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Reviewing Doctor Who Episodes Without Having Watched Them: ‘Robots of Sherwood’

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I saw ‘Deep Breath’ and ‘Into the Dalek’.  Then I stopped watching Series 8.  Welcome to the first in a new series of posts in which I will be revewing the rest of Series 8 without having watched it.

Mark Gatiss, that arch-trickster of modern Doctor Who, has done it again.  In ‘Robots of Sherwood’ he has managed to dupe everyone into thinking he is doing nothing more than simply paying homage to the classic series, while actually flying something far more profound under the fan radar.  Yes, he has armies of robotic Merry Men stalking around Sherwood Forest, their eyes glowing red, holding out their hands and saying “Kill the humans” in calm voices, but that’s where the similarities to ‘Robots of Death’ end.  For a start, these robotic outlaws are the good guys, cleansing the greenwood of the forces of law and order.

The triumvirate of villains in this episode – the Sheriff of Nottingham, Sir Guy de Gisbourne and King John – represent the power of the Norman state, and Robin Hood is a symbol of Saxon resistance.  It’s fitting that they should use a CGI Patrick Troughton to play Robin, since the Second Doctor was always the most anarchic and rebellious, and there’s always been something of Robin in the character of the Doctor.  The CGI is a bit wobbly here and there, but generally it more than adequately captures the nuances of Troughton’s acting style.

The extended use of quotations from Marx, Engels, Kautsky, Plekhanov, Labriola, Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Radek, Victor Serge, Rosa Luxemburg, Gramsci, Lukacs, Herbert Marcuse, Christopher Caudwell, Bakunin, Proudhon, Kropotkin, Maxim Gorky, Adorno, Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin and Brecht liven up the episode no end.  It’s quite remarkable that the BBC should choose to devote such a long stretch of an episode of their flagship family entertainment show to a scene in which various characters learnedly debate revolutionary theory.  But the brave decision pays dividends.  I particularly enjoyed Jenna Coleman’s readings from Minima Moralia.

Jenna is the star of the show here, especially in the scene where she verbally disembowls the Sheriff when he quotes from various sociobiologists, most notably E. O. Wilson.

However, at the end of the day, Gatiss is playing yet another trick on us – albeit a fascinating one – when he launches his extended mediatations on the hermeneutics of revolutionary theory and the radical Enlightenment.  What he’s really up to is a critique of the whole concept of metafiction.  By having his characters display a lumpenly obvious and clunky self-awareness of their own historico-mythic quasi-fictionality, he tackles head on the banality of the pop-postmodern obsession with texts which are reflexively self-referential.  (There’s also, I believe, an encoded critique of Steven Moffat here… I know he and Gatiss don’t get on.)  This ties in with the way in which the functional adequacy of the CGI Troughton implicitly lays bare the limitations of the original actor.

Gatiss’ ultimate project for Doctor Who becomes clear in the powerful mix that he creates for ‘Robots of Sherwood’: a subversive political radicalism joined to a total rejection of the strategy of the self-involved and the self-referential. …

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Playing with Dolls

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UPDATE, 25/09/12:  If you read this post, please read on through the comments too.  Some astute readers used the comments section to set me straight on some issues both of fact and interpretation.  As a result, my attitude towards ‘Night Terrors’ is now considerably more negative than my initial reaction (which you can read in the main review below).  In fairness to myself, I do spend most of the piece saying what I don’t like about ‘Night Terrors’, including identifying some of what I call the “latent hostility” towards working-class people… but I failed to notice the wider context of the episode and so also the scale of the problem.  I don’t mind admitting when I’m wrong (of course, I do really) but I hate that I blogged before giving myself sufficient time to think.  

Okay, my foolhardy project of catching up with all the Doctor Who I’ve not seen in order to re-synch with the new stuff (and hopefully provide myself with blogging material) continues.

Last night I finally watched ‘Night Terrors’. Much to my astonishment, I didn’t absolutely hate it. I mean, it wasn’t particularly good… but it wasn’t actively offensive most of the time either. Which is fairly good going for Moffat-era Who written by Gatiss.

I was horrified by the idea that the Doctor now hears and answers prayers like God, with the pleas of a little boy travelling up to him through the heavens, but that was somewhat neutralised later by some technobabble explanation that made it sound very much like a special case.  In the end, I liked that the Doctor actually seemed comparatively less full of himself, and more like a guy making it up and thinking it out as he went along.  Matt Smith should be encouraged to slow down a bit more often.  He had some nice, quiet moments (inbetween all the usual frenetic gibbering) that were very likeable.  He does ‘kindly’ rather well.

There were cliches galore, of course.  An old lady complains about her knees.  A yobbo guy with a pitbull.  Hoodies, etc.

Where would any mainstream BBC drama be nowadays if it had to try and depict a housing estate without the employment of hostile cliches?  I think the latter stages of RTD’s depiction of Rose’s estate are the last example of such places being sketched without such latent hostility.

But… there was an interesting visual stress on the uniformity and blandness of the housing estate, bathed in that sickly yellow night-time street-light aura.

And this made the opulent but fake interior of the ‘mansion house’ into a fairly interesting visual counterpoint.

Of course, it was entirely predictable that the mansion would turn out to be a dolls house.  But even that was kind of covered when the Doctor immediately realises it when he ends up there, treating the conclusion as though it’s self-evident.  It looks like evidence of two tracks of thought at work in the story.  We’re more on the Doctor’s wavelength than the other characters… which is not self-evidently the wrong way to do it. …

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Victory of the Icon 3

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I have a massive, endlessly-lengthening list of books, old and new, that I want to get around to reading.  Donny Gluckstein’s new book A People’s History of the Second World War just went straight in near the top of the list.

Gluckstein’s argument seems to be that WWII was actually two wars, fought in parallel.  One was an imperialist squabble between established empires and up-and-coming imperialist nations that were set to clash with them.  Britain, France, Russia and America (which was already a continental empire and was ready to expand globally) found themselves violently competing for hegemony with Germany, Italy and Japan.  Running beneath this conflict there was a people’s war against fascism (the form taken by the new empires) underpinned by dreams of freedom and democracy.  The imperialists running the first war knew that had to appeal to the priorities of the people fighting the second war in order to enlist their support, hence the democratic rhetoric.

I mention this here because Gluckstein has done an interview for New Left Project, in which he has some things to say about Winston Churchill, the subject of my irregular ‘Victory of the Icon‘ posts.

Churchill was always very clear that his mission in the war was to defend the British empire, not promote the interests of ordinary citizens. He was not ideologically committed to destroy fascism. He made statements such as the following when he met Mussolini in 1927: ‘If I had been an Italian I would have been with you from the start in your struggle against the bestial passions of Leninism’. During the Spanish civil war he backed Franco (whose survival depended on Hitler and Mussolini’s massive material support), and afterwards he defended Franco when some argued that his regime was the unfinished business of WWII. Churchill also backed the Japanese invasion of Manchuria before the war.

During the war itself Churchill was very resistant to the notion of opening a second front (a landing in France) to relieve pressure on Russia. The focus of British strategy until 1944 was to avoid confronting the Nazis in Europe, and instead defend the imperial routes. That is why the main fighting was in North Africa (Tobruk, El Alamein). When the tide turned on the Eastern Front and it looked like Russia would sweep across Europe Churchill suddenly threw his efforts into the D-Day landings.

For ordinary British people the war had a very different meaning. It was a war against Nazism and fascism, for liberation and democracy. Churchill was fighting to defend the status quo of 1939 which, at home, had meant mass unemployment, appalling poverty and deprivation. The majority were not going to put their lives at risk to continue with that. Nor would they be duped with the sort of propaganda issued in the First World War (such as Lord Kitchener’s famous poster – ‘Your country needs you!’) They had seen what imperialist war meant.

And:

Churchill was an important figure in the sense that the British ruling class was divided about what to do with Germany.

…

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The Surplus Population

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It’s getting near Christmas.  Christmas means Dickens.  Doctor Who has ‘done’ Dickens twice in recent years… on both occasions, the show has travestied Dickens’ most famous Christmas story A Christmas Carol.  Last year we were given that Moffat-penned obscenity that shared its title.  He transmuted the tale into a gleefully cynical celebration of hubris, casual sexism, complacency and hypocrisy.  But Moffat was following a trail already blazed.

Back in 2005, Mark Gatiss riffed on the same story (which is about a selfish man who is made to realise that he owes the world a debt, only to find himself transformed by that knowledge) and turned it into a parable about how helping the apparently needy is dangerous folly stemming from thoughtless guilt… because the apparently needy (even ‘foreign’ refugees, running from the devastating effects of a war they didn’t start) will probably want to swamp you and steal your world.

Once I’d realised (with help from others more immediately perceptive than myself) what ‘The Unquiet Dead’ was actually about, I became very critical of it.  However… as time passes… I begin to think I’ve been overly critical of Gatiss.  Perhaps even a tad unfair to him.

Don’t get me wrong, I still loathe ‘The Unquiet Dead’ (together with just about everything else Gatiss has ever done in his career, to be honest), but I think I’ve been on iffy ground when I’ve implied that his tale of gas sprites in Victorian Cardiff went against the spirit of Dickens.  Yes, ‘The Unquiet Dead’ directly contradicts the stated message of A Christmas Carol, and uses Dickens to do it, but Dickens himself did that too.

In response to the eruption of revolt against Britain’s unremittingly cynical, cruel and ferocious imperial domination of India (the event that the Victorians dubbed ‘The Indian Mutiny’) Dickens collaborated with Wilkie Collins on a story called ‘The Perils of Certain English Prisoners’.  It’s a classic imperialist text.  It is a fictional story about pirates and treacherous natives in Belize, but the story is unavoidably about India.  It makes the imperialists into the victims of the natives, as such texts always do.  It belittles a character who is probably meant to refer to Lord Canning (Governor of India during the revolt) who earned himself the contemptuous nickname of ‘Clemency Canning’ for daring to suggest that some discrimination should be used in reprisals, rather than the indiscriminate and bestial torture and mass slaughter actually employed by British troops.

“I wish I were Commander in Chief in India,” Dickens told a correspondent, “I should do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested… [he refers to massacres committed by the rebels… in response to British massacres that predated and dwarfed them] and raze it off the face of the Earth.”

We can take into account the fact that he was responding to very one-sided media coverage and government accounts.  Lord Palmerston had written a popular pamphlet in which he detailed atrocities of the rebels… needless to say he didn’t contextualise them with details of British imperial cynicism, ruthlessness, murder and torture.…

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Childhood’s End

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Shabgraff does Series 1 of the revival.  It’s my blather from Timelash II, plus a little new stuff.  (I may do something separate about ‘The End of the World’ at some point.)  This is about a series which works because its about a young woman growing up.  I feel like I’ve grown up too, in a sense, since 2005… which is why my opinions about Series 1 have drastically changed since first viewing.

Rose

I have never been able to entirely make up my mind about this.

The characterisation is glib, sneering at ditzy blonde ‘chavvy’ people who say silly things about making legal claims and flirt with anything in sight, etc (admittedly, this improves later in the series)… not to mention having a LAD character who is OBSESSED WITH FOOTBALL (as are all men, obviously), probably looks at porn on the internet and is stupid (this doesn’t improve ever… though, in fairness to RTD’s writing, it might’ve helped if they’d cast somebody who could act, even just a little bit).

There are things about it that are puzzlingly wrong… just off somehow… like the way Rose calls for a lone store caretaker (!) and calls him “Wilson”, as though he’s an underfootman or something. Huh?

Plus, the music is absolutely awful. And about half the comedy bombs. I know we’re all supposed to look down our more-sophisticated-and-ironic-than-thou noses at people who hate the wheelie bin… but it’s still stupid.

There are some great things in it, however. They whole idea of the Autons being the first monster in the new series is inspired… and they’re quite well done… though, obviously, the priority was to use monsters that were on Earth in the present day, i.e. to make the initial setting as inoffensive to sneery meedja types as possible.

This really is the underlying logic of the whole episode: appease the meedja. Look meedja, it’s a “serious” actor… and he’s not wearing anything naff, he’s wearing a leather jacket, etc. Look meedja, a pop star/lad’s mag companion! Look meedja, London (the only place people like you think fucking exists).

Luckily there’s enough magic in the TARDIS and the Autons and Chris (who’s miscast but good anyway) and the excellent Billie Piper (who will be the unexpected jewel of the first series) to make the whole thing watchable and, often, fun.

Oh, and the ferocious, unrelenting, slavering meedja hype helped too, I imagine.

There’s a germ of something interesting in the Doctor’s appearance as a lone bomber (soon junked)… and the geeky internet bloke who’s somewhere between an obsessed fan, a conspiracy theorist and a cultural dissident.  It suggests a support for the uncool, the obsessional, the underground that strangely belies the meedja-pleasing and brand-resurrecting surface priorities on display.

The Autons retain their original charge as emblems of commodity fetishism… products become autonomous and threatening because they represent alienated labour.  Rose’s status as a wage slave only emphasises these undertones, as does the Doctor’s reference to a “price war” and the Auton’s imperialistic lust for our plastic (oil).…

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Victory of the Icon

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In the course of preparing myself [to play Churchill in a biopic]… I realized afresh that I hate Churchill and all of his kind. I hate them virulently. They have stalked down the corridors of endless power all through history…. What man of sanity would say on hearing of the atrocities committed by the Japanese against British and Anzac prisoners of war, ‘We shall wipe them out, every one of them, men, women, and children. There shall not be a Japanese left on the face of the earth’? Such simple-minded cravings for revenge leave me with a horrified but reluctant awe for such single-minded and merciless ferocity.

– Richard Burton. (He got banned from the BBC for writing that. Which must’ve really burned him as he lounged around in Hollywood with Elisabeth Taylor’s head in his lap.)

In ‘Victory of the Daleks’ by Mark Gatiss, Winston Churchill is depicted as a wiley and cantankerous old fox, as a twinkly-eyed yet determined fighter against the Nazi menace, as a moral force, as an impish and roguish but unequivocally good man. This is very much the mainstream view of Churchill, in both ‘pop culture’ and in much of the trash that masquerades as history in our society.

Moreover, Churchill is an old mate of the Doctor’s. They go way back. In other words, he gets the endorsement of Our Hero, the narrative and moral locus of the series.  Here is Gatiss’ reasoning:

I think in the end it came down to sort of printing the Churchill of legend, because Doctor Who is not the place, really, to examine those sorts of things, except wherever possible, as it were, in the gaps, in the shadows, you can suggest his pragmatism. So in this episode when the Doctor, despite the fact that the Doctor’s telling him that the Daleks are the worst thing in the entire universe, he thinks ‘I can end the war quicker, I can save lives’. So that sort of thing was interesting to play with. But I did, you know, it just isn’t the place to try and have those conversations, because it’s an adventure series.

This reminds me of a page at the BBC website about whether Churchill was “as good as we think?”. As ever, “we” is left undefined. The page lists Pros and Cons. The best Cons they can come up with are a couple of military blunders, the return to the gold standard and Yalta. In other words: was he as marvelous as “we” apparently all believe or did he sometimes make mistakes? The big one on the list is Yalta, so the worst thing he can be accused of is handing much of Europe over to the real evildoers. Pravda would have been proud of such framing.

(The Yalta thing seems especially unfair to Churchill. He assumed that Russia would renege on the agreed post-war frontiers of Europe and advocated ‘Operation Unthinkable’, a lunatic plan to launch an unprovoked attack upon Russia as early as July 1945, thus starting a new war against one of his own allies.)…

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