uneven and combined development

May 22, 2011

Rolling the Boulder

Jack Graham 80s, binro, Black Guardian, class, day of the moon, Enlightenment, fiona cumming, history, immortality, JN-T Day, John Nathan-Turner, Mawdryn Undead, nixon, peter grimwade, sam harris, steve gallagher, Terminus, the x files, uneven and combined development 4

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

For John Nathan-Turner.

‘Mawdryn Undead’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I make no apologies; I love ‘Terminus’.

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

December 8, 2010

Binro Was Right

Jack Graham binro, dawkins, historical materialism, hitchens, progress, religion, ribos operation, robert holmes, robin hood, sam harris, science, shakespeare, superstition, uneven and combined development 3

This is a rejigged new version of something originally posted at the old site. I’ve snipped a few irrelevancies and amplified some conclusions. Oh, and it’s dedicated to Iain Cuthbertson and Timothy Bateson, both of whom died last year.

‘The Ribos Operation’ seems, at first glance, to present the cosmic conflict between Good and Evil, spiralling downwards from a meeting with a quasi-God in a surreal conceptual landscape, downwards into a story about the vast conquest plans of an interplanetary warlord, further downwards into a heist caper about two semi-comic con-men, and then further downwards into a short meeting between and old man and a young man in a little flea-ridden hovel… yet it’s in the hovel that we find the real message of the story. But is Binro right?

Well, he’s right about the stars being suns circled by inhabited worlds (just like his somewhat-more mystical and flamboyant progenitor Giordano Bruno, who was burnt at the stake by the Church for, effectively, founding science-fiction… fair enough, some would say). But, in the wider sense, isn’t the story’s most moving and thematically vital scene compromised by what goes on around it? After all, it turns out that the universe is caught in the battle between light and dark “gods”, and shaking bones about and chanting is a valid path to knowledge!

My feeling is that, ultimately, this story’s real gist is a little more complex and contingent than it seems. I’m not convinced that it’s really about oppositions between good and bad, or even science and superstition… but we’re going to have to work around this a bit.

For a story which sets up and begins a quest narrative about the conflict between two godlike entities called the White Guardian and the Black Guardian, ‘The Ribos Operation’ is surprisingly ambiguous in its treatment of morality. The White Guardian here is certainly no lovable Mr Nice Guy. On the contrary, he’s a sinister old bourgeois bully, twisting the Doctor’s arm into helping him for reasons that are (by anything he actually says) self-serving. If he’s God (and the opening scene cheekily teases us into momentarily thinking he might be) then he’s no kindly deity, but rather the Old Testament Yahweh in one of his quiet and scary moods.

(It’s interesting to note that, on the few occasions when the classic series had the Doctor meeting gods, they were usually played by plummy thesps and did an awful lot of sitting around in chairs being coldly inscrutable. Really, the “gods” in the classic series really do an astonishing amount of sitting, i.e. Sutekh, the Gods of Ragnarok, etc. By contrast, the only “god” to have appeared in the new series takes the form of a big, snarling Heavy Metal album cover. Now, the Beast may represent fine CGI, but, if you ask me, it possesses considerably less dramatic power than Cyril Luckham sipping creme de menthe.)

But, anyway… like the old geezer in the chair, Garron and Unstoffe are also hard to pin down morally.…