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50th anniversary countdown

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“My goodness…” says the Doctor as yet more fine fare is brought to the Tharils already-laden table, “You live like kings.”

“We are kings,” says Biroc impassively.  He merely states it as a fact.  He is both part of this feast and an observer of it.  He was at it, and now he returns later in his personal timeline.  He can travel along his own trajectory.  He sits at a table he once sat at long ago, in the same seat.  He acknowledges this past life and does not disown it, yet he does not embrace it either.  His tone is neutral.  Truthful.

Meanwhile, at the same table many years later, after history has revolved, men – who make their living capturing, chaining and shipping creatures like Biroc for sale and industrial use – are sitting down for their lunch break.  They pass round sandwiches, pickles, thermos flasks.

Their boss, Rorvik, regards them with the wary contempt that only a truly stupid person can feel for those slightly more stupid than he is.  He has so little success trying to make them listen to his inanities that he has to wave his blaster pistol at them. 

Back in the ‘past’, back at the other meal, the Doctor asks where all the Tharils’ luxury and variety comes from.

“The universe is our garden,” says Biroc simply.  Again, the abrupt tone of factual statement.

“Ah. So this is what it was all like.”

“At the height of our empire, before the Tharils became the slaves of men.”

The mention of slaves turns the Doctor’s mind instantly to the servants moving around the table.  He responds to Biroc’s barely-implied complaint by calling him out on his apparent hypocrisy.

“I notice you don’t do too badly for staff,” says the Doctor.  “This garden of yours, the universe… how do you manage it”

“We use our power.  For those who travel on the time winds, the vastness of space is no obstacle.”  The Tharils have the power to travel where they will – the basic requirement of any imperial project.  “Everything is ours.”

The serving girl by the Doctor makes a mistake, spilling the wine that she is pouring into a goblet.  The Tharil whose goblet it is knocks her to the floor, as one swipes irritably at a fly.  The Doctor glares at him and gets up to help the young woman.

“Including her?” he asks.

“They’re only people.”  Again, Biroc’s tone is flat.  He does not endorse or condemn… except in so far that simply saying such things is its own condemnation.  He simply recites the truth of how this system operated.  To the Tharils, their slaves were only people… just as, to Rorvik, his slaves are only Tharils.  But there is no self-justification from Biroc.  He makes no pleas, and gives no excuses.  Rorvik is losing control of his present.  Biroc owns his past. 

“So you’re the masters the Gundan spoke of, hmm? The enslavers?”

“The weak enslave themselves, Doctor. You and I know that.” …

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John offers the Doctor some sugar for his tea.  John is a black man with a Caribbean accent.

“Ah,” says the Doctor ruminatively, regarding his sugarless tea, “A decision. Would it make any difference?”

“It would make your tea sweet,” says John, humouring this strange customer.

“Yes, but beyond the confines of my tastebuds, would it make any difference?”

“Not really.”

“But…”

John is suddenly strangely interested.  “Yeah?” he prompts, wanting to hear more.  (I used to think of John as a manifestation of the ‘magical negro‘ stereotype… but actually he’s just an ordinary Londoner who meets a magical Scotsman.  As such he’s one of the better examples of the Cartmel era representing black people.  Sadly, those years often saw black men cast simply because the character was a rapper or a blues musician.)

“What if I could control people’s tastebuds?” suggests the Doctor, “What if I decided that no one would take sugar? That’d make a difference to those who sell the sugar and those who cut the cane.”

One person making a little decision doesn’t change much.  Lots and lots of people making lots and lots of little decisions, however…

“My father, he was a cane cutter,” says John.

“Exactly. Now, if no one had used sugar, your father wouldn’t have been a cane cutter, would he?”

“If this sugar thing had never started,” says John, “my great-grandfather wouldn’t have been kidnapped, chained up, and sold in Kingston in the first place. I’d be a African.”

In British Jamaica, as in Brazil and French San Domingue, slavery was at its most brutal.  Slaves were literally worked to death.  The horrors of Caribbean slavery – virtually unrepresented by the mainstream capitalist culture industries – equal anything seen in the Nazi camps (which are endlessly dramatized and documented in popular culture as a warning against ideological extremism and a foil for the moral courage of the British and the Americans).  The connection between these horrors – that both were caused by capitalist empires grabbing land and profiting from racialised slavery – is still less often made.

John is lucky to exist at all.  For a long period, death rates for slaves in Jamaica were considerably higher than birth rates.

Slavery is not only one of the foundations of capitalism, funding and propping it up in the lands of the free, but it is also the origin of modern racism.  ‘Race’ is a fundamentally unreal concept when it comes to humans; a social construct… and a relatively recent one in its current form.  ‘Races’ were made socially.  It was, for instance, far from clear to the dominant ‘Anglo-Saxon’ culture in 18th-19th Century America that the Irish or the Poles were ‘white’.  The idea that ‘negroes’ were an inferior ‘race’ arose with the need for millions of people who could be used as farm machinery in the plantations of the ‘New World’.  It was a get-out clause against the universalising promises of the bourgeois revolutions.  The American Declaration of Independence stated “all men are created equal”. …

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The Doctor, Polly and Jamie have been condemned to the pits, to the ‘Danger Gang’, for the crime of proving to the Pilot that his world is run by secret things that constantly order him to not notice them. 

The trio are entering the pithead to begin their work as miners, mining the deadly gas that the Colony collects for its unseen masters.  One of the Colony’s jolly little work ditties plays in the background.  A loud, insanely chipper voice sings lyrics about how happy everyone should be to work and serve the Colony.

The Doctor groans as if in terrible pain.

“What’s the matter?” asks Polly.

“Ooooh, dreadful!” exclaims the Doctor, “Did you hear that rhyme? The man who wrote that ought to be sent to the Danger Gang, not us!”

Jamie laughs.

The Doctor’s concern isn’t for the danger of the mines.  It’s for the ugly, crass, aesthetic banality of tyranny; for its kitsch horrors; for its lack of imagination.  This might seem like a failure of proper priorities… until you remember that such crassness is a symptom of the infection in the social wound, the same wound in which the macra teem.

In a society that demands you work for hidden, secret, ineffable, insane masters that you never see and can’t control, the mass-produced art that surrounds you is always going to be so much slop.  Its function is to soothe, to reassure, to distract.  It may not be consciously crafted to do these things, but if it doesn’t do them it simply doesn’t get mass-produced in the first place.  In a world so riddled with secrecy and injustice that psychosis becomes a necessary feature of social life, the songs you hear on the radio are always going to hide repressed lunacies within their mindless platitudes.  When you are expected to never question and never stop smiling, what chance is there that culture will be anything other than bland, safe, comforting pap?

And shitty, rubbishy, worthless, careless songs hurt us.  Songs that side with power are injurious, especially if they’re dripped into your ears day after day after day.  Songs that are just ugly and dull, because they are made in the same way as spam, are just as bad.  They hurt our hearts and souls and guts.

The Doctor’s priorities are just fine.…

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Enlightenment and Persuasion have walked in on the Doctor and his friends.  They now look human.  A man and a woman, created from a sketch Tegan drew.  Pale, impassive, handsome, impeccably-groomed people in clothes that Tegan thought fashionable.  They look like she modelled them on First Class passengers on Concorde.  The Jet Set. 

Persuasion hands round drinks.  Nothing more persuasive than that.

Enlightenment is explaining her transformation from frog to aspirational 80s princess.  She speaks in cut-glass vowels and icicle consonants.

“We enjoy the most advanced technology in the universe,” she claims, her voice suffused with nonchalant arrogance.

She was kissed by technology.

“The dominant emotion on planet Earth is fear,” says Persuasion suavely.  Yes, that’s always how the ‘natives’ look to the ‘explorers’.  Fearful little things.  “When last we were there, our reception was hostile.”

Tegan, a woman from a nation built on the destruction and subjugation of ‘natives’ by ‘explorers’, is not fooled.

“Yeah, that doesn’t surprise me,” she sneers.

“Well, we must read your history books,” says the Doctor.  There is no better way to learn about the mindset of the rulers of any civilisation than to read their official history books.  You can read a lot between the lines.

“You will be welcome to do so,” says Enlightenment, “but first it will be necessary for me to instruct you in our computer languages.”

There is, it goes without saying, no conceivable possibility than a non-Urbankan might already have the ability to read Urbankan books.

“One couldn’t wish for a more enchanting teacher,” says the Doctor.  He almost seems to be flirting with her.

“A very elevated one,” adds Persuasion, regarding this insolent bug with lofty amusement.

“Enlightenment,” says the Doctor.

“Minister of Enlightenment,” Persuasion corrects him.  Just so you know where you stand.

“Yes, of course,” replies the Doctor, his eyes icy with contemptuous understanding, “And you must be Minister of Persuasion.”

Of course, every ‘civilised’ nation that ever set about conquering the ‘primitives’ always thought themselves superior, always thought they were bringing the benefits of their ‘advancement’, always said they were helping the child-races to grow… or at least to stop being a hindrance in lands they were too inferior to use properly.

And such ‘civilised’ nations always aimed for ‘hearts and minds’, always brought their greater ‘wisdom’ with them as a justification and a gift, holding it before them as they invaded and conquered and slaughtered and enslaved. 

And they always needed – need – their Ministers of Enlightenment.  And Persuasion.…

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Tobias Vaughn shows Jamie and the Doctor into his office at the International Electromatics factory.

“Confusing, isn’t it?” chuckles Vaughn smoothly when he sees Jamie’s astonishment.

“It’s exactly the same as your office in London!” says Jamie.

“In all basic essentials, yes,” replies Vaughn, “That’s the secret of my success.  Uniformity.  Duplication.  The very essence of business efficiency.  My whole empire is built on that principle.”

In the script (but not in the televised story) ‘Doctor Who’ comments: “Mass production.”

Mass production of uniform duplicates.  From disposable radios to micro-monolithic circuits (tiny things that form a massive slab or wedge of power).  From identical offices to endless copies of Watkin’s ‘teaching machines’.

This is why the Cybermen have chosen Vaughn as a business partner.  This is why he is going to co-ordinate and distribute their troops.  This is why they arrive at his depot in packing crates, waiting to be activated.  His company is the perfect delivery system for their virus.  The synergy is obvious.…

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Lytton and Griffiths are wandering across a quarry.  It actually is a quarry.  Something is being dug up or mined there, by slaves watched over by Cybermen.

Lytton has a device that detects Cybermen.

“There are two very close,” he says.

“That’s right!” shouts a very human voice from behind him.

Bates and Stratton – two escapees from the Cybermen’s labour gangs – disarm and frisk Lytton and Griffiths.

Lytton has been looking for them, and they’ve been looking for him.

“Are they Cybermen?” asks the perplexed Griffiths.

“Almost,” says Lytton, amused.

“This is what the Cybermen do to you…” sneers Bates, removing his glove and sleeve to reveal a cybernetic arm, a chilly construct of steel and pulleys.  His metal hand closes on Griffiths’ fleshy one and squeezes.  Bates watched Griffiths’ pain with dead eyes.

“How much of you?”

“Arms and legs.”

Bates and Stratton are rejects from the Cyber-conversion process.  The Cybermen turn their rejects – the ones that cannot be entirely consumed – into labourers in their quarry.

So… the Cybermen start with the arms and legs.  The legs that give locomotion.  The arms and hands that lift and move and dig and manipulate.  The organs of physical work.

When the Cybermen catch Lytton and subject him to conversion, they start with his arms.

The original Cybermen had human hands.

The severed hand is a recurring motif of the gothic.

The gothic is about dead labour, the living death of alienated work, the physical invasion and evisceration wrought by capital upon the working body, and the occult process whereby wealth is created from labour.

The Cybermen – with their skull-faces – are gothic things.  Zombies, in the old fashioned sense.  People reduced to pure labour power.…

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The Doctor, Zoe and Jamie are brought in to see the Master of the Land of Fiction.  He has dossiers on them.  He is, as Zoe says, very well organised.

“We have to be,” he says, “The running of this place requires enormous attention to detail. It’s a responsible position, but very rewarding”

A ‘responsible position’.  So it’s a job.

“Responsible to who?” asks the Doctor.

Not to a person, says the Master, to “another power. Higher than you could begin to imagine.”

A system, an inhuman hegemon.

He congratulates them on the way they handled their tests.  They have passed the job interview.

It transpires that the Master is a writer.

“Did you ever hear of the Adventures of Captain Jack Harkaway?” he asks.

“No, I can’t say that I… wait a minute, a serial in a boys’ magazine?”

“The Ensign!  For twenty-five years, I delivered five thousand words every week!”

“Twenty-five years, five thousand words a week…” Zoe adds it up… “that’s well over half a million words!”

“That’s why I was selected to work here,” says the Master.  He got headhunted.

He spent his life working to create copy for a publisher, who took his words and turned them into commodities.  The commodities were copies of his own ideas, his own characters, taken from him and transformed.  They piled up around him.  They took on a life of their own, apart from him.  Now he lives in a world of characters who were created by human labour, taken and turned into commodities.  They too have lives of their own.  In Marxism, this is called reification: the objectification of the social relations of production as things.  And it’s also commodity fetishism: the treatment of commodities (in this case, fictions) as though they people… and the treatment of people as though they were commodities.  One form of this is wage labour, and on that subject…

“And you’re the one that’s in charge of all of this?” asks Jamie.

The ‘Master’ hedges.

“Or is all this in charge of you?” asks the Doctor.
 
“My brain is the source of the creative power which keeps this operation going.”

So he doesn’t control it, but it won’t run without him, without his work.  Just like the magazines wouldn’t get made without the intellectual, creative labour of people like him… just like the printing presses wouldn’t print them without the manual labour of printers… just like the printed magazines wouldn’t get sold if it weren’t for the manual labour of distributors…

He’s now in a world literally run by an alien power that robs minds, just as his mind was robbed to make magazines.  And it wants to turn humanity into a string of sausages, all the same.

He denies that he’s a prisoner, but then the globe behind him glows and a siren sounds and the machinery demands his attention.  Soon it speaks through him, its stentorian commands coming from his mouth.  He tries to negotiate with it. …

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A flying ship has plunged into a tall public building, causing panic.

Outside 10 Downing St., the media have been sat around for hours with their cameras trained on the closed black door, waiting for someone official to come out and hand them their version of events… which will, of course, be repeated verbatim as The Story. 

Luckily for these relentless seekers after truth, a politician comes out to give them a press conference.

“Our inspectors have searched the skies,” he tells the journalists, “and they have found massive weapons of destruction, capable of being deployed in 45 seconds.  We face extinction unless we strike first.”  He goes on to beg the UN for “an emergency resolution” which will give them permission to launch this pre-emptive strike.  His words are relayed on the TV news without comment… except by the Doctor and the other people watching.

As satire, this isn’t subtle.  It’s like a sledgehammer to crack a nut… because that’s what the WMD story always was: an easily cracked nut.  But in a world in which barely anyone in the global media is capable of cracking nuts even with a nutcracker, maybe it’s time to get out the sledgehammers… if only to make a sarcastic point.

As a satire of US/UK foreign policy in the wake of 9/11, it’s crude… but then US/UK foreign policy in the wake of 9/11 was crude.  It didn’t need to be anything else.  The media could be relied upon to discount the idea that respectable politicians in ‘democracies’ might have cynical or imperialistic motives.  They could be relied upon to train their cameras at closed doors.  They could be relied upon to accept the contents of press conferences as basic common sense, and then amplify those press conferences and call them The Story.

This is the aspect of RTD’s satire that is so often overlooked: what we might call ‘the Andrew Marr aspect’.  Marr did a cutesy little cameo in this episode, in which he stands outside 10 Dowing St., wittering about personalities and process, while the government within – which now comprises evil, sniggering babies hidden inside the fleshsuits of respectable, well-groomed, sincere professionals – plots mass murder in order to make a killing on fuel profits.  Again, about as subtle as the truth.

On April 9th 2003, as the invasion of Iraq proceeded, beginning a process which would lead to the takeover of Iraq’s economy and perhaps more than a million Iraqi deaths, Andrew Marr stood outside 10 Downing St. and said this:

Well, I think this does one thing – it draws a line under what, before the war, had been a period of… well, a faint air of pointlessness, almost, was hanging over Downing Street. There were all these slightly tawdry arguments and scandals. That is now history. Mr Blair is well aware that all his critics out there in the party and beyond aren’t going to thank him – because they’re only human – for being right when they’ve been wrong.

…

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In the War Room of the War Lord’s War Base, two of the War Lords are playing Risk… but with real people’s lives.

“If my troops make a push here,” says Smythe, an alien who has taken on the identity of a General in the British Army in 1917, gesturing across the game board, “what resistance can you put up?”

“Along here we shall have pillboxes, machine gun nests, landmines,” replies Von Weich, an alien who has taken on the identity of a General in the German Army in 1917.

(Notice how nobody ever refers to these alien creatures as anything other than ‘Smythe’ and ‘Von Weich’.  It isn’t that they have real names beneath these identities; they are these identities.)

“You will have no chance,” continues Von Weich from behind his monocle, “but it will be an excellent test of the morale of your humans. Your entire force will be wiped out.”  This evidently amuses him.

They are standing over a game board, moving little pieces around.  Just like real Generals did, using real big boards and real little pieces, which really did represent real people, being slaughtered as they were moved across real people’s lands and homes.  This little board represents the War Zone that Smythe and Von Weich are playing with, but the whole map of all the War Zones is a game board.  It’s a map of the world, and of history.  On it, the War Lords are playing “the great game” of imperialism.

“Ah,” replies Smythe, his voice brimming with smug satisfaction at the idea of winning this little bit of the game, “but I will use my reinforcements to turn your flank.  Here!”

He shows Von Weich his move on the board.

“Then it will not be a fair battle!”

“Perhaps not, but it will be an excellent test of your morale!”

Despite their competition, these men are the same kind of creature; a kind of creature utterly alien to the men they move around on their board.  They both keep their alien communications devices behind portraits of their respective monarchs.  They both report to the same superiors, the same callous system of expansion and conquest.  The justification their system uses is that when it has conquered the universe, there will be no more war.  The motives are always humanitarian.  The current war is always “the war to end war”.

The Generals and Chiefs and Lords on both sides certainly fight each other, for power and territory and resources… as do Smythe and Von Weich, as do the War Chief and the Security Chief.  But, ultimately, they always have more in common with each other than they do with the little people on their game board.

Ultimately, the war is always waged by the rulers against the people, by the dice-rollers against the pieces. …

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The sacred mountain of the Sarns is being engulfed.  Turlough tries to persuade Timanov and the faithful to flee.

“Leave us alone,” says Timanov, “We wish to die with our settlement.”

You have to wonder if some of the others are truly eager to die needlessly, or whether they are just still under the spell of Timanov’s authority.  This is a man who has condemned people to burn many times.

A silver figure walks into the room.

“Logar!” cries Timanov, thinking he is seeing his god.

“On your feet!” shouts the figure.  He is offended by bended knees, yet he is hectoring in his command.  He removes his helmet.  It is Amyand, ‘leader’ of the unbelievers, wearing a heat-proof suit.  (The Sarn religion is a ‘cargo cult’, but we’ll complain about that – and everything that goes with it – some other time.)

“A deception,” says Timanov quietly, a bitter laugh in his voice, “Another deception.  And from a heretic.”

Amyand holds out his hand.  There is a way out.

“You will never understand, Amyand,” says Timanov quietly, “Logar is everywhere.  He cares for the faithful.”

But perhaps it’s Timanov who doesn’t understand.  After all, why expect a pantheistic god to walk in through a doorway?

Here is the split in the belief.  God is everywhere; God is a king on a throne.  God is love; God is power.  God cares; God is to be feared.  God is a comfort; God demands obedience on pain of death.

Timanov’s oligarchy has rationalised itself along this split.  Religion is the expression of, and protest against, a world that hurts us.  That’s why, ironically enough, it can be so useful to the people who run the world that hurts us.

Stripped of his power, Timanov will subject himself to burning – his old punishment for doubt – as a reward for faith.  This Logar’s care.  At least Timanov is not a hypocrite.…

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