Elizabeth Sandifer

The classics are classics for a reason, and there’s little more classic than letting Moffat run rampant on some formalist bullshit. The question, really, was which Moffat we were going to get. The most obvious comparison is of course Heaven Sent, and yes—this is absolutely Doctor Who made by the guy who did Heaven Sent, with all the imperious bravado that suggests. Put him on the new Doctor and let the series show off for its second week. It’s a sound strategy.

But it’s also not the whole story. For one thing, Moffat seems to have reverted to his Last Vow and Beast Below mode of spitting venom. Davies’ episodes to date have simmered with anger, but Moffat unleashes it fully. Boom never elevates into anything like a coherent critique—its reveal of algorithmic warfare against nobody in order to sell more war is clever without ever being pointed. Still, for all it’s “old man yells at cloud storage” nature, it’s easy to like. It’s damn near the ideal case for what we could have gotten out of Moffat, at least from the perspective I tend to hold.

There’s a third aspect here though, in the chaotic jumble that is the ending. Last week I compared the not quite baked denouement to Series 7 Moffat, when his narrative acceleration got out of control. And that’s in play here, with an ending that’s less concerned with earning itself than it is with ricocheting through the concept’s extremes. This could, obviously, be a problem. Arguably it is—I don’t think many people are going to call this Moffat’s greatest triumph, and that’s probably mostly down to its slightly stumbling ending.

Equally, Series 7 Moffat always felt like Moffat drifting out of focus. In an unhappy production situation he ground out television that felt half-baked. Whereas in the wake of six episodes worth of neo-Davies, it’s clearly a conscious choice that’s quite in keeping with last episode’s somewhat dubious relationship with resolution. If this is anything, it’s the Moffat of Heaven Sent having seen (or at least read) The Giggle. Whether it’s a successful choice will to a real extent be up to people other than middle-aged media critics. Rules and storytelling conventions shift, and if Moffat got out ahead of himself a decade ago, that says very little about now. If this is a hit then playing it this loose will be vindicated. If it stumbles, there’ll be plenty to Monday morning quarterback about. 

For my part… I mean, I basically liked Series 7 and was quite charmed by The Giggle.  Yeah, the former was the nadir of the Moffat era, but the reality is that the nadir of the Moffat era is still more likely to get a rewatch out of me than half of the RTD1 era, to say nothing of Chibnall. As for the latter, while its legacy is very much being discovered, it remains extraordinarily fun in the moment. 

The pleasures, then. Gatwa, obviously. Faced with “hey can you do Heaven Sent” in his third production block, as a fun challenge to follow up his first season premiere, he does his fellow Scotsman proud.…

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Now that’s something I haven’t seen before.

What is perhaps most impressive is the way in which it drops the hammer and simply never lets up. Once Jinx Monsoon crawls out of the piano the show simply works this way now. It does not worry about whether anyone will be confused by the fact that it works this way now. It just does. The universe is menaced by the Gods of Faggotry, the Doctor can hear non-diegetic music, and there’s always a twist at the end. It’s a gorgeous one-two punch with Space Babies, completing a magic trick in which, Doctor Who transforms before our eyes from a 2008 nostalgia piece into something startlingly unfamiliar, all in the space of Flux.

Let’s harp on the flaws, just to give a win to the people who are annoyed that I actually like the show. There’s a frustrating nothingness to the resolution. I mean, really, that stuttering ending, with its repeated promise of a twist and we don’t even go back to Susan, whether Foreman or Twist? The villain being defeated because Paul McCartney and John Lennon happen to walk down a hallway, such that the Doctor and Ruby are basically bystanders? This is the closest Doctor Who has been to functioning on pure spectacle since The Claws of Axos.

But come on. To paraphrase Ncuti Gatwa himself, The Claws of Axos fucks. This is absolutely bonkers fun. A tremendous amount of credit for that is down to Jinkx Monsoon, who effortlessly outpaces Graham Crowden himself in percentage of story spent at eleven. She takes the firm foundation laid by Neil Patrick Harris and stretches it to its absolute limits to produce the most memorable villain performance since Michelle Gomez. But as a performance, it’s well-tailored to Gatwa’s Doctor. Never before have we had a Doctor whose core strength is that he’s exquisitely good at melodrama. His performance lingers in the extremes of emotion. He does not so much swing between them as flicker—a series of maximalist emotings executed with devastating charisma. It evokes Nicolas Cage in its mindful dismissal of naturalism, and the result feels breathtakingly fresh.

The short straw in all of this goes to Millie Gibson, who has little to do but keep up. She doubtless fares slightly better among the roughly 100% of the audience who don’t look at her showpiece section of the episode and go “oh, we’re redoing Pyramids of Mars,” and actually does that bit quite well, but for most of the episode’s runtime she’s stuck being the one person who isn’t allowed to be maximalist. But even she plays a weak hand well.

I compared Space Babies to Rose, and it’s similarly helpful to compare this to The End of the World. In both cases the show is stressing how weird it can be. But as with Space Babies, there’s a sense of throwing caution to the wind. The End of the World was concerned with making sure the audience would accept its grinning excesses.…

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First off, a note on how I did these, given the oddness of the release structure. I’ve just come upstairs from watching Space Babies, and I’m writing this main section and putting it up on Patreon. Then I’m going to go watch The Devil’s Chord, and do the same for it. After that I’ll fill in bullet points on each, and see what’s going on with the Patreon level and whether these go on the main site yet. 

There was a trend among the reviews that started popping up last week where they suggested Space Babies was a pretty by the numbers Russell T Davies story, and that things got more interesting with The Devil’s Chord. And you can see what they meant right away. Nothing in this is surprising, at least to people who have seen any Doctor Who. It’s not as strictly RTD-by-numbers as those reviews suggest—there’s a lot of Moffat in here. But it’s immensely standard. The uncharitable thing to say is that it probably is going to benefit from having a second episode released alongside it, and it might even be true. It certainly falls short of my usual standard from Doctor Who that I want it to show me something I haven’t seen before.

But that’s probably the professional Doctor Who nerd in me talking. This is making the same basic move as The Star Beast, catering to a UK terrestrial audience with a “look, it’s Doctor Who, that thing you like” episode. If it’s over-cautious, it’s at least deliberate in that. And you can see why they thought it might be a good idea. It’s a showcase for Gatwa and Gibson—forty-five minutes of trad set pieces to let them demonstrate their specific flavor of charisma. And more to the point, even though it’s their fourth episode together from a filming perspective, it’s an opportunity for Gatwa and Gibson to put their stamp on those basics. One of the standard things chefs are asked to do in job interviews is to make an omelet, because an omelet is an effective test of a lot of fundamental kitchen skills. This is much the same.

Gatwa and Gibson, at least, prove solid cooks. There’s a fizz to their charisma—a ricocheting energy as they amp each other up. Gatwa described the dynamic as best friends who love getting in trouble together, and it’s spot on. The middle of the episode runs largely on the quality of the eponymous visual, and much of what sells the bonkers charm of space babies is just how much fun the Doctor and Ruby seem to be having with the concept. And when the third act begins a chain of rapid reveals, they similarly sell each a-ha with a breathless urgency, so that the plot tumbles giddily through its explanation. This is clearly going to be fun.

Where things stumble is the first quarter, labored as it is with “explain the lore for all those Americans on Disney+.” Gatwa and Gibson’s energy is enough to keep it out of trouble, but you find yourself thinking that maybe “two hearts” could have been saved for later in the season.…

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32.

Eight years into the throbbing agony of anticlimactic eschatology, it is perhaps time to reflect on what we’ve learned. First, let us consider QAnon, which I’ll use as a metonym for the larger phenomenon of conspiratorial fascism. Jeff Sharlet has observed that the actual discursive practice of QAnon is fundamentally gnostic in structure and approach—all hidden and implicit truths that must be individually discovered through the meditational contemplation of endless YouTube videos.

This is not surprising—what other form would the intellectual discourse of a nihilistic Ruined Modernism take? For that matter, what other form would an intellectual discourse based on wall to wall falsehoods take? For all the alarm and panic about pervasive misinformation, the fact, as hundreds of thousands of dead COVID truthers can’t actually attest, is that material reality eventually asserts itself. And so of course the intellectual discourse surrounding a mendaciously narcissistic avatar of the twentieth century’s death drive is fundamentally gnostic. No epistemology short of the complete rejection of reality could possibly stay aloft in these circumstances.

All the same, there are core beliefs organizing the apophenic free play—racism and homophobia, for instance. But the biggest anchoring principle within all of it is an absolute and unwavering belief in the man himself. This does not simply extend to the comprehensive writing off of any and all actual bad actions, from grabbing them by the pussy to staging a coup, but to borderline—even outright—deification. This is not an ontological truth per se—there’ve been moments, must sustainedly around COVID vaccines, in which his hold threatened to slip. But it is an ongoing practical truth.

It is in some ways helpful to consider all of this—gnostic ideological forces, warm and sycophantic bodies, vast capital expenditures, and, of course, the rotting void around which they orbit—as a single entity infecting the body politic. In my previous work I focused on the hollowed chasm of the man himself, suggesting that he had offered up his name in what I colorfully referred to as an “architectural black mass” to become a creature of pure image. In many ways this gestalt is the result of that—the creature that his eaten name became. Let us call it Trump, then.

On an ideological level, Trump is simple. When I say ideology, to be clear, I don’t mean the gnostic conspiracy theories that constitute its discourse. Trump is, after all, a creature of reckless falsehoods, and its propaganda, even if sincerely believed by its foot soldiers, does not constitute its actual ideology. Its ideology is far blunter—a crude lust for power, which is in turn conceptualized in binary terms of winners and losers and the former’s blunt domination of the latter. This often has the characteristics of outright sadism, but this is better thought of as a low energy state for Trump as opposed to an intrinsic dimension of it.

The more interesting question is how Trump operates. Here it is useful to consider an anecdote about the man. Back in 1996, he attended a gala for an AIDS charity.…

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As with most things I find myself liking while everyone else is at best, like my daughter, conflicted, I find myself starting from what the question of what the film thinks it’s doing. The beginning is instructive here. We start in an uncomfortable close-up on Nick Offerman’s nameless President. He is strangely awkward and tentative as he works his way through describing a military victory. Gradually, however, his delivery grows firmer and more confident until it attains a swaggering, brusque confidence. Eventually the scene switches, and we are looking at the President on television, now delivering his remarks in a suitably statesmanlake cadence. Our view expands, and we see a haggard Kirsten Dunst in a hotel room at night as explosions rock the cityscape outside her large glass windows. She carries a camera, which she raises to her eye, pointing it at the President on the TV screen, lining up her shot. Click.

Which is to say that this is a film about the production of the image. This fact frames most decisions the film makes—certainly its choice of protagonists, with the two leads both being war photographers, one of them working a pointedly analog setup of an SLR camera and portable developing kit just to highlight the root mediality of this. As Christine notes, the film makes savvy use of this, alternating between fast-moving, tense action sequences and still photographs, sound cutting in and out to emphasize the contrast between event and image. Even its structure as a travelogue of a journey from New York to Washington pushes it towards a disconnected series of images.

This provides crucial context for what is proving the most controversial aspect of the film: its willful disinterest in the actual politics of the titular civil war. The primary rebellion is the “Western Forces,” an alliance between California and Texas that deliberately cuts across the lines most likely to divide an actual American civil war in the near future. Even within that, there’s little clear sense of who, exactly, is doing what. The film’s tensest sequence, in which the characters are menaced by Jesse Plemons, who demands to know where they’re from and shoots the characters born outside of the US, never actually identifies what side he fights for. The other most intriguing characters, a pair of rainbow-haired soldiers pinned down by a sniper, ostentatiously refuse to disclose what side they’re on. Offerman’s President reveals no political positions save for autocracy.

The absurdity of this defiant effort to produce an apolitical film about an American civil war has proven vexing for critics. Even those willing to grant the notion of apolitical art—and I’m on record rejecting the possibility entirely—are struck by the impossibility of this task. Garland, who is not an idiot, can surely see it as well. But the quixotic attempt serves the same purpose as those sonic cuts, highlighting the act of representation, making us aware that we are looking not at an American civil war but the image of one.

In this regard what Christine highlights as the film’s strength—its repeated arrival at chilling, harrowing images—is the whole of its point.…

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Patrons had access to this two weeks ago. For just $5 a month, you could be as cool as them.

Throughout Cuckoo, characters talk about helping each other. This starts from the very first page, a prologue in which a housewife frets about the impending return of her daughter from camp, hoping that “Casey’s problems will be cleaned up.” And it continues throughout the early book. In the next chapter, some people show up at the place where Shelby, a trans girl, is staying and greet her as Andrew, saying that her parents are worried about her and that they’re “here to help you.” A few pages later the woman physically restraining a girl named Nadine and forcing her into an unmarked van says the same thing—“We’re trying to help you.” So too the counselors at Camp Resolution, where these and other queer kids are unceremoniously deposited. As Pastor Eddie, who seemingly runs the place, explains in his speech to the group, “you’re here because your parents love you.” 

Opposite this helpfulness—which is, of course, simply a genteel mask for sadism in the same way that “minimizing harm to civilians” is a genteel mask for carpet bombing Gaza—is queer solidarity. The campers quickly find themselves fighting together for their survival, a trauma bond that survives a sixteen year time jump in the book’s final third. It is not that this solidarity is without pain or hurting each other. It’s a book about traumatized queers; we hurt each other all the fucking time, and so do Felker-Martin’s characters. But there’s a ride or die certainty to it—a clear sense that these people form a community that will keep itself safe. 

Between these two , meanwhile, sits the Cuckoo. Felker-Martin leaves much of the nature of her monster mysterious. It is an alien presence, owing no small debt to The Thing (Felker-Martine even has her characters watch the movie), but fundamentally it is simply a ravenous Other that wants to consume not just people but lives. And, y’know, a bunch of absolutely skin-crawling descriptive passages about faces opening up like petals of a flower.

The interplay between these—as befits a Thing/Invasion of the Bodysnatchers riff—is one of paranoid uncertainty. The characters are constantly, acutely aware of the way in which the bottom could drop out of their lives at any moment. That’s not just because we spend the first two third of the book with them at a fucking conversion camp—as “bottom dropped out” a moment as it’s really possible to get as a teenage queer. When we rejoin them in the 21st century their lives still exist with a constant precarity, a knowledge that their friends or lovers could split open their faces and try to eat them at any moment. 

The result abandons the incendiary directness of Manhunt, with its readymade “the TERFs are the real monsters” summary, in favor of something more enigmatic. This is not a bad thing—for one, that sort of bluntly high concept storytelling is an odd fit with Felker-Martin’s own critical taste, which, while by no means categorically opposed to populism, pointedly has more time for art films and headscratchers than it does for mass market blockbusters.…

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Penn and I made a six page comic featuring a non-trademark infringing cartoon mouse character! But before we get to that, some business announcements. First, Whittaker-era TARDIS Eruditorum will be back after the new season airs. When it was widely expected at the end of May I was intending to get through Series 12, but right now if I try to run it weekly it’ll leave off mid-season and at an unsatisfying point. So look for the Spyfall post on July 1st or so.

Between now and the first review, meanwhile, I’ll run a smattering of things like, well, this. I’m not sure it’ll be every week, but I’ve got a bunch of things I’ve put out on the Patreon that could be posted here, and I’ll be filling the time with them.

Speaking of the Patreon, and related to the main topic here, I’m pleased to announce that it’s now officially a joint Patreon with Penn. We’re both posting essays there, he’s posting regular music reviews, we’ve got the comic, and we’ve got more on top of that. It’s pretty much two for the price of one—I’m still posting all my output there, and now you get a second awesome person doing the same. We hope you’ll consider supporting us. 

Which brings us to The Demon Hero, which I wrote on a hungover lark on New Year’s and Penn decided to draw as a break before digging into the single hardest scene of Britain a Prophecy that I’ve ever written him. We hope you enjoy it as much as we have.

See you next week with… something!

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