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Robot of Sherwood Review

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This review exists because of the generous support of 149 backers at Patreon. Please consider becoming the 150th. Or 151st, or whatever, if someone beat you to it. In any case, you can contribute here. Also, a second reminder that once the comments section gets a certain length, displaying all comments requires you to hunt and click the “load more” link. It’s right above the ad at the bottom of the page.

Right. Top-line assessment is that this one’s a bit more polarizing than the last two, which seemed to be widely liked with an inevitable pool of detractors. The first comment on the episode to come through declared it to basically be the worst thing ever, and GallifreyBase currently has it at 55.48% in the 8-10 range. Which is on the whole still pretty good, but clearly the most mixed reception of the season to date.

For my part… well, look, this was never going to be my favorite episode. I’m not a huge fan of Gatiss, the celebrity historical is not my favorite Doctor Who subgenre, and I’ve seen enough Doctor Who at this point in my life that the business as usual/meat and potatoes episodes, while often enjoyable, aren’t exactly highlights. And this was, at the end of the day, a meat and potatoes celebrity historical written by Mark Gatiss.

But none of those are reasonable things to hold against the episode on any level other than ranking it in the list at the end of the review. One can’t critique a beach for not being a paperclip. Instead, what jumps out is that everyone involved knows exactly what they’re doing. This alone puts it ahead of Gatiss’s previous swing at a celebrity historical, in which nobody quite seemed to know what tone to go for at any given moment. Here, everybody from Gatiss on down understands that they’re doing a fluffy one.

Perhaps more to the point, however, everybody gets how best to approach one of these. Gatiss is at his best when he’s taking an old and well-worn structure and giving it a spit and polish to modern tastes (The Unquiet Dead, Cold War, The Crimson Horror), and so this is firmly in his wheelhouse. There’s nothing particularly extraordinary about the script (indeed, when the first five scripts leaked, more than a few people proclaimed four of them good and this one to suck), but it moves through its set pieces and knows what it’s doing at any given moment.

But this isn’t a story about the clever script. It’s a story about dancing merrily through the obligatory set pieces. Gatiss holds up his end of the bargain by getting them all in and keeping the pace up. But the heart of this one is the execution, and it’s there that this does sparkle. It’s pure melodrama, and everybody gets that. The episode would be completely derailed if either of the two major guest roles (Robin and the Sheriff) pulled a Graham Crowden (or, if you want a more recent option, a Roger Lloyd-Pack).…

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The Svadishtana Chakrah (The Last War in Albion Part 60: Rite of Spring)

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This is the tenth of twenty-two parts of Chapter Eight of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing. An omnibus of all twenty-two parts can be purchased at Smashwords. If you purchased serialization via the Kickstarter, check your Kickstarter messages for a free download code.

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently available in six volumes. This entry covers stories from the second and third volumes. The second is available in the US here and the UK here. The third is available in the US here and the UK here. Finding the other volumes are, for now, left as an exercise for the reader, although I will update these links as the narrative gets to those issues.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: After an epic storyline featuring the return of Anton Arcane and the death of and resurrection of Abby Cable, Moore offered a pair of self-contained issues by guest artists, starting with a pastiche of Walt Kelly’s Pogo entitled “Pog.”

“It slithers up towards the Svadishtana Chakra, just three finger-breadths below the navel, corresponding to the lunar sphere of dream, imagination, sexual fantasy… opening inside us, a six-petal lotus, an ecstatic flowering of possibilities, fantastic, sensual, limitless… and the snake moves. And the snake turns.” – Alan Moore, Promethea #8
Eventually the aliens encounter Swamp Thing (who, in this issue, speaks only in an incomprehensible string of symbols), and explain to him their origin, telling him how on their planet (which they call the Lady) “there was one solitribal breed of misanthropomorphs who refused to convivicate with elsefolk. They constructed their own uncivilization, and excluded anykind else from joining it. They were the loneliest animals of all. They took our lady away from us.” He goes on to explain the horrible things these animals did, running medical experiments and, worse, killing and eating the other creatures until Pog and his shipmates set forth in their ship Find-the-Lady to find a new Lady on which to live, which Pog believes that they have now done. 
Figure 444: In a surprisingly bleak twist, Pog’s crewmember
Bartle is devoured by real gators. (Written by Alan Moore,
art by Shawn McManus, from Swamp Thing #32, 1984)
In response, Swamp Thing sadly takes Pog to Baton Rouge to show him the nature of the planet on which they have landed – a silent sequence of humans cooking and eating meat, which Pog stares at in dumbstruck horror before weeping and crying out that “they can’t own this Lady too! We were going to be happy here!” Swamp Thing and Pog rush back to the swamp, but are too late to save one of Pog’s crew, a cute alligator-looking alien named Bartle, from being killed by attacking gators in the swamp. After a funeral for Bartle, Pog and his crew return to their ship and fly off, trying still to look for a planet unspoiled by man, giving the story a bleak finish that is both surprising and effective.
…

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Sensor Scan: Doctor Who

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Hi everyone. Since we’re all friends now and this is a judgment-free zone, I’d like to tell my story here today as part of sharing time. I know we’ve all been talking lately about the things we grew up with and how they shaped us into the people we are today, so in light of that I have a confession to make. I never grew up with Doctor Who.

Let’s be realistic here. Nobody reading this needs me to explain to them what Doctor Who is. It is, as of this writing, arguably the biggest, most talked about, most beloved and most overanalyzed television show on the air today. It has a cultural weight that utterly demolishes everything else remotely comparable, and regularly sweeps the science fiction awards shows year after year partially because it’s the only science fiction show left on TV. As I write this I’m coming off of the franchise’s fiftieth anniversary in 2013, a year where it absolutely dominated entertainment headlines and was an omnipresent sight in every store, at every convention, and in every neighbourhood. Doctor Who currently has a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles-level of media presence, so trying to historicize it in any way feels bemusing and inauthentic. You know what this is, I know what this is, let’s not kid ourselves.

It’s not that I’m bitter or jealous, it’s just that Doctor Who is not a cultural phenomenon that I’m along for the ride with. I occasionally watched the New Series off and on between 2005 and 2012, but I eventually just lost interest in it completely and it’s not something I have any sort of emotional investment in. Doctor Who interests me mostly at an academic level: The current phenomenon is sort of fun for me to watch unfold as it reminds me a bit of what Star Trek: The Next Generation was like in the early 1990s, but now I’m on the other side of the glass, as it were. But also, as many critics, including many of my personal friends, have pointed out, Doctor Who is a show that does some very clever things with things like narrative and metatext and, thanks to a handful of the architects who worked on it in formative years, inherits a relatively unique kind of progressive edge. I’m not going to go into a ton of detail about that here, because there are people who can explain it far better than me and have dedicated a not-insignificant part of their lives to doing just that. You could go ahead and check out, say, Phil Sandifer, Jack Graham, Andrew Hickey, Alex Wilcock or the co-hosts of the Pex Lives! podcast.

What I will talk about is my history with the franchise and what we can glean about Star Trek through looking at it. The Doctor Who I remember is an unusual thing: It’s not the show itself, even though it was on the air at the time.…

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Essential Problems and Dialectical Solutions (‘Deep Breath’ 5)

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Many people have already commented on the expansion of Clara’s character in ‘Deep Breath’.  I think there’s something to this… in that Clara now appears to have a character, now that she’s been freed from her tedious and contentless mystery-arc.  Those impatient with the right-on critique of Moffat will respond with all sorts of examples of brave, complex things she did in Series 7, and some of those examples will be right, but still… she really did look like a characterless blur across the screen, a sort of jumble of traits, a Rubik’s Cube with a face drawn on it.  There’s no denying, she looked better in ‘Deep Breath’.  It’s possible that, as with so much else that seems better about ‘Deep Breath’, I may just be perceiving an improvement because the episode is largely free from the dominating and infuriating presence of a certain actor who will not be missed at all by me.  But then, such things do make a difference.  One performance in an ‘actually existing’ production of a written text can change the meaning.

Clara’s monologue rebuke to Vastra is part of her apparent improvement… though I have to say (in my complainey way) that the monologue contains yet another example of Moffat fetishizing the powerful, with Clara saying that Marcus Aurelius was her only pin-up.  Of all the philosophers she could have idolised, Moffat chooses the one who was also a Roman Emperor!  I also noticed an implied contempt towards teenage girls who like boy bands, as if that makes them inherently trivial people.  Clara gets to angrily reject the notion that she is unwilling to accept an older man, but the idea is expressed in terms that imply contempt for young women who who don’t reject young hot guys for old, establishment figures.  To be painstakingly fair, I’m sure this is not what was intended.  It’s one of those examples of a writer being unable to fully win no matter what he does.  Which happens.  Sometimes writers can’t win.  Sometimes they’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t.  It’s not about their flaws so much as the social context in which they write.  That’s not an excuse, but it is a thing.  The solution to this, as I’ve said before, is not to find better writers, or better ways of writing which square such circles away nicely and neatly so we can all watch in perfect comfort, but rather to change society so that massive imbalances of power don’t keep setting off these little textual mines.  Sounds like I’m demanding a lot, doesn’t it?  Well, I am.  Deal with it.  That’s just how I roll.  Etcetera.

At first, the whole business with Clara’s difficulty accepting the new Doctor reminded of the nasty reaction towards ‘fangirls’ that was unleashed by the news of Capaldi’s casting, with all those memes about the shallow, hormonal girlies, supposedly devastated by the news that the new Doctor was someone old and wrinkly.  Just another manifestation of the ‘fake geekgirl’, a chimeric invention of a closed shop full of males objecting to the scary presence of women in ‘their’ fandom. …

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Comics Reviews (September 4th, 2014)

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As always, and by always I mean just like the last two weeks, from worst to best.

Original Sin #8

Well. That didn’t work. Which is odd, because so much of it felt so close to working. The “a secret is revealed” trick to tie into the crossovers was great on paper, but then got squandered when both Avengers and Uncanny X-Men just did their own plots without actually using the “truth bomb,” but branded them as Original Sin crossovers anyway. The plot wasn’t uninteresting, but it was continually below the level of what it felt like a big crossover should be. This was a small, personal story that affected, ultimately, one character who doesn’t even hold down his own title, but was done as a giant mega-crossover event, which just wasn’t the right frame for it. The art was quality, but almost consciously wrong for the slightly humorous story Aaron was telling. Nobody felt quite on the same page as anyone else. Pretty much a flop.

Miracleman #10

It’s not a bad issue, to be sure. But even in the original, this was a filler issue between the huge birth issue and the start of Book Three, and while there exist issues of Miracleman good enough that $4.99 feels reasonable, the sixteen pages of actual story in this book aren’t one of them.

Moon Knight #7

I won’t lie, I’ve gone off Brian Wood a bit since the sexual harassment allegations came up a while ago. It’d been coming, with my getting bored with his X-Men, Conan, and Star Wars runs in fairly rapid succession, but there’s no point in pretending that the slight cringe whenever I hear his name isn’t the biggest problem. So I went into this kind of expecting it to be the issue where I dropped Moon Knight.

Much stays the same – stylistic complexity, the one-issue story, et cetera. And, appropriately, much changes, as it should, since just doing a Warren Ellis imitation would be doomed. The problem is that the changes consist of taking things Ellis did that were interesting and replacing them with the boring. A tease in the final panel gesturing towards an arc. The way in which the high concept premise of the issue isn’t explored and plumbed, but is just the backdrop for some action sequences. All the stylistic innovations and structures that powered Ellis’s book feel like they’re receding, replaced by the ill-conceived Batman clone that Ellis was always fighting the gravity of.

It’s good enough to get another issue, which means it beat expectations, I suppose, but I’m still pessimistic.

Uncanny X-Men #25

It plays to Bendis’s strengths in many ways. The interactions among X-Men, particularly from both sides of Ye Olde Schism, are great. The big retcon, Matthew Malloy, gets enough space to breathe that he feels like a functional and interesting character. The extra story pages are used well, in equal measures to allow for more plot and to give the plot to breathe. It’s still a Bendis comic, with that strange anticipatory tone whereby everything that’s happening now is overshadowed by some promised future event that, whenever it arrives, will itself be overshadowed by the next big thing.…

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Outside the Government: The Curse of Clyde Langer

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It’s October 10th, 2011. Rihanna is at number one with “We Found Love,” a song whose video, consisting of shots of Belfast, provides a perhaps unintentional but amusing sense of what is meant by “a hopeless place.” One Direction, LMFAO, Dappy, and the Goo Goo Dolls also chart, the latter, still mysteriously, with “Iris.” In news, Paul McCartney gets married again, Steve Jobs dies, and mutterings begin that Occupy Wall Street will be moved out of Zuccotti Park so it can be “cleaned.” 
While on television, The Curse of Clyde Langer, Phil Ford’s final script for The Sarah Jane Adventures. Phil Ford is an odd duck. His two best scripts are co-authored – The Waters of Mars before this and Into the Dalek after. His Torchwood script is quite good, and arguably the highlight of a weak season. His Sarah Jane Adventures stories range from the quite solid to the Curate’s eggs. In many ways, he epitomizes The Sarah Jane Adventures, in that he is a writer one wishes was slightly better than he is, but who could be a lot worse. Certainly, as the primary writer of the series, he kept it at the basically watchable, which is more than one can say of Chris Chibnall on Torchwood. 
The Curse of Clyde Langer is in many ways the archetypal Ford script, in that it has some lovely bits and some crap bits, and is in other ways the archetypal Sarah Jane Adventures story, in that it could have fallen very flat, but is ultimately saved by Daniel Anthony. In this regard, most of what is good about it is the sort of thing we have come to expect from The Sarah Jane Adventures. The eponymous curse means that upon hearing Clyde’s name people instantly hate him, turning his friends and family against him. Clyde’s sputtering fear as he begs his friends not to abandon him is marvelous, as is his steady determination to survive and figure something out. 
The obvious transition here is that what’s bad about the story is for the most part more interesting. A major plot of the story concerns Clyde’s relationship with a homeless woman who gives her name as Ellie, and who takes him into a homeless community when he’s forced away from home. Some of this is also brilliant. In casting the story, someone had the absolutely brilliant idea of casting Lily Loveless, famous from seasons three and four of Skins, as Ellie. The result is that with very little screentime, Clyde and Ellie feel like a real friendship and budding relationship, as Loveless and Anthony are more than capable of selling the hell out of it. There’s also some great dialogue around it – when Clyde first meets her, before he’s cursed, he gives her money when she begs for it. Sky asks why she needed money, and he answers, “because she’s a scrounger.” Then Sky asks why he gave it to her, and he answers, “because it’s probably not her fault.”
…

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Sensor Scan: Hellraiser and Hellraiser III

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The psychology behind horror movies interests me. I know there have been studies done that show a link between fear and endorphin release, and that a lot of their popularity has been attributed to the rush your brain gets when the pleasure and fear senses get crossed. But do we actually watch horror movies to get scared? There’s a whole massively popular genre of campy, no-budget horror movies that no one could possibly be remotely frightened of, yet is beloved precisely because of how cheap, fake and ridiculous it is. Then there are people who just really like seeing blood and guts splattered all over the screen: They’re not getting anything deep or meaningful out of the experience, they just like the lurid spectacle.

I know for me, while horror is not a particular favourite genre of mine, the bits of it I partake in I enjoy because of the way they build atmosphere. That’s sort of been a defining theme in all of my various media interests: I like things that can build a mood and a feeling. A lot of the reason I’m so partial to the German Expressionist movement and the early Universal Horror movies is because of the way those films use light, colour and design to craft a surreal mindscape the convey certain themes and emotions. I mean, that’s no real surprise at this point and by now I really need to come up with some new words to describe what I like to see in media.

But I also like horror movies that use their horror trappings to explore something that’s horrific or somber in real life, like how Alien made generations of men uncomfortable with themselves by turning rape culture and patriarchy into something repulsive and monstrous. The original Godzilla should really be considered a horror film, and there the horror comes from not just the obvious allegory (atomic weapons, natch), but in that classic Japanese trope of modernity’s shortsighted disconnect from the natural universe. But as much as we’re supposed to be horrified at the destruction of Tokyo, we also sympathize with Godzilla herself, and take pity on the tragic plight she endures. As much as we’re aghast at the destruction left in her wake, we want Godzilla to win.

Which, weirdly, leads into the Hellraiser series. An adaptation of Clive Barker’s novel The Hellbound Heart helmed by the author himself, the first Hellraiser film is an examination of the role pain and violence play in the human psyche as conveyed through a horror movie. It concerns a magical puzzle box that, when solved, opens a portal to the realm of the Cenobites, creatures of a monstrous visage who practice a form of ritualistic sadomasochism and self-mutilation in an effort to explore and understand carnal experience, them seeing no distinction between pleasure and pain. It’s definitely an intriguing concept, especially for a horror film in 1987. With a set-up like that, there’s a lot of potential for metacommentary on the whole genre, filtered through an examination of real-world S&M lifestyle.…

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Outside the Government: Sky

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It’s October 3rd, 2011. Sak Noel is at number one with “Loca People,” with One Direction, Goo Goo Dolls, and Dappy also charting. There is presumably some reason why the Goo Goo Dolls are charting with “Iris,” a years old song at this point, but I certainly don’t know it off the top of my head. In news, really basically nothing has happened in the two days that have passed since The Wedding of River Song. There’s a factory fire in Surrey, and Amanda Knox’s conviction is overturned. And the day the second episode of this airs, there’s a car bombing in Mogadishu. 
While on television, The Sarah Jane Adventures returns with Sky. There is, of course, something of an dilemma here in terms of how to approach this final season of The Sarah Jane Adventures. On the one hand, they are a clear memorial to Lis Sladen – a run of episodes that can only be taken in the context of her death. On the other, they were never meant to be this. They’re just the first half of Season Five, shot alongside Season Four in the expectation that everyone would be back in a few months to finish the run. It’s just that the second half never got made because Lis Sladen died of cancer not long after these filmed. This paradox hangs over the entire season in a way that can’t be ignored.
It’s something we’ve talked about before, but it’s perhaps worth stressing once more how much of a blow Sladen’s death was. For a variety of reasons. The fact that it came so close after Nicholas Courtney’s was one. I mean, fandom always takes deaths of major players in Doctor Who kind of hard. On aggregate, we take actors the worst, and fair enough, because far more people know who Lis Sladen and Nicholas Courtney are than know who Verity Lambert and Barry Letts are. But Sladen and Courtney were big even by the standards of actors. They were people who figured generationally in people’s lives. Children who grew up watching Sarah Jane and the Brigadier watched Sarah Jane and the Brigadier with their children. Parents who grew up watching them watched them with their grandchildren. That hurts in its own unique ways.
But Courtney was 81, mostly retired, and had been in ill health, while Sladen was 65 and still a television star. For those who paid attention there was a sense something might be wrong, but for the most part it felt as though one minute she was on BBC One watching David Tennant regenerate, the next she was dead. I mean, it was the first time I decided to post something other than an actual TARDIS Eruditorum post on the blog, because it hit so hard that I felt like I just had to say something about it, because it was one of those days where writing was how I grieved. I remember a friend messaging me on Facebook just saying “Oh No.
…

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Flight Simulator: Dirty Pair: Project E.D.E.N. (Famicom Disk System)

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Back when I started planning these video game posts it never would have crossed my mind that it would take until 1987 to properly get this phase of the project underway and that the first actual video game we’d be looking at wouldn’t even be a Star Trek one. And yet, Kei and Yuri must be heard.

There were a handful of Star Trek titles released for early PCs and home consoles like the Apple II, TRS-80, VIC-20, Commodore 64, Atari 2600 and Vectrex in the early 1980s, but they were all on platforms I either didn’t have at a formative age or are so arcane they’re difficult to get ahold of these days. Considering the way the pagination for Volume 2 is turning out, I may try to take a look at a few of them to flesh that book out, but we’re skipping them for the time being. The Star Trek video games I’m most familiar with date to the late-1980s and early 1990s and we’ll talk about those when the time comes, but, as it turns out, Dirty Pair: Project E.D.E.N. predates them all. In the meantime, a whole bunch has happened in the video game industry, namely that there is now in fact a video game industry that has been around long enough to not only crash thanks to market saturation and Atari’s sloppy management, but come back bigger than ever before thanks to toy company from Japan called Nintendo.

The Famicom Disk System is a strange beast within the history of Nintendo. It was a Japanese-exclusive add-on for the Famicom (or Family Computer), which is what the NES (or Nintendo Entertainment System) was called in its home country. This naming discrepancy actually reveals a lot about how the history of the game industry in the United States differs from how it played out in Japan. See, by 1985 video games were seen as a dead fad thanks to the collapse of the monopolistic Atari that dragged the whole industry down with it in 1983. Because of this, Nintendo had to market the NES as essentially a children’s toy to get it to sell its first Holiday season, in the process changing the way video games are thought of even to this day (before Nintendo’s US success, video games were seen as social things for everybody, though primarily young, single, active adults). However, this was only true in the US, and in Japan, the console was marketed as what it straightforwardly was: A home computer designed for family entertainment.

(You can see this attitude play out even today: In the US, in spite of the industry’s major inroads in recent years, video games still can’t *quite* shake the stigma of being thought of as expensive playthings for lazy, socially maladjusted children, or adults with the mentality of socially maladjusted children. In Japan, the Nintendo 3DS is as ubiquitous as the iPhone.)

So, the Famicom Disk System is something that Nintendo would only ever have released in Japan at this time, along with the modem that also existed for the console at the time (yes, you could access something a lot like the Internet on your Famicom in 1983).…

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Bits and Bobs (‘Deep Breath’ 4)

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It ends with another mysterious woman, another predatory dominatrix older female.  She represents another story arc which we, the viewers, have no possibility of guessing or understanding until the inevitable ‘twist’ becomes self-evident just before being served up to you on a plate several episodes later than it could’ve been.

She speaks as if she is one of the audience and saw what we saw.  Like us, she couldn’t see if the Doctor persuaded Half-Face to commit suicide or if he pushed him to his death.  Again, a metatextual trick is used as a signifier of the enemy.

Another physical endurance test or test of skill becomes part of the nature of the monster-of-the-week.  The Weeping Angels were based on how long you could go without blinking.  The Sredni Vashtar (or whatever they were called) were based on how long you could go without touching a shadow with your own shadow.  The droids in ‘Deep Breath’ were based on how long you can hold your breath (a slightly dodgy thing to encourage in the playground possibly).

How much you like all this probably depends on how much you like repetition.

I said:  how much you like all this probably depends on how much you like repetition.

(To be fair, RTD was hardly unrepetitious – how many eleventh episodes ended with robotic things swarming in the sky and swooping down to shoot milling people?  Quite a few, as I recall.)

The business with the droids stealing bodies hooks into the corpse economy of Victorian London, but strips it of class significance.  Rich and poor alike get predated upon.  It’s not like in ‘Bad Wolf’ in which the Daleks harvest the tramps and the sick and the outcasts… and then start feeding on the TV audience which tunes in to watch bodies punished.

The episode has lots to say about faces, and how we acquire them.  The Doctor chooses (unconsciously, presumably) his new face as a way of being honest with Clara and trusting her.  He initially finds it hard to recognise as himself.  Vastra’s face is also the key to understanding and accepting her.  You perceive a veil if you are unprepared to see and accept who she is.  The droid has half a face (why couldn’t he have become a Springheel Jack-style urban legend called Jack Half-a-Face? – that would’ve been awesome) because he unconsciously recognises that it is not his own.  He is contrasted with the Doctor and Vastra in that his face is a lie that he essentially rejects despite his attempts to accept it, whereas they performatively reject their own faces as a way of making others accept their honesty.

Vastra’s larder mirrors the larder of the droids, their store cupboard of human bits and bobs.  It also mirrors the remark the Doctor makes to Clara about all restaurants being slaughterhouses, and his not remembering her becoming a vegetarian.  (As a longstanding veggie myself, I liked that bit – though his attitude was condescending… but then, let’s face it, the Doctor is often morally condescending, and so are vegetarians.) …

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