Anti-Plastic (Praxeus)

It’s February 2nd, 2020. Peter Capaldi’s second cousin is at number one with “Before You Go.” The Weeknd, Dua Lipa, and Billy Eilish also chart. I, meanwhile, am on a plane back to New York after a whirlwind of a week in which Penn and I galavanted about London. I can’t even remember everything we did—the Tate Modern, the British Museum, Hampton Court, St. Paul’s. Tourist shit. I remember the slow background drip of this news story coming out of China—what looks like a redux of SARS or bird flu. It doesn’t seem very interesting. Brexit happens while we’re there, and like the coronavirus has no tangible impact on the day to day experience of life or place. Our final day there is the canonical best day of my life—the morning is spent at the Tate Britain looking at Blake paintings—we’d briefly seen the exhibition the night before, but only had about an hour in the gallery, so went back and spent the three hours it deserved, successfully blagging our way in for free despite the fact that the exhibit is sold out that day. Then we spend the afternoon and evening with Kieron Gillen, culminating in dinner at a fancy Indian place.

That was also my wife’s birthday. I, obviously, missed it, having planned the trip to coincide with an event at the Tate that was hosted by John Higgs, who was the first critic to cite TARDIS Eruditorum in a book. My wife—also a big fan of Kieron’s, and for that matter of Brian Catling, who was on the panel at the Tate—stayed home, visited her parents, and got the flu. That was her choice—I invited her, and she said she didn’t want to spend the money. But it still happened; I ditched my wife on her birthday to go have the canonical best day of my life with my other partner. I mention this precisely because it makes me look unsympathetic. I‘m not above reproach. Don’t ever think this is the sort of story where I’m above reproach.

Anyway, I finally watch this back in Connecticut. Possibly the next day. I don’t really remember. Like a lot of Doctor Who in this era, it doesn’t make much of an impression on me one way or the other. I’ll tell you who it apparently does make an impression on, though—this fellow named “Tibère” who wrote a big long blog post praising it. Tibère was a pen name for a guy who existed in what might dispassionately be called leftist Doctor Who fandom and more egotistically called the greater orbit of my work. They ran a site called Downtime where a ton of my more engaged readers were routinely doing some phenomenal stuff, and published a book on the Whittaker era with longtime friend of the blog James Wylder’s Arcbeatle Press. To the extent that I knew them they seemed a decent enough sort, but I couldn’t honestly say they’d made more of an impression on me than “the gay French one who was doing a podcast with my daughter,” at least until it emerged that they’d been emotionally abusing and sexually harassing a ton of people, my daughter included. At which point they nuked their blog and ceased having any public presence I’m aware of. But on top of all the “being a horrible person” they were up to, they’d also apparently been constantly talking shit about me and my work in a semi-private Discord. So I figured even though they were too chickenshit to do what an actually savvy and ambitious critic would do and publicly attack me to try to knock me off my perch within leftist Doctor Who fandom, I’d still offer my thoughts on what was, at the time, one of the most prominent critical voices in favor of the Chibnall era.

(You might validly object that this petty grudge settling diminishes me. To which I’d respond that, no, it’s writing about the Chibnall era that diminishes me; this just fills out the word count. Besides, I already told you what kind of story this is.)

I won’t fault Tibère for the obvious debt to my style implicit in a structurally dense analysis that moves through three separate voices set off by differing typefaces. There’s no hypocrisy in being influenced by someone you also have major objections to. That’s the point of influence; students exist to rebel against teachers. But I will say that if, as they groused on Discord a few weeks after this aired, I’ve “utterly fucking poisoned the entirety of left-wing Doctor Who discourse” then I have to think the way I’ve done it as by accidentally inspiring a wave of incoherent logorrhea with overly complicated typesetting. To paraphrase Alan Moore, it was only a bloody cut-up method post. It wasn’t a jail sentence.

Anyway, Tibère’s assertion is that this story “creates a rich and compelling dramaturgy from the idea of disconnected events being tied together in a larger plot, a larger purpose.” Which is presumably why there’s all these games with italics—to try to similarly weave together disparate threads into a singular analysis. Anyway, they start by connecting Praxeus to Orphan 55, which, fair enough, two environmentally themed stories in one season is certainly a thing. They seem to think both stories are about climate change, which is puzzlingly reductive, but they do this kind of Pyramidal Hierarchy that can have no apex thing where we’re simultaneously thinking about climate change as a massive existential terror (Orphan 55) and as something existing on an intimate and personal scale (Praxeus).

From here they fragment into the first of their weird italic fugues. “do you know what loneliness is?” they ask, and then go on to describe… I mean, honestly they just kind of describe being away at school and having a disrupted sleep schedule due to chatting with your online friends in different time zones. “you feel like you’re the only living boy in new york” wait sorry that’s Paul Simon, “you feel like you’re the only living human being in the entire world” there we go that’s the quote. They talk about how their friends are just “ghosts. lovely, beautiful ghosts, offering you comfort, and support, and promises. the screen is the medium, the interface, and they exist only in its reflection, and maybe the wifi will cut out and when it comes back they’ll all be gone, erased by the system’s spasms,” and it’s a little hard not to ask whether that’s why it was so easy to abuse them all. But mostly it’s a little hard not to just yawn.

I’m sorry. I’m not trying to be mean here. It’s just hard, amidst the bathetic discussions of how “your room is like a ship, waiting for a wreck, and in front of you are oceans of darkness, and there is nothing else, nothing but four walls and a screen and a bed you dread to use,” to not notice the fact that this is just a college kid with ordinary depression. It’s not that it isn’t undoubtedly quite agonizing. I don’t imagine anyone that hurt as many people in the ways Tibére did isn’t in quite a lot of pain. It’s just that there’s nothing terribly interesting about that pain. “you’re awake at three in the morning, staring out of your room’s window the city laying at your feet—so many lights, stretching into the horizon, buildings and billboards, ambulances cutting the silence and blinking colours” and you’re oh so lonely and for fuck’s sake this is literally just the monologue at the end of Deep Breath. Get the fuck out of your room and experience the fucking city. Make some friends that aren’t other online Doctor Who fans. Touch, as the kids say, grass. It might make you a better person; clearly this wasn’t doing the trick.

After this, they go back to media analysis from there with a big long thing about Praxeus’s use of disaster movie tropes. But what’s interesting, to my eye, is their example—the film Independence Day, and specifically an analysis of the film that seems to be cribbed from a piece of YouTube film criticism. Now, I’m not going to argue that Independence Day isn’t a disaster movie under the hood—that’s quite clever, actually. But, speaking here as a critic, if I were to go looking for an example of a disaster movie to base my reading of disaster movie tropes on I would go do the work of watching an actual established classic of the genre—something like The Towering Inferno or The Poseidon Adventure. I wouldn’t just go off of whatever the YouTube video I got the idea from says—I’d go engage with primary sources because that’s my fucking job. Tibére doesn’t do that. They just cite this YouTube video and offer a smattering of namedrops of academic articles they don’t actually engage with on a level that would require having read them. I’d be unsurprised if they’re just the books mentioned in the YouTube video, but it doesn’t really matter—the point is that there’s no actual engagement with the genre that Praxeus is supposedly interacting with, or with any texts that exist outside the bubble of online nerd culture.

Which is what it is—a rookie critical mistake—one I made back in private during grad school, so already knew better than to make by the time I was writing for the general public. But it’s significant, I think, when evaluating the larger critical lapses that happen here. When, for instance, Tibére praises the “very large, pan-national cast,” a claim that’s false both empirically (eight guest stars is comparable to Fugitive of the Judoon and actually quite a bit smaller than Can You Hear Me?) and in terms of its ethical weight. In fact the cast is almost exclusively European—the guys who play the dying submarine guy and the lab assistant that dies are both South African, and the woman who plays Jamila, i.e. the other one who gets killed, is Brazilian. (Ironically Tibére opts to highlight Joana Borja, the other Girl Roaming, who is Portuguese, and not this fact, which would have supported their point far better.)  So no, it’s exactly as international as you’d expect for a British production that filmed a few scenes in South Africa, and with a striking imbalance on who gets killed to boot. More baffling is when they praise the wide variety of settings before noting that “yes, the filming team didn’t actually go to Hong Kong, but that changes very little,” a genuinely amazing claim about a series of scenes that feature exactly zero east Asian actors and communicate “we’re in Hong Kong” exclusively through such nuanced touches as an alley full of paper lanterns and a warehouse for storing chintzy Chinese dragon props. Which actually changes quite a lot in terms of presenting any sort of global perspective.

They go on in much the same vein as they lay out their argument (such as it is), with the italic sections breaking in with angst about how there used to be snow in winter and how they “feel like an anomaly, a glitch in the machine,” and eventually a boldface section that offers a potted history of queerness in Doctor Who. Some parts are clever—the observation that the guest cast consists of a traveller, a policeman, a scientist, and an astronaut, and are thus all fragments of the Doctor is reasonably sharp even if I’d quibble about whether two out of the four accurately describe the Doctor. Most of them are just long and undercooked tangents about the existential angst of climate change or Biblical symbolism. There’s one bit about how Praxeus and HIV are both viruses that’s kinda weirdly funny in the context of February 2020, but that’s not their fault. Eventually it builds to a conclusion about how “what really puts Praxeus over the edge is the way it shows queer love as this incredibly powerful force, this motor of action and redemption, but without ever showing it as some twee, uncomplicated spray of rainbow.”

And it’s here that I feel like the strangely narrow perspective on offer here switches from being a mild embarrassment to a significant problem. Because, sure, if you’re an emotionally stunted shut-in whose worldview doesn’t meaningfully extend beyond Doctor Who I can see how this might come across as a rich and significant piece of representation. Despite a long history of queer fandom, representation has never been a high point of the series; even the first Davies era largely disappoints on that front. But Jesus Christ this is thin gruel. Neither character is given an ounce more depth than “cop who doesn’t do emotions” and “dying guy.” The only thing that comes close to making this work is, as usual, Bradley Walsh, who manages to make “I don’t think he’s the one you’re punishing” work almost as well as “your room is like a ship, waiting for a wreck.” But even if you are—through a process I freely admit I do not understand—emotionally compelled by this dynamic… for fuck’s sake, where does queer love do jack shit in this episode? Like, sure, yes, one of the two gay guys goes up in the rocket ship and heroically sacrifices himself to save the day only ha ha shocking twist the Doctor saves him. But other than the literal, basic fact of the representation, what’s there? It’s not even love that saves the day—it’s fiddling some switches on a spaceship. Frankly, it’s even less faggy than a Gareth Roberts episode.

And look, at the end of the day it’s a terrible mistake to try to find moral value in aesthetic preferences. Liking the Chibnall era doesn’t make you a bad person any more than liking Clara makes you a good one. Nevertheless, I can’t help but see the structural similarity between self-confessedly not seeing any of your supposed friends as real people to the point of abusing them and seeing this facile, empty nothing of representation—a word that increasingly rings with the same bleak peal as “content”—as deeply meaningful. And even if praising it isn’t actually the sign of a deeply sick soul that I wish it were, it’s still a massive disservice to actual queer art.

Because at the end of the day, that’s the thing about letting Doctor Who be your entire worldview: it convinces you that you have to settle for this shit. And you don’t. There’s actually queer art out there. Even within science fiction in this exact cultural moment, the 2020 Hugo ballot had A Memory Called Empire, City in the Middle of the Night, and Gideon the Ninth on it—all of them books that actually felt queer instead of feeling like a slightly embarrassing sop after a year spent burying gays across the spectrum. But frankly, if you want to commit to queer art in any remotely meaningful sense you’re going to actually have to voyage out of the tight little garden of genre fiction and franchise media into the entire fucking legacy of queer art—stuff like Scorpio Rising and Nevada and Lesbian Concentrate and countless other things you’re never going to find out about from a Doctor Who blog, all of it actually capturing queer reality in its messy and liminal glory. In a world where all of that exists, how can you honestly get excited about this hollow, vapid piece of plastic? It’s a Sin even has a Dalek in it if you’re that fucking desperate for fandom shit.

And anyway, if you are going to argue that this is inherently queer the way to do it isn’t to pick up on Praxeus being a virus; by that standard Terry Nation stories would be inherently queer. No, the way to do it is by focusing on the fact that Chibnall restages the death of Adric and has the Doctor save him this time. You fucking dipshit amateur.