series 4

July 12, 2011

Little People

Jack Grahamdaleks in manhattan, donna, fires of pompeii, forest of the dead, next doctor, partners in crime, poison sky, series 4, silence in the library, smith and jones, soap, sontaran stratagem, specials, voyage of the damned, waters of mars3

The inevitable round-up of my Timelash II stuff on Series 4 and the ‘specials’. It’s a bumpy ride.

Voyage of the Damned

In this story, fat people or little people are there to sacrifice themselves when the plot needs them to, having shown some fatuous mechanical bravery and/or expressed some mawkish emotion-by-numbers. Sexy, pretty people are inherently of more value, whatever their intellectual vapidity and hollowness as characters, as evidenced by the Doctor’s laughably protracted and exaggerated heartbreak over the death of anonymous, mechanised dummy Astrid (seriously, I was waiting for her to be revealed as an Auton). The episode itself mourns her too, with its frankly revolting music and hilarious over-emphasis on her passing (one last kiss with the radiant ghost, a shooting star, etc…)

We’re supposed to gasp with awe at the way RTD Subverts Expectations by letting Unpleasant Posh Bloke survive while ‘good’ people die (oooh, have a little pat on the head you good little people – you have done your master’s bidding and died on cue like the plot fodder you always were)… but so what? Bad people don’t always get their comeuppance? Wow, thanks for that.

And, in any case, this ‘message’ is undercut by the way we’re obviously supposed to consider the death of Astrid more important than all the other deaths in the episode. Why is this? Well, RTD makes the Minogue character into a lowly waitress… but this only suggests that he’s desperately trying to deny the patently obvious: she’s more important in the story because she’s played by a star.

Remember that bit in ‘The Stolen Earth’ when Davros taunts the Doctor about how he turns ordinary people into killers and the Doctor then has a maudlin (and irrelevant) series of flashbacks of all the people he’s known who’ve died? We get a flash of Astrid. Do we get flashes of Morvin, Foon and Banakafalatta? In a pig’s arse. Little people. Not important. That’s why it’s so unintentionally revealing when, in ‘Waters of Mars’, we’re supposed to be shocked by the Doctor using the actual phrase “little people”. Thing is, the show itself has been thinking like that for ages. Even in ‘Waters of Mars’, the death of the Lindsy Duncan character is more earthshattering because she’s played by Lindsy Duncan.

As Lawrence Miles said, RTD is now so thoroughly trapped in the self-celebrating Meedja echo chamber that he now has the Doctor being chased by BAFTAs.

Yes, the villain turns out to be a ruthless capitalist (who – as in Bond films – is bad because he’s a criminal, not because he’s a capitalist) but this hardly says anything at all… not in an episode in which we’re also supposed to think that Wilf’s patriotic bibble is cute and lovable, in which the Doctor is implied to be a friend of the Queen, in which his big achievement is to save Buckingham Palace. The implications are thoroughly and mindlessly reactionary. Right-wing, Little Englander, flag-waving, royalty-saluters are Lovable British Eccentrics. The British state and aristocracy are Lovable British Eccentrics.…

July 12, 2011

Asylum, UK

Jack Grahamasylum seekers, british government, christmas invasion, condems, donna, girl in the fireplace, islamophobia, orientalism, refugees, rtd, school reunion, series 4, tenuous thematic connections, turn left, zargoids1

A rejigg of something I wrote for the old site on the subject of ‘Turn Left’, the best episode of series 4.

The alternate world that Davies conjures up in ‘Turn Left’ is not so far removed from our own. We might not (yet) see British soldiers patrolling our streets and pointing automatic weapons at unarmed women (though the recent behaviour of the police towards student protestors has been pretty savage)… but that sight would not be so unfamiliar to the people of Baghdad. Or Belfast, for that matter.

The nightmarish, decaying, dystopian Britain in this episode reflects aspects of our current social predicament… indeed, as Simon Kinnear pointed out in DWM, the episode seems prescient of the years ahead of it, of (to put it my way) recession/cuts torn Britain.

While it doesn’t get specific, or touch economics much, ‘Turn Left’ seems like the closest thing to a direct political attack on crisis-wracked British society that any mainstream TV show could possibly get away with. Let’s just recap: in an episode of that highly commercial kid’s romp known as Doctor Who, Russell T. Davies suggested that, in a time of crisis, the British state might institute a program of racist slavery, if not extermination. At the very least, we see people herded and treated like animals while patrolled by armed guardians of the state. Moreover, the people being treated that way are the poor, the dispossessed, the helpless. Brits get the kind of treatment meted out to refugees once they too become scapegoatable dependents.

I’m not sure that Davies intended the title as direct political advice (though it wouldn’t be bad advice) but it surely can’t be entirely an accident that Donna’s apocalyptic turn is a turn to the right, a turn that results in “England for the English”.

The Donna in the car at the start of ‘Turn Left’ might vote that way. She’s the same thoughtless, selfish Donna we met at the start of ‘The Runaway Bride’. She’s exactly the kind of self-involved, complacent brat who hardly notices as society crashes around her… until she is touched by it. Davies pulls no punches. We see her obsessing over stationary and offices grudges as the rest of Chowdry’s staff watch the TV, horrified, for news of the hospital. We see her asking “What’s for tea?” as news of Sarah Jane Smith’s death flashes on the screen.

I know people like that. Indeed, speaking as someone who lives in southern England – surely the global epicentre of reactionary complacency – it is very hard indeed not to derive a massive and delicious jolt of schadenfreude from the way Davies manages to turn the (surviving) population of the Sun and Daily Mail reading world into despised, harangued, jobless refugees. “Who’s going to listen to us?” asks Donna’s Mum, “Refugees. We haven’t even got a vote. We’re just no-one Donna. We don’t exist.” To put it another way: seek asylum and you’ll be locked up in one.

It’s ironic that as Donna’s society disintegrates, she suddenly discovers other people.…

July 12, 2011

The Commodity Strikes Back

Jack Grahamcapitalism, commodity fetishism, planet of the ood, revolution, school reunion, series 42

Thoughts on ‘Planet of the Ood’

A very beautiful episode to look at. A stark pallet of whites and blues and greys, the exterior scenes harshly bathed in cold light… counterpointed by the dark warehouses and the red haze of the Ood rage.

Series 4 continues its apparent intent of readdressing moral lapses on the part of the Doctor/show. The inexcusable laxity of the treatment of slavery in ‘The Satan Pit’ (and the invisibility of the issue in the preceding episode) gets repudiated here. Big time.

Some would rather have had a story about a race that actually did crave servitude… but J. K. Rowling has already given the nation that sort of thing with her innately and happily subservient House Elves. And I don’t believe a sentient life form could evolve that wanted to be a commodity. Indeed, to even suggest such a thing may be to fundamentally misunderstand what consciousness is.

This may be a straightforward polemical tale, but there’s nothing wrong with that. This is about ruthless, corporate capitalism exploiting people that it sees as nothing but a resource to be used. Sentient beings cut and sliced and spliced into shape as customisable toys and then packaged, branded, priced-up and shipped out in boxes. People in pacakaging. The gimmicks with their voices say it all: it’s like changeable novelty mobile-phone covers only with people.

This is a parable about commodification. About people turned into products and merchandise. About how relationships between living people become like relationships between things through the logic of the market. Halpen is, in his way, as much a victim of the commodification syndrome as the Ood. We see glimmers of decency in him, not least when he sends Ood Sigma back to his people. But he’s trapped within the logic of the impersonal system. Like the PR girl who – oh joy, oh bliss – does NOT have a yawnsome “crisis of conscience” but does her job, stays within the psychological confines of the system and stays true to her corporate loyalties. The PR/marketing slime in the hospitality lounge are as lobotomised as the Ood. Sharp suits and empty heads and crippled consciences.

Mr Halpen’s ultimate comeuppance is to become the thing he owned and traded in. That amazing gore moment that also, through the context, manages to be poetic, beautiful and moving. And satisfying. It’s a fantasy, but a pleasing one. Let’s put together a chain-gang starring Warren Buffet, Phil Nike, Rupert Murdoch, etc. See how those bastards like being at the bottom of the pile. Maybe sometimes, empathy must be imposed.

The episode does not flinch from showing the brutality or the necessity or the moral justifiability of violent revolt. No patronising sermons to the oppressed about non-violence.

The Doctor’s remark to Donna – “who do you think made your clothes?” – was quite startling at the time. Under most circumstances, such little eruptions in mainstream drama can be accounted for as mere twinges of liberal guilt… but in a story like this one, which explicitly endorses violent revolution… well, it seems to have a bit more integrity than that.…