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Doctor Who

Epics and Monsters

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Parts of the below were developed in conversation with Niki Haringsma, whose Black Archive on ‘Love & Monsters’ is forthcoming, and who was recently heard in conversation with El.  Again, I alone am to blame for the faults of what follows.

 

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So, contrary to those who feel it’s become ‘too PC’ (a misprision that is interesting by itself), Doctor Who these days looks increasingly like it is taking a reactionary turn – albeit one of a complex kind – as it seems to drift from being an “accidental critique of milquetoast liberalism” (as Kit Power put it) into an outright accomodation with the systems it has found itself unable to effectively struggle against.  This makes Chibnall’s show, in its own way, a mirror to Moffat’s, which was also deeply concerned with the limits of resistance to systems.  

This is a space for analysing the political attitude found in the content.  But there is also reason to look at what the form tells us, what it assumes, what it permits, etc.  As we’ve already talked about elsewhere, the form and content are actually inextricable.

Let’s take a detour into Brechtian ‘Epic Theatre’.    

Brecht’s theatre doesn’t aim to ‘resolve’ political questions even when it is morally and politically clear because – at least in his mind, and one is free to disagree with him – its moral and political project is an invitation to the audience to contemplate profound contradictions and problems in society.

The problem with bourgeois theatre, for Brecht (and he sees Lukacs as doing the same thing) is that it is “afraid of production”, i.e. it hides it.  Realist theatre (Ibsen, Strindberg, etc) tries to create an illusion of realism, an empathic connection with the characters, which not only smooths over social contradictions but also masks production itself.  (Modern TV, which strives to look cinematic, arguably does this same thing far more than old-school TV, which was often more-or-less televised theatre.)  Brecht dislikes this as a Marxist, and one with a particular emphasis on production as fundamental to social existence (an emphasis which I personally think is quite proper for a Marxist, but which is sadly lacking from much actual Marxism). 

It is this masking of production which, perhaps more than anything else for Brecht, creates the bourgeois illusion of fixity which he aims to dispel.  Epic Theatre concentrates on production both in terms of how people actually produce history and in terms of how theatre itself is produced.  This coherence is, paradoxically, a key way in which it aims to reveal social contradictions.

The irony is that modern Doctor Who is arguably a lot less like Epic Theatre in this sense than most classic Who manages to be by accident!  Classic Who is arguably far more concerned with political issues (re society and history) than New Who.  But it also accidentally estranges the audience by highlighting its own processes of production, simply by virtue of its production values being so shoddy that it inadvertently showcases them!

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Empires and Metaphors

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As noted last time, through its strategy – deliberate or not – of eloquent silence, ‘Demons of the Punjab’ almost says that Partition represents the British in India killing millions.  It establishes that the British are the ones drawing lines and then running away.  Later, the Thijarians say “Millions will die.” The episode aligns the parts of a statement… but never quite joins them up.

In a way this is fair enough, since the statement it never quite makes is both true and an oversimplification. Like many simple truths, it is one important part of a complex reality.   It is true that the British authorities didn’t mean to cause the horrors of Partition, didn’t themselves take part in the atrocities, and didn’t foresee them. It is true that most of the violence was committed by Indians attacking other Indians.  It is true that there has been – both before and after Partition – plenty of violence between Hindus, Muslims, and the other ethnicities in India.  It is true that intractable political arguments and gameplay between the Indian parties – mainly Congress and the Muslim League – helped stymie British attempts to avoid Partition.  It is true that the Muslims had real and understandable concerns about their future in a Hindu-dominated independent India, not least because of fascistic Hindu movements, with which some upper-caste Hindus in the nationalist movement had ties.  Such fascistic elements were involved in organising the violence of Partition as we saw last time. 

(Sadly, India today is still cursed with such things.  India’s current Prime Minister, Modi, is the authoritarian leader of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a right-wing Hindu nationalist party, and a member of the BJP’s ‘core cadre’, the right-wing paramilitary Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).  There are terrifying concerns about the rise of state-sponsored, racist, right-wing authoritarianism in India today that most of us here in the West have, with Eurocentric purblindness, failed to pay enough attention to as we gaze with horror at our domestic monsters as if they’re the only ones that matter.  For more about the RSS, their foundational role in Modi’s politics, their involvement in the violence of Partition, and their connections to Congress, please see here.  I’m indebted for this link, and for other suggestions, to TobermorianSass via the ever-wonderful Sam Keeper.)

All that being said, it is also the case that the explosion of violence and displacement in Partition was foreseeable, and that the inevitability was there for the British to see and understand, had they only cared to do so, or ever bothered to install a proper government in India, as opposed to a vast system of bureaucracy designed to give lucrative careers to English public school boys.  Mountbatten – a well-meaning but vain and ostentatious man who made a fetish of decisiveness – recklessly brought forward the date of Partition by about ten months so that it would happen on the anniversary of him accepting the surrender of Japanese forces in Asia. Even so, the timetable he was given was already rushed.…

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Demons and Silences

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The historian Yasmin Khan, who wrote a book about the Partition of India that Vinay Patel, the writer of ‘Demons of the Punjab’, has tweeted about having read as research, wrote that the Partition is “a history layered with absence and silences”.

Yes, her name is Yasmin Khan.   

What does that mean?  Does it mean anything?  We must simply add this to the list of questions ‘Demons of the Punjab’ raises, or almost raises, and then remains silent about. 

‘Demons of the Punjab’ is an episode haunted by silences.  Pregnant, eloquent silences. I don’t know if this is deliberate, in the sense of being a conscious strategy on the part of the people who made it.  Whether this matters is itself a question to consider.

The first pregnant, eloquent silence comes very near the start, when the elderly Umbreen remarks that she was “the first Muslim woman to work in a textile mill in South Yorkshire”.  This follows her remark, itself news to Yaz, that she was the first woman married in Pakistan. Umbreen has been very silent for a long time.

Contrary to myth and apologia, India before the British came was a wealthy, thriving country.  According to Shashi Tharoor in his book Inglorious Empire, “At the beginning of the eighteenth century, as the British economic historian Angus Maddison has demonstrated, India’s share of the world economy was 23 per  cent, as large as all of Europe put together”.

As he goes on to say:

Britain’s Industrial Revolution was built on the destruction of India’s thriving manufacturing industries. Textiles were an emblematic case in point: the British systematically set about destroying India’s textile manufacturing and exports, substituting Indian textiles by British ones manufactured in England. Ironically, the British used Indian raw material and exported the finished products back to India and the rest of the world, the industrial equivalent of adding insult to injury.

The British destruction of textile competition from India led to the first great deindustrialization of the modern world.

It is tempting to quote Tharoor’s devastating description of the cynical and violent methods by which this was achieved at length… but it would be hard to know where to begin or stop.  People who want the grisly details can read his book. (I highly recommend it. I have nitpicks with Tharoor, but overall his book is a brilliant and accessible introduction to the forgotten horrors of the British Empire in India, as well as a demolition of the more popular apologias.)

Britain’s industrial revolution was funded by the deindustrialisation of India, and textiles were a big part of how and why it worked.  (As we know, the British textile business was also dependant upon cotton produced by slaves in the Americas.)

By the way, another industry at which the pre-colonial Indians excelled as steel production.  The British hijacked that too, having destroyed the Indian industry. Sheffield became best known as a British centre of steel production, becoming known as ‘the steel city’.  Lest we imagine that ‘the British’ benefited from this as an abstract category, it’s worth remembering how “extraordinarily injurious” the work of being a steel-grinder in the Sheffield cutlery industry was, as Engels put it in his 1844 book The Condition of the Working Class in England.…

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Fragile Talons, Part 2: Colonies in Space

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“There has never been a document of culture, which is not simultaneously one of barbarism. Not even Doctor Who.”

– Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’ (quoted from memory)

 

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Where was I?

Oh yeah, it’s unfair to pick on ‘Talons of Weng-Chiang’ for being racist because all Doctor Who is racist.

So what do I mean by that?

Well, I don’t just mean that there are lots of stories in Doctor Who that contain implicit or explicit racist ideas, representations, or implications … though it does, and it might be worth going through some of them.

There’s ‘An Unearthly Child’, for instance, which associates ‘tribal’ life with brutishness and savagery, and suggests that tribal people need to be taught concepts like friendship and cooperation by enlightened Western liberals from technologically advanced societies… as if, historically, enlightened Western liberals from technologically advanced societies haven’t been the ones slaughtering tribal peoples.  Native peoples, by the way, know what friendship and cooperation are. Sometimes better than us. And we are talking about native peoples in ‘Unearthly’. Because of Europeans’ historic encounters with native peoples as European imperialism and colonialism spread across the globe, we’ve come to associate the notion of tribal people – if we accept that word and what it connotes – with people of colour. And such people, after initial encounters (often amiable), became conveniently reconstructed in the ideological thoughtworld of European imperialism and colonialism as, to borrow Kipling’s phrase, “half devil and half child”.  This couplet neatly describes the Tribe of Gum, and shows them to be imagined out of the imperialist ideological tradition. Even if, in an alternative reading, they are the descendants of the people of the 1960s after a nuclear holocaust, they are still a picture of humanity in a savage ‘state of nature’, itself part of the same ideological tradition.

This is a very early indication of the complexity of the issue.  Without any overt racial statement or coding, the very first story is found to be an ideological product of a racist tradition arising from imperialism and colonialism.

Then there’s ‘The Daleks’, an almost immediate engagement on the part of the show with something that will continue to be one of its running fixations: the metaphorical representation of Nazism.  This story introduces the show’s ubermensch uber-villains, well understood to be metaphorical Nazis, with their creed of racial supremacy and their cries of “Exterminate!” (though they don’t actually do that in their debut), and takes a more or less explicit anti-racist line on its surface.  It goes beyond a conventional post-war British triumphalism and explicitly associates Nazism with racism… or at least with its own understanding of racism as a form of parochialism, which chimes with a certain way of interpreting post-Windrush tension in the UK. The irony is that, almost behind its own back, this is a story in which “perfect”, virtuous, blonde, volkisch, Aryan, supermen-farmers are forced to fight a race of evil, mechanically-ingenious, wealth-hoarding, subterranean dwarves who threaten their culture.…

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Fragile Talons, Part 1: Of Its Time

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Thanks to the various people who looked over this and made suggestions, especially Holly.  The mistakes are, of course, mine alone.

This post was originally going to have the alternative title ‘Why I’m No Longer Talking to Doctor Who Fans About Race’ but Andrew Rilstone got there before me, damn his eyes.  Seriously, go read Andrew’s post because it’s excellent.  Amongst other things, he looks directly at the arguments put forward in Marcus Hearn’s Doctor Who Magazine editorial.  Which is, of course, what started this.

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We live in a strange world.  I’m being told, on the one hand, that Jeremy Corbyn, the most consistently and committedly anti-racist MP in the Commons, is an antisemite, and, on the other, that ‘Talons of Weng-Chiang’, a story in which a Fu Manchu style villain – played by a white actor in rubber ‘yellowface’ – abducts white women with the help of a Tong of “opium sodden” Chinese cultists working out of Limehouse, isn’t racist.  You just know, don’t you, that some professional Doctor Who hacks are convinced that Corbyn, if elected, would institute Britain’s very own reenactment of the Final Solution, but will also quibble with you over whether or not Julius Silverstein, the rich, greedy, grasping, paranoid collector in ‘The Web of Fear’ is problematic or not.

Gee, it’s almost like there is something profoundly, foundationally wrong with our discourse on the subject of race and racism.  The problems in Doctor Who fandom are a tiny – if microcosmic – part of this wider problem.  But Doctor Who fandom is one of the places I come from.  And they picked on my friend. So here we are. 

I won’t say much about the specifics of the kerfuffle which led me to write this.  Apart from anything else, it’s just another irruption of the same running argument that Doctor Who fans have been having about ‘Talons of Weng-Chiang’ for quite some time.  El and I, both veterans of Gallifrey Base, were together involved in at least one previous such irruption a few years ago, during which some forum posters – and I shit you not – actually stated that they felt John Bennett’s make-up was realistic.  As I noted at the time, being bothered by the rat but not by the yellowface is one thing, but

it’s yet another quantum leap to the point where you find the rat unconvincing but not the yellowface.  And you’re prepared to say so in public.  This reveals a shameless thoughtlessness, a terrifying absence of self-examination, an arrogance born of privilege.  And it also seems to reveal a willingness not simply to be unconcerned by the monstering of a whole race of people, not simply to delude yourself that its not happening in the text (because you’ve never bothered to avail yourself of the myriad opportunities now freely available to anyone with internet access to educate yourself about how representations of people work in the texts you consume) but to actually think that the representations (of, say, Chinese people as expressionless, rubberfaced bogeymen) are accurate and true to life.

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Pandorica Opens Commentary

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Hello everyone.  This week it’s audio time.  Again.

Firstly, here’s a commentary I recorded with our esteemed site editor on ‘The Pandorica Opens’. Yes, we finally did it.

We had a lot of fun recording this, and I’m sure you’ll enjoy listening to it.

If things go according to plan, our commentary on ‘The Big Bang’ will be dropping next week. In true Moffatian tradition, our resolution to our own cliffhanger will entail a narrative substitution.

Then I’ll be back to my ruminations on Ron Paul, the Austrian School, Murray Rothbard, libertarianism, and the alt-Right.  People who give me as little as a dollar a month on Patreon can get instant and exclusive advance access to the next five posts in this series.  Also, I will be finishing my trilogy of posts about ‘Last Jedi’ at some point – promise.  My Patreon sponsors will probably get advance access to that as well.

In other audio news, Wrong With Authority has produced two new podcast episodes I haven’t yet told you about here.

There was this commentary that Kit, Daniel, and I recorded on original Ghostbusters (a real giggle, this one), and this full WWA episode the whole gang recorded on Mel Gibson’s Braveheart.  Och aye, etc.

Our next WWA episode – of my choosing and hosting – will be on Anonymous, giving me the opportunity to fulminate over one of my silly bugbears: Anti-Stratfordianism.  Between this and the Austrian School, it seems I’m doomed to obsess over irrational reactionary narratives with the initials AS.  Autism Speaks next, as suggested by Erin Horáková on Twitter.

Happy listening. 

And watch the site for big announcements.

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The Pilot Review

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I’ll confess, I went into this with no small amount of pessimism. It was hard (and still is, really) to imagine Moffat crafting a better way to go out than Series Nine. Sherlock felt so utterly tired and creatively spent that it became easy to fear that Moffat was simply done. The Return of Doctor Mysterio was neither here nor there. So it was easy to assume that we were already past the peak in terms of what I wanted out of Moffat writing Doctor Who. And with the sure to be frustrating Chibnall era looming, well, my excitement’s definitely short of 100%. None of that’s changed based on The Pilot. That’s not to say I didn’t like the episode or anything. It was fun; in no way a classic, but Moffat’s season-openers generally aren’t. It’s just a sort of necessary bit of context. My initial setting here is cautious engagement.

And perhaps more to the point, that feels like the mood. I’ve been thinking about the Capaldi stretch of TARDIS Eruditorum, which I reckon will happen in 2018, Patreon willing. And obviously, there’s a Pop Between Realities on Brexit and the awful Doctor Who-less shitstorm that was 2016. I don’t think there’s been as obvious a Pop Between Realities since Jekyll. Which implicitly asks the question “what does it mean to do Doctor Who in the age of Brexit and Trump,” which is of course an awful question in the same way that “what does it mean to do Doctor Who after 9/11” was, but it’s a real one that asks itself, stupid and trite as it is. And of course there’s never been an era of Doctor Who that’s up to that task any more than there was one that was up to any other vast cultural task one sets upon a fucking kid’s show, but it’s worth saying, all the same, that the fandom mood going into The Pilot was not exactly one that seemed to think Moffat was going to acquit himself particularly well in those terms.

Let’s start with the title, then, with all its contradictions. On the one hand, an overt promise of newness, actively flagging the episode as a jumping on point. On the other hand, the paratext of Doctor Who never drops out. The writer, lead actor, and probably both members of the supporting cast are all going away in twelve episodes and the show is getting a complete overhaul. It’s the beginning, but the moment has been prepared for.

Within the context of this self-consciously late period reinvention the focus drifts naturally to Bill, who is the actual primary focus of this episode. Broadly speaking, she’s a solid creation. The companion who knows sci-fi tropes is one of those ideas that’s simultaneously obvious and never actually been done, and Moffat’s approach to it, whereby she knows tropes as opposed to making specific references, is a good way of keeping it from falling into most of the more blatant traps of the concept.…

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The Circle in the Square (Doctor Who)

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(Content note: This post references childhood sexual abuse, the objectifying male gaze, and the repression and processing of traumatic events in general.)

Given that, let’s start with something really abstract.  A symbol, and a pretty basic one as far as symbols go.  A circle, circumscribed by a square.  Simple geometry.  And the Circle in the Square is by no means a hugely important or influential symbol in Western esoterica – it’s minor enough to take some digging to uncover, and what’s uncovered isn’t exactly consistent.  Which, you know, is kind of part and parcel for abstract symbols. 

The first thing that might come to mind is a problem of geometry – “squaring the circle” refers to creating a square of the same area as a given circle, using a finite number of steps with only a compass and a straightedge.  It was eventually mathematically demonstrated to be an impossible problem, which is actually kind of delightful given the subsequent esoteric usages — for if such fusion is technically impossible, its success is necessarily transcendent, pointing to Ascension. Anyways, in basic symbolism, the Circle represents the infinite, the cyclical, the eternal, totality and perfection.  The Square, on the other hand, represents material reality, the four corners of the earth, and subsequent limitation.  As such, the Circle in the Square can represent a “union of opposites,” if you wish, or at the very least the immanence of the divine. 

This basic analysis makes sense of the Masonic use of the symbol – and we should note that the primary symbol of Masonry consists of a square-edge and compass, used for making squares and circles.  Anyways, as W.L. Wilmshurst describes in his 1922 book The Meaning of Masonry, “Deity, symbolized by the all-containing circle, has attained form and manifestation in a ‘square’ or human soul.  It expresses the mystery of the Incarnation, accomplished within the personal soul.”  This, we should note, isn’t just divine immanence (as opposed to a Manichean separation of the earthly and the sacred), but is specifically rooted in the human experience. Wilmshurst goes on to liken the metaphorical squaring of the circle to a kind of “regeneration,” an “ascension into heaven” that accompanies the “necessity of self-dying—not, we repeat, the physical death of the body but a mystical death-in-life of everything except the body” which is fundamental to understanding the esoteric mysteries.

There are also sources like Elliott Wolfson’s Circle in the Square, which delves into the symbolism of the Kabbalah, and specifically into its gender implications.  According to Wolfson, the Circle (with its curviness and suggestion of a hole) actually symbolizes the female, while the Square symbolizes the male, with the placement of one in the other not only suggesting union (alchemical or otherwise) but a particular hierarchical relationship. 

And yet, despite such inconsistencies and problematic implications, there’s nonetheless the same underlying principle at work, namely the integration of what are seemingly, if not opposites, non-overlapping magisteria.  Which is not unlike what Doctor Who does for a living – namely, smashing together disparate genres in new and interesting ways. …

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Creature from the Black Lagoon

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Last week we talked about the expression of the Beautiful throughout the history of Doctor Who, and gleaned different kinds of aesthetics employed by the show in the process – from awe at new, strange places… to the banal objectification of women… to an almost ritualized praise of monsters in the modern era.  And it’s this latter sense of beauty that I find most interesting, given how monsters are now used in Doctor Who, especially in the Moffat era.  Because monsters are no longer just villainous plot devices for generating scares.  Quite often they are secret protagonists, and weighted with symbolic value, especially when juxtaposed with our main characters such that they become telling metaphors.  This latter process I call the “monstering” of a character, and of particular interest to me is how Amy Pond becomes consistently monstered during her time on the show.

But what does it mean “to be monstered?”  What does that look like?  And how unique is it to the modern era?  To answer those questions, I’ll step briefly back into the past, to The Android Invasion, aa 4th Doctor story with Sarah Jane in Season 13.  In The Android Invasion the Doctor and Sarah Jane have landed on an alien planet that looks like Earth, but it isn’t Earth, it’s the staging ground for an alien invasion that will use android duplicates of certain Earthlings, which is pretty standard Doctor Who fare when you think of it.  Anyways, there’s this great cliffhanger where Sarah Jane has been replaced by an android duplicate, only the Doctor has figured it out and attacks her, wrestling her to the ground.  Her face falls off, revealing so much circuitry. 

Yes, this the best moment in the otherwise fairly dreadful tale (it was written by Terry Nation, for gods’ sakes), but it’s also freighted with some potentially interesting literary readings.  First of all, Sarah Jane isn’t the only android duplicate – there’s some regular UNIT personnel, and even the Doctor, all monstered by androids.  It’s uncanny because we see characters we’ve known as “good” behaving in ways that are “not good,” which is rather transgressive.  Aside from that, though, there’s the opportunity for the nature of the particular monster to inform us about our characters’ natures.  This works particularly well in the monstering of Benton and Harry – they’re programmatic characters.  Sadly, Terry Nation is not a particularly writerly writer, as the monstering of both the Doctor and Sarah Jane really don’t say much about them at all – well, unless we stretch it a bit.  For example, Sarah Jane’s role as a Companion is often programmatic, from assisting in asking questions for the audience to serving as a plot device.  And even the Doctor, well, it’s a role that could be (and has been) played by all kinds of performers, such that he doesn’t even have a real face anymore. 

Contrast this with the monstering of Amy in Night Terrors.  In Night Terrors, we see Amy transformed into a deadly Wooden Doll, the product of a child’s nightmare, a child who’s afraid of being abandoned. …

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You’re a Beautiful Woman, Probably

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I’ve been thinking about doing another essay on monstering in Doctor Who, especially with regards to Amy Pond, but it occurs to me that this would really benefit in hindsight of a full survey on the show’s conception of beauty.  Which is to say, I think the process of “monstering” is part and parcel of the modern show’s aesthetics, and what better way to explore those aesthetics than to come to some sort of understanding of the place where the Beautiful stands within it?  Well, there’s probably several other better ways, but when it comes to Amy Pond, I think “beauty” isn’t a bad place to start.  Not because Karen Gillan is classically beautiful, but because the character she plays actually articulates a philosophy of beauty that I find altogether more interesting:

WARRIOR AMY: All those boys chasing me, but it was only ever Rory. Why was that?
AMY: You know when sometimes you meet someone so beautiful, and then you actually talk to them, and five minutes later they’re as dull as a brick? Then there’s other people, and you meet them and think, “Not bad, they’re okay.” And then you get to know them, and their face just sort of becomes them, like their personality’s written all over it. And they just turn into something so beautiful.
BOTH: Rory’s the most beautiful man I’ve ever met.

Which kind of gets where I’m going with this idea, namely that we have multiple conceptions of beauty, which we can roughly bifurcate into those predicated on appearances, and those predicated on interiority.  This is actually a false dichotomy, which we’ll get to later on, but for now this represents the axis I want to explore, especially when we get to the Revival.  Anyways, what I’ve done is look for instances of the word “beautiful” and its variants within the show’s dialogue.  This was done using a blanket google site search on Chrissie’s Doctor Who transcripts at chakoteya.com, coupled with individual searches of all the remaining Revival episodes, plus City of Death, for as it turns out google site search isn’t as thorough as I’d hoped.  As such, I’ve haven’t thoroughly surveyed all the Classic stories, so if you remember any pertinent lines from something not covered here, please say so in the comments.

Now obviously this isn’t going to fully capture what the show actually finds beautiful. Dialogue, after all, is more reflective of the characters speaking it, and as such certainly can’t represent the implied authors of Doctor Who. Still, for a character to conceive of something as being beautiful, the implied authors have to conceive of it too, even if they might disagree.  Which is to say, there’s still an acknowledgment of a kind of beauty that someone can behold.  Furthermore, it’s much more difficult to pin down an acknowledgement of  “beauty” without being explicitly told.  Not impossible, no – for example, the production cues of Doomsday, when Rose is finally torn from the Doctor through their last moments on the beach, clearly flag an understanding of tragic beauty, whether it’s from the score or the location design or just from the story itself. …

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