Eruditorum Press

Sneakily taking the hinges off the doors of perception

creature from the pit

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Everyone is down a mine.

(Incidentally, it’s funny how often Doctor Who in the 70s and 80s keeps coming back to mines.  I’m sure it’s nothing to do with the fact that coal mining was a key industry in British economic life during these decades, miners were among the most powerful unionised workers in the 70s, and the 80s saw the calculated destruction of the miners’ unions and their industry by the Tory government.  Oh ho no.)

Anyway.  As I say, everyone – the Doctor, Romana, K9, Adrasta, Organon and a giant green blob called Erato – is down a mine.  And things are coming to a head.  (Head.  Pit-head.  Geddit?  Never mind.  It doesn’t really work anyway.)

Yes, so anyway…  Erato is, as I say, a giant green blob.

“Erato came here fifteen years ago to propose a trading agreement,” says the Doctor, while everyone else still reels from the revelation that the blob has a name, a mind and the ability to talk. “Tythonus is a planet rich in metallic ores and minerals….”

There’s an interlude here where the Doctor and Adrasta have a little argument about the fact that the Doctor is checking his facts by asking an electric dog.

“…the Tythonions exist on ingesting chlorophyll,” the Doctor continues, “Large quantities of it, judging by their size. Now, there’s a superabundance of planet life on Chloris, so…”

“So Erato came here to offer you metal in return for chlorophyll!” finishes Romana.

“Right. But who was the first person he met?”

“The person who held the monopoly of metal here,” supplies Organon in response to the Doctor’s rhetorical question.

He means Adrasta, by the way.

“Right,” agrees the Doctor, “And did she put the welfare of her struggling people above her own petty power? No. She tipped the ambassador into a pit and threw astrologers at him.”

If you don’t know what that last bit means, well I’m sorry… I have limited space and no inclination to explain.  What are you doing reading this blog anyway, if you’re not the sort of person who has already seen the DVD at least 412 times?

What Erato didn’t reckon on was the fact that he was a character in a story being written in Britain in the late 70s, when British society was laying to rest the last vestiges of the leftover radicalism of the 60s and just starting to be transformed by the crumbling of the post-war social democratic consensus and the rise of neoliberalism…  By coming to a feudal society that existed in such a story, Erato was coming to a place where feudalism was a stand-in for protectionism and backwardness and all sorts of other Bad Things that hindered free trade. So Bad Things were likely to happen to him.

The funny thing is… this story actually sort-of tallies with the Marxist view of history.  Marxism thinks historical change happens for all sorts of reasons, but one fundamental reason is the moment when the developing forces of production (how societies reproduce themselves by making what they need) come into conflict with the social superstructure (how relationships in society are arranged).…

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Skulltopus 7: Tentacle, Plastic and Bone

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The first fully-fledged tentacular monster in Doctor Who – in the senses of being both properly cephalopodic and of being a central monstrous antagonist of the Doctor’s – is the Nestene entity at the end of ‘Spearhead from Space’.  That’s seven years in before the show does a proper tentacular monster with real plot significance.

Apart from ‘Image of the Fendahl’ (which we’ll get to one day) and the Cyber-head in ‘The Pandorica Opens’, ‘Spearhead from Space’ is also the closest Doctor Who has ever come to merging or (horrid word coming up, but needs must…) juxtaposing the skull and the tentacle.  If you don’t know why I think that’s significant, please go back and read my other Skulltopus posts, starting here.

The Nestenes manifest as a tank full of tentacles…

Yes Jon, pull a comedy face and go cross-eyed.
That’s the perfect way to express mortal terror.

…inside which we can see a pulsing, vaguely obscene-looking anus/oesophagus/lung thing.  Meanwhile, the same story’s main images of the monstrous are unfinished-looking plastic replicas of human beings.  There is something faintly but definitely skull-like about their faces, especially when they’re not wearing wigs.

Note especially the empty eye-holes,
a detail lost in subsequent appearances.

If I were writing an Auton story now, my first priority would be the creation of a way for the tentacles and the plastic to co-reside in the same entity.  This never happens in ‘Spearhead’, but the Autons do stand and wait in the room where the Nestene tentacled thing hides.  At the end of the story, Channing reverts to a cruder Auton-form (once again making the Auton face skull-like, in that its appearance is linked to death in the more sophisticated Nestene replicas).  A line of green matter is spattered on the dead and reverted Channing’s plastic face.

Bless you.

This is the closest that the plastic gets to merging with the alien flesh.  The proximity of the plastic skull and the green organic squidgy creature is tantalising.

It Adds Up

Doctor Who – because of its (spurious) materialist/empiricist/educational remit – has a set of internal rules that generally make the explicitly supernatural off-limits.  The show tends to have been made with the intention of at least outwardly championing the Enlightenment values and certainties.  As I argued here, this self-imposed attempt to foreclose upon the supernatural guides the show towards material (and materialist) monsters.

However, owing to the converging influences of children’s fiction, mythological narrative (to which both SF and kid’s adventure fiction are much indebted) and the gothic (usually mediated through 20th century popular horror, most especially Universal and Hammer monster flicks), the show simultaneously inherits an underlying magical conception of reality and a tendency to make its monsters metaphorical and hauntological (if not usually spectral in the full sense), i.e. haunting us with the ‘repressed’.

Add the influence of ‘soft’ social SF literature, the prevailing ‘lefty liberal’ ethos among BBC creative types (which Barry Letts has spoken about) and the social context of pre-Thatcher Britain (in which there prevailed a broad ‘liberal’ socio-economic consensus), and you get a show that ends up representing this or that material nightmare of modernity in a great, mostly-liberal, allegorical morality play for kids.…

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Skulltopus 5: Fair Exchange, No Robbery

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Erato the Tythonian in ‘The Creature from the Pit’ doesn’t much resemble an octopus, but nevertheless he/it is a shapeless, amorphous creature that extends a probe which is (briefly) a bit tentacular… though this tends to be obscured by the fact that it also supposedly resembles a cock:

If this picture reminds you of your genitals,
seek immediate medical advice.

Neither seems to have been the writer’s intention.  Indeed, in the novelisation, it is specifically stated that “you couldn’t call it a tentacle”.  The probe is repeatedly described in terms of hands, fingers and fists.  As the story progresses, it becomes clear that Erato is meant to be a kind of giant, disembodied brain.

However, the probe is a long, flexible, green, non-humanoid limb… so let’s not fear to call it a quasi-tentacle, whatever Fisher says.

In any case, the Tythonian is – at least until it starts talking – reminiscent of the Weird… if only via its unstable and amorphous blobbiness.

In this post, I suggested that ‘Spearhead from Space’ erupts into tentacles at the end partly as a way of obscuring something else that is going on in the story, namely a convergence of various themes towards a potential critique of modern British capitalism as a system of hierarchy, racism, imperialism, sexism and exploitation.  (Click the link and read it if you think I’ve gone mad.)

I’m planning, in forthcoming posts, to suggest that Doctor Who in the 70s adopts the tentacular as a recurring way of simultaneously fleeing from and signifying capitalism.  There is a prelude to this: the Weirdish ab-crabs in ‘The Macra Terror‘.  There’s also a transitional story at the other end, just before the semiotic connection largely dies out in the 80s.  This transitional story is the final story of the 70s to feature the tentacular even as a suggestion.

Transitional Form

Philip Sandifer, at his TARDIS Eruditorum blog, has described ‘The Creature from the Pit’ as “a proper anti-capitalist screed”.  He describes Adrasta as “a selfish arch capitalist who is perfectly happy to thrive while everyone else suffers” and notes that Tat Wood and Lawrence Miles are wrong to write off as anachronistic the idea that Adrasta could’ve been intended as a Thatcher figure (the story was written during the election that she went on to win).  However, his argument is considerably more sophisticated than this and rests more especially on something he identifies in the script: the subversion of the (by now) standard Doctor Who ‘evil ruling class vs. rebels’ trope.  Sandifer identifies this story as coinciding with the great shift in the ‘centre ground’ of British politics that more-or-less coincided with the advent of Thatcherism.

The key thing is… the way in which both sides of an apparent political debate were in one sense indistinguishable because they both adhered to the same premise… [For example] the way in which the trade unions, Callaghan, and Thatcher all took for granted that maximizing profit was the right thing to do. The idea that they were opposing sides in many key ways serves more to cut other perspectives out of the debate entirely than it does to actually describe a fundamental philosophical difference between them.

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