Gallibase has relaunched 'Timelash' as a story-per-day affair. Along with others, I've managed a review (ranging from a terse comment to a bloated essay) for every story. It goes without saying, I don't have a girlfriend.
Anyway. Today, we got to 'The Tenth Planet' and so I thought I might post my comments here - or the more interesting ones anyway (everything being relative) - and make it a regular thing every time we finish with a Doctor. Basically, I'm very bored.
As you will see, my view of the Hartnell era is much influenced by the work of V. Gordon Childe, Walter Benjamin, historical materialism in general, the wobbly 'permanent arms economy' theory, William Morris, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Edward Said and lots of thinly veiled class hatred. There's also some stuff in here that might remind you of the About Time books... but, with all due respect to Miles and Wood, I'd already thought of it all before I read them. When I mention something that I got from them, I acknowledge it.
'An Unearthly Child'
It's been said before but its true: the first episode is amazing, the other three are disappointing... but only by comparison.
The first episode really is extraordinary; an example of pure TV alchemy. A fusion of literate sci-fi, children's fiction, folklore, the aesthetics of 'everyday life' drama, urban gothic and the uncanny. Somehow, everything comes together to create something fascinating, suggestive, oneric and scary.
The stuff with the tribe is rather grim and plodding by comparison... yet, note how seriously it demands to be taken. And note the thought that went into the themes.
To the Doctor, Ian and Barbara are savages... just as the tribe are to Ian and Barbara. Fire is technology, the future... to be acquired by a society struggling in cold and darkness... just as the TARDIS is a symbol of the same quest for power through technology. The reluctant crewmates of the TARDIS find themselves forced to be a tribe, to be a society in miniature.
Note, also, the characterisation of the Doctor. His intellect (which is ruthless and cold) is undermined by his emotional reactions. When he doesn't think too hard, he reacts with instinctive compassion. "If he dies, there will be no fire!" And then he proceeds to deduce who murdered The Old Woman (nice character for an actress to be offered) and ruthlessly engineer the coup against Kal.
Note also, how many of the series long running concerns are already present: technology, tools, political struggle, tyranny, literacy, death, social and universal and technological entropy...
Really, this story libels tribal societies. Hunter-gather societies (in which humans lived for the vast majority of their history) were almost certainly very egalitarian and probably dominated by social altruism. Certainly, most tribal societies that survived into the modern era demonstrated startling ethics of fairness and sharing. They didn't behave like the Tribe of Gum, who are ruthless and selfish throatslitters, preying on each other, yearning for hierarchical domination and unable to understand compassion. They're more like people from a devastated capitalist world. Which makes me think that the Gummers are probably just the survivors (or the children of the survivors) of the nuclear war that people in 1963 expected any minute. This isn't 100,000 BC. It's more like 1986, twenty years after someone pressed the red button.
But then, fire has always been able to burn us as well as warm us.
'The Daleks'
'The Daleks' is a weird one. Looked at one way, the Daleks are Nazis irrationally trying to destroy the Thals simply because they're different... which reduces racism, even the highly systematised and technological racism displayed by the Daleks, to mere xenophobia.
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, volkisch, Nordic types.. i.e. as the Wagnerian, anti-semitic version of Norse mythology.
So, it's either an inept anti-racist polemic... or an accidental quasi-Nazi fable!
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 Nation and Whittaker were trying to be anti-prejudice. But Ian's analysis of the race war ignores the fact that the Daleks have come off (drastically) worse as a result of a war which was probably started by the Thals, who were the warriors back then. And the reasoning by which Ian convinces the Thals to launch a pre-emptive strike would gladden the heart of a neocon. Conveniently, the Daleks really are tooled up with WMD which they are planning to deploy at any moment... which makes the genocidal attack upon them by the Thals and TARDIS crew all right.
It's kinda hard to see these problems when you look at the story through the fog of decades in which the Daleks have developed from crippled and fearful underground survivors into galaxy-spanning and unfathomably evil conquerors.
It's also kind hard to see this story for the curate's egg it is, when we all know that the Daleks made the show.
But this really is just a B-movie rip-off with questionable morality.
The triumph of the story is, of course, aesthetic. The production design, the forest, the amazing music, the amazing sounds, the Dalek voices and the Dalek machines themselves - an instant design classic.
'Edge of Destruction'
Dali Who! Melting clocks! Scissors! Shadows!
But, of course, it misses the point of dream symbolism... because every weeeeiiird symbol turns out to mean something literal, something mechanical... and once properly interpreted, everything is solved. Mystery, clues, theories, solution, resolution. This isn't Freud or surrealism. It's... it's Agatha flamin' Christie.
It's also proto-Moffatt. He's all about contrived creepiness, fake surrealism and soapy relationship conflicts as garnish upon tricksy stories about malfunctioning systems.
For all that, it's well acted, creepy and sinister at times, etc. And I like the idea that something as small and insignificant as a jammed spring under a switch could cause a machine like the TARDIS to both malfunction and go a bit mental. The contrast between the huge, cosmic events outside the TARDIS doors and the smallness of the fault is pleasing. The animated sequence is lovely and the special sounds are, once again, marvellous.
If only the cast had all been on the same page. Russell and Ford play the early scenes like Beckett but Hartnell and Hill just chug on like normal.
'Marco Polo'
A story about people trapped together in a particular landscape and political situation. Personalities chime, rhyme, clash, abrade, compromise, cheat, strategise, strain against each other, etc...
Marco is the unbendingly honest and decent plain dealer... who is desperate to get away from the society that he once loved so much that he allowed himself to be adopted by it... so desperate that he will steal the TARDIS and kidnap the tense little pseudo-family now living in it... and be unaware of his own hypocrisy because he considers his royal charge to be warrant for anything... but who is not really trusted or accepted by the Mongols around him, however much he might refuse to see this...
... and yet he has more in common with even Tegana than with the Doctor and friends. The beginnings of a clash of old and new moral sensibilities in the 60s is echoed in the different attitudes of the 13th century characters and the time travellers. The fascinating scene in which Ian tells Marco the truth... and Marco refuses to believe him because he once lied about the key! The wonderful scene in which Marco falls into a rage because he finds that the future people don't see what is obvious to him: that Ping Cho should and must be married to the man chosen for her.
Marco's sense of honour stops him seeing Tegana's blatant villainy. This isn't a goof, as some claim. Rather, it's a character note. Tegana is an appointed ambassador, hence to be trusted. The wily old Kublai Khan has seen more of life and has the quiet ruthlessness of an efficient ruler. He notices how well Tegana has persuaded him to doubt Marco's loyalty... hence his trust in Tegana is also reduced.
The world in which the TARDIS had landed keeps unfolding and expanding, revealing itself in ever greater detail... new characters keep appearing and broadening the social picture... the characters refuse to be what we expect them to be, i.e. the Khan turns out to be a wizened and doddery old fart, yearning to play board games all day and scared of his wife... and then slowly reveals that he has a mind like a razor blade.
But, for all the sprawling time and geography traversed, this is a story about social confinement. Marco wants out of the Khan's service, Tegana is trapped by his own role as provocateur, the TARDIS crew are trapped so near to the means of their escape that it nearly drives them mad, the Doctor is trapped by his own unbending will, Marco by his own refusal to deviate from duty, Ping Cho by the destiny laid out for her, even the Khan is trapped in his palace and his status and his wealth - which seems to mean so little to him that he'll gamble it away on games of backgammon.
The key, as so often in Doctor Who, is flexibility of thinking. Tegana is inflexible, but all the others eventually manage to think their way out of their traps, at least to some degree.
'The Sensorites'
The first bona fide specimen of that most frustrating species: the clever/dumb story. 'The Sensorites' is both clever and stupid in equal measure. The plot makes very little sense... but even the silliest elements stem from a genuine attempt to be different and imaginative and thought-provoking.
There are some reactionary elements. The depiction of the Sensorites contains a submerged form of orientalism (they're enigmatic, all look the same and live in a forbidden city), and there's an implicit theme about personal ambition always and inevitably destabilising egalitarian political states ("some people always want more" as the nice air stewardess woman says, so forget about socialism kids!).
Also, the depiction of humans (i.e. all white westerners, natch) accidentally causing problems for a foreign culture (as mentioned, the Sensorites are an encoded orientalist stereotype) and suffering madness because of their contact with it, is pure imperialist self pity.
Mind you, Ray Cusick neutralises this effect to some degree by creating an amazing set for the Sensorite city that recalls Gaudi.
On the whole, this is an attempt at a story about openness to the unknown and the different, about the need for a rational and humane approach to contact with strangers. Again, flexibility of thinking is the key. The Sensorites - who are a rigid and static culture - need to think outside of the box they live in... and the humans - who are depicted as psychologically vulnerable to fear and lunacy - need to accept contact with the other.
It's just a shame that this dialectic is rendered in terms of a daft, ludicrously overcomplicated, grindingly slow 'thriller' plot about a villainous public official whose big, sneaky disguise involves simply changing his attire. Slightly.
'The Reign of Terror'
So, the policy of making 'educational' historical stories has already come unstuck. And why? Because the decision was made to do one about the French Revolution... which entails a choice: do the actual history, which would run the terrible risk of actually making the revolution look quite exciting and admirable... or do a Baroness Orczy pastiche. Obviously, it had to be the latter.
It had to be set during the "Reign of Terror" rather than during any other phase of the revolution. It had to feature Robespierre as a cold hearted, calculating, bloodthirsty tyrant. It had to depict the sans culottes as thugs, lechers, cowardly grovellers and ignorant scum. It had to feature dashing British agents rescuing people from a guillotine that is melting due to constant and indiscriminate use.
What was the alternative? Depict the common people of France in a good light? Celebrate the fact that they'd unseated a brutal, callous, ruthlessly exploitative and repressive autocracy that had flogged and beaten and worked and starved them into misery for years, while the rich lived in careless luxury under the benevolent eye of a succession or moronic, indolent scum kings? Depict Robespierre as a complex, flawed but fundamentally idealistic man, trapped in desperate circumstances, trying to radicalise a revolution that was slipping back on its initial promise, fighting a war against a very real threat from invaders who wanted to destroy the gains the people had made and reinstall the vengeful monarchy? Acknowledge the fact that relatively low numbers died in "the Terror", certainly compared to other terrible moments in history that can be laid at the door of the system the Jacobins were trying to bury forever? Acknowledge the fact that the British state was up to its necks in trying to send the French people back under the thumbs of their earstwhile lords and masters?
Oh no, that would never do. What would Lord Reith say?
Of course, these are all ideological choices... and what 'The Reign of Terror' peddles to kids is ruling class ideology, plain and simple. A few half-hearted words about the revolution being "not all bad" merely create the illusion of balance in a story that depicts the revolution as an irrational outbreak of villainy and fanaticism, imposed on ignorant scum commoners by evil zealots.
Well, bollocks to that.
Why not do a story about the first phase of the revolution? About the massive upsurge in popular involvement and democracy? About the storming of the Bastille? About a postman arresting a fleeing King? About people suddenly refusing to obey the lazy filth who'd owned and run them all their lives? About Tom Paine, or Mary Wollstonecraft, or Wordsworth... ? Yes, show how the revolution derailed and started to "eat its own children"... but show the concrete, historical reasons why this happened.
But no, we get the Blue Peter version.
I hate this one. I don't need a story to suit my ideological preferences before I can like it... but this one is too much.
'The Romans'
Having, by now, entirely and wholeheartedly abandoned any pretence of making "educational" (i.e. vaguely accurate) historicals, the show is now free to visit historical periods and settings for the purpose of sending them up, and sending up the way in which they've been depicted elsewhere.
So, in 'The Romans', we get the TARDIS crew poncing about playing at being in Ancient Rome (Ian spouting his few bits of latin, Barbara combing his hair forward, etc), we get cheesy stock footage of lions inserted into a cheesy storyline about lions in the arena, we get Nero and the imperial court as bedroom farce, we get the professional court poisoner, etc...
Years before I, Claudius did Rome as a middle class soap opera, 'The Romans' does it as outright sitcom... and very clever and witty it is too. It's camp in the best sense: archly straining against its own pretentions and brazenly revelling in its limitations.
'The Web Planet'
It's usual to say something like "great ideas, poor production values". In my opinion, it's the other way round. For the time, and given the temporal and spatial and financial limitations under which they were working, the production values are amazing. The plot, on the other hand, is boring and hackneyed. Okay, it's cast in terms of insect-people, but essentially this is nothing but the most basic rebels-vs-guards runaround. Capture, interrogation, escape, rebellion, prison breakout, blah, blah, blah.
The first episode is rather enjoyable, for the peculiarity of (amongst other things) the new environment in which the crew find themselves and the even greater peculiarity of Hartnell's performance. Maureen O'Brien continues to impress, conveying genuine fear at Barbara's possessed hand.
It's interesting to note the submerged, anti-communist theme. The Zarbi are beasts of burden, made "militant" by the arrival of a malignant, cancerous spider and rebelling against their natural rulers, the noble Menoptera. The Menoptera are put into labour camps and treated brutally. They have to plot an invasion and counter revolution to restore the natural order and put the Zarbi back down to their proper position. The Animus (which is another word for hostility or hatred) is called "the dark power" by the Menoptera... yet, interestingly, it burns with light. However, the serial doesn't really question the moral right of the Menoptera to re-establish their rule and the power that has unseated them is depicted as unnatural, as enslaving the mind, overturning the proper hierarchy of society and destroying all order. It's a reactionary depiction of a space-Bolshevik. The Zarbi are the mindless drones who are encouraged by this manipulative force into usurping their proper masters and then establishing a tyranny.
'The Crusades'
Whittaker draws on conventional ideas and adventure story tropes about the Crusades, and adopts a quasi-Shakespearean mode with the dialogue... all of which could easily have made this killingly naff. But it's saved - and triumphs - because it strives carefully and conscientiously to provide a nuanced, detailed, morally complex picture of events and personalities... and because it is so deliciously aware of itself as a story.
Richard is portrayed far more kindly than he deserves... but still, he is shown to be capricious, scheming, selfish, callous and manipulative. Joanna's tirades express both a just outrage at being used like a chess piece (with which we can sympathise) and a racist revulsion at the "infidels". The Earl of Leicester's bigotry, superstition and warmongering counterpoints noble English characters like William des Preaux.
On the other side, El Akir is a classic orientalist stereotype - an almost archetypal expression of Western ideas about the cruel, sensual, decadent East. And yet... he is seen to conspire with a Genovese merchant who is prepared to help him acquire Barbara in return for a chance to talk contracts with Saladin. These are still stereotypes (i.e. the machiavellian, money-minded Italian) but they problematise any attempt to see this as a story about nasty Muslims victimising innocent Westerners. Saladin himself is dignified, intellectual, judicious, melancholy, ruthless, noble... the depiction is the classic version of a Western admiration for the man, epitomised by the fact that Napoleon built him a tomb. (One wonders how, by contrast, Whittaker would have depicted the altogether more ferocious and effective Baibers, who is more admired in the Muslim world than Saladin.) The various harem girls are depicted more or less as sexual slaves (this version of harems being yet another obsession of the West, particularly in Romantic and Gothic fiction or art). So, imperfect... but an obvious attempt has been made to be balanced.
I recently watched the David Suchet version of 'Murder on the Orient Express'. They inserted a scene (not in the novel) in which an adulteress is hunted down through the streets of Istanbul by a baying mob and stoned to death. The British presence in Istanbul, meanwhile, is depicted in terms of 'men of honour' commiting suicide when accused of lying. Later, Poirot rages at the killers on the train, calling them "medieval" for taking the law into their own hands like (it is implied) the savages on the streets of Istanbul, who were (Poirot has previously remarked) simply obeying the law of their "different culture". He ends the story clutching a rosary. What I'm saying is that, compared to the kind of casual, faux-sophisticated Islamophobia that is now mainstream enough to get on primetime ITV, 'The Crusade' looks like it was written by George Galloway.
The best thing is the depiction of ordinary people. Ibrahim is a rogue, but a lovable one with a streak of the anarchist in him. Ben Daheer and Thatcher are struggling to get by in a warring world run by big personalities who don't care about the little guy. Haroun - evidently a devout Muslim - is a man of immense dignity and humanity; the most straightforwardly sympathetic guest character in the whole tale.
The other great thing about this story is its awareness of itself as a story, indeed of Doctor Who as a story. Whittaker uses Shakespeare as a template for telling a story set in the past (which was common practice for every TV hack back them) but is playfully aware of the fact. He has Vicki get into the kind of comic cross-dressing dilemmas that turn up all the time in Shakespeare. The Chamberlain is obviously a version of Malvolio and other such characters in the plays. Whittaker launches the characters into quasi-iambic pentameter during the barnstorming debate scene in which the Doctor plays (with evident and self-conscious theatricalism) at being a royal adviser.
And, most beautifully, Whittaker has Barbara tell Saladin about her travels on the TARDIS... which Saladin interprets as meaning that she and her friends are travelling players, tellers of stories about giant insects and Roman emperors... and he tells her that her survival will rely upon becoming a new Scheherazade, the storyteller from the One Thousand and One Nights, who knew that she would die if she ever ran out of stories... a bit like the show itself, or even human culture itself.
'The Time Meddler'
Witty, cheeky and very clever. Dennis Spooner invents an entirely new kind of Who story... though, really, it's just a development of the ordinary 'historicals' (which, after all, have time travellers in them, i.e. our heroes) crossed with precedents like A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and even A Dream of John Ball.
But Spooner combines this with the kind of cheeky interrogation of history, and of the show's inability to really be accurate or educational about history, that he previously tried out in 'The Romans'.
1066 and all that comes under his ironic gaze here, and because of his less overt use of comedy, we are never entirely sure when (and if) he's joking... which is great fun.
I tend to think that he spends the entire story gently mocking every standard idea about the period - from Flintstones villagers to treasure-seeking, behelmeted Vikings - and counterpointing it with the idea of two time travellers, one who wants to just watch and one who wants to change things (i.e. rewrite the story to make it better).
Is this a picture of two opposing ways of writing 'historicals'? The educational way vs. the ironic way; the straight way vs. the muckabouty way? If so, Spooner undermines the straight way at every turn. What is the Monk but a distorted picture of the Doctor? After all, the Doctor intervenes when it suits him, moralising to cover up his own desire to get involved and have adventures, collecting bric-a-brac... the Monk just has more self-awareness, just like an ironic story in relation to a straight one. The conclusion seems to be that the unironic way is the least honest... but the Doctor still has to win. How ironic.
The only bum note in all this mockabilly narrative syncopation is the implied rape of Edith. This seems to be in there simply because Spooner is mocking every last cliche about Vikings, but perhaps there was a taste failure there. It's debateable.
Hartnell was never better and his scenes with the excellent Butterworth are priceless. Purves and O'Brien are two of the best actors to ever play companions, and their scenes together are excellent. They really work up a great relationship between their two characters. Camfield's direction is full of lovely touches (i.e. the overhead back projected sky) but he's in on Spooner's joke, viz the hilariously jammed-in stock footage of the longboat.
'The Myth Makers'
This one grows in stature every time I listen to it.
First and foremost, this is genuinely funny. And the fun comes on several levels. Earthy wit, bathos which plays against the mythic dimensions of the story, good puns (nothing wrong with a good pun) and self-aware self-ridicule (notice how Cotton puts the best puns... which are always the worst ones... into the mouths of the most fatuous characters).
Secondly, this is a brilliant trip into Doctor Who as both psuedo-History and self-aware Story. They've been doing this sort of thing for a while now under the aegis of Dennis Spooner (whose own scripts are exemplars of it) and Cotton swoops in with just the right script to bring the theme to a head.
Shakespeare's play about the Trojan war, Troilus and Cressida, is a gloriously filthy and cynical swipe at all notions of order, hierarchy, love, honour, legend and... well, just about everything else you can think of. Cotton is clearly influenced by this (though he tones down the bile and smut, natch). The Trojan story is the perfect vehicle for a sceptical and ironical look at history and myth... precisely because it masquerades as history and provides one of the fundamental mythic narratives of Western culture. Cities at war, peoples in opposition... all because of noble motives about protecting the honour of untrustworthy women. All rubbish, of course... as 'The Myth Makers' shows, with its guilty references to "trade routes" and its total disinterest in Helen (she's an inconsequential, lazy bimbo in Shakespeare; in 'Myth Makers' she's simply irrelevant and thus absent).
Moreover, as reiteration of myth and legend in the age and idioms of modernity, sci-fi is obsessed with Greeks and Trojans. Sci-fi is crammed full of warring races/cities/planets and Who is no exception (i.e. Kaleds and Thals, Atrios and Zeos, etc).
Where 'Myth Makers' particularly scores is in its awareness of the fact that the TARDIS crew have ventured into a space that is neither history nor myth but simply Story. The Doctor resists the horse idea but eventually, wearily, has to give in to it. Stephen tries to pass as a Greek warrior and finds he gets on much better behaving like a sitcom character. Vicki seems to realise that she is caught in an inevitable destiny (plot?) when she meets Troilus and realises what he thinks her name is. Of course, she has to have a happy ending and so be allowed to avoid the clutches of Diomedes... but only because in this version of events he's already dead. She and Troilus disappear into a new myth as they meet up with Aeneas.
After this story, Doctor Who descends into weeks and weeks and bloody weeks of pompous, bloated, OTT, Dan Dare bullshit... so it's delicious to see such stuff mocked in advance. The warring races, invasions and swaggering heroics of Terry Nation have already been given a slow puncture by Donald Cotton. Heroes aren't brave and semi-divine supermen, they're cowardly or outright villainous. Odysseus is vile, but he's preferable to just about everyone else in the story because he's the only one with irony or self-awareness. He's the only one who really knows that gods are always fake, heroes always drunks and fools, honour little more than ideology, heroics always little more than murder.
And here we come to another triumph: the seriousness of the depiction of the slaughter. The trouble with irony is that it can become overpowering and put us at a distance from the emotional effect that drama should have on us. Cotton switches the irony off at the last moment and allows the dirty brutality of war to suddenly jump out at us. The effect is quite startling.
A thousand curses upon whoever burnt this one.
'The Massacre' (Yes, that's what's it called. Nice, short, succinct title.)
On the surface, this is the most 'serious' Doctor Who story ever made. It's John Lucarotti's version of Marlowe's The Massacre at Paris, minus the crude (but thrilling) machiavellianism of the Guise. There's a very good BBC radio production of Marlowe's play (findable online if you look in the right places...). Listen to it immediately before or after the CD release of 'The Massacre'. The effect is rather startling.
Lucarotti plays the politics, the diplomacy, the bigotry, the violence all dead straight. Paddy Russell (a marvellous director) brings in an amazing cast who treat the script like Shakespeare or Bernard Shaw. The massacre itself, with the sounds of mass murder overlaid over depictions, is done with the direct intention of causing horror.
There is an inexorability about these parts of the story which mirrors the terrible inexorability of history. There's no escaping the massacre, or the suffering. In this way, this story says much more about the "destruction of time" than the last one. We might not agree that massacres are inevitable, but we are forced to assent (with the Doctor's peroration at the end as a caveat) to the story's contention that History is a great machine that grinds the little people up into mincemeat.
Also, this story pulls no punches in its depiction of the corrupt, callous, ruthlessness of a royal state. Even the King himself is caught in the whirlpool of Catherine de Medici's unaccountable power. The bigotry radiates downwards from her and she is shown - in the single most negative depiction of a real historical royal ever in Who - to be a thoroughly hateful specimen. Tavanne is much less a bigot than a loyal apparatchik to a state that is rotten to the core.
Thing is... this is also a story about a time traveller who inexplicably encounters (or rather fails to encounter) a physical double, leading to all sorts of adventure-serial mistaken-identity shenanigans. The best that can be said about this strain of the story is that it comes from Dickens (physical doubles leading to confusions in Paris) rather than Marlowe.
There is a staginess, a literary artifice about this element of the story that directly plays against the careful attempts at realism elsewhere. With the arch smile and knowing wink of a Dennis Spooner or a Donald Cotton, a story could get away with it... but Lucarotti's straightforwardness, coupled with the bolted-on business of the Abbot of Amboise seeming to be the Doctor, makes for an awkward combination.
For all its integrity, there is something less convincing about this story than even 'The Myth Makers', precisely because 'Myth Makers' is prepared to face the fact that its a story, whereas 'Massacre' tries to dodge it.
Even with these niggles, however, it's still a 9/10. If only for the little details, like Preslin's interest in lenses, or the way the Huguenots react to Stephen saying he's been in Egypt.
'The Savages'
Easily the best of the Hartnell futuristicky stories; certainly the only one that can compare favourably with the historicals.
It's a straightforward tale about benevolent rulers of a utopia who, natch, turn out to be evil exploiters in charge of a dystopia. Cue lots of captures, escapes, chases, etc.
This story scores, however, by taking its concepts very seriously and trying to explore them.
This is achieved, partly, by the stripping away of obvious indicators. Apparently this was going to be called 'The White Savages' but that got changed. Jaeger is blacked up but seems to be the only swarthy Elder. So, this isn't straightforwardly about race. There are elderly "savages" and young "Elders" so it's not straightforwardly about the generation gap. There's no labour or production of any kind, so it's not straightforwardly about capitalism.
This leaves the story free to focus on exploitation itself, in its most basic form. Of course, sucking out the "life force" is sci-fi mumbojumbo, but its very emptiness as a concept allows it to stand for lots of other things.
The story gets exploitation fundamentally right. You exploit people, seperate and degrade them in the process, and then point to their seperateness and degradation as proof that they're to blame for their own position. You treat your victims as less than human. You cover up as much of the dirty process as you can and ideologically neutralise the rest. You treat anyone who dares to protest with condescension and then brutality if they refuse to shut up. The exploitation leads to surplus and thus to hierarchy, though even those on the lower levels of the oppressing class don't have the same status and liberty as the people at the pinnacle. The luxury and complacency that stems from the exploitation helps to legitimate the system, even providing a utilitarian pseudo-moral argument. Etc.
I think this speaks to unease about the long post-war economic boom that was just starting to decline when this story was shown. The boom was built largely on unprecedented and continuous armaments production, legitimated by the "cold war". Meanwhile, the third world starved and Indochina burned under Western bombing raids. Mind you, I don't want to overstate that. Economics is invisible in this story (as it usually is in Doctor Who), with it being by no means clear how harvesting the mojos of a bunch of hairy people translates into a post-labour and post-scarcity society for others. Also, the very metaphorical vagueness of the story makes it impossible for it to say anything specific about capitalism or imperialism.
There's a strong moral strain in this story that is both a strength and a weakness. You can't help but thrill to the Doctor's passionate moral outrage (Hartnell is on particularly good form here)... but you also get fascist guards who reform once they get a taste of their own medicine, which is unconvincing. Also, the story ends with a reconciliation, instead of real retribution. The exploiters and the exploited must learn to forgive each other and live together.... but how can they?
All the same, and bearing all the weaknesses in mind, this is still the most intelligent, direct and thoughtful "sci-fi" Hartnell... though it lacks the arch wit and self-consciousness of the best historicals. It may fail here and there but, essentially, this is a fine example of what Who was *made* to do: the politico-mythic morality fable.
ideas are icepickproof
Tuesday, 31 August 2010
Sunday, 1 August 2010
Law & Order: Special Sarcasm Unit
As a fan of both Mark Steel and old Public Information Films, I like the clip below.
The wonderfully shifty, disreputable-looking spivs and wideboys in the old film are the direct ancestors of the hoodied happy-slappers who rampage through the urban warzones of Tunbridge Wells and Wootton Bassett in the fevered nightmares of modern Daily Mail readers.
Still, at least in the olden days you could call the bobbies whenever you saw a cockney loitering near a car... in these days of totalitarian Political Correctness, call the police and you'll probably be prosecuted under EEC health and safety laws (in case, y'know, the policeman who answers the phone hurts himself picking up the reciever... or gets offended because you're not a Muslim or something...)
Also, we no longer have those handy boxes everywhere (see 2 minutes 10 seconds into the video above... the bit that makes the video vaguely relevant to this blog). But then, if we did they'd all be carted away under the cover of darkness by tragic geeks with enough space in their spare rooms.
Oh, just give me an Abso for sarcasm and we'll call the matter closed.
The wonderfully shifty, disreputable-looking spivs and wideboys in the old film are the direct ancestors of the hoodied happy-slappers who rampage through the urban warzones of Tunbridge Wells and Wootton Bassett in the fevered nightmares of modern Daily Mail readers.
Still, at least in the olden days you could call the bobbies whenever you saw a cockney loitering near a car... in these days of totalitarian Political Correctness, call the police and you'll probably be prosecuted under EEC health and safety laws (in case, y'know, the policeman who answers the phone hurts himself picking up the reciever... or gets offended because you're not a Muslim or something...)
Also, we no longer have those handy boxes everywhere (see 2 minutes 10 seconds into the video above... the bit that makes the video vaguely relevant to this blog). But then, if we did they'd all be carted away under the cover of darkness by tragic geeks with enough space in their spare rooms.
Oh, just give me an Abso for sarcasm and we'll call the matter closed.
Thursday, 1 July 2010
Mything the Point
What’s the difference between RTD and Moffat?
RTD, for all that he’s an atheist, has a fundamentally religious view. I mean that, while he may not have any belief in an actual god, his basic outlook on life (at least as it finds expression in his writing) is religious in tone and is informed by religious mythology. RTD can’t think about concepts like ‘the end of the world’, or ’saving the world’, or ‘regenerating’, or any of this stuff (all very much the bread and butter of pulp fantasy fiction, which is all Who is really) without connecting it, maybe subconsciously, to religious concepts and stories. (Well, he can, but for the purposes of this theory, I’m going to pretend that he can’t. So there.)
‘Bad Wolf’/'Parting of the Ways’, ‘Gridlock’, ‘Voyage of the Damned’, ‘Sound of Drums’/'Last of the Time Lords’ and the other season finales… they’re all soaked in religious language and imagery, in Christian symbolism. And the theme of fiery judgement is never far away, nor is the idea of someone sacrificing themselves to redeem the world. Isn’t ‘The Ark in Space' supposedly his favourite classic story? No wonder.
I might also mention the fact that his most Whoish work prior to Who (much more Whoish than either of those kids’ fantasy serials he wrote) was about the second coming of Christ. This isn’t unusual. Douglas Adams was another atheist sci-fi writer obsessed with religion. H.G. Wells, Olaf Stapleton, Arthur C. Clarke… in fact, you’d be hard pressed to find a half-decent sci-fi author who doesn’t spend a large amount of his time thinking and writing about religion in one form or another.
Moffat, on the other hand, has no such underlying religious conception. He plays with these concepts on a technical level. He’s much more interested in playing around with plot for its own sake, twisting it around like origami. But there are some problems with this.
Firstly, he doesn’t tune into the mythological/religious basis of science-fiction (which is a reiteration of mythology in the secular age of technology). Secondly, he seems to lack any real interest in evil… which is problematic because Doctor Who, like religion (and, incidentally, like Shakespeare), is absolutely obsessed with evil (and not always in a simplistic way). You might be tempted to bring up Jekyll now… but I’ll remind you that, in Moffat’s conception, even Mr Hyde turns out to be an expression of the fierceness and danger inherent in love.
Consequently, his stories tend to be about malfunctions. They’re about things going wrong, usually technology. Nanogenes, automatic repair systems on spaceships, etc… but also chronology (any supposedly linear, predictable system, really)… and, when dealing with chronology, he can use that as a way of playing around with plot for its own sake.
The problem with playing around with plot for its own sake is that you tend to tie yourself into narrative knots that are very hard to cut through while retaining dramatic values. For all Moffat’s supposed mastery of the time-travel jigsaw plot, the greatest instance of this kind of thing yet found in 2005+ Who is RTD’s deceptively simple trick with the tie in ‘Smith and Jones’. Not because it’s more complicated and twisty than any Moffat bit of “timey wimey” stuff (it clearly isn’t), but because it serves a purpose for both plot and characterization. The real cleverness of it lies in the punning. The Doctor ties the story into a neat little bow with his tie. He goes back to create the confusion that alerted him and Martha to each other in the hospital, simultaneously giving her proof of time travel before she’s even stepped into the TARDIS.
In ‘The Big Bang’, Moffat pulls off something similar when he reveals that the peculiar sequence from ‘Flesh and Stone’ actually fits into another story. The scene has genuine dramatic power, despite being a bit of narrative trickery concealed within a time travel macguffin… though the travelling-back-through-Amy’s-timeline thing is cheating really, a bit of baseless gobbledegook, evidently just made up on the fly and inserted into the story to make it possible for the Doctor to save himself via Amy’s memories.
Most of the time, however, ‘The Big Bang’ relentlessly undercuts itself with its constant mucking about with chronology. Moffat obviously intends us to be going “oooh, that’s clever!” every few minutes. The most egregious example of this is the stuff about Amelia’s drink. It serves no purpose but showing off. It is, essentially, exactly the same thing as the ‘tie trick’ in ‘Smith and Jones’ but stripped of any plot or character significance. However, it’s also probably the least damaging instance, precisely because it has no import for the plot. When, by contrast, you have vital plot points that turn out to be nothing but trickery (i.e. the future Doctor appearing and, apparently, dying), you are looking at a story that isn’t really a story but is just pretending to be. There is absolutely no reason for that sequence to be in there. There’s no reason why the Doctor couldn’t just come up with his plan and clamber into the Pandorica without first getting shot, going back in time by 12 minutes, whispering to himself and appearing to die. It’s not only gratuitous and artificially complex, it also creates a feeling of the drama being undercut. (In fact, if there’s one single factor that repeatedly neuters the dramatic values throughout the entire 2005+ show, it’s the refusal of the dead to stay dead.)
Anyway, the point is that you can do a story in which time (i.e. plot) ties itself into knots and make it interesting as long as the knots are not the whole basis of the story, as long as the story is about something more than that, i.e. ‘Day of the Daleks’, ‘Smith and Jones’, even ‘Blink’ saves itself from being about nothing but sitcom characters caught in plot knots by thinking a bit about what the passage of time really means for people, how it changes them, etc. But when you have a story that, really, is about nothing but plot taken apart and then reconstituted like one of those puzzles with several equally valid solutions…
The other thing that Moffat lacks is, as I said, any real interest in evil or malice. He occasionally tries (i.e. Prisoner Zero is rather nasty) but, really, his baddies are usually malfunctioning, runaway systems or predators. He even writes the Cyberman in ‘The Pandorica Opens’ as an empty, unoccupied machine still running on its old programming (i.e. as a malfunctioning, runaway system) and casts his rogues gallery of Who monsters as uniting to save the Universe!
The ultimate expression of both of these tendencies (plot knots and no evil) came in ‘The Big Bang’, in which the big enemy, the Doctor’s opponent, was *drum roll please* just a malfunctioning, runaway plot!
RTD’s season finales usually left me underwhelmed… but I can’t help thinking that they were all fundamentally more interesting than Moffat’s first effort at an end-of-season blowout, precisely because they all locked into the legendary, mythic aspect of sci-fi and concerned themselves with the Doctor struggling against galaxy-powered malice. It’s hard not to look at ‘The Big Bang’ and see nothing but a well-crafted exercise in manipulating plot, in pushing plot to the limit of its tolerances within the Who milieu. Admittedly, there are some intimations of a theme concerning the relationships between fairytales, childhood imagination, stories, history and... and something or other. But it's all rather garbled and facile. You'd be much better off just rewatching 'The Mind Robber'.
Religious stories rarely make much sense, but they often resonate powerfully. Moffat’s style is more like a labyrinthine whodunit, in which the murder turns out to have just been an accident with a misifiring gun all along.
You’d think that, as an atheist, I’d be unhappy with RTD’s religion-soaked stories… but at least they had some political content. You see, one reason why religious stories are so resonant is because they often have strong political themes. The better (earlier) Gospels, for all their frequent deformities and obscenities, are revolutionary tracts that offer a (for the time) radical political message. They were, after all, popular political expressions of a people subjugated by empire. Of course, the concentrated forces that have appropriated, reinterpreted and controlled these stories for centuries have done a good job of stripping them of this context and content. Whether the people running things are scammers or no, successful religions tend to find their first recruits amongst the poor and downtrodden. Religion, as Marx pointed out, is an expression of and protest against very real suffering and alienation. That’s what ‘Gridlock' is about.
As well as being a reiteration of mythology, sci-fi is (and always has been) drenched in politics (how could it not, religion being a political ideology?) Look at the foundational texts of science-fiction. Frankenstein is about a scientist who plays God (he creates another man in his own image, endows him with free will and then banishes him to wander alone in a cruel and incomprehensible world) but it is also about the Age of Enlightenment, about the radical new ideas sweeping Western society, about the revolution going on in how society relates to the individual, about the role of education in forming personality, about the ideas of Rousseau, etc. H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine is a satire of the class system, with the workers oppressed for so long that they evolve into troglodytes and the idle rich devolving into helpless children, but is also highly redolent of the Garden of Eden and the serpent. The War of the Worlds is both a critique of British imperialism (casting us as the natives being conquered) and a reiteration of the Christian apocalypse.
None of this need surprise us. For centuries, Christianity was the dominant social ideology in Western culture, and was part of the underlying mental grammar of just about everyone in the West. The people who rebelled against the establishment at any time almost always cast their objections in terms of religion. The fiery radical priest John Ball couched his demand for universal equality in terms of the common ancestry of all men from Adam and Eve. The Levellers and the Diggers likewise. The abolitionist movement in both Britain and America did much the same. Protestantism itself began partly as a result of disgust at the corruption and decadence of the Catholic Church, comparing it unfavourably to Christ the pauper. In our own age, it's all too easy to think of dark alliances between political rage and religious ideology... but, lest we get too Sam Harris about this, it's also possible to find alliances between progressive politics and sectors of religion. It's the sigh of the oppressed creature, and sighs can be the expression of murderous rage... or progressive outrage.
Anyway. This inherent political dimension to religious storytelling could be precisely why science-fiction (as myth reiteration) is also so concerned with politics. I dunno. Ask a proper scholar and see what she thinks. (Sorry, how silly of me... any scholar of science-fiction will obviously be male.)
RTD’s mental connection to this religio-mythic element in sci-fi is probably what causes his stories to be so political. For example: The Master in ‘Sound of Drums’ / ‘Last of the Time Lords’ is not just the Anti-Christ, bringing the tribulation and controlling mankind through their own original sins, he is also a Blairesque opportunist who flashes his fake smile at the TV while using the state apparatus to arrest innocent people and scheme for war.
Which I dug.
One last remark. There is another Who story involving a bit of timey-wimeyness and a drink. It’s called ‘Warriors’ Gate’. The Doctor walks into the cobwebby, ruined Tharil dining hall and sets right a goblet that was left on its side centuries ago. Later in the story he is taken back to the moment that the Tharils began to lose control of their empire, when they were attacked at the height of their power by the revolution they thought they could dodge forever. Disgusted by their treatment of their slaves, the Doctor pours wine into the very same goblet (but centuries before he first saw and righted it) until … well, until the Tharil’s cup runneth over… and then knocks it over in a gesture of splendid, ironic contempt for their decadence; decadence built on the suffering, servitude, abuse and unrequited labour of those the Tharils call “only people”. It is an amazing moment. It unites plot, theme, myth and politics. It brings home to you the tangled and circular nature of time at the gateway. It connects the past, present and future… but it does this not only in terms of the temporal shenanigans that form the conceptual heart of the story, but also in terms of the story’s political message about the temporary and fragile and brittle nature of all power built on the cruel usage of others.
Both RTD and Moffat have done excellent work but… well, they don’t write stories like that any more.
RTD, for all that he’s an atheist, has a fundamentally religious view. I mean that, while he may not have any belief in an actual god, his basic outlook on life (at least as it finds expression in his writing) is religious in tone and is informed by religious mythology. RTD can’t think about concepts like ‘the end of the world’, or ’saving the world’, or ‘regenerating’, or any of this stuff (all very much the bread and butter of pulp fantasy fiction, which is all Who is really) without connecting it, maybe subconsciously, to religious concepts and stories. (Well, he can, but for the purposes of this theory, I’m going to pretend that he can’t. So there.)
‘Bad Wolf’/'Parting of the Ways’, ‘Gridlock’, ‘Voyage of the Damned’, ‘Sound of Drums’/'Last of the Time Lords’ and the other season finales… they’re all soaked in religious language and imagery, in Christian symbolism. And the theme of fiery judgement is never far away, nor is the idea of someone sacrificing themselves to redeem the world. Isn’t ‘The Ark in Space' supposedly his favourite classic story? No wonder.
I might also mention the fact that his most Whoish work prior to Who (much more Whoish than either of those kids’ fantasy serials he wrote) was about the second coming of Christ. This isn’t unusual. Douglas Adams was another atheist sci-fi writer obsessed with religion. H.G. Wells, Olaf Stapleton, Arthur C. Clarke… in fact, you’d be hard pressed to find a half-decent sci-fi author who doesn’t spend a large amount of his time thinking and writing about religion in one form or another.
Moffat, on the other hand, has no such underlying religious conception. He plays with these concepts on a technical level. He’s much more interested in playing around with plot for its own sake, twisting it around like origami. But there are some problems with this.
Firstly, he doesn’t tune into the mythological/religious basis of science-fiction (which is a reiteration of mythology in the secular age of technology). Secondly, he seems to lack any real interest in evil… which is problematic because Doctor Who, like religion (and, incidentally, like Shakespeare), is absolutely obsessed with evil (and not always in a simplistic way). You might be tempted to bring up Jekyll now… but I’ll remind you that, in Moffat’s conception, even Mr Hyde turns out to be an expression of the fierceness and danger inherent in love.
Consequently, his stories tend to be about malfunctions. They’re about things going wrong, usually technology. Nanogenes, automatic repair systems on spaceships, etc… but also chronology (any supposedly linear, predictable system, really)… and, when dealing with chronology, he can use that as a way of playing around with plot for its own sake.
The problem with playing around with plot for its own sake is that you tend to tie yourself into narrative knots that are very hard to cut through while retaining dramatic values. For all Moffat’s supposed mastery of the time-travel jigsaw plot, the greatest instance of this kind of thing yet found in 2005+ Who is RTD’s deceptively simple trick with the tie in ‘Smith and Jones’. Not because it’s more complicated and twisty than any Moffat bit of “timey wimey” stuff (it clearly isn’t), but because it serves a purpose for both plot and characterization. The real cleverness of it lies in the punning. The Doctor ties the story into a neat little bow with his tie. He goes back to create the confusion that alerted him and Martha to each other in the hospital, simultaneously giving her proof of time travel before she’s even stepped into the TARDIS.
In ‘The Big Bang’, Moffat pulls off something similar when he reveals that the peculiar sequence from ‘Flesh and Stone’ actually fits into another story. The scene has genuine dramatic power, despite being a bit of narrative trickery concealed within a time travel macguffin… though the travelling-back-through-Amy’s-timeline thing is cheating really, a bit of baseless gobbledegook, evidently just made up on the fly and inserted into the story to make it possible for the Doctor to save himself via Amy’s memories.
Most of the time, however, ‘The Big Bang’ relentlessly undercuts itself with its constant mucking about with chronology. Moffat obviously intends us to be going “oooh, that’s clever!” every few minutes. The most egregious example of this is the stuff about Amelia’s drink. It serves no purpose but showing off. It is, essentially, exactly the same thing as the ‘tie trick’ in ‘Smith and Jones’ but stripped of any plot or character significance. However, it’s also probably the least damaging instance, precisely because it has no import for the plot. When, by contrast, you have vital plot points that turn out to be nothing but trickery (i.e. the future Doctor appearing and, apparently, dying), you are looking at a story that isn’t really a story but is just pretending to be. There is absolutely no reason for that sequence to be in there. There’s no reason why the Doctor couldn’t just come up with his plan and clamber into the Pandorica without first getting shot, going back in time by 12 minutes, whispering to himself and appearing to die. It’s not only gratuitous and artificially complex, it also creates a feeling of the drama being undercut. (In fact, if there’s one single factor that repeatedly neuters the dramatic values throughout the entire 2005+ show, it’s the refusal of the dead to stay dead.)
Anyway, the point is that you can do a story in which time (i.e. plot) ties itself into knots and make it interesting as long as the knots are not the whole basis of the story, as long as the story is about something more than that, i.e. ‘Day of the Daleks’, ‘Smith and Jones’, even ‘Blink’ saves itself from being about nothing but sitcom characters caught in plot knots by thinking a bit about what the passage of time really means for people, how it changes them, etc. But when you have a story that, really, is about nothing but plot taken apart and then reconstituted like one of those puzzles with several equally valid solutions…
The other thing that Moffat lacks is, as I said, any real interest in evil or malice. He occasionally tries (i.e. Prisoner Zero is rather nasty) but, really, his baddies are usually malfunctioning, runaway systems or predators. He even writes the Cyberman in ‘The Pandorica Opens’ as an empty, unoccupied machine still running on its old programming (i.e. as a malfunctioning, runaway system) and casts his rogues gallery of Who monsters as uniting to save the Universe!
The ultimate expression of both of these tendencies (plot knots and no evil) came in ‘The Big Bang’, in which the big enemy, the Doctor’s opponent, was *drum roll please* just a malfunctioning, runaway plot!
RTD’s season finales usually left me underwhelmed… but I can’t help thinking that they were all fundamentally more interesting than Moffat’s first effort at an end-of-season blowout, precisely because they all locked into the legendary, mythic aspect of sci-fi and concerned themselves with the Doctor struggling against galaxy-powered malice. It’s hard not to look at ‘The Big Bang’ and see nothing but a well-crafted exercise in manipulating plot, in pushing plot to the limit of its tolerances within the Who milieu. Admittedly, there are some intimations of a theme concerning the relationships between fairytales, childhood imagination, stories, history and... and something or other. But it's all rather garbled and facile. You'd be much better off just rewatching 'The Mind Robber'.
Religious stories rarely make much sense, but they often resonate powerfully. Moffat’s style is more like a labyrinthine whodunit, in which the murder turns out to have just been an accident with a misifiring gun all along.
You’d think that, as an atheist, I’d be unhappy with RTD’s religion-soaked stories… but at least they had some political content. You see, one reason why religious stories are so resonant is because they often have strong political themes. The better (earlier) Gospels, for all their frequent deformities and obscenities, are revolutionary tracts that offer a (for the time) radical political message. They were, after all, popular political expressions of a people subjugated by empire. Of course, the concentrated forces that have appropriated, reinterpreted and controlled these stories for centuries have done a good job of stripping them of this context and content. Whether the people running things are scammers or no, successful religions tend to find their first recruits amongst the poor and downtrodden. Religion, as Marx pointed out, is an expression of and protest against very real suffering and alienation. That’s what ‘Gridlock' is about.
As well as being a reiteration of mythology, sci-fi is (and always has been) drenched in politics (how could it not, religion being a political ideology?) Look at the foundational texts of science-fiction. Frankenstein is about a scientist who plays God (he creates another man in his own image, endows him with free will and then banishes him to wander alone in a cruel and incomprehensible world) but it is also about the Age of Enlightenment, about the radical new ideas sweeping Western society, about the revolution going on in how society relates to the individual, about the role of education in forming personality, about the ideas of Rousseau, etc. H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine is a satire of the class system, with the workers oppressed for so long that they evolve into troglodytes and the idle rich devolving into helpless children, but is also highly redolent of the Garden of Eden and the serpent. The War of the Worlds is both a critique of British imperialism (casting us as the natives being conquered) and a reiteration of the Christian apocalypse.
None of this need surprise us. For centuries, Christianity was the dominant social ideology in Western culture, and was part of the underlying mental grammar of just about everyone in the West. The people who rebelled against the establishment at any time almost always cast their objections in terms of religion. The fiery radical priest John Ball couched his demand for universal equality in terms of the common ancestry of all men from Adam and Eve. The Levellers and the Diggers likewise. The abolitionist movement in both Britain and America did much the same. Protestantism itself began partly as a result of disgust at the corruption and decadence of the Catholic Church, comparing it unfavourably to Christ the pauper. In our own age, it's all too easy to think of dark alliances between political rage and religious ideology... but, lest we get too Sam Harris about this, it's also possible to find alliances between progressive politics and sectors of religion. It's the sigh of the oppressed creature, and sighs can be the expression of murderous rage... or progressive outrage.
Anyway. This inherent political dimension to religious storytelling could be precisely why science-fiction (as myth reiteration) is also so concerned with politics. I dunno. Ask a proper scholar and see what she thinks. (Sorry, how silly of me... any scholar of science-fiction will obviously be male.)
RTD’s mental connection to this religio-mythic element in sci-fi is probably what causes his stories to be so political. For example: The Master in ‘Sound of Drums’ / ‘Last of the Time Lords’ is not just the Anti-Christ, bringing the tribulation and controlling mankind through their own original sins, he is also a Blairesque opportunist who flashes his fake smile at the TV while using the state apparatus to arrest innocent people and scheme for war.
Which I dug.
One last remark. There is another Who story involving a bit of timey-wimeyness and a drink. It’s called ‘Warriors’ Gate’. The Doctor walks into the cobwebby, ruined Tharil dining hall and sets right a goblet that was left on its side centuries ago. Later in the story he is taken back to the moment that the Tharils began to lose control of their empire, when they were attacked at the height of their power by the revolution they thought they could dodge forever. Disgusted by their treatment of their slaves, the Doctor pours wine into the very same goblet (but centuries before he first saw and righted it) until … well, until the Tharil’s cup runneth over… and then knocks it over in a gesture of splendid, ironic contempt for their decadence; decadence built on the suffering, servitude, abuse and unrequited labour of those the Tharils call “only people”. It is an amazing moment. It unites plot, theme, myth and politics. It brings home to you the tangled and circular nature of time at the gateway. It connects the past, present and future… but it does this not only in terms of the temporal shenanigans that form the conceptual heart of the story, but also in terms of the story’s political message about the temporary and fragile and brittle nature of all power built on the cruel usage of others.
Both RTD and Moffat have done excellent work but… well, they don’t write stories like that any more.
The Megropolis 1 Budget - at a glance:
The Gatherer today unveiled harsh new plans to deal with the economic crisis caused by loss of investor confidence after Pluto was ruled to no longer be a planet.
The Medical Tax on Q-Capsules is to raised to 20%. Also to be raised is the Medical Tax on all other types of capsules ranging from A to P. And from R to Z. Also, purchase of these capsules is to be made compulsary. It is hoped that the energy boost provided by a steady diet of these capsules will contribute towards higher productivity.
Cider-flavoured pills remain exempt, much to the relief of the Usurian Cider-Flavoured Pill Production Company.
A new 20% tax is to be levied on extremely plummy accents in all PCM plant workers.
The tax on ill-fitting, pastel-coloured clothes is to be increased to 20%.
All co-workers with names that sound amusingly (but rather arbitrarily) like a double act of comedy female impersonators are to henceforth have all their taxes raised. By 20%.
A 20% suicide tax is to be introduced for all D-Grades, to compensate the Company (praise the Company) for loss of profit (and tax revenue) resulting from the self-inflicted deaths of those who refuse to pull their weight.
The current 0.2% tax on ludicrous hats is to be scrapped. This will stimulate the ludicrous hat industry.
To help business, a new 100% tax immunity is to be introduced for people with no head hair. Scissors, razors and old age to be banned.
The suns to be privatised. At below cost price. Regulation of prices of UV-rays to be abolished.
Tough but fair. Remember citizens… we’re all in this together. Until things are going well again, whereupon fuck you. Praise the Company.
(This was originally posted after Osbourne's budget. You guessed that, didn't you?)
The Medical Tax on Q-Capsules is to raised to 20%. Also to be raised is the Medical Tax on all other types of capsules ranging from A to P. And from R to Z. Also, purchase of these capsules is to be made compulsary. It is hoped that the energy boost provided by a steady diet of these capsules will contribute towards higher productivity.
Cider-flavoured pills remain exempt, much to the relief of the Usurian Cider-Flavoured Pill Production Company.
A new 20% tax is to be levied on extremely plummy accents in all PCM plant workers.
The tax on ill-fitting, pastel-coloured clothes is to be increased to 20%.
All co-workers with names that sound amusingly (but rather arbitrarily) like a double act of comedy female impersonators are to henceforth have all their taxes raised. By 20%.
A 20% suicide tax is to be introduced for all D-Grades, to compensate the Company (praise the Company) for loss of profit (and tax revenue) resulting from the self-inflicted deaths of those who refuse to pull their weight.
The current 0.2% tax on ludicrous hats is to be scrapped. This will stimulate the ludicrous hat industry.
To help business, a new 100% tax immunity is to be introduced for people with no head hair. Scissors, razors and old age to be banned.
The suns to be privatised. At below cost price. Regulation of prices of UV-rays to be abolished.
Tough but fair. Remember citizens… we’re all in this together. Until things are going well again, whereupon fuck you. Praise the Company.
(This was originally posted after Osbourne's budget. You guessed that, didn't you?)
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'.
From Our Skaro Correspondent
(This was originally written in the aftermath of the election. I read Private Eye, you see.)
In the recent elections held by the surviving Kaled Elite (scientific and military), neither Davros nor Gharman recieved a full majority.
Gharman felt that his performance in recent debates within the Kaled bunker had increased his surport, yet this failed to translate into the “complete landslide against any further development of the Daleks” that he had been expecting. “It seems that, in these trying times… what with the Kaled Dome being destroyed and the rest of our race being exterminated and everything… people decided to stick with what they know” he said yesterday.
“We have a hung Elite,” said Davros’ trusted deputy, Security Commander Nyder, “which is precisely what we ought to do to all members of the Elite who betray Davros: hang them. Slowly. With piano wire.”
However, after several rounds of negotiations, a deal has been struck between the Davros and Gharman factions.
“We’ve had to make a few concessions,” said Gharman. “Firstly, Davros will remain as leader. And we’ll carry on trying to kill all the Thals. And that weird bloke with the scarf whose been hanging around here lately will have to be caught and executed. And, yes, development of the Daleks will continue. However, Davros has partially agreed to our key demand that the creatures should have a moral sense, a judgement of ‘right and wrong’. In a major concession, Davros has agreed to give the Dalek creatures fully half of our proposed set of moral instincts. They’re going to get ‘wrong’. But this is a place to start. From here, ‘right’ is something we can work towards. I want to stress that, while some in our faction might be uneasy about this, I feel that we’ve scored a major victory. After all, I am now Davros’ deputy leader, Kavell will become Minister of White Tunics, and Kravos – our young star – has been made Under-Minister of Heart Pumps.”
Terry Nation is 80.
In the recent elections held by the surviving Kaled Elite (scientific and military), neither Davros nor Gharman recieved a full majority.
Gharman felt that his performance in recent debates within the Kaled bunker had increased his surport, yet this failed to translate into the “complete landslide against any further development of the Daleks” that he had been expecting. “It seems that, in these trying times… what with the Kaled Dome being destroyed and the rest of our race being exterminated and everything… people decided to stick with what they know” he said yesterday.
“We have a hung Elite,” said Davros’ trusted deputy, Security Commander Nyder, “which is precisely what we ought to do to all members of the Elite who betray Davros: hang them. Slowly. With piano wire.”
However, after several rounds of negotiations, a deal has been struck between the Davros and Gharman factions.
“We’ve had to make a few concessions,” said Gharman. “Firstly, Davros will remain as leader. And we’ll carry on trying to kill all the Thals. And that weird bloke with the scarf whose been hanging around here lately will have to be caught and executed. And, yes, development of the Daleks will continue. However, Davros has partially agreed to our key demand that the creatures should have a moral sense, a judgement of ‘right and wrong’. In a major concession, Davros has agreed to give the Dalek creatures fully half of our proposed set of moral instincts. They’re going to get ‘wrong’. But this is a place to start. From here, ‘right’ is something we can work towards. I want to stress that, while some in our faction might be uneasy about this, I feel that we’ve scored a major victory. After all, I am now Davros’ deputy leader, Kavell will become Minister of White Tunics, and Kravos – our young star – has been made Under-Minister of Heart Pumps.”
Terry Nation is 80.
Workers of the Whoniverse
(This was originally written for May Day.)
Some people think Doctor Who is inherently left-wing. This is bullshit. But… like much bullshit, there’s a fibrous grain of truth in there somewhere if you don latex gloves, break the crust and delve deeply enough into the contents of the pat.
Doctor Who started just before the worldwide explosion of dissent and protest that represents the real point of what is called (inaccurately) “the 60s”. It ran through the years of the Vietnam war, the end of the post-war economic boom, the worldwide wave of protests by students and workers, France in ’68, the Prague Spring, the height of the civil rights movement, the ascendancy (and murder) of Martin Luther King Jnr., the rise of the women’s movement and feminism, the rise of the gay liberation movement, etc. It ran during interesting times. It reflected the massive changes in social attitude that were transforming Western culture – how could it not, being a product of Western culture? It reflected something amorphous and overhyped (but real) that we call “the liberal consensus”, which is easy to take for granted now but which was a drastic change in the whole nature and consciousness of Western capitalist society, brought about by the struggles of kids, students, minorities, oppressed people and workers. It was, for the most part, shaped by creative people who were interested in their world and had a tendency to be open-minded, liberal and tolerant in their outlook, i.e. people like Barry Letts. And, later, it reflected the backlash against these changes which were lead, on this little island, by Margaret “Evil Edna” Thatcher, a backlash of which a younger generation of lefty/eco/liberals like Andrew Cartmel were strongly disapproving.
Moreover, the show was originally a product of a state-funded public service broadcaster that didn’t have to compete in the marketplace in order to survive and had a mandated role to reflect the entire nation. Beyond wanting there to be someone for the kids to identify with (and Dad to lust over) there wasn’t much time spent on demographics and other such marketing preoccupations (at least not compared to today). Reith may have been a reactionary old patrician, but Reithianism in the abstract is almost a quality-not-quantity ethic with paternalistic distortions. And the cheap-and-cheerful nature of the old series gave it a strange freedom, at least some of the time. The BBC always used the show as a cash cow, but it has only become so near-crucial to BBC prestige and revenue in recent years. And there is also the philistinism of management to remember – a BBC bigwig might send an angry memo to a producer if he thinks an episode is too scary for the nation’s chidlers while missing the fact that the same episode is sub-textually critiquing Western imperialism.
Given all this, and given the variety of writers who contributed to it over the years, it would be amazing if Doctor Who hadn’t occasionally aligned itself with workers – especially during times of heightened class struggle. After all, there were times during its original production run when even sobre and pessimistic people thought that youngsters, workers and radicals might change the world a very fundamental way. As it was, the struggles of such people heavily influenced mainstream culture, if slowly and unconsciously. In a time during which being a Maoist was to be mainstream in most universities, it’s no more surprising that the (presumably non-Maoist) makers of Doctor Who should have their hero claim friendship with Mao than it is that they should have him tripping through psychedelic surrealism (as in ‘The Time Monster’) despite not themselves being LSD users. Memes are bullshit, but ideas can be viral. When counter culture is strong and insurgent, it effects the mainstream… if only because the mainstream is heavily influenced by what is commercial and therefore tries to sell counter culture back to people when it becomes popular.
Frequently, Who will point out the corruption, callousness and brutality of masters, but they tend to be masters of slaves rather than of labour. Frequently, economic relationships are not depicted at all. When workers do appear, they tend to be stick figures in the background who are either irrelevant or need the Doctor to help them. Or they are ignorant, semi-comedy oafs. The best example of this is probably ‘The Green Death’, the culmination of the Letts/Dicks tendency towards right-on, tree-hugging, soft liberal/lefty polemics. The workers are portrayed as “funny little Welshm[e]n” who can be quite nice and kind at times, and who grumble at the nasty boss, but who also sneer ignorantly at the people with the real solutions: the middle class, University-educated, scientifically-trained, semi-hippy, right-on, soya-munching kids in the cute little commune. The other representation of workers to turn up like a bad penny is the “hotheads” thing. The Peladonian miners have legitimate grievances (the show is lefty enough to admit as much) but their sensible, moderate leader is the good guy while the radical amongst them is a “hothead” who descends into homicidal madness because he suspects that his comrades are being sold out. Meanwhile, the Doctor notes approvingly how the moderate miners’ leader stands shoulder to shoulder with the Queen and the High Priest (who have been oppressing his fellows) once they are threatened from outside. Yeurch.
When not being patronised and/or pitied, workers tend to be ignored. They just get left out, even when the show is at its most bolshy. We get a brief mention of “plebeian classes” on Gallifrey but we never see them. (This blog is named for these disdained, policed, strangely absent, seemingly vandalism-prone proles of the Doctor’s home world.) The show harps on about the evil of militarism, imperialism, fascism, racism and slavery. The show has some criticisms of organised religion. It frequently lashes out at the rich and the powerful. Sometimes it even takes on capitalism itself, situating evil forces within the context of business and corporate power. The show often seems to be sympathetic to revolution. The show has many nasty oligarchies felled by rebellion. All well and good. Inspiring even. But the rebels tend to be cookie-cutter resistance fighters rather than ordinary working people driven to revolt. Once in a while you get mention of a strike… with fish people on the picket line. There is a stripping away of wider context, even in some of the series’ most powerfully political episodes. You get sub-textual attacks on fascism… but you don’t, for instance, find any hint of it as a counter-revolutionary reaction against high levels of working class struggle (fair enough really – the Trotskyist analysis of fascism isn’t the kind of thing that keeps viewers glued to the screen between Grandstand and Juke Box Jury). Even some of the most angry attacks on capitalism lack any portrayal of workers, i.e. ‘The Caves of Androzani’.
But, as I said, occasionally a story comes along in which the workers are strongly present, in which they seem to be real people, to have a chance of winning (by themselves as much as with the Doctor’s help) and to have a chance of being a positive force, of changing the world. And it even happens occasionally in our dreary present. The series is today made by people who grew up watching it and loving it. Once in a while, even a New Labour-supporting writer with an O.B.E. and a future career in Hollywood will find himself writing a script in which an ordinary working woman stands up to the soldiers who are taking the immigrants away. Maybe it’s the influence of the old show working on his soul. Who knows?
And so… here it is, the Shabogan Graffiti guide to the three best Doctor Who stories that show the people who create all the wealth of society throwing off their (mental and/or physical) chains and fighting back.
'The War Games'
Soldiers are workers too. The guys at the front, bearing the brunt, are usually not (for the most part) the sons of privilege. The cannon fodder is drawn from the ranks of the poor and propertyless. On the ground, the Iraq war was kids from American urban wastelands devastated by domestic neoliberalism vs. reluctant Shia and Kurd conscripts. ‘Twas ever thus. And the soldiers we meet in ‘The War Games’ are clearly workers (or peasants). Okay, Carstairs and Lady Jennifer are posh, but the rest of them are common as muck.
From bluff Yorkshireman Russell to the defiant black Northern soldier Harper, the kidnapped soldiers are the workers of the world. They’ve been duped and brainwashed by their cynical leaders. They’re pawns on the chessboard of the ‘Great Game’.
And the players of the game? The English General Smyth (“the Butcher”), the German von Weich, the Confederate (also von Weich – are they clones? ...well, the Generals are all the same!) who sneeringly calls Harper “boy”… The commanders on all sides are actually allies in a conspiratorial abuse of the workers who are fooled and forced into fighting each other for no reason but to further imperialist ambitions. The real war is the war waged by the rulers against the people.
But the people see through the conditioning (or some of them do – Lenin would’ve probably called them a vanguard) and form the Resistance. Black and white, all nationalities… even Arturo Villa joins his bandits to the cause. Scared kid Private Moor saves the day by fragging the officer. Jamie and the Redcoat with whom he’s imprisoned join forces despite their natural mistrust and escape together. In the end, the War Games are stopped by this international union of soldiers in revolt.
And when was this made and shown? 1969. The year that the worldwide anti-Vietnam protests reached a crescendo.
'The Mutants'
Two words: Stubbs and Cotton. They’re a cut above yer usual sci-fi guards. Why? Because they behave like real people. Well, they behave a bit like real people (this is still Doctor Who after all). They call their boss “his nibs” when he’s not about. They grumble when the alarm goes off because they’ve got to cut short their tea break. They’re not idealised. Stubbs is prepared (though obviously not eager) to kill “Mutts” before he gets savvy to what’s really going on in the system he serves. For ages they’ve carried on standing their posts, despite casually saying that the Solonians should’ve been given their independence years ago when anybody bothers to ask them.
These are clearly meant to be normal working stiffs. Stubbs has a regional accent (a rarer and therefore more pointed detail back then) and Cotton is a black man with a Caribbean accent (again, a rare and pointed detail). The choice of a Caribbean actor (albeit a very bad one) to play Cotton is indicative (I don’t know if it’s specified in the script that Cotton should be a black man but it hardly matters). The Caribbean was a nexus point of empire – the natives were all but annihilated by Westerners and the islands were subsequently used as a crucial staging post of the slave trade. (Also, in the context of black slavery, the word “cotton” is itself redolent of many pertinent associations.) And it had to be a conscious anti-racist statement, in the early-70s context of racial strife and a resurgent National Front. Stubbs and Cotton are best mates, despite their ethnic difference. The sci-fi context makes them both “Overlords”, i.e. both defined by their common humanity… but they go on to redefine themselves as being against some of their fellow humans, i.e. the Marshal and what he represents. This is the key thing about them: in the course of a struggle against the forces of reaction, they undergo a change. They see and hear things that bring about their political awakening. They shrug off “false consciousness” as they fight alongside Ky and the other Solonians. Just as white and black workers can join forces, so can they join forces with colonial people that their own nation has subjugated.
Everybody knows that ‘The Mutants’ has things to say about apartheid, but mostly we nowadays think of apartheid in connection with the old South Africa. But Rhodesia was an apartheid state too. It had only been a self-declared independent republic since 1965 and, in 1972 was still run by the racist white-minority government of Ian Smith. It would not be until 1979 that pressure from nationalist resistance fighters and revolutionary guerrillas would force Smith to come to terms and hold proper elections, in effect granting “majority rule”. The Marshal is very reminiscent of Smith. He refuses to go along with the official policy of peaceful relinquishment devised by a crumbling system. He dreams of doing what Smith did, declaring independence from the Empire while retaining the minority rule of the “Overlords”.
In 1972, people could still see the turmoil in Britain’s colonies (or former colonies) on the TV news. A generation had lived through a process of imperial divestment, during which the British Empire dismantled itself because the Second World War had left Britain economically bankrupt. The Earth Empire in ‘The Mutants’ is clearly the British Empire (rather than the French or Portugese) because it is taking itself apart. Britain had little choice but to peacefully grant independence to her former colonies once they achieved non-communist “stability” because empire had become too expensive. France, by contrast, squandered lives and treasure trying to hold onto her possessions, only to be defeated at length… but in France in ’68, many students and workers and ordinary people had expressed their solidarity with those brutalised by their own country’s empire, which had once included what the French called Indochina… which had since become the target of another empire, and the focus of more protest.
'The Sun Makers'
Some idiot once wrote that, in this story, the rebels are worse than the baddies. I dunno what story he was watching, but it ain’t the one I know as ‘The Sun Makers’. The Others might be a motley and even unsavoury lot but they’re hardly as bad as the planet-enslaving Collector and his pet Gatherer. Mandrel makes nasty threats that he doesn’t try very hard to make good on. The Doctor, ever a keen judge of character, doesn’t seen worried by Mandrel even when he’s waving a red hot poker in his face. Leela has some choice words for them that are very pertinent. She calls them cowards and that, essentially, is the trouble with them. Mind you, you can’t blame them for running away from life in Megropolis 1.
Some other idiots have occasionally argued that ‘The Sun Makers’ is a right-wing allegory because it depicts a tyrannical state and rails against taxes. Well, that’s fine if you’re dumb enough to buy the bullshit lie that conservative politics really is all about defending personal liberty from big government and punitive taxation. In fact, ‘The Sun Makers’ couldn’t be clearer about its political sympathies (even if you stick your fingers in your ears during the playful misquoting of Marx). The tyrannical state in this story is the Company. They are effectively one, or the Company exercises such control that they might as well be. This isn’t a big state stifling the liberty of free enterprise and free consumers. This is a big state as a vehicle for corporate domination. The Company is a private concern, engaged in “commercial imperialism”. The Company has, essentially, carried out a hostile takeover of the government. This is one big state that’s been privatised.
The icons of modern conservatism (i.e. Reagan, Thatcher, Bush, Bush II) are usually, for all their populist anti-government rhetoric, ultra-statists. They might reduce bureaucracy here and there (usually by cutting public services, etc.) and deregulate business, but they always strengthen the state’s machinery of enforcement, regulation, control and surveillance of its citizens, i.e. the poor schmoes who do all the work get spied on and arrested more. Meanwhile, we have de facto economic planning in the hands of radically undemocratic and monolithic organisations. We just call them corporations, but they act like states within states. And they get more and more powerful all the time.
Was the Iraq war a state affair? Well, the costs were pretty much covered by the state (i.e. by the American taxpayer) but the opportunities and profits were tendered out to the companies that swarmed in like vultures. Neoliberalism wants to turn the state into a heavily armed enforcement service that monitors and controls and taxes the population while acting as a munificent pimp for corporations, farming out every other task of the state to them, garnished with massive subsidies (i.e. corporate welfare).
The state gathers and the Company collects.
This is pretty much what Bob Holmes wrote about in ‘The Sun Makers’. His income tax bill seems to have got him thinking about the future of neoliberalism. Strange but true. Maybe he was looking at Chile and General Pinochet’s great experiment in merciless Chicago school ultra-monetarism, which he inflicted on his people via brutal repression. How else did he manage to write a Doctor Who story in 1977 that can be read as a companion text to The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein?
But the key thing for the purposes of this little essay is the way the workers are portrayed as changing in the course of the struggle. The Others are clearly former workers who’ve opted out. Mandrel’s grade status and former workplace even become plot points. Cordo is the lowest of the low; a timid, despairing and bankrupt drudge, the son of a lifelong corridor sweeper. But they end up uniting across the grade barriers, across their former differences. The Others go from cowardly hiding and petty criminality to leading a general strike. Cordo goes from contemplating suicide to jubilantly leading a revolution. Bisham is an executive grade whose moment of curiosity lands him in detention; initially, he lies back and accepts his doom.. but he ends up uniting with B and D Grades to topple the government. The workers with hand and brain.
Okay, they need the Doctor to get them started, but in this story the Doctor is almost like a personification of Information itself. He tells them things. He makes them curious. He makes them angry. He poses the right questions. He turns off the gas that makes them anxious and passive (surely this is thematically linked to his taking over the TV station and the news service?) and thus gets the ball rolling. It isn't long before he wanders off with Leela and leaves the united workers to pursue the revolution on their own.
The Doctor’s role as catalyst notwithstanding, this is a full scale workers’ revolution. Moreover, it’s explicitly linked to industrial action in the scene where Goudry and Veet incite the strike. It’s idealised, sure, but the portrayal is not without sceptical irony or some healthy moral ambiguity. Mandrel’s former colleagues Synge and Hackett obviously join the revolution from fear rather than immediate enthusiasm (though they seem to end up happy enough to help), and Marn simply switches sides when she sees which way the wind is blowing.
And then we have the matter of the Gatherer and his little tumble... Well, you can wring your hands about him if you like. I have to do my own tax return so, frankly, I’m not feeling merciful.
Some people think Doctor Who is inherently left-wing. This is bullshit. But… like much bullshit, there’s a fibrous grain of truth in there somewhere if you don latex gloves, break the crust and delve deeply enough into the contents of the pat.
Doctor Who started just before the worldwide explosion of dissent and protest that represents the real point of what is called (inaccurately) “the 60s”. It ran through the years of the Vietnam war, the end of the post-war economic boom, the worldwide wave of protests by students and workers, France in ’68, the Prague Spring, the height of the civil rights movement, the ascendancy (and murder) of Martin Luther King Jnr., the rise of the women’s movement and feminism, the rise of the gay liberation movement, etc. It ran during interesting times. It reflected the massive changes in social attitude that were transforming Western culture – how could it not, being a product of Western culture? It reflected something amorphous and overhyped (but real) that we call “the liberal consensus”, which is easy to take for granted now but which was a drastic change in the whole nature and consciousness of Western capitalist society, brought about by the struggles of kids, students, minorities, oppressed people and workers. It was, for the most part, shaped by creative people who were interested in their world and had a tendency to be open-minded, liberal and tolerant in their outlook, i.e. people like Barry Letts. And, later, it reflected the backlash against these changes which were lead, on this little island, by Margaret “Evil Edna” Thatcher, a backlash of which a younger generation of lefty/eco/liberals like Andrew Cartmel were strongly disapproving.
Moreover, the show was originally a product of a state-funded public service broadcaster that didn’t have to compete in the marketplace in order to survive and had a mandated role to reflect the entire nation. Beyond wanting there to be someone for the kids to identify with (and Dad to lust over) there wasn’t much time spent on demographics and other such marketing preoccupations (at least not compared to today). Reith may have been a reactionary old patrician, but Reithianism in the abstract is almost a quality-not-quantity ethic with paternalistic distortions. And the cheap-and-cheerful nature of the old series gave it a strange freedom, at least some of the time. The BBC always used the show as a cash cow, but it has only become so near-crucial to BBC prestige and revenue in recent years. And there is also the philistinism of management to remember – a BBC bigwig might send an angry memo to a producer if he thinks an episode is too scary for the nation’s chidlers while missing the fact that the same episode is sub-textually critiquing Western imperialism.
Given all this, and given the variety of writers who contributed to it over the years, it would be amazing if Doctor Who hadn’t occasionally aligned itself with workers – especially during times of heightened class struggle. After all, there were times during its original production run when even sobre and pessimistic people thought that youngsters, workers and radicals might change the world a very fundamental way. As it was, the struggles of such people heavily influenced mainstream culture, if slowly and unconsciously. In a time during which being a Maoist was to be mainstream in most universities, it’s no more surprising that the (presumably non-Maoist) makers of Doctor Who should have their hero claim friendship with Mao than it is that they should have him tripping through psychedelic surrealism (as in ‘The Time Monster’) despite not themselves being LSD users. Memes are bullshit, but ideas can be viral. When counter culture is strong and insurgent, it effects the mainstream… if only because the mainstream is heavily influenced by what is commercial and therefore tries to sell counter culture back to people when it becomes popular.
Frequently, Who will point out the corruption, callousness and brutality of masters, but they tend to be masters of slaves rather than of labour. Frequently, economic relationships are not depicted at all. When workers do appear, they tend to be stick figures in the background who are either irrelevant or need the Doctor to help them. Or they are ignorant, semi-comedy oafs. The best example of this is probably ‘The Green Death’, the culmination of the Letts/Dicks tendency towards right-on, tree-hugging, soft liberal/lefty polemics. The workers are portrayed as “funny little Welshm[e]n” who can be quite nice and kind at times, and who grumble at the nasty boss, but who also sneer ignorantly at the people with the real solutions: the middle class, University-educated, scientifically-trained, semi-hippy, right-on, soya-munching kids in the cute little commune. The other representation of workers to turn up like a bad penny is the “hotheads” thing. The Peladonian miners have legitimate grievances (the show is lefty enough to admit as much) but their sensible, moderate leader is the good guy while the radical amongst them is a “hothead” who descends into homicidal madness because he suspects that his comrades are being sold out. Meanwhile, the Doctor notes approvingly how the moderate miners’ leader stands shoulder to shoulder with the Queen and the High Priest (who have been oppressing his fellows) once they are threatened from outside. Yeurch.
When not being patronised and/or pitied, workers tend to be ignored. They just get left out, even when the show is at its most bolshy. We get a brief mention of “plebeian classes” on Gallifrey but we never see them. (This blog is named for these disdained, policed, strangely absent, seemingly vandalism-prone proles of the Doctor’s home world.) The show harps on about the evil of militarism, imperialism, fascism, racism and slavery. The show has some criticisms of organised religion. It frequently lashes out at the rich and the powerful. Sometimes it even takes on capitalism itself, situating evil forces within the context of business and corporate power. The show often seems to be sympathetic to revolution. The show has many nasty oligarchies felled by rebellion. All well and good. Inspiring even. But the rebels tend to be cookie-cutter resistance fighters rather than ordinary working people driven to revolt. Once in a while you get mention of a strike… with fish people on the picket line. There is a stripping away of wider context, even in some of the series’ most powerfully political episodes. You get sub-textual attacks on fascism… but you don’t, for instance, find any hint of it as a counter-revolutionary reaction against high levels of working class struggle (fair enough really – the Trotskyist analysis of fascism isn’t the kind of thing that keeps viewers glued to the screen between Grandstand and Juke Box Jury). Even some of the most angry attacks on capitalism lack any portrayal of workers, i.e. ‘The Caves of Androzani’.
But, as I said, occasionally a story comes along in which the workers are strongly present, in which they seem to be real people, to have a chance of winning (by themselves as much as with the Doctor’s help) and to have a chance of being a positive force, of changing the world. And it even happens occasionally in our dreary present. The series is today made by people who grew up watching it and loving it. Once in a while, even a New Labour-supporting writer with an O.B.E. and a future career in Hollywood will find himself writing a script in which an ordinary working woman stands up to the soldiers who are taking the immigrants away. Maybe it’s the influence of the old show working on his soul. Who knows?
And so… here it is, the Shabogan Graffiti guide to the three best Doctor Who stories that show the people who create all the wealth of society throwing off their (mental and/or physical) chains and fighting back.
'The War Games'
Soldiers are workers too. The guys at the front, bearing the brunt, are usually not (for the most part) the sons of privilege. The cannon fodder is drawn from the ranks of the poor and propertyless. On the ground, the Iraq war was kids from American urban wastelands devastated by domestic neoliberalism vs. reluctant Shia and Kurd conscripts. ‘Twas ever thus. And the soldiers we meet in ‘The War Games’ are clearly workers (or peasants). Okay, Carstairs and Lady Jennifer are posh, but the rest of them are common as muck.
From bluff Yorkshireman Russell to the defiant black Northern soldier Harper, the kidnapped soldiers are the workers of the world. They’ve been duped and brainwashed by their cynical leaders. They’re pawns on the chessboard of the ‘Great Game’.
And the players of the game? The English General Smyth (“the Butcher”), the German von Weich, the Confederate (also von Weich – are they clones? ...well, the Generals are all the same!) who sneeringly calls Harper “boy”… The commanders on all sides are actually allies in a conspiratorial abuse of the workers who are fooled and forced into fighting each other for no reason but to further imperialist ambitions. The real war is the war waged by the rulers against the people.
But the people see through the conditioning (or some of them do – Lenin would’ve probably called them a vanguard) and form the Resistance. Black and white, all nationalities… even Arturo Villa joins his bandits to the cause. Scared kid Private Moor saves the day by fragging the officer. Jamie and the Redcoat with whom he’s imprisoned join forces despite their natural mistrust and escape together. In the end, the War Games are stopped by this international union of soldiers in revolt.
And when was this made and shown? 1969. The year that the worldwide anti-Vietnam protests reached a crescendo.
'The Mutants'
Two words: Stubbs and Cotton. They’re a cut above yer usual sci-fi guards. Why? Because they behave like real people. Well, they behave a bit like real people (this is still Doctor Who after all). They call their boss “his nibs” when he’s not about. They grumble when the alarm goes off because they’ve got to cut short their tea break. They’re not idealised. Stubbs is prepared (though obviously not eager) to kill “Mutts” before he gets savvy to what’s really going on in the system he serves. For ages they’ve carried on standing their posts, despite casually saying that the Solonians should’ve been given their independence years ago when anybody bothers to ask them.
These are clearly meant to be normal working stiffs. Stubbs has a regional accent (a rarer and therefore more pointed detail back then) and Cotton is a black man with a Caribbean accent (again, a rare and pointed detail). The choice of a Caribbean actor (albeit a very bad one) to play Cotton is indicative (I don’t know if it’s specified in the script that Cotton should be a black man but it hardly matters). The Caribbean was a nexus point of empire – the natives were all but annihilated by Westerners and the islands were subsequently used as a crucial staging post of the slave trade. (Also, in the context of black slavery, the word “cotton” is itself redolent of many pertinent associations.) And it had to be a conscious anti-racist statement, in the early-70s context of racial strife and a resurgent National Front. Stubbs and Cotton are best mates, despite their ethnic difference. The sci-fi context makes them both “Overlords”, i.e. both defined by their common humanity… but they go on to redefine themselves as being against some of their fellow humans, i.e. the Marshal and what he represents. This is the key thing about them: in the course of a struggle against the forces of reaction, they undergo a change. They see and hear things that bring about their political awakening. They shrug off “false consciousness” as they fight alongside Ky and the other Solonians. Just as white and black workers can join forces, so can they join forces with colonial people that their own nation has subjugated.
Everybody knows that ‘The Mutants’ has things to say about apartheid, but mostly we nowadays think of apartheid in connection with the old South Africa. But Rhodesia was an apartheid state too. It had only been a self-declared independent republic since 1965 and, in 1972 was still run by the racist white-minority government of Ian Smith. It would not be until 1979 that pressure from nationalist resistance fighters and revolutionary guerrillas would force Smith to come to terms and hold proper elections, in effect granting “majority rule”. The Marshal is very reminiscent of Smith. He refuses to go along with the official policy of peaceful relinquishment devised by a crumbling system. He dreams of doing what Smith did, declaring independence from the Empire while retaining the minority rule of the “Overlords”.
In 1972, people could still see the turmoil in Britain’s colonies (or former colonies) on the TV news. A generation had lived through a process of imperial divestment, during which the British Empire dismantled itself because the Second World War had left Britain economically bankrupt. The Earth Empire in ‘The Mutants’ is clearly the British Empire (rather than the French or Portugese) because it is taking itself apart. Britain had little choice but to peacefully grant independence to her former colonies once they achieved non-communist “stability” because empire had become too expensive. France, by contrast, squandered lives and treasure trying to hold onto her possessions, only to be defeated at length… but in France in ’68, many students and workers and ordinary people had expressed their solidarity with those brutalised by their own country’s empire, which had once included what the French called Indochina… which had since become the target of another empire, and the focus of more protest.
'The Sun Makers'
Some idiot once wrote that, in this story, the rebels are worse than the baddies. I dunno what story he was watching, but it ain’t the one I know as ‘The Sun Makers’. The Others might be a motley and even unsavoury lot but they’re hardly as bad as the planet-enslaving Collector and his pet Gatherer. Mandrel makes nasty threats that he doesn’t try very hard to make good on. The Doctor, ever a keen judge of character, doesn’t seen worried by Mandrel even when he’s waving a red hot poker in his face. Leela has some choice words for them that are very pertinent. She calls them cowards and that, essentially, is the trouble with them. Mind you, you can’t blame them for running away from life in Megropolis 1.
Some other idiots have occasionally argued that ‘The Sun Makers’ is a right-wing allegory because it depicts a tyrannical state and rails against taxes. Well, that’s fine if you’re dumb enough to buy the bullshit lie that conservative politics really is all about defending personal liberty from big government and punitive taxation. In fact, ‘The Sun Makers’ couldn’t be clearer about its political sympathies (even if you stick your fingers in your ears during the playful misquoting of Marx). The tyrannical state in this story is the Company. They are effectively one, or the Company exercises such control that they might as well be. This isn’t a big state stifling the liberty of free enterprise and free consumers. This is a big state as a vehicle for corporate domination. The Company is a private concern, engaged in “commercial imperialism”. The Company has, essentially, carried out a hostile takeover of the government. This is one big state that’s been privatised.
The icons of modern conservatism (i.e. Reagan, Thatcher, Bush, Bush II) are usually, for all their populist anti-government rhetoric, ultra-statists. They might reduce bureaucracy here and there (usually by cutting public services, etc.) and deregulate business, but they always strengthen the state’s machinery of enforcement, regulation, control and surveillance of its citizens, i.e. the poor schmoes who do all the work get spied on and arrested more. Meanwhile, we have de facto economic planning in the hands of radically undemocratic and monolithic organisations. We just call them corporations, but they act like states within states. And they get more and more powerful all the time.
Was the Iraq war a state affair? Well, the costs were pretty much covered by the state (i.e. by the American taxpayer) but the opportunities and profits were tendered out to the companies that swarmed in like vultures. Neoliberalism wants to turn the state into a heavily armed enforcement service that monitors and controls and taxes the population while acting as a munificent pimp for corporations, farming out every other task of the state to them, garnished with massive subsidies (i.e. corporate welfare).
The state gathers and the Company collects.
This is pretty much what Bob Holmes wrote about in ‘The Sun Makers’. His income tax bill seems to have got him thinking about the future of neoliberalism. Strange but true. Maybe he was looking at Chile and General Pinochet’s great experiment in merciless Chicago school ultra-monetarism, which he inflicted on his people via brutal repression. How else did he manage to write a Doctor Who story in 1977 that can be read as a companion text to The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein?
But the key thing for the purposes of this little essay is the way the workers are portrayed as changing in the course of the struggle. The Others are clearly former workers who’ve opted out. Mandrel’s grade status and former workplace even become plot points. Cordo is the lowest of the low; a timid, despairing and bankrupt drudge, the son of a lifelong corridor sweeper. But they end up uniting across the grade barriers, across their former differences. The Others go from cowardly hiding and petty criminality to leading a general strike. Cordo goes from contemplating suicide to jubilantly leading a revolution. Bisham is an executive grade whose moment of curiosity lands him in detention; initially, he lies back and accepts his doom.. but he ends up uniting with B and D Grades to topple the government. The workers with hand and brain.
Okay, they need the Doctor to get them started, but in this story the Doctor is almost like a personification of Information itself. He tells them things. He makes them curious. He makes them angry. He poses the right questions. He turns off the gas that makes them anxious and passive (surely this is thematically linked to his taking over the TV station and the news service?) and thus gets the ball rolling. It isn't long before he wanders off with Leela and leaves the united workers to pursue the revolution on their own.
The Doctor’s role as catalyst notwithstanding, this is a full scale workers’ revolution. Moreover, it’s explicitly linked to industrial action in the scene where Goudry and Veet incite the strike. It’s idealised, sure, but the portrayal is not without sceptical irony or some healthy moral ambiguity. Mandrel’s former colleagues Synge and Hackett obviously join the revolution from fear rather than immediate enthusiasm (though they seem to end up happy enough to help), and Marn simply switches sides when she sees which way the wind is blowing.
And then we have the matter of the Gatherer and his little tumble... Well, you can wring your hands about him if you like. I have to do my own tax return so, frankly, I’m not feeling merciful.
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