Planet of the Daleks Video Blog
Sorry for the delay on this. The video blog for Planet of the Daleks is now ready. I’ve disabled comments here, however, so please leave those on the actual entry.
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Sorry for the delay on this. The video blog for Planet of the Daleks is now ready. I’ve disabled comments here, however, so please leave those on the actual entry.
…
Someone I respect a lot has recently said that Moffat’s Who stories don’t really display much in the way of viewpoints. With all due respect to Gallibase forum poster Affirmation (and that’s one heck of a lot of respect), I actually think Moffat’s stories do tell us a lot about what he thinks. I think they tell us quite a bit about what he thinks about women, for instance.
‘Blink’, for example, tells us that following a woman you’ve just met is an acceptable (even whimsically amusing) way of wooing her. It tells us that geeky internety guys are amusingly tragic pratts… but that women exist to redeem them by accepting them. Ultimately, the gorgeous young girl misses her opportunity to ‘get’ the hot cool copper (she automatically imagines marrying him once she’s automatically attracted to him) and has to settle for the nerd. Settling for the nerd (i.e. finally getting herself a man of some description) is the sign that she’s grown up, settled her issues, is ready to move on with life, etc. Living with her mate and having a laugh were the preludes to Real Life, the start of which (for both female characters) is naturally signfied by becoming a wife or permanent girlfriend to the nearest man ready to accept her.
And ‘Blink’, I should add, is one of Moffat’s better stories (in my ‘umble). Compared to other of his episodes, ‘Blink’ actually does seem (to me) to have some things to say. It rather amusingly takes bad sitcom characters and subjects then to a very non-sitcom plot (which is more than Gareth Roberts could manage). Of course, they’re still just bad sitcom characters… but the episode does say something about the passing of time and the achievement of emotional maturity.
Of course, the sentiments expressed are somewhat sexist (see above) and are not particularly original or shattering. Life passes quicker than you think it will, you don’t always get what you want or expect in life… well, unless you’re the steadfastly and creepily loyal nerd who eventually ‘wins’ his ‘out-of-his-league’ girlfriend once she realises what a loyal puppydog he is.
One doesn’t have to be Freud, does one?…
Here is the logic:
We live in a society that touts the pursuit of self interest. That tells people they should look out for themselves. And yet we also tell people pretty tales about community and cooperation and mutual respect.
Enterprise and initiative… but we’re all in this together.
The former ethic is for those who succeed to live by. The latter ethic is for those who have to budge in together in crowded conditions because, for whatever reason, they have not acquired enough material success to allow them to live the separated, isolated, private, individualistic life of the rich. The former ethic is for those with a private drive, detached dwellings, grounds, boundary walls and closable gates. The latter ethic is for those in terraces and flats with cardboard walls and laundry racks on their small balconies.
In short, if you live in a tenement or a housing estate, you must be public spirited. You must behave. You must get on with your neighbours. Your lack of wealth is your own fault; it is itself evidence that you do not have the necessary thrusting spirit of ruthless self-advancement… ergo, you must embrace community spirit because you are so inadequate that you must live in a community. Those with the necessary thrusting spirit of ruthless self-advancement can leave the graffiti-daubed, dog-shit-smeared romper room of community, and so need not attempt the cooperativeness that their very success shows to be against their nature in any case.
This is, in a roundabout way, a reiteration of the myth of innate and inborn destiny. It is the same myth that class societies have always told themselves, filtered through the hypocritical bad faith of modern liberalism.
It is not a scripted conspiracy, it is manufactured ideology. As such, it has all the chaos and contradiction of delusion. It is believed, even if it is a convenient piece of bunk. It is applied in a scattershot way, in all sorts of mixed-up and contradictory forms.
The apartheid inherent in it is not seen, is not admitted to, is often sincerely repudiated. And yet its persistence is tolerated, its expansion promoted. Nobody, after all, is ‘in favour’ of divisions between rich and poor. It’s one of those things that everybody formally disapproves of and yet continue.
When the people living in the cramped and dirty corners decide that they will no longer behave themselves, then we see the skull of class society beneath the moisturised, botoxed skin of liberal democratic discourse.
When the poor tear up their hovels, they are ticked-off for damaging their own ‘communities’ – as though this might not have occured to them, as though they might suddenly realise that they are trashing places that they actually find congenial, as though their behaviour speaks only to their own self-destructive madness and does not suggest that they actually find these ‘communities’ to be frustrating, grim, tedious, miserable, degraded places in which to be confined.
It is the same as the witless consolation that is offered to the suicidal. …
In ‘The Beast Below’, you – as a subject of Liz 10 and a citizen of Starship UK – get to vote. You get a choice of buttons. You can ‘Protest’ or ‘Forget’.
This is evidently an attempt to express something about electoral democracy.
Every time we are exposed to some unpleasant and uncomfortable fact about our society or our world, or even to a suspicion of some such thing, we are presented with an implicit option to protest or forget. Beyond voting booths, we have a set of these buttons inside our heads. When you hear, for instance, that thousands of dirt poor South Africans were forcibly evicted from their shanty towns and moved to settlements of corrugated iron shacks to get them away from the new $450 million World Cup football stadium, you have the option to kick up a stink or to sigh, mumble some platitude like “tsch, how awful” and then put it out of your head so you can comfortably sit back and enjoy watching teams of overpaid jocks play amidst the McDonalds adverts.
By the way, don’t think I’m being holier-than-thou. I’m just as guilty of this kind of thing as anybody. God knows how many times I’ve found myself scrunching up a Kit-Kat wrapper and only at that point remembering that Nestlé are evil. This is normal human frailty at work, the understandable instinct to flee from guilt, as ‘The Beast Below’ indicates by showing Amy’s reflexive, horrified pressing of the ‘Forget’ button and her subsequent remorse.
So, we are clearly banked upon the sharp and shaley shores of satire.
‘The Beast Below’ presents a picture of Britain as an island in space, a star-traversing city (after James Blish’s fascinating ‘Okie’ novels, collected as Cities in Flight), with tower blocks representing counties… ah, we’re already in trouble. So, everyone from Essex lives in the same tower block? Rich and poor side by side? Maybe there are luxury apartments up at the top, opulent penthouses above floor after floor of pokey little prole cupboards… but we don’t see anything like that, unless we count the private apartments of Liz 10, but she’s a problematic figure anyway (which I’ll get to). You might argue that, in a lifeboat, rich and poor would have to budge in together… but a look at the stats for Titanic survivors might be salutary at this point:
Number of 1st class passengers: 325. Of whom survived: 202.
Number of 2nd class passengers: 285. Of whom survived: 118.
Number of 3rd class (steerage) passengers: 706. Of whom survived: 178.
Much as I hate to give Ben Elton any credit, I tend to suspect that, if the world were threatened with imminent destruction, something along the lines of the scenario described in his novel Stark would be nearer to what happened than what we see in ‘The Beast Below’, i.e. the rich would set up their own escape into space and fuck the rest of us nobodies. Mind you, that would be very shortsighted of them, not simply as they’d be left with only each other to talk to (a grim fate, as Elton’s novel implies) but also because they need us: they live off our labour.…
Avatar is progressive in many ways. It represents racism towards native people as stemming from imperialism. It notices that imperialism is about capital accumulation, indicting a corporation along the way. It shows an ‘economy’ in which spines can be repaired, but only if you have the dosh. It metaphorically revisits the violent imperialist foundations of America – and any such settler colonial state – in a forthrightly disapproving way. It supports the right of native people to violently resist conquest, even when Americans are doing the conquering.
Fair enough.
However, it is also deeply patronising towards native people. To quote David Brooks’ article in the New York Times:
It rests on the stereotype that white people are rationalist and technocratic while colonial victims are spiritual and athletic. It rests on the assumption that nonwhites need the White Messiah to lead their crusades. It rests on the assumption that illiteracy is the path to grace. It also creates a sort of two-edged cultural imperialism. Natives can either have their history shaped by cruel imperialists or benevolent ones, but either way, they are going to be supporting actors in our journey to self-admiration.
And, even better, here‘s Annalee Newitz at io9.com, on the subject of Avatar and movies like it:
These are movies about white guilt. Our main white characters realize that they are complicit in a system which is destroying aliens, AKA people of color – their cultures, their habitats, and their populations. The whites realize this when they begin to assimilate into the “alien” cultures and see things from a new perspective. To purge their overwhelming sense of guilt, they switch sides, become “race traitors,” and fight against their old comrades. But then they go beyond assimilation and become leaders of the people they once oppressed. This is the essence of the white guilt fantasy, laid bare. It’s not just a wish to be absolved of the crimes whites have committed against people of color; it’s not just a wish to join the side of moral justice in battle. It’s a wish to lead people of color from the inside rather than from the (oppressive, white) outside.
Think of it this way. Avatar is a fantasy about ceasing to be white, giving up the old human meatsack to join the blue people, but never losing white privilege.
All true, if old news.
My interest here is in the fact that ‘The Power of Kroll’, a Doctor Who serial from 1978-9 that could only have dreamt of having a hundredth of the budget of Avatar (and that not even many Doctor Who fans like) did much, much better.
It covers much of the same ground as Avatar politically. It represents racism towards native people as stemming from imperialism. It notices that imperialism is about capital accumulation, indicting a corporation along the way. It metaphorically revisits the violent imperialist foundations of America – and any such settler colonial state – in a forthrightly disapproving way. It supports the right of native people to violently resist conquest, even when Brits are doing the conquering.…
I can scarcely believe I’m doing this…
Saw the Potterocalypse. Well crafted. I’ve had worse afternoons in the cinema.
One of the most interesting things about the films is how much better they are than the books. That goes for all of them. This last is no exception.
Rowling is a poor novelist but Kloves is an excellent adaptor. It’s quite amazing how he streamlines the windy, pompous, digression-ridden plots so that audiences can follow them without flowcharts.
Also, the films have always made Harry easier to like than the books, partly because Radcliffe is naturally likeable and partly because cinema can’t give us what Rowling insists on foisting upon readers: unfettered access to Harry’s every self-obsessed, uncharitable, weak-willed, petulant thought. Again, in this latest film, Kloves helps mightily by snipping out acres of Potterian sulking and obsessing over irrelevancies, like the ancient and brief moral failures of mentors, etc..
Harry’s wobbles over loyalty to his dead headmaster go on for faaaaaar toooooo loooooong in the book… and yet, in the film, even after all the set-up from the last film, we get only the briefest hint of Aberforth’s resentments before Harry states that he trusted Dumbledore And That’s All There Is To It. Harry doesn’t even ask the spectral Dumbledore about it in the dream/afterlife bit (which is filmed in a pleasingly 2001: A Space Odyssey-ish way). I’m not complaining about this, but it’s odd how breezy is the treatment of the whole Dark Dumbledore Backstory in Deathly Hallows Part 2, given how much attention the set-up stuff (i.e. conversations at the wedding, Rita Skeeter’s book) gets in Deathly Hallows Part 1. This is an odd but ultimately minor stumble, largely because this subplot is fundamentally uninteresting and they are quite right to sideline it.
One of the worst of Rowling’s many, many, many flaws as a novelist is that she doesn’t understand her own characters. She knows who she wants them to be… no, hang on… a better way of putting it would be that she knows how she wants her readers to view them, but this often fails to jive with how they actually behave. For example, she damn-nigh instructs the reader to love Harry because he’s kind and brave and heroic and full of love, etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum, but actually depicts him (especially in the final book) as a thoughtless, selfish, grumpy, maudlin, indecisive, clueless little irritant.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with having a flawed hero – especially if that hero is a teenage boy, since they’re usually pretty damn flawed – but it becomes a problem when the authorial voice fails to percieve the flaws, and has the embodiment of moral authority in the books (Dumbledore) treat Harry as though he’s a ruthlessly efficient intellectual humanitarian.
But then the embodiment of moral authority is deeply flawed too. His actions make him – to any disinterested observer – a cynical, calculating manipulator with a revolting streak of sentimentality and an outrageously brazen habit of indulgent and permissive favouritism towards certain of his pupils. …
Timelash II. Series 5. You know the drill. Thank goodness this tiresome, needless, self-imposed task is now almost over.
The Eleventh Hour
How interesting that, whereas RTD usually got public figures to play themselves in contexts that took the piss out of them (even if they didn’t realise it), Moffat drafts Patrick Moore and casts him as a prestigious and influential expert with a naughty twinkle in his eye, rather than as a sexist, right-wing old pratt.
I’ll post seperately on The Beast Below. I’ve looked at the heavily biased and ideological representation of Churchill in Victory of the Daleks here. The only other thing to note about that wretched story is the cynicism with which the Daleks have been redesigned in order to launch a new range of toys.
The Angels Two-Parter
I like the bit with the angel on the screen. Nice bit of appropriation from J-horror.
Otherwise… well, I’ll once again quote my friend vgrattidge-1, who captures it concisely:
Just what ‘Who’ needed – another straight-to-video style ‘Aliens’ rip-off that undermines a brilliant (one-off!) monster and makes them behave in illogical ways for plot expediency, plus the smug and annoying River Song (I just can’t bring myself to care what relationship she has with the Doctor) and well, not much else. It’s hollow stuff with the Doc making another tough-guy speech before firing a gun…Yawn
One interesting thing about this story is the matter of the Church Soldiers (related to the Church Police perhaps… will they be investigating dead Bishops on the landing and rat tart?). I remember Paul Cornell saying he was grateful to Moffat for his generosity in portraying relgious people in a positive light. So… Paul sees it as positive when monks are shown going around in fatigues, obeying orders within a military hierarchy and carrying machine guns? How telling.
Vampires of Venice was too boring to write about. Here is my (positive) look at Amy’s Choice.
The Hungry Earth / Whatever the Other One was Called
The Silurians become dull, generic reptile aliens… and, as I recall, such reptile aliens featured in one of the very few half-decent episodes of ST: Voyager, which actually tried to intelligently investigate some of the cultural ramifications of ‘common descent’, etc. It comes to something when Who can’t even do reptile aliens better than Voyager.
The less likeable side of Star Trek actually provides the inspiration for story. It resembles the worst excesses of Trek when it’s in liberal-moralising-allegory mode. There is the fatuous treatment of racial suspicion, the vapid semi-allusions to Israel/Palestine (lets get round the table and sort out a deal… all we need is a reasonable negotiating partner!), etc.
Worse, it wants to have its cake an eat it. On the one hand there is the morally myopic liberal fingerwagging at nasty old inherently-xenophobic humans… but this contradicts the half-assed (bordering on offensive) subtext about Guantanamo Bay / Abu Ghraib, where the mother who tortures a recalcitrant and inherently hostile Arab terrorist… sorry, I mean a Silurian… for information is shown to be acting from understandable necessity.…
The inevitable round-up of my Timelash II stuff on Series 4 and the ‘specials’. It’s a bumpy ride.
Voyage of the Damned
In this story, fat people or little people are there to sacrifice themselves when the plot needs them to, having shown some fatuous mechanical bravery and/or expressed some mawkish emotion-by-numbers. Sexy, pretty people are inherently of more value, whatever their intellectual vapidity and hollowness as characters, as evidenced by the Doctor’s laughably protracted and exaggerated heartbreak over the death of anonymous, mechanised dummy Astrid (seriously, I was waiting for her to be revealed as an Auton). The episode itself mourns her too, with its frankly revolting music and hilarious over-emphasis on her passing (one last kiss with the radiant ghost, a shooting star, etc…)
We’re supposed to gasp with awe at the way RTD Subverts Expectations by letting Unpleasant Posh Bloke survive while ‘good’ people die (oooh, have a little pat on the head you good little people – you have done your master’s bidding and died on cue like the plot fodder you always were)… but so what? Bad people don’t always get their comeuppance? Wow, thanks for that.
And, in any case, this ‘message’ is undercut by the way we’re obviously supposed to consider the death of Astrid more important than all the other deaths in the episode. Why is this? Well, RTD makes the Minogue character into a lowly waitress… but this only suggests that he’s desperately trying to deny the patently obvious: she’s more important in the story because she’s played by a star.
Remember that bit in ‘The Stolen Earth’ when Davros taunts the Doctor about how he turns ordinary people into killers and the Doctor then has a maudlin (and irrelevant) series of flashbacks of all the people he’s known who’ve died? We get a flash of Astrid. Do we get flashes of Morvin, Foon and Banakafalatta? In a pig’s arse. Little people. Not important. That’s why it’s so unintentionally revealing when, in ‘Waters of Mars’, we’re supposed to be shocked by the Doctor using the actual phrase “little people”. Thing is, the show itself has been thinking like that for ages. Even in ‘Waters of Mars’, the death of the Lindsy Duncan character is more earthshattering because she’s played by Lindsy Duncan.
As Lawrence Miles said, RTD is now so thoroughly trapped in the self-celebrating Meedja echo chamber that he now has the Doctor being chased by BAFTAs.
Yes, the villain turns out to be a ruthless capitalist (who – as in Bond films – is bad because he’s a criminal, not because he’s a capitalist) but this hardly says anything at all… not in an episode in which we’re also supposed to think that Wilf’s patriotic bibble is cute and lovable, in which the Doctor is implied to be a friend of the Queen, in which his big achievement is to save Buckingham Palace. The implications are thoroughly and mindlessly reactionary. Right-wing, Little Englander, flag-waving, royalty-saluters are Lovable British Eccentrics. The British state and aristocracy are Lovable British Eccentrics.…
A rejigg of something I wrote for the old site on the subject of ‘Turn Left’, the best episode of series 4.
The alternate world that Davies conjures up in ‘Turn Left’ is not so far removed from our own. We might not (yet) see British soldiers patrolling our streets and pointing automatic weapons at unarmed women (though the recent behaviour of the police towards student protestors has been pretty savage)… but that sight would not be so unfamiliar to the people of Baghdad. Or Belfast, for that matter.
The nightmarish, decaying, dystopian Britain in this episode reflects aspects of our current social predicament… indeed, as Simon Kinnear pointed out in DWM, the episode seems prescient of the years ahead of it, of (to put it my way) recession/cuts torn Britain.
While it doesn’t get specific, or touch economics much, ‘Turn Left’ seems like the closest thing to a direct political attack on crisis-wracked British society that any mainstream TV show could possibly get away with. Let’s just recap: in an episode of that highly commercial kid’s romp known as Doctor Who, Russell T. Davies suggested that, in a time of crisis, the British state might institute a program of racist slavery, if not extermination. At the very least, we see people herded and treated like animals while patrolled by armed guardians of the state. Moreover, the people being treated that way are the poor, the dispossessed, the helpless. Brits get the kind of treatment meted out to refugees once they too become scapegoatable dependents.
I’m not sure that Davies intended the title as direct political advice (though it wouldn’t be bad advice) but it surely can’t be entirely an accident that Donna’s apocalyptic turn is a turn to the right, a turn that results in “England for the English”.
The Donna in the car at the start of ‘Turn Left’ might vote that way. She’s the same thoughtless, selfish Donna we met at the start of ‘The Runaway Bride’. She’s exactly the kind of self-involved, complacent brat who hardly notices as society crashes around her… until she is touched by it. Davies pulls no punches. We see her obsessing over stationary and offices grudges as the rest of Chowdry’s staff watch the TV, horrified, for news of the hospital. We see her asking “What’s for tea?” as news of Sarah Jane Smith’s death flashes on the screen.
I know people like that. Indeed, speaking as someone who lives in southern England – surely the global epicentre of reactionary complacency – it is very hard indeed not to derive a massive and delicious jolt of schadenfreude from the way Davies manages to turn the (surviving) population of the Sun and Daily Mail reading world into despised, harangued, jobless refugees. “Who’s going to listen to us?” asks Donna’s Mum, “Refugees. We haven’t even got a vote. We’re just no-one Donna. We don’t exist.” To put it another way: seek asylum and you’ll be locked up in one.
It’s ironic that as Donna’s society disintegrates, she suddenly discovers other people.…