the shakespeare code

April 6, 2014

“…a swaggering, overbearing, tin-plated dictator with delusions of godhood”: Lord Bobby’s Obsession

Forest of IllusionsStar Trek Phase II, the shakespeare code0

“Lord Bobby’s Obsession” is described as “Space Seed” meets “The Squire of Gothos”. This is the most accurate description in the history of things describing other things because that’s literally what it is.

It doesn’t even pretend to be something different. It is, beat-for-beat, the exact same story as “Space Seed” with the exact same scenes and the exact same plot twists except the supervillain is an alien fascinated with the British Empire, is acting alone this time and the submissive female humanities expert smitten with him stays on the Enterprise instead of departing with him at the end of the episode. This is my least favourite kind of story to write about, because it gives me essentially no material to work with. Even Margaret Armen gave me enough to complain about that I could find 1800 words to squeeze out of “Savage Syndrome”. You could practically take my “Space Seed” post, change the names around and write your own Vaka Rangi review of “Lord Bobby’s Obsession”.

That said, like “Tomorrow and the Stars” before it, this doesn’t mean “Lord Bobby’s Obsession” doesn’t manage to improve on its source material such that this is the superior version of the story. It definitely does, and this alone makes it noteworthy and deserving of at least a little attention. Once again, the Star Trek Phase II version manages to distill out the essence of the story by removing all of its more problematic ethical hangups. In this case, most of the welcome changes come from the title character himself: Robert Standish, Third Earl of Lancashire. Modeling him after Trelane instead of Khan is actually something of a genius move, and the result is we get someone whose latent charm and charisma belies the fact he’s really a petulant, childish, self-centred wannabe with a seriously inflated sense of self worth and importance. And because Lord Bobby isn’t a godlike being, he’s just a regular guy with access to some advanced technology, this neatly avoids the problems we read into Trelane’s character back in “The Squire of Gothos”. And in doing so, “Lord Bobby’s Obsession” manages to deftly invert that episode’s structure, demonstrating that, despite everything, Star Trek really has come a long way.

What I mean by this is that the basic issue I found with “Gothos” was that Trelane is set up as a kind of dark parodic mirror of William Shatner’s interpretation of Jim Kirk, namely, a drag action hero fixated on honour, duty, valour, the chain of command and warmaking. The intended point being, as I saw it, that in spite of Shatner’s noble attempt to skewer the inherent silliness of all that by taking Kirk in a different direction then how he was originally written, by the mere fact of playing Kirk and playing the hero of this show, he was in some sense at least partially complicit in the original Star Trek‘s unsavoury predilections. The problem came about in the climactic reveal, where it turned out Trelane was literally a child, the spoiled offspring of a couple of standard-issue hyper-advanced energy beings, thus removing any claim Trelane had to offering any sort of serious critique.…

March 7, 2011

Sound and Fury

Jack Grahamgaddafi, gareth roberts, shakespeare, the shakespeare code, theatre17

The comedian Ed Byrne says that the only ironic thing about the Alanis Morrisette song ‘Ironic’ is that it contains no irony. Well, one of the many ironic things about ‘The Shakespeare Code’ is that it contains no code, and little that meaningfully refers to Shakespeare… and yet its title is rather apt. Really, the episode might just as well have been called ‘Billy Shakespeare and the Goblet of Fire’, yet the very arbitrariness of the title, and the fact that it tries to make the audience smile at a modern cultural reference, makes the title perversely appropriate for the story… because the story itself throws lots of modern cultural references at us but fails to engage with Shakespeare as a man or an artist.

A TELEVISED THEATRE

When it was shown, ‘The Shakespeare Code’ was probably the most visually spectacular episode of Doctor Who yet made. It still looks absolutely marvellous. But there is a complex of ironies here.

There’s always been a kind of affinity between Shakespeare (as a category of play) and Doctor Who. Like Shakespeare, Who is a sort of genre of its own, which comprises many different types of story, some of which are of dubious canonicity and some of which are hard to categorise. Doctor Who is highly theatrical. Doctor Who, like Shakespeare productions, can be very camp. Doctor Who often presents highly implausible plot developments. People who criticise RTD for sloppy endings should check out Cymbeline in which the god Jupiter turns up (in a real deus ex machina!) to sort out the plot. Doctor Who, like Shakespeare, tends to buy into the ‘King list’ theory of history. Many of the early historicals are clearly indebted to Shakespeare, or to various writers’ idea of him. And Doctor Who, like Shakespeare, often presents us with fictional social worlds (shown in microcosm) in order to explore political themes. Both Shakespeare and Doctor Who create little worlds representing great societies which exist ‘offstage’, as it were.

Moreover, Doctor Who grew in a BBC culture that considered TV drama to be like ‘televised theatre’. Who always strained against this… what with Sydney and Verity both being grounded in commercial telly… but most of the classic series looks much more like a televised play, with occasional inserts filmed on location… highly reminiscent, in fact, of the early seasons of the BBC Shakespeare series.

In many ways, Doctor Who‘s development over the years is a perfect example of the way that TV drama has gradually shifted away from this ‘televised theatre’ tradition, towards the prevalent style now, which is to make TV dramas look as much as possible like little films. ‘The Shakespeare Code’ may be the ultimate example of this trend in fruition… yet the irony is that it looks cinematic mostly because of its huge, impressive central set… which isn’t a film set at all but an actual theatre! What’s more, this theatre was built as a recreation of a place where Shakespeare and his company put on his intensely political plays, plays that built fictional worlds in order to examine politcal ideas and themes, plays that confronted their audience with unusually strong depictions of women, plays that had no choice but to summon up huge armies and black nights using only words, there being little in the way of special effects available… though the theatre of the English Renaissance certainly did attempt spectacle (with opulent costumery being a particular draw). …