kamelion

July 9, 2011

The Real McCoy and the Forgotten (Sacrificial) Lambs

Jack Grahambattlefield, delta and the bannermen, feminism, gods, greatest show in the galaxy, happiness patrol, kamelion, modernism, paradise towers, peri, social darwinism, stalinism, survival, thatcherism, the master, turlough3

I continue to round up my Timelash II stuff with these bits ‘n’ bobs about the McCoy years. There will eventually be separate posts on some of the ‘big hitters’ left out below.

Paradise Towers

Very Whoish ideas. Lots of clever use of language, from the street names to the slang which incorporates degenerated formal rules, to the Caretaker lingo full of subsections and codes, etc.

It suffers from ‘Mysterious Planet’ disease in that the production looks good but nothing looks right.

Mel’s apparently monomaniacal fixation upon the swimming pool is decidedly odd. But, if you approach this as children’s television (which is clearly what it thinks it is) then you can enjoy it as a surprisingly sophisticated story about social entropy.

Brings to mind Le Corbusier and his notion of houses as “machines for living in”… which always had a tinge of the authoritarian about it, amidst all the utopianism of early 20th century modernism (which also always had a hidden inner core of mysticism beneath all the pseudo-rational stright lines, etc). The insistence upon a buried notion of virtue (you had to be a certain kind of healthy, high-minded, thin, modern-minded, puritanical person to live in a gleaming white box with glass walls) leads to a kind of disillusion, a bit like the contempt felt by Kroagnon. The modernists (Mies, for example) got chased out by their shadowy reflections in the utopian, mystical, ‘modern’, puritanical Nazi party and ended up creating gigantic monuments to corporate capitalism in Chicago. The cleaners seem to represent the intersection of these ideas, rounding up the “human garbage”, the unwanted elements, the uncontrolled human detritus that ruins the idealistic/totalitarian perfection embodied in the architecture.

I don’t like the ending, with all the antagonistic social groups suddenly realising they don’t hate each other after all and making friends. Even the Daily Maily Rezzies turn out to be mostly nice, with only two of them being murdering cannibals.

Delta and the Bannermen

Dispiriting. So ill judged, so clashing that you can’t even laugh at it.

Loud, multi-coloured, sequin-covered, self-consciously zany, folksy and naff… yet there is something melancholic, even quietly apocalyptic about watching this.

You are watching Doctor Who die. The show that gave us ‘Genesis of the Daleks’ is dying. In a puddle of Diet Coke. It’s like watching George Orwell being kicked to death by Mr Blobby and the Krankies.

This taste malfunction carries over into the heart of the story itself. It’s a story about genocidal racism… set in a holiday camp and starring light entertainers. It’s like the Eichmann trial being held in Toys R Us. It’s like a bright green water pistol filled with orphans’ tears. It’s like being murdered by being force-fed party balloons.

My god, it hurts.

The Happiness Patrol

I just love this story. Last time I put it on, I spent the whole 75 minutes giggling, grinning, cheering and clapping like a loon.

This is a liberal attack on Thatcherism as a psycho-cultural style… but it also notices that Thatcherism’s rhetoric about personal liberty was pure hypocrisy.…

July 6, 2011

Getting into a Lava

Jack Grahamcolonialism, fiona cumming, freudianism, kamelion, next doctor, nicola bryant, peri, peter grimwade, planet of fire, poison sky, religion, season 21, the master, turlough, voyage of the damned0

Posting this for something to do. It’s a tweaked version of something I originally wrote for Shockeye’s Kitchen. It’s been rewritten to be more politically correct.

Several of the characters in ‘Planet of Fire’ are orphans (either literally or figuratively). Turlough and Malkon are literal orphans. You can look at the Sarns as the orphans of the vanished Trion colony. Peri also seems like an orphan in some ways. Her father is absent (dead?). She tells her stepfather Howard of her plan to travel to Morocco but doesn’t appear to have any plans to tell her mother about it. She goes to Howard for support and money, not to her mother. But Howard is too close to Peri’s age to properly serve as a father figure. Moreover, Peri seems attracted to him; she flirts with him by talking about “the God of love and fertility” and obliquely refers to the fact that he goes around displaying his washboard. Her decision to bunk off to North Africa with a couple of guys she’s just met is obviously a bid for Howard’s attention. Feverish after her brush with death, Peri has an intense dream about Howard abandoning her – a dream so powerful that it causes Kamelion to adopt Howard’s form.

(BTW, I dunno where this thing about Howard abusing her came from but there’s precisely zilch in the televised story that either suggests or supports that reading.)

Talking of Kamelion, he’s actually a kind of nexus where the story’s themes meet.

He’s another orphan. Like the ancient artefacts that Howard and Curt dredge up from the sea, like the crumbling buildings and technology of the Trion colony on Sarn, Kamelion is an artefact left behind by a decaying civilisation riven with internal conflict. Kamelion is being torn apart from within by conflicting influences and allegiances… just like Turlough and Malkon. Just as Turlough fights his inner tendencies towards cowardice and selfishness, just as Malkon fights the orthodox conditioning of Timanov, so Kamelion fights his connection to the Master. Kamelion’s inner struggle takes the outer form of a literal struggle for identity, for form.

The fractured families depicted in the story mirror the fractured social connections. Sarn is a decayed Trion colony. The planet’s society and geology are both running amok because the Trions are no longer there to control either. The Trions used technology to control the volcano and siphon off the power of the numismaton gas (just like all colonial masters, their primary interest was in the theft of natural resources). Without this control the volcano becomes periodically unstable and the Sarns use myth to explain it. Sarn was a convenient place for the Trions to dump their unwanted elements (like Australia for the British Empire). Religion was probably used by the Trions from the outset. The tales of Logar took on their own life in the ruins left by the Trion withdrawal, much as Roman religious practices degenerated into new cults once the legions departed Britain. The Sarn legends of Logar, the Chosen Ones and the Outsiders are corrupted memories of Trion activity – vulcanology, arriving spaceships, etc.…