timey wimey

August 31, 2010

Hartnellical Materialism

Jack Grahamanthropocene extinction, budget, coalition, confidence man, crusades, cuts, daleks, edge of destruction, hartnell, libdems, list, marco polo, massacre, myth makers, reign of terror, reviews, romans, sarcasm, savages, sensorites, time meddler, timey wimey, unearthly child, web planet0

Gallibase has relaunched ‘Timelash’ as a story-per-day affair. Along with others, I’ve managed a review (ranging from a terse comment to a bloated essay) for every story. It goes without saying, I don’t have a girlfriend.

Anyway. Today, we got to ‘The Tenth Planet’ and so I thought I might post my comments here – or the more interesting ones anyway (everything being relative) – and make it a regular thing every time we finish with a Doctor. Basically, I’m very bored.

As you will see, my view of the Hartnell era is much influenced by the work of V. Gordon Childe, Walter Benjamin, historical materialism in general, the wobbly ‘permanent arms economy’ theory, William Morris, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Edward Said and lots of thinly veiled class hatred. There’s also some stuff in here that might remind you of the About Time books… but, with all due respect to Miles and Wood, I’d already thought of it all before I read them. When I mention something that I got from them, I acknowledge it.

‘An Unearthly Child’

It’s been said before but its true: the first episode is amazing, the other three are disappointing… but only by comparison.

The first episode really is extraordinary; an example of pure TV alchemy. A fusion of literate sci-fi, children’s fiction, folklore, the aesthetics of ‘everyday life’ drama, urban gothic and the uncanny. Somehow, everything comes together to create something fascinating, suggestive, oneric and scary.

The stuff with the tribe is rather grim and plodding by comparison… yet, note how seriously it demands to be taken. And note the thought that went into the themes.

To the Doctor, Ian and Barbara are savages… just as the tribe are to Ian and Barbara. Fire is technology, the future… to be acquired by a society struggling in cold and darkness… just as the TARDIS is a symbol of the same quest for power through technology. The reluctant crewmates of the TARDIS find themselves forced to be a tribe, to be a society in miniature.

Note, also, the characterisation of the Doctor. His intellect (which is ruthless and cold) is undermined by his emotional reactions. When he doesn’t think too hard, he reacts with instinctive compassion. “If he dies, there will be no fire!” And then he proceeds to deduce who murdered The Old Woman (nice character for an actress to be offered) and ruthlessly engineer the coup against Kal.

Note also, how many of the series long running concerns are already present: technology, tools, political struggle, tyranny, literacy, death, social and universal and technological entropy…

Really, this story libels tribal societies. Hunter-gather societies (in which humans lived for the vast majority of their history) were almost certainly very egalitarian and probably dominated by social altruism. Certainly, most tribal societies that survived into the modern era demonstrated startling ethics of fairness and sharing. They didn’t behave like the Tribe of Gum, who are ruthless and selfish throatslitters, preying on each other, yearning for hierarchical domination and unable to understand compassion.…

June 30, 2010

Mything the Point

Jack Grahamreligion, rtd, sci-fi, steven moffat, timey wimey0

What’s the difference between RTD and Moffat?

RTD, for all that he’s an atheist, has a fundamentally religious view. I mean that, while he may not have any belief in an actual god, his basic outlook on life (at least as it finds expression in his writing) is religious in tone and is informed by religious mythology. RTD can’t think about concepts like ‘the end of the world’, or ’saving the world’, or ‘regenerating’, or any of this stuff (all very much the bread and butter of pulp fantasy fiction, which is all Who is really) without connecting it, maybe subconsciously, to religious concepts and stories. (Well, he can, but for the purposes of this theory, I’m going to pretend that he can’t. So there.)

‘Bad Wolf’/’Parting of the Ways’, ‘Gridlock’, ‘Voyage of the Damned’, ‘Sound of Drums’/’Last of the Time Lords’ and the other season finales… they’re all soaked in religious language and imagery, in Christian symbolism. And the theme of fiery judgement is never far away, nor is the idea of someone sacrificing themselves to redeem the world. Isn’t ‘The Ark in Space‘ supposedly his favourite classic story? No wonder.

I might also mention the fact that his most Whoish work prior to Who (much more Whoish than either of those kids’ fantasy serials he wrote) was about the second coming of Christ. This isn’t unusual. Douglas Adams was another atheist sci-fi writer obsessed with religion. H.G. Wells, Olaf Stapleton, Arthur C. Clarke… in fact, you’d be hard pressed to find a half-decent sci-fi author who doesn’t spend a large amount of his time thinking and writing about religion in one form or another.

Moffat, on the other hand, has no such underlying religious conception. He plays with these concepts on a technical level. He’s much more interested in playing around with plot for its own sake, twisting it around like origami. But there are some problems with this.

Firstly, he doesn’t tune into the mythological/religious basis of science-fiction (which is a reiteration of mythology in the secular age of technology). Secondly, he seems to lack any real interest in evil… which is problematic because Doctor Who, like religion (and, incidentally, like Shakespeare), is absolutely obsessed with evil (and not always in a simplistic way). You might be tempted to bring up Jekyll now… but I’ll remind you that, in Moffat’s conception, even Mr Hyde turns out to be an expression of the fierceness and danger inherent in love.

Consequently, his stories tend to be about malfunctions. They’re about things going wrong, usually technology. Nanogenes, automatic repair systems on spaceships, etc… but also chronology (any supposedly linear, predictable system, really)… and, when dealing with chronology, he can use that as a way of playing around with plot for its own sake.

The problem with playing around with plot for its own sake is that you tend to tie yourself into narrative knots that are very hard to cut through while retaining dramatic values.…