Eruditorum Press

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Skulltopus 10: How Green Was My Death?

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‘The Green Death’ is a ghost story.  Doctor Who itself may actually be best described, from one standpoint, as an anthology of ghost stories.

Okay, let’s go back a bit.

Firstly, let me defend my notion about 70s Doctor Who sprouting Weird tentacles when it notices (and thus needs to evade and/or signify) capitalism.  ‘The Green Death’ is clearly aware of capitalism and, sure enough, shows signs of Weird inflection.  (I’m aware, by the way, that I keep talking about the show as though its alive… a form of commodity fetishism that I’ll address some day.)

Apart from anything else, there’s a dirty great tentacle in ‘The Green Death’.  It’s only in it for a few seconds, during the Doctor’s abortive trip to Metebelis III, but still…

As in ‘Curse of Peladon‘, this is the tentacular riding in on past associations… however, it can’t be said to work quite the same way as previous tentacles in the Pertwee era.  This tentacle is clearly not obscuring any potential thematic convergence upon the subject of capitalism, as in ‘Spearhead from Space‘ and ‘Claws of Axos‘.  Nor is it standing in for implied capitalism, as in ‘Curse of Peladon’.  Capitalism is something that ‘The Green Death’ is aware of openly.  It doesn’t need to be either obscured or implied… especially since the ‘critique’ of capitalism the story offers is actually quite diffident, to the extent of dehumanizing the working class.  And this tentacle is only a momentarily glimpsed feature of a side-trip, taking place literally light years away from Global Chemicals.  However, it’s in ‘The Green Death’ rather than, say, ‘The Time Warrior’.  It’s in a story about an evil corporation rather than one about a feudal warlord.  So, the association is still evident and active.

There is also a distinct Weird inflection to the maggots.  Their multiplicitous tubular wriggliness is hardly a million miles from being tentacular.  They have some of that quintessentially Weird incoherence.  

However, like ‘Spearhead from Space’, ‘The Claws of Axos’ and ‘Curse of Peladon’ before it, ‘Green Death’ retains a hauntological charge.  

The maggots themselves are steeped in gothic, in associations to do with death.  Real maggots breed in corpses or bad meat.  They are of putrefaction.  This suggests skulls and bones and graveyards, and it suggests them in the gothic mode: as signalling extremes and transgressions, and the haunting presence of that which has been denied and repressed.  Biological corruption is here aesthetically linked with the corruption of the environment by big business.  The maggots appear in the mine because they are generated by the toxic waste from the Stevens Process, which is secretly dumped underground.  Eventually, they erupt out of the mine into the world above, like zombies out of graves.  They make a typical gothic move.  They do it almost too literally.  They have been repressed and then they return.  They have been buried out of sight but wriggle out of their subterranean hiding-place.  Moreover, this is gothic very much in the Who mode.…

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One Tiny Little Gap in the Universe Left, Just About To Close (Kinda)

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A snake! A snake! Ooooooh! A Snake! (Badger badger…)
It’s February 1st, 1982. Kraftwerk! They’re at number one! With “The Model/Computer Love!” It only lasts a week, but they’re overtaken by The Jam, also a fabulous band, with “A Town Called Malice/Precious.” The rest of the top ten isn’t hugely interesting, although some mention needs to go to the rather fabulously named Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, who chart with the equally fabulously named “Maid of Orleans (The Waltz of Joan of Arc.” Meat Loaf and Christopher Cross also chart, taking the positions on either side of OMD. Oh well.

In real news, Hafez al-Assad, father of current Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, conducts a scorched earth campaign in Hamathat kills between seventeen and forty thousand people, mostly civilians. Like father like son, clearly. And British airline Laker Airlines abruptly goes out of business, stranding six thousand passengers when their flights are cancelled due to lack of airline. Putting the creativity into creative destruction, then.

And then on television, Kinda. As such things go, Kinda is one of the most overdetermined Doctor Who stories in existence. So we’ll start with a book that I’m kind of largely going to avoid, namely Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text. There is, to be clear, nothing particularly wrong with this book. It’s a fabulous example of early 1980s media studies. Unfortunately, the 1980s were basically the earliest days of media studies. And so reading The Unfolding Text in 2012 one gets the sense of a clever book where the only bits that would be at all new to someone who is reading this blog are basically the bits where some mildly arcane bit of literary theory is being evoked. I mean, I don’t think most of my readers are necessarily going to be solid on Greimasian oppositions and their relationship to The Krotons, but even there I think they’d do fine on the actual analysis.

But The Unfolding Text has a particularly detailed reading of Kinda due to the fact that the authors were allowed to hang around the set during filming, and so among we academic types Kinda has a bit of a reputation simply because its been analyzed in particular depth. All of which said, the reading is a bit flat – various codes of meaning overlap and partially cancel each other out and the end result reinforces established social codes based around a BBC image of “professionalism.” It’s a fair enough approach and hard to argue with, but it falls a bit too neatly into the general tendency of early cultural studies work to find oppressive cultural hegemony everywhere.

I, somewhat obviously, prefer a different approach. Not to break out the theory excessively, but I tend to favor an approach where it’s assumed that nothing is ever fully erased and that overlapping codes of meaning – which obviously happen in any collaboratively authored text, and, frankly, in most single-author ones – do just that – overlap, leaving each meaning intact as one of a number of routes through the text.…

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BBC Wales

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The patronizing use of Welsh stereotypes in ‘The Green Death’ is evidence of the employment of centuries-old imperial condecenscion.  However, Welshness alone does not straightforwardly equal idiocy in this story.  Rather, it is the conjunction of Welshness with membership of the proletariat which produces characters who don’t really have a clue what’s going and need everything explained to them.

Clifford Jones and ‘Nancy’ (note how she doesn’t need a surname) are allowed to be efficient and useful only because their Welshness (which entails them using cute provincialisms galore) is offset by their educated, middle-class boffinity and right-onitude.  Meanwhile, Jo marvels openly at her own foolishness in caring so much about the death of a “funny little Welshman” (who kept her alive).  The difference between these Welsh characters – i.e. between the ones who qualify as people and those who don’t – is down to class.

The workers in this story are belittled, peripheral figures.  They are profoundly out of touch and their Welshness is but a conduit by which they can be further quaintified.  They miss the big picture, even when the hippy scientists try to explain everything to them. They side with Stevens when he tries to bribe them with promises of the trickle-down effect… indeed, the validity of Stevens’s claims that profits for Global will also mean prosperity for the workers is never challenged, only qualified by the criticism that pollution will be a side-effect.  There is hardly a hint of class struggle here, besides the opening scene… and even here the struggle is portrayed as over.  The mine is closed, the miners all but absent.  Their status seems unclear… some of them seem to still have access to the mine despite its apparent closure.  The mine itself seems not to be owned by the government but by Global Chemicals.

Now, in its haphazard and accidental way, some of this is actually prescient.  The UNIT stories were supposed to be ‘five minutes into the future’ (we’re not getting into UNIT dating controversies – I couldn’t care less) and, of course, by the late-90s, British mining – together with so much manufacturing industry – had been deliberately destroyed by the Tories.  Huge numbers of traditional working class jobs had been annihilated.  Working class communities were wrecked in the process.  In many ways, the sight of a crowd of workers, made redundant, closed out of their sold-off and shut-down workplace, listening to speeches about how coal is dead, being fraudulently told that their future lies in the trickle-down effect of private profit, is a sight that predicts the result of Thatcherism (which, of course, had already begun under Heath, albeit in a less aggressive form).

Thing is, viewed in the context of the times in which it was made, this is as puzzlingly skewiff as it is prescient.  ‘Anachronistic’ is the only way to properly describe it.

You see… miners were powerful in 1973, having struck in 1972 for the first time since the 20s – and won!  Miners all over the country came out over piffling proposed pay rises, proposed by the Tory government in the midst of declining living standards and working conditions.…

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Because We Don’t Quite Fully Understand (Four to Doomsday)

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And apparently one of the things we don’t quite fully
understand is basic physics. 
It’s January 18, 1982. Bucks Fizz are at number one with “The Land of Make Believe,” with Kraftwerk threatening to take the number one spot. Unfortunately it is instead Shakin’ Stevens with “Oh Julie” that inherits the number one from Bucks Fizz. Elsewhere, The Human League have two separate songs in the top ten and are joined by Kool and the Gang, Foreigner, and Meat Loaf.
The trouble with these twice-weekly airings is that I get very little window to cover any non-musical history in. To wit, all I’m finding is that the post-war peak in unemployment happens in the UK, with over three million people out of work. Ah, the triumphs of Thatcherism. (Yes, she cut the unemployment rate later. But in the process she presided over a complete realignment of the economy that was… less than ideal.)
While on television, it’s Four to Doomsday. With the exception of The Highlanders, which is, of course, missing, I am reasonably certain that this is the second appearance of a Doctor that the fewest people care about one way or another. The next two Doctors get two of the most reviled stories in series’ history for their second outings (one of them even correctly reviled), while Hartnell, Pertwee, and Baker get all-time classics for their second go-rounds. Davison, on the other hand, gets this – a story nobody much likes, nobody much hates, and, frankly, nobody much thinks about beyond “that one between Castrovalva and Kinda” with a side of “that was the first story Davison filmed.”
While I would not go so far as to call this story an overlooked gem (or as an overrated disaster), it is a fair bit more interesting than its reputation. The first thing to realize about it is that it very much sets the tone for Season Nineteen. Of the seven stories in Season Nineteen three are unabashedly attempts to redo things the series has done in the past in a new format. The first of these is, of course, Castrovalva, which we already noted was an effort to go back and build a transition out of the Bidmead era. And we’ll deal with the other two in a few days. Three more are conscious attempts to try new things that the series couldn’t previously do. And then there is Four to Doomsday, a story that it is difficult to firmly describe as forward-looking or backward-looking. In a season that is equally committed to finding ways to rework the standards into the new approach for Doctor Who and to finding new things to do, Four to Doomsday is actually the one story that’s splitting the difference between the two approaches. 
On the one hand, as Miles and Wood point out, Four to Doomsday is essentially built like a Hartnell story. From the start, this is clear: the story opens with the Doctor failing to get his companion back to Earth and the TARDIS crew trying to figure out what sort of world they’re in.
…

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White as Snowy

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I’m sure I’m giving you all the impression that I’m a kind of obsessed stalker when it comes to China Miéville, but everyone should read his latest blog post.  It’s about the recent decision by the Belgian Supreme Court to reject the application by Bienvenue Mbutu Mondondo…

to have Tintin in the Congo declared unacceptable under the Belgian race relations law.  However, he had made clear for years that he would be satisfied if, as in Britain, the book was published with a visible warning, a reminder of the context in which it was written (maybe even of the toxic ideology enshrined within). What Mondondo wanted was an official recognition that this text was a spitting in his face. That it came down to what was always clearly a nuclear option was due to the steadfast refusal of the publishers to countenance this – and thereby take responsibility for what they publish. The Belgian establishment went to cultural war, & it did so not for free speech, but for their right not to apologise for racist slander.

When human rights lawyer David Enright asks for the book to be sold as an adult work, while explicitly, repeatedly, stressing that he does not advocate banning it, nonetheless, cometh the resentment-spewing dissemblers in the comments insisting that he is supporting ‘censorship’. This is a degree of point-missing so great it is hard to believe it is not performative.

(Indeed, an astoundingly small proportion of arguments ‘for free speech’ & ‘against censorship’ or ‘banning’ are, in fact, about free speech, censorship or banning. It is depressing to have to point out, yet again, that there is a distinction between having the legal right to say something & having the moral right not to be held accountable for what you say. Being asked to apologise for saying something unconscionable is not the same as being stripped of the legal right to say it. It’s really not very fucking complicated. Cry Free Speech in such contexts, you are demanding the right to speak any bilge you wish without apology or fear of comeback. You are demanding not legal rights but an end to debate about & criticism of what you say. When did bigotry get so needy? This assertive & idiotic failure to understand that juridical permissibility backed up by the state is not the horizon of politics or morality is absurdly resilient.)

In case you don’t know the book, here‘s a link (provided by Miéville in his blog post) that will fill you in.

Had a look?

Delightful, isn’t it?

I’m not quoting it or putting any of the pictures on here.  It makes me feel ill.

Herge (real name Georges Remi) was, by the way, a Nazi collaborator who featured anti-semitic stereotype villains (hook-nosed, cigar-chomping financier called Blumenstein, for instance) in his cartoons.  Nice company for Spielberg and Moffat.

Aside from picking over the Tintin issue forensically, Miéville’s blog post is of relevance to this blog because he goes over the various weasely excuses always wheeled out by people who want to sleaze their way out of confronting the racism often blatant in cherished old stories.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 17 (Cold Fusion, Virgin Books, 1996)

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As novels that I couldn’t possibly avoid go, this one ranks pretty highly. I’ve noted several times that, within the classic series, McCoy is “my Doctor,” so to speak. As the only Doctor (after my first three episodes) I didn’t originally know existed he was the one I got to discover without episode guides. But even still, when I got into Doctor Who it had been off the air for three years. The McCoy years may have been the televised Doctor Who that I came to freshest, but until the dark days of 1996 the only Doctor Who that I got to follow as it came out were the Virgin books.

I’m going to cover much of the Virgin and BBC books lines as if they were new episodes when the time comes. (I haven’t gotten a firm list together, but on a quick scan of titles I think I’m going to do about 30 Virgin books and about 15 each of the BBC Books and Big Finish Eighth Doctor stuff.) But my relationship with them was… interesting. I was reading them roughly from the ages of 11-13, which is just a bit too young for them. But this is in some ways the perfect way to relate to the Virgin books. Their darkness, complexity, and occasional jaunts into overt sexuality are as perfect for that age. The mixture of scandalous and salacious content with the fundamental safety of Doctor Who is as gentle a gradient to tackle emerging sexuality as they come – like having a copy of Timeframe with its Katy Manning/Dalek photo as your sole piece of pornography (which, for years, I did).

This book, in other words, merges two of my favorite eras. As Doctor crossovers go, this one is, for me, as good as it gets. Not just because it’s two of my favorite Doctors, but because there’s such an intrinsic contrast between them. The relative gentleness of Davison’s Doctor combined with the dangerous and manipulative nature of the Virgin Books version of McCoy’s are an inspired pairing that offers no shortage of drama.

All of which said, any multi-Doctor story is less about the particulars of a man meeting himself at a different point in his life and more about the comparison of two eras of the show. Doubly so in a book, where we do not get Davison’s Doctor or McCoy’s Doctor but rather their textual ghosts. The Doctors themselves are televisual performances – things created by actors, directors, and writers in a collaborative environment. These are purely literary characters, responding almost entirely to the whims of a singular creator. They are echoes. That does not diminish the validity of their stories, but this book belongs to neither the Davison nor the McCoy eras.

This gets at another issue with the Virgin books (and for that matter the BBC ones) that I’ve largely danced around. I poke at it a little bit in both the Man in the Velvet Mask entry and the Empire of Glass essay in the Hartnell book, and deal with it more extensively in the Scales of Injustice entry, but it’s been a while and it’s high time we tackled the issue of fanwank again.…

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We’ve Materialised With Considerable Finesse (Castrovalva)

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It wasn’t until Matthew Waterhouse watched the fourth
episode of Castrovalva that he realized that he hadn’t been
hungover at all.
It’s January 4th, 1982. The Human League are at number one with “Don’t You Want Me,” but are unseated by Bucks Fizz’s “The Land of Make Believe,” a song whose lyrics, by former King Crimson member Peter Sinfield, were supposedly a subtle attack on the Thatcher government. Very subtle, in fact. Also in the charts are ABBA, Adam and the Ants, Kool and the Gang, and, now in the top ten, Kraftwerk!

In real news, AT&T agrees to being broken up, the coldest temperature ever recorded in the UK is managed in Braemar, and, at least from my perspective most importantly, the Commodore 64 is introduced. Although I’m still nine months out from my debut (I’m strictly gestational for Season 19), my parents got me a Commodore 64 in the name of getting themselves one when I was about two, and my earliest memories are of playing it.

This serves, in part, as another transition point then. The fact that my entrance to Doctor Who came at the end of the Pertwee era meant that I remained absent for that in the blog. I was present for the Hinchcliffe era, but those were the stories I watched in 6th grade, largely. The Williams era I missed, but as I noted in passing on The Keeper of Traken, with Warrior’s Gate 4 watched I have now hit the point where I have, in fact, seen every single existent episode of Doctor Who, save, of course, the two as of yet unreleased missing episodes. But I’ve watched reconstructions. (I am rather glad to have had Warrior’s Gate be my last unwatched story. It was a very lovely way to go out.)

The remaining three classic series Doctors divide fairly neatly for me. Davison and Pertwee, as I’ve said elsewhere, made up the overwhelming majority of my parents’ VHS tapes. Since I was not fond of Pertwee, and in the absence of the Baker stories I desired, Davison was the first Doctor I watched with any avidness. I treated him at the time as my second favorite Doctor, behind Baker, but as I loved a theoretical ideal of Baker, this was a lie. Until I discovered the existence of Sylvester McCoy (my parents’ guidebooks all left off in the vicinity of Davison’s regeneration. I knew Colin Baker existed and that my parents hated him, but I’d been a Doctor Who fan for a solid year before I learned that there was a Seventh Doctor) Davison was my favorite Doctor. It’s a little tricky to reconstruct because I found a couple of Davison stories on mislabeled tapes after I’d started getting commercial VHS releases, but the “core” of Davison stories I remember watching young are Castrovalva, Four to Doomsday, Kinda, Time Flight, Arc of Infinity, Snakedance, Mawdryn Undead, The Five Doctors, Resurrection of the Daleks, Planet of Fire, and The Caves of Androzani, though I remember getting The Visitation, Black Orchid, and Earthshock all relatively early as well.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 26 (Coronation Street)

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The Davison era is described, usually by its detractors, as a soap opera. “Soap opera,” it should be noted, is one of the great denigrating terms in science fiction fandom. There is nothing, including the Star Wars Christmas Special, quite as bad in the world as being a soap opera.

To anyone outside of science fiction or soap opera fandom this is completely insane since the two are self-evidently the exact same thing. To someone uninvolved in either there is no difference whatsoever in what die-hard sci-fi fans do and what die-hard soap fans do. Both are equally objects of mockery. One dresses up more, the other sends panicked letters in that don’t quite seem to grasp that the characters are fictional. But other than that they’re exactly the same thing.

Consider a recent example. In 2011 Coronation Street brought back the character of Dennis Tanner, who had not appeared in the show since 1968. The only thing that can possibly be reached for as an analogy would be something like bringing Sarah Jane Smith back to Doctor Who in 2006 when she hadn’t appeared in it since 1983. Or bringing Leonard Nimoy as Spock back in the latest Star Trek movie. More simply, consider this – virtually every long-form serialized text (as opposed to something like, say, Garfield that is serialized but consists of one-off strips instead of continuing storylines) that exists in either the US or UK is either a sci-fi/fantasy story or a soap opera.

And yet it’s difficult to imagine two genres that are more diametrically disdainful of one another. Under the hood much of this comes down to the fact that although their basic narrative structures match almost exactly their subject matter is wildly different. Soap operas are emotionally-based character dramas, science fiction is action-adventure. But understanding the fact that they’re basically the same in terms of structure and audience interaction is key to understanding why, starting in about the 1990s, sci-fi/fantasy shows began working hard to try to cater to a soap audience as well. It’s just good business – if the two work similarly, you may as well try to appeal to both.

The other thing to note is that the perception that soap operas and science fictiona re diametrically opposed is not quite fair. It’s true that the average soap fan and the average science fiction fan are very different audiences. This is the logic behind the other event that would justify a Coronation Street entry, the scheduling of Doctor Who opposite Coronation Street in the Sylvester McCoy years on the grounds, as Michael Grade put it, that nobody in Britain watched both shows. But the logic behind this line was delightfully skewered years later in Russell T. Davies’s Queer as Folk when Vince Tyler reminisces about how irritating it was to have both shows on at once. Of course now that Phil Collinson has moved from Executive Producer of Doctor Who to showrunning Coronation Street the idea of any opposition between the shows becomes almost farcical.…

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A New Hope?

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Rewatching Star Wars is an odd experience.

It’s surprisingly dirty, grimey and grotty.

It doesn’t introduce the hero until about 15 minutes in.

Loads of the first reel is one-sided bickering, followed by silent wandering around in the desert.

Han is really very seedy… and a murderer.

Leia is a sarcastic, bossy, combative dominatrix; a far cry from the sexual-harassment-victim / soppy-girlfriend she later became.

The tone suddenly veers from deadly serious to comic/quippy as soon as the Falcon arrives at the Death Star.

The Stormtroopers hang around and chat.

The Rebels are an unprepossessing bunch – skinny, scrawny, tubby, greasy-haired, snaggletoothed, etc.

The droids are CLEARLY slaves to the humans.

The Sandpeople are CLEARLY evil Arabs.

The backstory as explained by Ben is much better than anything in the sequels, let alone the prequels: Ben and Annakin go and become Jedis, their protege Darth kills Annakin, Ben buggers off home. Clear, simple and emotionally resonant.

Darth is clearly a first name and is clearly NOT Luke’s dad, no more than Leia is Luke’s sister.  Luke and Leia clearly fancy each other.

The funny thing is that, if we take the prequel canon as applying to the original film (which can be done without inflicting emotional damage upon oneself as long as its only a temporary thought experiment) then the lovechild of Luke and Leia would be absolutely LOADED with midichlorians… thus making it, in all probably, the most powerful Jedi in history. The only problem is that a lightsabre would probably be harder to wield effectively with webbed fingers.

Darth Vader, by the way, is a henchman to Tarkin… and god only knows how he comes out of the whole let-Leia-escape-with-the-plans clusterfuck with a PROMOTION!

Also… isn’t destroying an entire planet, just to make a point, a bit of a fucking waste? Did Alderaan have no resources, no wealth, no strategic value, no military, industrial or economic significance to the Empire? None at all? It’s a bit like Hitler saying: “just to prove how powerful I am, I’m going to completely destroy Belgium”.

And ponder Luke’s lack of concern over the slaughter of his adoptive parents – “ah, fuck ’em, they made me do farm work” – not to mention Leia’s brusque dismissal of the destruction of her entire planet.

Weird.…

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Skulltopus 9: Signs of Progress and the Progress of the Sign

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You can rifle the Pertwee era for tentacles and find relatively few.  They only crop up in stories in which capital looms.  They only fully-materialize as a major threat where capitalism is a systemic presence, threatening – even if only obliquely – to connect up various social and political nightmares.

That isn’t to say that social and political nightmares are thin on the ground.  Far from it.  But it’s only when those problems are connected to capital, commodification and trade as exploitative or destructive, that they sprout tentacles.

Evidence of Absence

The reason why ‘Spearhead from Space’ builds to an unexpectedly tentacular conclusion is because all sorts of things within it hint obliquely and elliptically at deep problems in the Britain of the late twentieth century, problems which seem to build towards a connection that must be occluded: namely the connection of all these problems at the economic base of society, the productive forces, the capitalist factory, the commodity form itself.  ‘Spearhead’ is saturated in depictions of hierarchy, domination and class.  The story hints – albeit very quietly – at imperialism, and at racial and gender hierarchies.  The monsters are stalking emblems of alienation and commodity fetishism, manufactured things, products, hostile commodities in the estranged human form of consumerism.  The tentacles appear to obscure the hub of the story.  We don’t even see the hub of the creature within the tank, only its flailing limbs.

‘Spearhead’ is, however, unusually potent, oneiric, suggestive and loaded.  That said, many of its preoccupations recur throughout the Pertween era… just not together, not in such a ‘joined-up’ way and not in stories that even notice capitalism, let alone suggest that evil emanates from capitalist alienation of labour.

For instance, in ‘The Silurians’, social hierarchy is definitely in evidence but it doesn’t reach deeply into everyday normal life as in ‘Spearhead’.  Work is in evidence, but almost all of it takes place in a state-owned research centre and all the main characters are professionals who are, apparently, dedicated scientists rather than, say, factory drudges.  The monetary value of the facility is mentioned but not in terms of profitability.  There isn’t any poverty to be seen, or much in the way of class.  There are certainly no drastic social divisions.  There is xenophobia and prejudice but these are treated as human traits – related, if anything, to our biology – rather than social phenomena.  Capitalism is hardly hinted at, economically or culturally.  There is simply the world as it stands, as a backdrop to events.  All of this broadly holds true for ‘Ambassadors of Death’ too.  There are no tentacles in either story, though there is some mildly Weird inflection detectable in ‘Ambassadors’, in the appearance of the aliens and their peculiar ship.  It’s worth noting, in this connection, that an attempt is made to commodify the alien ambassadors, whereas this is not the case with the Silurians.

In ‘Inferno’, fascism (or some form of totalitarianism at any rate) is a major theme, but there’s no hint in the text that it’s linked to economics.…

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