logopolis

November 19, 2013

11

Jack Graham50th anniversary countdown, capitalism, commodification, crisis, entropy, imperialism, logopolis, modernity, rubbish, SF, war1

Adric has found the Doctor sulking in the TARDIS cloisters. The Doctor has lost Romana and K9. He’s feeling his age. His ship seems to be falling apart too. The stone pillars, overrun with vines, crumble under his fingers. And, to cap it off, Adric wants to be taken back to Gallifrey.

“I sometimes think I should be running a tighter ship,” he says sadly.

“A tighter ship?” gasps Adric, as though this is a threatening notion.

“Yes. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is taking its toll on the old thing. Entropy increases.”

“Entropy increases?”

“Yes, daily. The more you put things together, the more they keep falling apart. That’s the essence of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and I never heard a truer word spoken.”

It’s only fitting that the Doctor should fight one of his most elemental battles against omnipresent entropy. The Doctor has encountered entropy many times on his travels. The Tribe of Gum were dangerous because their world was dying in the cold, all heat drained away. The Moroks froze entropy in an attempt to freeze their own declining imperial history. Skaro was a petrified jungle, everything “turned to sand and ashes”. Later, the same planet was depicted as a wasteland, with technology evolving in reverse as the Thals and Kaleds fought a backwards war of attrition. The Exxilons built a city that sucked all life and vitality out of their civilisation. Skagra tried to fight entropy by subjecting all life to his will, thus turning the universe into a machine for constructing more and more structure. The Argolin were sterile, living on a desolated world. The Melkur came to the Keeper’s walled garden and started breeding blights and weeds. The Doctor even comes from a world that has stalled entropy forever, only to find itself socially entropic. Entropy has always been implicitly unbiquitous in the Doctor’s universe. Just as he notices it nibbling away at the TARDIS, it becomes explicitly unbiquitous.

SF is obsessed with entropy because SF is one of the cultural products most peculiar to modernity. Modernity is, essentially, the condition of the rise and triumph of capitalism. Capitalism is entropic. Like the Master, it ‘generates’ entropy.

SF expresses the dizzying possibilities of modernity in terms of space travel and time travel. It is not ‘scientific’ but it would be unthinkable without science. The language of science is the language it uses to reiterate the old myths and legends of death and decay and eternity. It is, perhaps, the quintessential genre of modernity. It is how fiction tackles the “relationship of man to his tools” in a modern, capitalist age when the tools have become powerful enough to destroy worlds and (seemingly) think for themselves. SF keeps coming back to the hyper-destructive violence of high-tech war. It keeps coming back to the end of the world, the post-apocalyptic wasteland. It keeps coming back to stalled and tottering dystopias. It keeps coming back to the malfunctioning of technology, its unintended by-products, the machines that kill and ruin.…

November 10, 2011

Nice Guy, Nasty Cosmos

Jack Grahamarc of infinity, black orchid, castrovalva, caves of androzani, five doctors, four to doomsday, frontios, king's demons, logopolis, resurrection of the daleks, snakedance, twin dilemma, warriors of the deep0

The great Timelash II rehash finally hobbles to a close. Here’s the last roundup. Seasons 19-21.

Castrovalva

This is a story, like ‘Logopolis’, that achieves greatness despite its many flaws. Flaws first:

“Take your hands off me – this is an official uniform!” and “We’re perfectly harmless, unfortunately!”

Seriously… who the hell talks like that? I can forgive “I know so little about telebiogenesis” because Nyssa is an alien scientist child prodigy aristocrat. But Tegan is supposed to be a down-to-earth working woman. And, on that subject, it becomes abundantly clear during this story that the programme makers aren’t going to exploit the contrast between the two characters’ backgrounds and attitudes for interesting dramatic conflict. Nor are they going to milk the business of the Master inhabiting Nyssa’s father’s body for dramatic potential either… though, to her great credit, Sarah Sutton is still trying to use her face to express anguish at the Master’s appearance.

Ainley, it need hardly be said, excels as the delightful Portreeve (channelling Olivier to the point that it becomes beside-the-point that it’s always obvious who he is) but suddenly goes crap when called upon to play an obtuse, snarling Dick Dastardly. At times, when playing the Master at the end, Ainley moves and looks like no-one other than Groucho Marx (my second favourite Marx, as it happens… but there’s a time and place for everything). As in ‘Logopolis’, we needed a better villain. It seems hardly credible that a dunce like this Master could devise a trap of such subtlety and beauty as Castrovalva, let alone characters like Ruther and Mergrave. (One can only assume that they come as much from Adric as from his captor.) Ironically enough, we’re meant to be wrong-footed into suspecting Shardovan of villainy… because he’s a villain stereotype in black clothes and a black moustache.

The first two episodes are a bit of a trudge. There are lots of good bits, but they could easily be condensed into one episode. Again, Bidmead makes the TARDIS into an almost metaphysical space, a peculiar and vaguely-sinister labyrinth with healing rooms that smell of roses, rooms that can be ‘deleted’ as though the whole structure exists as data on a hard drive, rooms that seem to have been placed in the Doctor’s way by the TARDIS itself (to help provide him with a new identity) and medicine chests with Alice in Wonderland-style bottles inside marked ‘The Potion’, ‘The Ointment’ and ‘The Solution’. “Ah my little friend… if only you were!” Gorgeous.

Sadly, the business with the TARDIS being sent back to the hydrogen inrush is a bit of a mcguffin… and, again, as in ‘Logopolis’, Bidmead feels the need to have characters naming and explaining this story’s Big Theme to each other… just in case we miss it when it pops up. Having said that, the business with the Index File being listed in the Index File under Index File is very clever, both conceptually and linguistically. But the second half of Episode Two, featuring Tegan and Nyssa slowly carrying a box through a (admittedly beautiful) forest, is possibly the most boring thing ever committed to film.…

November 9, 2011

Things Fall Apart

Jack Grahamchristopher h bidmead, entropy, evolution, fedualism, full circle, idealism, John Nathan-Turner, keeper of traken, leisure hive, logopolis, mao, materialism, meglos, racism, season 18, state of decay1

Here’s a round-up of my Timelash II on Season 18. I was holding this (and some of the stuff about Seasons 19-21) back because I was going to rework it into something bigger, but that isn’t happening (too much else to do), so…

The Leisure Hive

Bidmead’s script tinkerings somewhat dilute the essential idea of a leisure planet in favour of wannabe-big-conceptual stuff… which is pretty dull and lumbering, if we’re honest.

The planet fails to convince as a leisure resort, which kind of undercuts all the lengths they go to to stress that the whole race have become employees of a going concern. All that boardroom stuff where they discuss investments suddenly looks redundant. What’s it there to contextualise?

The stylistic overhaul is huge, ambitious and largely successful. There’s a new willingness to try stuff out. They’re happy to go all dark and quiet during the scene where Timson is stalked by the West Lodge Foamasi. I particularly like the slow, melancholy opening.

Mind you, the seeds of the later-80s problems are already visible. The Doctor is now wearing a uniform, etc.

The politics is weird. The war was about… what? Argolin militarism? So, their response to their catastrophic defeat was to become capitalists specialising in leisure? Umm, okay… And their enemies, who now want peace, are apparently statists who have outlawed “private enterprise”… apart from a kind of mafia faction… er… Y’know, it’s potentially good stuff but, somehow, it fails to fit together.

It’s darn good as a first attempt at an overhaul of the basic dramatic and aesthetic values of a show in decline… but we’ll have to wait until ‘Full Circle’ before they get it to work.

You wouldn’t think this was the start of one of my absolute favourite seasons, would you?

Meglos

This is daft. But I have to confess to having a seriously soft spot for it.

There are some good ideas buried in there. The Dodecahedron makes me think of Kepler, and his obsession with the perfect shapes that he thought contained the secrets of the universe… which was a conflict within him between science and mysticism which he sought unsuccessfully to reconcile… the problem is that the nearest thing to such a character in the story is Zastor, who’s hardly there at all.

Some of the music is great. The Screens have an impressive monumentalism to their design. They suggest (to me anyway) some ruined statue of Ozymandias lying rusting in the silicon desert of the real.

Sadly we have a silly jungle planet too. And someone who wants to run the universe for no particular reason.

Also, we have casual racism in the casting: the Gaztaks are multi-racial because they’re a band of criminals. Of course, I realise this happens because they’re pirates… and pirates were supposedly (I know next to nothing about the actual history of pirates) a multi-racial bunch… but this also explains why there are no black Tigellans… which underlines the fact that, in this story, normality is civil society and civil society (i.e.…