Eruditorum Press

Incremental progress meets Zeno’s Paradox

tom baker

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 16 (The Tomorrow People, The Uncanny X-Men)

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Upon its first appearance, under the editorial eye of David Whitaker, the TARDIS was explained via a metaphor of television in which the Doctor justifies his ability to fit a very large room inside a small box on the grounds that the same thing is accomplished via television. Aside from the role this moment plays in setting up the strand of alchemical and mystical thought I’ve traced through eleven years of Doctor Who thus far, this speaks to another crucial metaphor: that of the rabbit hole.

Of course, strictly speaking, if you’re going to talk about connections between Doctor Who and children’s literature in that Victorian tradition (and as I’ve said, there are very good reasons to talk about those connections), the TARDIS owes more to the work of CS Lewis, who, as I never get tired of pointing out, died the day before Doctor Who premiered, almost exactly an hour before the Kennedy assassination, and eight hours before Aldous Huxley. But the basic concept is the same either way – the very first image we had of Doctor Who, where Ian and Barbara fall out of the world.

Of course, that’s any Doctor Who fan’s first image of Doctor Who. That’s what shows like it are. Rabbit holes that we fall into. I don’t mean this according to the utterly banal logic of suspension of disbelief whereby we imagine ourselves endlessly in made-up places. I mean something much more literally. For me, on a weekend afternoon in September of 1992, I fell out of the world. I put a tape into the VCR, and when it was over I was not the same person anymore.

On his blog, after The Doctor’s Wife aired, Neil Gaiman did a little Q&A about the episode, and at one point said, “I like mythologies, and I knew what a Dalek was and what planet it came from, or what TARDIS stood for when I was five, before I knew who Thor or Anubis were.” This is, more or less, exactly it. The significance of Doctor Who, first and foremost, is an entire mythology and system of storytelling that has been unspooling through my brain for nearly twenty years now.

This is the way of fandom. Anyone who lives and breathes in geek culture has their rabbit holes. The books or movies or television shows that grabbed them and began asserting gravity in their minds. Usually the gravity is a subtle thing. Most of us do not embark on too many major life decisions out of fandom. But it is a vast thing. How many Christmases would have had a completely different tenor had the bulk of the presents not been Christmas themed? How would my honeymoon with my ex-wife have gone had we not planned it around seeing David Tennant in Hamlet? How would middle school have gone if the bullying I got for liking something as weird as Doctor Who had been forced to find a different path of least resistance?

This last one is, perhaps, the most interesting.…

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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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Fang Rock, Class and the Tentacular Revolution

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If you ask me, ‘Horror of Fang Rock’ is one of the best ever; a thriller that focuses on characters who really interact while they’re trapped together, featuring Tom and Louise at their acme.

It investigates the nature of belief in an age of rising science and technology: Adelaide’s astrology fetish compares to the superstition of Vince and Reuben, with Vince’s terror as real as hers, and Reuben’s fear of monsters more a manifestation of melancholy stubbornness at the rise of unsympathetic forces he doesn’t understand (like electricity… which is also the weapon of the monster that kills and impersonates him). Meanwhile, Leela lectures Adelaide that consulting her “shaman” (despite Adelaide’s denial, that is the right word for people like Miss Nethercote) is a “waste of time”… but, with relishable irony, the semi-educated Leela simply believes in science because her mentor has told her to.

‘Fang Rock’ has a quiet undercurrent about sex too. Adelaide is understood by Harker to be Palmerdale’s “fancy woman” and Skinsale obviously envies this (though god knows why)… but he’s also clearly very taken with Leela. Paddy Russell gives us a whole shot simply to establish how much Skinsale digs Leela on sight. Vince is very flustered by Leela’s impromptu striptease (which she completely fails to understand) and pays attentions to Adelaide, which she simply treats with a patronising indulgence (to her he’s an instrumentum vocale, not a young man). And then we have the porn under Reuben’s bed. Mind you, I’m not a Freudian so I’m not saying anything about phallic symbolism. Sometimes, a lighthouse is just a lighthouse.

‘Fang Rock’ is also very interested in class and the way it was changing in the early 20th century. Palmerdale is loaded and is therefore a scumbag, obviously. Crude but very Whoish… and true enough in general terms. He seems dead posh to the keepers… but to Skinsale (a wonderfully apt name, considering the manner of his death) Palmerdale is a nouveu riche, arriviste, vulgar little money-grubber… and such things obviously matter to Palmerdale since he has evidently purchased his lordly title. He tries to buy everything. He even seems to be paying his mistress (albeit for being a secretary rather than a concubine). Skinsale, meanwhile, considers himself Palmerdale’s social superior, despite obviously being skint (old money, obviously… and with a reputation built on enforcing empire in India). Palmerdale gets loads of his sailors killed but makes sure that he escapes (there are lifeboats enough for the gentry, as with the Titanic disaster, but not for the commoners) after causing the crash because he’s anxious to use insider info to fleece the markets… and then views Harker’s recriminations as irrelevant impertinence, and the keepers as more servants.

It’s worth noticing that the Doctor treats the workers (other than the cloddish and xenophobic Reuben) with respect. He starts off calling Vince “Mr Hawkins” while the poshos automatically talk to him like he’s a footman.

Vince, upon realising that Palmerdale is dead, burns the cash that His Lordship gave him, instinctively understanding that if he’s found in possession of it, the society he lives in will simply assume that he murdered the venal, titled git for the money.…

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Rise Like Lions

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Even as I type this, protestors are clambering over the stone lions at the base of Nelson’s Column, waving anti-cuts placards while sat astride the petrified leonine relics of an imperial age that is still decaying… and trying to take us all with it.

‘Warrior’s Gate’ came up for discussion at Gallifrey Base today.  It seems almost ridiculously appropriate.  Well, it does to me anyway.

Biroc makes me think of Walter Benjamin’s ‘Angel of History’:

The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.

Benjamin’s exegesis was inspired by a figure in a painting by Klee… but, sometimes, when I read that passage, I see Biroc.  To me, Biroc is the angel, haunted by the cruelties of the past and propelled forwards by the inexorable progress of brutality, yearning to pull the emergency cord and stop the train of history, to burst apart the continuum of repetitive exploitation. The media of his travel are the mirrors, the shimmering reproaches that reflect his and his people’s ruin back at him, and allow him through into the past where he can see – and even participate in – the horror of the lost empire that has doomed his people to their turn in servitude, the lions now kings no more, the king’s beasts in chains.

The Doctor walks into the cobwebby, ruined Tharil dining hall and sets right a goblet that was left on its side centuries ago. Later in the story he is taken back to the moment when the Tharils began to lose control of their empire, when they were attacked at the height of their power by the revolution they thought they could dodge forever. Disgusted by their treatment of their slaves, the Doctor pours wine into the very same goblet (but centuries before he first saw and righted it) until … well, until the Tharil’s cup runneth over… and then knocks it over in a gesture of splendid, ironic contempt for their decadence; decadence built on the suffering, servitude, abuse and unrequited labour of those the Tharils call “only people”.

The grand feudalism of the Tharils has crumbled, demolished by the revenge of history, by the revolt of the serfs and their faceless machines of violent liberation… and the industrious serfs have built their own civilisation, which has become mercantile and imperialistic, technological and temporal, perhaps with their time engines based on the looted skills of the time sensitives who used to loot their skills long ago.…

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