, portentous, powerful, inescapable box turns out to be easily escapable almost immediately, natch. How many times is it possible for a show to relentlessly undercut its own openly daft logic before viewers start feeling insulted? Quite a few times, it seems.
The second episode is an improvement on the first. Actually, the recap of 'Pandorica Opens' at the start of 'Big Bang' is better than the actual episode it recaps - all the essential plot points and none of the procrasto-padding.
I theoretically admire the idea of having a final episode which largely consists of people fighting the slow death of time and history in an echoey, empty museum... but, really, we are just watching corridor athletics, aren't we?... just set amidst exhibits of old tombs and stalked by stone Daleks... which, again, sounds great until you realise that none of these potentially potent signs and symbols add up to anything.
It kind of reminded me of 'The Creature from the Pit'. I'm not flinging cheap insults. 'Creature' is another story rich with signs and symbols and themes... none of which really connect with each other. They're just sort of there.
The first episode, for all that it was was garbled and naff and empty, did hint at possible developments. The business with the Roman soldiers emerging from a book in Amy's room, etc., hinted that we might be in for some voyage into metafiction... but, of course, nothing of the kind arrived. It's just that the Autons raided Amy's memories. Er, when? And how? And... umm... why? As a trap, it's overcomplicated, random, and works only by sheer chance!
I suppose, if you peer at 'The Big Bang' intently, you can discern some themes about memory and loss... but was anything really done with them beyond playfully batting them around the place and then using them as the basis for a cutesy resolution? A resolution which, ironically enough, was more like Four Weddings than anything in the Richard Curtis episode.
What does it actually say? That remembering things can bring them back from oblivion? Well, I hate to point this out, but... it doesn't. It really doesn't.
Sure, remembering things can keep them alive in some form, i.e. myths and legends... but this story actually undercuts and undermines myths and legends by making them literal. The ancient guardian stops being so potent an idea the moment you find out there actually is an ancient guardian... who is guarding the impregnable box which is keeping his girlfriend alive... for no reason at all. Once you do that, it just becomes plot... and silly plot to boot. As for the characterisation? Rory appears unchanged after his millenia long vigil, even down to resuming conversations he had before it began. Is this satisfactory? Not to me. But it does provide 'romance' of a kind so ridiculously over the top that it actually makes the Amy/Rory relationship less believable, hence less touching.
Oh, and how can Rory wait for thousands of years of history... if history's been erased? Oh yeah, eye of the storm. Like all the other things that need to be saved for the plot to work. I mean, they really are just making this shit up as they go along, aren't they? The stone Daleks are "afterimages" of erased timelines (umm... why weren't they preserved in the "eye of the storm"? ...I mean, they were standing right next to the bleedin' Pandorica, much closer than AutonRory and Amy's corpse!) until they need to come to life, whereupon some Pandorica light can resuscitate them... which kind of works... until you ask why the Pandorica needs to be a life-support system at all!
I can't help but sigh with relief that we're no longer getting the kind of embarassingly hammy, OTT, semi-crazed, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink emo-porn that RTD used to serve up at the end of a season... but, for all that, RTD's better season finales had some semi-coherent Stuff To Say.
'Bad Wolf'/'Parting' (clearly the best) has the Daleks as religious (market) fundies, lurking behind a twisted, but scarily believable, depiction of Western media culture as a giant machine for the grinding up of people into raw material. 'Sound of Drums'/'Last of the Time Lords' has a real New Testament vibe going on and, much as it might personally revolt me to see the Doctor behaving like the resurrected Christ, it packs a genuine emotional punch underneath all the histrionics... and manages to be heavily political in a decidedly unstraightforward way.
Sadly, 'The Big Bang', for all the convoluted mytho-fairytale stuff and self-consciously clever plot dynamics, says zilch to me. Which is quite an achievement. I can hardly believe that somebody made a Who story about the erasure of time closing in on an empty museum, about stone Daleks, about ancient myths coming to life and convergences between story, myth and memory... and I don't like it. How did they manage that?
'Big Bang' is a Rubik's Cube. You work at it, solve it, look at it and think... is that it? Why did I bother?
There's a theme in there about the power of storytelling; about myths and fairytales and the dreams of children, and how they can represent deeper truths...but it doesn't amount to anything more than banalities and stylistic borrowings. And showoffish tricksy plot gymnastics. And, after all that, it still basically relied on a great big cheaty Reset Button, didn't it? As bloody usual.
And how does Amy remember the Doctor back into existence/reality anyway? She hasn't done that with anything before! She says she brought Rory back but she didn't - AutonRory was created by the monster alliance and newlywed Rory is part of the cosmic reboot!
And why does Moffat always try to make wonderful places like museums and libraries sinister and scary?
And I really don't know why Moffat insists on making the Doctor so matey with authority figures (i.e. "your majesty" on the phone). I just hate that. I shall be accused of being ideological again... as though having the children's hero on friendly terms with loads of powerful establishment figures is somehow neutral, apolitical and non-ideological!
Thursday, 1 July 2010
Decimate! Decimate!
There (was) one of those ‘10 worst Doctor Who stories ever’ threads currently doing a brisk trade over at Gallibase at the moment and, yes, the fires of list fever and whingeaholism burn in my geek heart also, so here’s mine.
My criteria are nothing to do with bad acting, bad effects, shakey plots or anything like that. I can usually tolerate those with a grin on my face. I’m looking for stories that betray the central ethos of the show, that embody or exhibit cynicism, crass commercialism, cliché, group-think, xenophobia, anti-intellectualism and silence or ignorance about things that matter.
Here are my ten rotten eggs, in no particular order.
1. ‘Victory of the Daleks’ - or, to give it its proper alternative title – ‘Merchandising of the Daleks’. Of course, the Daleks have always been an intensively milked cash cow, but this squalid episode brings the cynicism involved to a new subterranean low. The production team have not only redesigned the Daleks, they parade the (ugly) redesign in a selection of vibrant, collectable primary colours. Gotta catch ‘em all, kids. This sort of thing has always gone on, but to see it done with such obvious and slick calculation by the people actually writing the scripts… well, it turns the stomach. Plus, this story presents mass-murdering terrorist, aristo class warrior and racist imperialist Winston Churchill as a twinkly old rogue with whom the Doctor can be an uncritical hug-buddy. What’s next, an episode in which the Doctor teams up with his old pal General Pinochet to fight an army of sentient novelty mobile phone covers? Utterly revolting. Not even the close-ups of Karen Gillan’s freckles can save this one from the lowest, hottest circle of Who Hell.
2. ‘The Shakespeare Code’ – sub-Blackadder clichés take the place of any real attempt to portray a fascinating man in a fascinating place at a fascinating time. Ignorant bardolatry takes the form of a depiction of Shakespeare as a hyper-intuitive Gallagher brother celeb/yobbo. Martha relapses into cypherhood for the course of this story. Dreary doggerel masquerades as lost Shakespeare material. Reality is saved by lines of J. K. Rowling while no real attempt is made to engage with Shakespearean material, to express why it is so valuable. The kids are simply told: Shakespeare was a GENIUS… which is a good way to keep them thinking that his work must be unapproachable. Even the title is stupid – it’s a riff on that excremental “novel” by Dan Brown… for absolutely no reason, unless it is covert self-mockery. Which I doubt.
3. ‘The Unquiet Dead’ – At the height of a reactionary media scare about immigrants, this episode (accidentally) presents us with an anti-asylum seeker parable in which Charles Dickens learns that the message of A Christmas Carol was deeply mistaken: charity to the downtrodden isn’t necessary for the full development of the human soul after all but is, rather, a foolish and dangerous extravagance on the part of the self-serving and guilt-ridden. Oh, and just to round things off, it is implied that the world is saved from the evil immigrants by the ghostly immortal soul of Gwyneth, thus rubbishing Dickens’ stubborn naturalism and siding with the supernatural.
4. ‘The Reign of Terror’ – In contrast to ‘The Aztecs’ which honestly tries to take a nuanced view of Aztec culture, or ‘The Crusade’ which depicts Muslims as a complex and rounded bunch, ‘The Reign of Terror’ takes a black and white view of the great French revolution. Taking their cue directly from Baroness Orczy and Blue Peter, the sans culottes are all shown to be vicious sadists, corrupt idiots and lecherous thugs. The foreign agents who rescue aristocrats are heroic and dashing while Robespierre is depicted as just a cold hearted tyrant. A few mealy words about the revolution not being all bad do not change the fact that, overall, the revolution is dishonestly sketched as a dangerous outbreak of irrational villainy.
5 – ‘The Mind of Evil'. Implies that people in prison are neurologically impregnated with original sin. If you're in jug, you're Bad - that's a given. And it's because you've got Evil in your brain. Nothing more to it than that. I don't know if this is reductionist biological determinism, a religious notion, or both. But either way, I don't like it.
6 – ‘The Two Doctors’. Proof that even geniuses can make terrible mistakes, this tale smuggles in a rather wonderful and satirical anti-meat subtext… while depicting the second Doctor as a reactionary genetic determinist who thinks in terms of inferior and superior races. “Really Doctor,” says Dastari, “I expected something more progressive from you.” So did I. In the end, the Doctor’s disapproval of tinkering with Androgum DNA is proved justified, with even Dastari realizing that the Androgums are just inherently inferior. And how are the Androgums depicted? As heavy-browed, warty, big-nosed, red-haired people incapable of controlling their lower urges… i.e. in terms of racist stereotypes used, at one time or another, against Jews, the Irish, you name it. Utterly unforgivable.
7. – ‘The Tomb of the Cybermen’. No attempt has been made to make this story make any kind of sense on any level, with the Doctor’s actions being so illogical and contradictory as to make him inexplicable. But I could live with that… were it not for the sexism and racism with which this story is larded.Victoria
8 – ‘The Family of Blood’. Pro-war liberal and “theist” Paul Cornell not only has Tim go to war (instead of being a conshy and red cross volunteer as in the book) but then has the Doctor wearing a bloody poppy – the symbol by which the establishment that organizes and conducts our imperialist slaughterfests both appropriates and controls our memory of them.
9 – ‘The Impossible Planet’/ ‘The Satan Pit’ has the Doctor giving headroom to the idea that the Christian devil might be a real entity, thus implying the possibility of the Christian god. Why is the Doctor prepared to countenance this idea? Because the Beast responds to his scientific positivism (which is itself clumsily expressed) with the usual fatuous rubbish about science itself being just another form of faith. Does the Doctor respond with the proper scoff of derision that such piffling drivel warrants? Does he say “Well, now I know you’re not the devil – the devil would have better arguments.”? No, he looks worried and then dodges subsequent questions about what the beast is. I’m sure the writer of this garbage imagined that he was being sophisticated, which only makes it more obnoxious.
10 – ‘The Dominators’. I try to squint at this and see a parable about youngsters (including one sceptical, daring rebel) proving more effective than fuddy-duddy oldsters in their brave resistance to reactionary imperialist invaders… but that reading isn’t really tenable. In fact, this is a sneering attack not only upon pure pacifism (I wouldn’t mind so much if that was all the writers took aim at) but also upon all notions that calm, reasonable, rational, non-violent debate might be the proper response to warmongering.
Dishonourable mentions must also go to ‘The Monster of Peladon’ for depicting radical strikers as unstable hotheads and inter-class unity as desirable, to ‘Resurrection of the Daleks’ for portraying the Doctor as prepared to commit murder as long as those he kills aren’t humanoid and to ‘Fear Her’ for equating the Olympics (which, in case we were in any doubt, is nothing but an orgy of pointless jockery, jingoism and commercialism) with human love and hope.
The original version of this little bit of spleenvent had 'Warriors of the Deep' at position 5... but, after a conversation with a friend and reader (he's a sucker for punishment), I decided to release it from the Shabgraff Pandorica and substitute 'The Mind of Evil'.
My criteria are nothing to do with bad acting, bad effects, shakey plots or anything like that. I can usually tolerate those with a grin on my face. I’m looking for stories that betray the central ethos of the show, that embody or exhibit cynicism, crass commercialism, cliché, group-think, xenophobia, anti-intellectualism and silence or ignorance about things that matter.
Here are my ten rotten eggs, in no particular order.
1. ‘Victory of the Daleks’ - or, to give it its proper alternative title – ‘Merchandising of the Daleks’. Of course, the Daleks have always been an intensively milked cash cow, but this squalid episode brings the cynicism involved to a new subterranean low. The production team have not only redesigned the Daleks, they parade the (ugly) redesign in a selection of vibrant, collectable primary colours. Gotta catch ‘em all, kids. This sort of thing has always gone on, but to see it done with such obvious and slick calculation by the people actually writing the scripts… well, it turns the stomach. Plus, this story presents mass-murdering terrorist, aristo class warrior and racist imperialist Winston Churchill as a twinkly old rogue with whom the Doctor can be an uncritical hug-buddy. What’s next, an episode in which the Doctor teams up with his old pal General Pinochet to fight an army of sentient novelty mobile phone covers? Utterly revolting. Not even the close-ups of Karen Gillan’s freckles can save this one from the lowest, hottest circle of Who Hell.
2. ‘The Shakespeare Code’ – sub-Blackadder clichés take the place of any real attempt to portray a fascinating man in a fascinating place at a fascinating time. Ignorant bardolatry takes the form of a depiction of Shakespeare as a hyper-intuitive Gallagher brother celeb/yobbo. Martha relapses into cypherhood for the course of this story. Dreary doggerel masquerades as lost Shakespeare material. Reality is saved by lines of J. K. Rowling while no real attempt is made to engage with Shakespearean material, to express why it is so valuable. The kids are simply told: Shakespeare was a GENIUS… which is a good way to keep them thinking that his work must be unapproachable. Even the title is stupid – it’s a riff on that excremental “novel” by Dan Brown… for absolutely no reason, unless it is covert self-mockery. Which I doubt.
3. ‘The Unquiet Dead’ – At the height of a reactionary media scare about immigrants, this episode (accidentally) presents us with an anti-asylum seeker parable in which Charles Dickens learns that the message of A Christmas Carol was deeply mistaken: charity to the downtrodden isn’t necessary for the full development of the human soul after all but is, rather, a foolish and dangerous extravagance on the part of the self-serving and guilt-ridden. Oh, and just to round things off, it is implied that the world is saved from the evil immigrants by the ghostly immortal soul of Gwyneth, thus rubbishing Dickens’ stubborn naturalism and siding with the supernatural.
4. ‘The Reign of Terror’ – In contrast to ‘The Aztecs’ which honestly tries to take a nuanced view of Aztec culture, or ‘The Crusade’ which depicts Muslims as a complex and rounded bunch, ‘The Reign of Terror’ takes a black and white view of the great French revolution. Taking their cue directly from Baroness Orczy and Blue Peter, the sans culottes are all shown to be vicious sadists, corrupt idiots and lecherous thugs. The foreign agents who rescue aristocrats are heroic and dashing while Robespierre is depicted as just a cold hearted tyrant. A few mealy words about the revolution not being all bad do not change the fact that, overall, the revolution is dishonestly sketched as a dangerous outbreak of irrational villainy.
5 – ‘The Mind of Evil'. Implies that people in prison are neurologically impregnated with original sin. If you're in jug, you're Bad - that's a given. And it's because you've got Evil in your brain. Nothing more to it than that. I don't know if this is reductionist biological determinism, a religious notion, or both. But either way, I don't like it.
6 – ‘The Two Doctors’. Proof that even geniuses can make terrible mistakes, this tale smuggles in a rather wonderful and satirical anti-meat subtext… while depicting the second Doctor as a reactionary genetic determinist who thinks in terms of inferior and superior races. “Really Doctor,” says Dastari, “I expected something more progressive from you.” So did I. In the end, the Doctor’s disapproval of tinkering with Androgum DNA is proved justified, with even Dastari realizing that the Androgums are just inherently inferior. And how are the Androgums depicted? As heavy-browed, warty, big-nosed, red-haired people incapable of controlling their lower urges… i.e. in terms of racist stereotypes used, at one time or another, against Jews, the Irish, you name it. Utterly unforgivable.
7. – ‘The Tomb of the Cybermen’. No attempt has been made to make this story make any kind of sense on any level, with the Doctor’s actions being so illogical and contradictory as to make him inexplicable. But I could live with that… were it not for the sexism and racism with which this story is larded.
8 – ‘The Family of Blood’. Pro-war liberal and “theist” Paul Cornell not only has Tim go to war (instead of being a conshy and red cross volunteer as in the book) but then has the Doctor wearing a bloody poppy – the symbol by which the establishment that organizes and conducts our imperialist slaughterfests both appropriates and controls our memory of them.
9 – ‘The Impossible Planet’/ ‘The Satan Pit’ has the Doctor giving headroom to the idea that the Christian devil might be a real entity, thus implying the possibility of the Christian god. Why is the Doctor prepared to countenance this idea? Because the Beast responds to his scientific positivism (which is itself clumsily expressed) with the usual fatuous rubbish about science itself being just another form of faith. Does the Doctor respond with the proper scoff of derision that such piffling drivel warrants? Does he say “Well, now I know you’re not the devil – the devil would have better arguments.”? No, he looks worried and then dodges subsequent questions about what the beast is. I’m sure the writer of this garbage imagined that he was being sophisticated, which only makes it more obnoxious.
10 – ‘The Dominators’. I try to squint at this and see a parable about youngsters (including one sceptical, daring rebel) proving more effective than fuddy-duddy oldsters in their brave resistance to reactionary imperialist invaders… but that reading isn’t really tenable. In fact, this is a sneering attack not only upon pure pacifism (I wouldn’t mind so much if that was all the writers took aim at) but also upon all notions that calm, reasonable, rational, non-violent debate might be the proper response to warmongering.
Dishonourable mentions must also go to ‘The Monster of Peladon’ for depicting radical strikers as unstable hotheads and inter-class unity as desirable, to ‘Resurrection of the Daleks’ for portraying the Doctor as prepared to commit murder as long as those he kills aren’t humanoid and to ‘Fear Her’ for equating the Olympics (which, in case we were in any doubt, is nothing but an orgy of pointless jockery, jingoism and commercialism) with human love and hope.
The original version of this little bit of spleenvent had 'Warriors of the Deep' at position 5... but, after a conversation with a friend and reader (he's a sucker for punishment), I decided to release it from the Shabgraff Pandorica and substitute 'The Mind of Evil'.
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