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This is not a place of honor

natural selection

Double Coded

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There’s a scene that is evidently supposed to justify the way Moffat’s version of the show has been talking the Doctor up as a powerful, scary, dangerous bad-ass.  It supposedly justifies the Doctor’s own increasing tendency to appear decidedly impressed with himself, to see himself – and talk about himself – as Mr Scarypants.  It justifies the decision to show him (especially in Moffat scripts) as being hubristic, bombastic, aware of his ability to strike terror into the monsters.  Look me up, Vashta Nerada, and then run away.  Look me up, Atraxi, and then run away.  “There’s one thing you never put in a trap…” and “Don’t ever think you’re capable of playing games with me…” and all that pompous, I’m-so-hard, showoffish bum-gravy.

The scene in question is said, by some, to throw all this into relief, to undermine it, to pull the rug from under the Doctor’s feet, to be the reversal towards which all this was leading, a treacherous terminus that forces us to reassess our hero’s morality, and to make him reassess it too.

The scene is near the end of ‘A Good Man Goes to War’.  It’s the scene where River rebukes the Doctor.  He says “None of this is my fault!”, referring to the war waged by the anonymous military people and their anonymous Headless Monk friends, the war in which Amy and her baby have become unwilling pawns, in which other friends and allies of the Doctor have been killed.  River snaps back at him that it’s all his fault.  He brought it all upon them by allowing himself to become a figure of terror to the bad guys, a warrior… to the point where even his name – “Doctor” – has come to mean “mighty warrior” in the language of the anonymous military people.

You see, Doctor, what a pass this has come to?  Ooooh, you have become what you were fighting.

Except that it doesn’t do or say or achieve anything of the kind.  If that is the intended import of the scene, it fails miserably.

Firstly, how many times are we supposed to have seen the Doctor bitten-on-the arse by his own hubris now?  And when has it ever changed his behaviour?  He’s supposed to have been humbled at the end of Series 5… only to come back at Christmas, so arrogant, such a self-appointed puppet-master, such an unrepentant and moralising neoconservative of other people’s souls, that he inserts himself into a man’s past, his memories, his innermost self, and rewrites his life – as he watches.

It’s similar with the Doctor’s ‘lesson’ at the end of ‘A Good Man Goes to War’.  Once River has finished lightly scolding him, and he’s finished looking faintly sheepish, he instantly snaps back into normal mode.  River – the quintessential Moffat ‘strong female’… i.e. slavishly obsessed with her man – goes all gooey-eyed as she reveals her (entirely predictable) identity and the Doctor, grinning, announces to Amy and Rory that all is well.  He knows that they’ve just lost their chance to raise their daughter, irrevocably, forever.…

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Monkey Business

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On ‘Ghost Light’.

Let’s leave aside the aesthetic beauty of the production, with its pattern of oppositions – light and dark, day and night, madness and sanity, stone and wood, feminine and masculine, dead and alive – which alternate until they start to bleed into each other and mingle until we are left with no certainties.

Let’s leave aside the willfully abstruse script; the wonderful way it is deliberately constructed as a jewelled puzzle box; something to be studied and pondered and interpreted rather than just passively enjoyed.

Let’s leave aside the scrumptious bevy of literary references, sly self-referencing jokes, puns, double meanings, allusions… all of which show an intense and highly self-conscious (though not glib) awareness and playfulness with language, text, genre and storytelling tradition.  You want an example?  How about the use of the word “wicked”, which – with wonderful irony – appears in both the Victorian usage and as 80s teenspeak.  It’s the last word of the story – the last word spoken by the Doctor in the last-filmed story of the classic series.  And when the Doctor uses it to describe Ace, he sounds like a Victorian moralist (of times past or present) scolding a disobedient child… but, by Ace’s usage, and by his own sly wink, he’s giving his approval to her pyromaniacal aversion to the house haunted by evil Victoriana.

Let’s look instead at what this story says about evolution.

Firstly, it gets things technically wrong by depicting evolution as working teleologically, so that the human is the ‘final’ stage when the process is finished.

Or does it?

Secondly, it’s about homo victorianus ineptus (and his spiritual descendants) railing against a theory they don’t understand because it offends their bigoted prejudices. It’s about Soapy Sam Wilberforce and our latter day creationists, terrified by the theological and cultural and social and political ramifications of a scientific discourse which emphasizes mutability and materialism.

Or is it?

Let me suggest that, while there’s some truth in the above, there’s also a lot more to it than that.

I don’t think it gets evolution wrong so much as it gets people’s ideas of evolution right. It understands that a certain kind of vulgar, reactionary, bourgeois idea of evolution pictures a ladder with the strongest, most ruthless at the top… and the weak at the bottom. It seems to depict evolution as a succession of ‘rungs’ which are climbed through mutation, achieving progress and reaching a final goal embodied in a human male… but, in its strategy as a text, it represents this as the process (progress?) of exactly the kind of reactionary, bourgeois mind that would view the Victorian gentleman as the pinnacle of evolutionary ascent.

That’s why the ultimate punishment for Josiah seems to come from within him. It’s his own idea of successive stages that makes it possible for him to fall back down through them; it’s his own idea of the superior keeping the inferior as pets that makes it possible for Control to put him on a leash.…

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Anxiety Satellite

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The indefatigable Mr. Oliver Wake has put together and released the latest issue of the print fanzine Panic Moon.  It can be ordered here.

It contains (amongst other things) a judicious appraisal of the ‘Day of the Daleks’ Special Edition, a look at the way Hartnell’s shade has taken to haunting the recent series, a clever thing about the way Daleks always seem to get some new physical ability in first episodes, an interesting look at the pre-Who 60s Pathfinders serials which are now out on DVD and an excellent analysis of ‘The Sun Makers’ which identifies some of its roots, going beyond the usual stuff about Bob Holmes being annoyed by a tax bill.

Once again, I’ve contributed two articles.  In one, I identify a blind spot in the lefty-liberal creds of ‘Colony in Space’ and try to tease out some of implications of this, leading me to briefly consider something badly amiss with liberalism itself.  In another article, I have a good old ramble about the various ways Doctor Who has creatively misrepresented evolution, often using it was a way of re-encoding mythic themes or addressing political concerns… though there is, I argue, one story that really is about evolution itself.

It’s good, so… umm… buy it.  Please?

(No career in advertising awaits me, I know.)…

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Flat Earth Society

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The greatness and uniqueness of ‘Image of the Fendahl’ is shown in the scene where the Doctor “explains” what’s going on to Adam Colby. Of course, he doesn’t actually do any such thing. He suggests two possible explanations. He favours the first but his listener is sceptical so the Doctor offers an alternative which his listener finds more plausible. The Doctor also says that it might all be a coincidence. His tone is flippant but there is no real reason to suppose that he isn’t being serious. It is clear that the Doctor is theorising and that he doesn’t have the final answer.

This is fascinating and, as far as I can recall, unique in classic Doctor Who.

The Doctor has often been seen to behave superficially like a scientist (mucking about with test tubes, talking about oscillators, etc.) but this is the first and only real occasion when he really acts like one (like an idealised, Baconian one, that is). The Doctor is admitting that he doesn’t know and doing his best to come up with workable explanations which fit the facts. Moreover, the person the Doctor is speaking to is a scientist who has demanded answers and is coming to his own conclusions about how plausible the Doctor’s ideas are. No final decision is reached or stated as to which solution (if any) is correct. Fendleman’s rant to Stael before his death tends to support the Doctor’s idea about genetic manipulation (Colby’s preferred option, possibly because he heard Fendleman speak) but the Doctor seems to prefer his first idea about a “biological transmutation field” which Colby might doubt simply because he doesn’t know what one is.

This is all highly appropriate in a story that is preoccupied with the tensions between science, evidence, theory, supposition, superstition and belief.

The story opens with Colby fretting over a dissonance between established scientific facts (the age of the skull) and the apparent impossibility of their implications. (Someone once asked J.B.S. Haldane if any scientific finding could disprove evolution; “Fossil rabbits in the pre-Cambrian” was his gruff response.) Meanwhile, Fendleman spends much of the story trying to convince Adam of the validity of his theories. Wonderfully, Fendleman gets it partly right and partly wrong (something else that doesn’t usually happen in tales like this). His theory about the pentagram being a neural relay seems to be borne out, but his idea of the nature of the power it contains is woefully mistaken.  Nobody is really entirely Right or Wrong about anything in this story, which is very refreshing.

Stael is an interesting character. His employment of the occult ritual is self-consciously ironic and cynical. He rejects Colby’s taunts about being a Satanist and claims to be unimpressed by “the grimoires”. Nevertheless, he employs occult language and ceremonies… this might be meant as showing unconscious drives. Scott Fredericks (an actor with a lot of interiority) even seems to be working to endow Stael with a repressed sexual interest in Colby. Stael’s ideas exist on that deeply-70s line of thinking along which the occult, paranormal phenomena and science intersect.…

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