Elizabeth Sandifer

It’s May 19^th, 1973. Between now and June 23^rd, forty-eight will die in a plane crash in India, six will die in a pair of IRA bombings in Coleraine, thirteen will die in Argentina when snipers open fire on protesters in the Ezeiza massacre, and six year old boy in Kingston upon Hull will die in the first fire of Peter Dinsdale’s near decade-long spree of arson. This relatively sparse major death toll masks the steady progression of the world towards the eschaton. Also, The Green Death airs.

The Green Death offers a genuinely uncanny trick of perspective—like one of those lenticular images that shifts as you move in front of it. One second it’s the most 1973 thing imaginable, a cornucopia of glam semiotics. The next it’s a strangely contemporary thing, with concerns that have not aged a day. The obvious explanation for this is that very little has changed in forty-seven years—corporations continue to be killing the world according to the logic of a supposedly dispassionate algorithm. Sure, the climate crisis has edged out industrial waste and the sheer size of the computers has ratcheted downwards, but the basic concerns really are the same. We knew what needed to be done a half-century ago, we didn’t do it, and now we’re watching nervously as the inevitable cascade begins.

None of this is wrong per se. The Green Death’s earnest environmentalism really has aged quite well, looking more like clear-headed moral certainty than po-faced lecturing. The story remains stylistically of its time, but in a way that feels like a reverse remake—a story from the 2020s that got a campy 1970s remake. This, however, is veering dangerously into Philip Sandifer territory. Let’s not get too wrapped up in supernatural implications. After all, this is scarcely the first oddly prescient Doctor Who story we’ve seen, and you can hardly be surprised that 1973 is more prescient than 1963. Watching the present emerge into focus is an even more boring way to watch Doctor Who than trying to decode the secret alchemical messages about utopia.

Let’s ask instead what’s changed between this and the previous evil computer story, The War Machines. The most obvious difference is between WOTAN and BOSS on the level of personality. Which, I suppose the more basic one is that BOSS has a personality. WOTAN is simply a system of automation run amok—an analogue for capitalism where the wrong value is pursued with a ruthless maximalism that suddenly highlights the flaw in the value. And this is true of most of the computers up to this point. Consider the unthinking rigidity of the computer in The Ice Warriors, or, more broadly, the treatment of the Cybermen as forces of dispassionate, emotionless control. In every case, computers are fundamentally remote, doing what they are programmed to do, only to an extent catastrophically unanticipated by their programmers.

BOSS is a tremendous departure from this. As explained, he was connected to a human brain and learned the vast and magic power of inefficiency, with which he ascended to godhood.…

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It’s February 26th, 1972. Between now and April 1st, 125 will die in a coal sludge spill in West Virginia, 19 will die in an avalanche on Mount Fuji, and the Easter Offensive wll begin in the Vietnam War, lasting into Octoer and resulting in somewhere between fifty and a hundred thousand deaths. In addition, M.C. Escher will die in a hospital in the Netherlands, the world will inch ever closer to the eschaton, and The Sea Devils will air.

Within the innate conservatism of the Pertwee era, Malcolm Hulke remains one of the most interesting figures. At one point in his life, he was a member of the Communist Party, and while this membership at some point lapsed, he appears to have been a lifelong socialist and leftist. And yet the era of Doctor Who he’s associated with is one of its most resolutely conservative. More to the point, his stories are not the ones that most challenge that tendency. Three of his Pertwee stories are earth-based military action pieces that trend away from the era’s nominally progressive glam instincts. The other two are space-based stories displaying the most uncomplicated liberalism imaginable. The overall impression is of the sort of bland centrist who imagines himself to be progressive—a Buttigieg voter, to use a contemporary metaphor. 

But implicit within that image is the presence of some genuinely progressive instinct that is subsequently smothered under the blandness of centrist liberalism—a moment in which some sort of serious political engagement is entertained. And Hulke generally displays that as well—Colony in Space, with its setup of a bunch of working class miners oppressed by an evil corporation, is probably the clearest case, but the interest in the moral question of how legitimate the Silurians’ claim to the planet is in their eponymous story is also clear. In both cases, the end results are disappointing, but you can see the vague consideration of being interesting before the stories commit to their worst political instincts.

But neither of these stories compare with The Sea Devils, which elevates political confusion into an art form. On the one hand you have Hulke revisiting the concept of The Silurians. On the other, you have Barry Letts dictating that they do a propaganda piece for the Royal Navy. The result is a tangle of influences and directions. One case, pushed by Tat Wood, is that the story (at least as director Michael Briant conceives it) is about consumption, shot from a perspective where the Sea Devils are the sense of normality and the humans are the weird ones, as apparently evidenced by the (admittedly peculiar) frequency with which they’re seen eating and the odd camera angles. It’s certainly an interesting interpretation, but even Wood is forced to admit that it’s only marginally in the actual story. You certainly could do a story about the indigenous lizard people of the world and their horrified bewilderment at human consumption—it’s even a pretty good idea for a story.…

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The rule, apparently, is that anyone talking seriously about this story has to start with Paul Cornell’s 1993 review of it. I’m not entirely sure why this is the rule—presumably because Cornell is surely terribly embarrassed by the review now that he’s firmly into the “everything is lovely, especially fandom and the Pertwee era, let’s all just get along and support New Labour” phase of his career instead of the “actually doing anything worthwhile” one. Or perhaps just because, in spite of Cornell’s latter day shame at having ever had interesting opinions, the review remains one of the most solid and important things ever said about the Pertwee era. It’s not that Cornell is correct per se—his vituperative denunciations of the entire cast along with everyone else involved in the story is excessive, not least in his claim that there are only two competent actors in the era, which more than doubles the actual number, although he at least correctly identifies one of them. It’s just that it’s petty, mean-spirited, and therefore exactly what the era needs, culminating in the utterly savage kicker that Barry Letts and Terrence Dicks “exiled the Doctor to Earth and made him a Tory.”

Part of the brutal efficiency of this comes from the fact that Terror of the Autons is, on a surface level, one of the least conservative Pertwee stories. I mean, the next story is a racist fantasy that posits that evil is a tangible thing. There’s two stories that look at the genocide of indigenous populations and offer a firm “well there’s good points on both sides.” This, meanwhile, is the ur-text for the era’s glam rock inclinations, which introduces three of the queerest characters in series history. It’s one of the maddest stories in the series to date—an explosion of color, spectacle, and basic weirdness. It is, in other words, an odd story to use as your staging ground for an attack on the Pertwee era’s right-wing politics. It’s like trying to go up an escalator on a unicycle: this should be easy, but not the way you’re doing it.

In a real sense, this is the appeal of Cornell’s approach. By going after one of the most straightforwardly appealing and consensus beloved stories of the era—one where its political foibles are quieter and its gonzo glam excesses are pronounced—Cornell goes for the throat. Complain about the politics of The Mind of Evil and you can semi-reasonably be answered “yeah, but it’s not all like that.” Complain about the politics of Terror of the Autons and the era’s defenders have relatively few retreats open to them. But Cornell does not actually go for the throat. Instead he takes drab swipes at the acting and production. As I said, it’s not that Cornell is wrong per se about the acting in the Pertwee era—almost everyone involved is various forms of dreadful. But what of it? The next era of Doctor Who is going to prove beyond all doubt that you can build a great show around a poor actor so long as you structure it to use their flaws.…

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It’s May 9th, 1970. Between now and June 20th, Henry Marrow will be killed in North Carolina in a racist hate crime, two will die when police fire into a crowd at a demonstration at Jackson State University, a fourteen-year old fan will die after being struck in the head by a foul ball at a Major League Baseball game, eleven will die in Israel in a Palestinian terrorist attack, six when a plane crashes into an Interstate Highway in Florida. In addition, E.M. Forster will die of a stroke, Abraham Maslow will die of a heart attack, and unnumbered people will die in the ongoing Vietnam War whilst the world slides ever closer to the eschaton. Also, Inferno airs.

With Inferno, Doctor Who proffers a startling sense of lucidity, presenting a world in which drilling for energy sources destroys the world. That it is allegorized through an over the top “they dug too deep” narrative is of course a hedge, but only in the sense of doing the bare minimum necessary to pass this off as children’s entertainment. Within the pit of near universal awfulness that is Doctor Who fandom, this sense of apocalyptic frenzy is taken to make this a “serious,” “epic” story widely praised as a high point of its era. As Philip Sandifer has noted, this is puzzling given that the story is a semi-coherently plotted jumble, but it’s easy enough to see why fans are so seduced. Inferno may not function as a story, but Doctor Who has gotten by on nothing save for sheer verve before and will do so again. And the truth is, this is an unusual bit of verve.

What’s interesting is not simply the world being destroyed, although this is a relatively rare occurence for Doctor Who, but rather episodes five and six, in which the characters on the fascist parallel Earth spend the whole time aware that their planet is doomed and figuring out what to do with this news. This provides a sense of apocalyptic dread, yes, but what’s more interesting is simply the emotional content—the specific ways in which characters react to the impending end of the world. 

Obviously, this is a 1970s sci-fi adventure story and not some Peak Television drama about people moodily staring off into the middle distance, although the confusion is understandable given how the speaking cast is basically all middle-aged white men. Regardless, the emotional content is not long on subtle depths; this is not a piece of television where much is to be gained talking about “interiority.” This isn’t about the complex psychology of the doomed, but rather about staking out a moral position about lost causes.

The key dispute within Eyepatch World is over whether and how to prioritize returning the Doctor to Eyeball World so that he can save it. On one side is the Brigade Leader, who faces the end of the world with an insistence that the Doctor try to save him. This is portrayed as selfish cowardice, in contrast to Greg Sutton, the paragon of resolute masculinity (who, notably, is portrayed as a political dissident) who immediately sides with the Doctor’s “save another world” argument.…

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It’s November 2nd, 1968. Between now and December 21st, a mine explosion will kill seventy-eight in West Virginia, twenty-two will die in a factory fire in Glasgow, two will be shot by the Zodiac Killer, and numerous people will die in the Vietnam War, including 374 civilians in Laos when the US Military targets a cave in the incorrect belief that it housed Viet Cong troops and not refugees. In addition, Upton Sinclair will die in a nursing home in New Jersey, Enid Blyton will die in a nursing home in London, and John Steinbeck will die of heart failure in New York. A flu pandemic rages, ultimately killing one million, and the world drifts ever-closer to the eschaton. Also, The Invasion airs.

Miles and Woods begin their elaborately judicious review of The Invasion—a document that manages to at no point actually indicate if they like the story—by noting the peculiarity of its title. This is the definite article, as the saying goes—not an invasion of Dinosaurs, Androids, Zygons, nor even of Daleks, but simply the invasion—a type specimen against which all others are to be recognized. Given this, any interpretation must start with the money shot—the Cybermen marching down the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral. Contrary to Philip Sandifer’s lengthy attempt to brag about having been to London/plagiarize Alan Moore, the relevant fact here is not which London landmark the Cybermen are tottering down (St Paul’s is mostly notable for having a staircase down from an instantly recognizable view, as opposed to any larger mystical significance) but simply the sense of juxtaposition between iconic cityscape and iconic monster. 

Let’s pivot from here to the moment immediately before the invasion cliffhanger, in which Isobel and Captain Turner reflect on the serene, peaceful nature of morning in London right before this peace is shattered. The episode is not subtle about this—the scene is meant to build up tension, with Isobel’s last line immediately before the invasion begins being to reflect on how “Looking at all that peace out there, it’s so difficult to imagine” the Cybermen attacking. This is a familiar line of thought about the nature of civilization and society, and the way in which its seemingly solid and constant normalcy can abruptly shatter—one that resonates even more in 2020 as we waltz with unsettling calm into the jaws of climate change than it did in 1968 as cultural memory of the second World War began to fade into the seeming permanence of the Pax Americana.

This impermanence is increasingly shifting to be a part of Doctor Who’s brand. From The War Machines through the Troughton era we’ve watched as the base under siege formula, with its paranoid dread and BBC-achievable claustrophobia, became the default setting of the series. But The War Machines always promised an even more direct simplification of this: having the monsters attack contemporary Britain. The Invasion was consciously designed as a trial for this approach, establishing UNIT as a ready-made set of supporting characters for a regeared version of Doctor Who that would, in fact, mostly consist of various aliens invading contemporary Britain.…

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It’s December 23rd, 1967. Between now and January 27th, thirteen people will die in England when a train collides with a truck that had stalled on the tracks, 380 will die in a Sicilian earthquake, and 121 will die in a pair of submarine crashes in the Mediterranean. In addition, Mike Casparak will die of liver failure fifteen days after being the first successful recipient of a human heart transplant in the United States, while Bill Masterton will die of a brain injury sustained during a National Hockey League game, and huge numbers will die in the still-continuing Vietnam War. Also the world will progress ever-closer to the eschaton, and The Enemy of the World airs. 

The Enemy of the World is first and foremost a story about dictators. This is separate from being a story about dictatorship, which is the more usual way for science fiction to do this. There are tons of Doctor Who stories about dictatorship—it’s the default shape of dystopias, after all. But The Enemy of the World is not ultimately interested in the shape of a dictatorship—indeed, a dictatorship never actually arises within its confines. It’s not even particularly interested in the conditions out of which dictatorship arises—its vision of the futuristic world of 2018 with its system of zones is never fleshed out enough to serve as social commentary upon that setting. The Enemy of the World is instead about the people at the top—the sorts of people who seek abusive power.

Its answer to this is specific to a cultural moment. Many critics have reasonably pointed out the problems involved in Patrick Troughton blacking up and putting on a funny voice to play a treacherous Mexican, and they’re right to, especially given that this is yet another David Whitaker script with what can charitably be called dodgy racial politics. But if one is going to launch some desperately tedious project to justify ignoring racism because you really like an episode of television (no doubt fobbed off as a “redemptive reading” or some similar shit), The Enemy of the World leaves you more options than most. Salamander isn’t Mexican because of some arbitrary bit of racial prejudice—he’s Mexican because Whitaker looked at the world outside his window and engaged with it. This was written in an era where Fidel Castro and Che Gueverra were current events—charismatic men offering liberation and material social progress were coming to power, and specifically coming to power in Latin America. 

The obvious thing to point out here is that a story about demonizing leftist revolutionaries is only faintly better than one that’s just blandly racist. But that’s oversimplifying Whitaker’s game here. The Doctor, after all, is consistently, at times even ludicrously skeptical of everyone’s claims against Salamander (a position that is ultimately justified by the fact that the main person making them is also fundamentally untrustworthy), which clearly positioning him as instinctively sympathetic to the sort of leftist revolutionary Salamander is modeled after. But there’s only so far you can get with this—at the end of the day, the gravity of Salamander being a megalomaniac is pretty inescapable.…

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