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To Fight a Bigger War (The Pirate Planet)

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Well, I can poke at it for a bit, but eventually we’re just
going to have to give in and invent some technobabble. 

It’s September 30, 1978. John Travolta and Oliva Newton John are at the top of the charts with “Summer Nights,” one of the classic cuts from Grease, and I’m going to go wash my fingers out with soap for even typing that phrase. This situation lasts for four weeks, and at two separate points other songs from Grease (John Travolta’s solo “Sandy” and Frankie Valli’s title track) also chart. In addition, ABBA, The Commodores, Exile (with “Kiss You All Over,” a country song whose sales may owe more to the topless woman on the single cover than to the song itself), Electric Light Orchestra, and the Boomtown Rats also chart, the latter with something other than “I Don’t Like Mondays.”

People who do like Mondays include the New York Yankees, who defeat arch-rivals the Boston Red Sox to make it to the AL East title (having been 14 games out of place a mere two months earlier) on their way towards winning the World Series on Monday, October 2nd (they win it on Tuesday, October 17th), and Karol Józef Wojty?a, who becomes Pope John Paul II on Monday, October 16th. Other eventful days of the week include Sundays, as Tuvalu becomes independent from the UK and Vietnam attacks Cambodia; Fridays, as the first Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras takes place. Designed as protest march/commemoration of the Stonewall Riots, the event attains a permit which is then revoked, leading to numerous arrests and public outings of people for what had been legal activity; and Tuesdays, as a massive electrical fault brings down NASA’s SEASAT satellite after only 105 days of operation.

While on Saturdays, we have The Pirate Planet. By far the least loved of Douglas Adams’s three Doctor Who scripts and ranked a staggering fourth out of the six stories from this season in the Doctor Who Magazine poll, The Pirate Planet is, I think it’s safe to say, a deeply under-appreciated story. Somewhat unusually, the reasons to criticize this story haven’t changed much since 1978, with the major lines of critique closely paralleling the production difficulties the story had. These difficulties centered on two major concerns. First, Adams’s scripts required substantial revision. This fact is taken by some as evidence of Adams’s flaws as a writer, which would make total sense if the script editor hadn’t, at the end of the season, recommended Adams as his replacement. All reports in fact suggest that the problem with Adams’s scripts was excessive complexity. While I m not saying that this is prima facie not a problem, we ought be honest about the sort of problem it is. Writing above the level of complexity that Doctor Who ought go for is a heck of a lot easier to fix than being Bob Baker and David Martin is. That does not, of course, mean the script is good (though it is, as we’ll see), but at the very least there’s no strong reason to think it’s bad.…

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The Dark Knight Propagandizes

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I see the first big trailer for the next installment of Nolan’s Batman franchise has been leaked.  It looks consistent with the previous films.

Remember in Batman Begins, the League of Shadows claim to have caused the recession that crippled Gotham when Bruce was a kid. So recessions happen not because capitalism is inherently prone to them but because nefarious Europeans and Orientals come over from outside and artificially create them.

Of course, recessions are something that happens to capitalism, not something that capitalism can’t help itself causing… we know this because Bruce’s Dad is a noble, wise, kindly man who happens to be hugely wealthy and own a massive mega corporation, so wealth and corporations must be just fine and dandy per se. Papa Wayne has even helped the city… by building a massive elevated train system. Hmmm, that’ll help the people who can’t afford tickets (or homes) anymore. And naturally it was all done at his expense and he made no profit… something that is even less likely in reality than flying bat-costumed ninjas.

Sure enough, we later learn that corporations are only bad when run by unscrupulous individuals like Rutger Hauer (in probably the single most irrelevant film role in cinema history) who wants to take the company public and manufacture weapons… and all that icky stuff that nice capitalists never do ‘cos they’re just so socially responsible and unconcerned with profits.

The victims of the recession that get most screentime and sympathy are, natch, Bruce’s wise and noble Dad and his silent blonde Mum, ie the rich people who are the victims of the filthy poor.

In the next film, we learn that it’s necessary to take extreme measures that might (briefly) offend principled liberals like Lucius Fox, in order to defeat the unreasoningly hostile terrorists who just wanna watch the world burn and hate us because of our freedom, etc. So that lets President Bush off the hook, don’t it? When faced with insane and wanton aggression from terroristic nihilists, what can the responsible people do but take the law into their own hands, torture people for information, spy on the populace, peddle propaganda to keep the sheep feeling hopeful? The guy with the strength to do what has to be done will find himself morally compromised and unpopular, but he’s doing it all for the greater good, shouldering the burden for the weak and squeamish. 

Of course, the public hero who will inspire the people, Harvey Dent, is not averse to abducting suspects and threatening them with guns… but he’s still a noble, heroic white knight… and when the villainy of al Qaeda… sorry, I meant the Joker… drags him down, this fact must be concealed from the plebs for their own good.

If Batman Begins is pure neoliberal propaganda, Dark Knight is pure neo-Conservative propaganda. By the trailer, Dark Knight Rises – in which Selina Kyle taunts Wayne at a party about how his lot have “lived so large that there was so little left for the rest of us” and then cuts to Bane leading what seems like a revolt of the unwashed – looks set to be the film equivalent of Fox News commenting on Occupy Wall St.…

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A Trickster Or a Warrior (The Ribos Operation)

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As we round to about a week away from what is, statistically speaking, probably a major gift-giving occasion for a lot of the readers of this blog, I wanted to take one more opportunity in 2011 to shamelessly beg for money.

I apologize for the raw crassness of this. So let me frame it another way. A lot of talk, in various spheres and contexts, goes on about supporting “independent” producers of things or about creating “new digital models” for creativity that get away from the normal models of publishing and the like. This blog is the sort of thing they mean.

I’m a barely employed PhD in English facing an economy that, realistically, means I will probably never see full-time employment in the field I spent a decade and went into crippling debt to train for. When you see stories about people staggering under the weight of their student loan debt, I am what they are talking about – if I devoted 100% of my paycheck to paying off my student loans then I would still be paying them off in twenty years. Full-time hires in my field barely exist. There were a dozen full-time academic jobs in the country that I was qualified for this year, and every one of them had 200+ applicants.

I think that’s bullshit. I think there’s way more demand for scholarship about popular culture and media, and way more people who want to learn about it than anyone gives credit for, but that academia as it stands is a noble profession badly corrupted by money and politics, and that publishing hasn’t come close to figuring out how to cater to people insane enough to want to read 10,000 words a week about postmodernism and 20th century British sci-fi television. I think there has to be another way. But I’m not a business guy, and the extent of what I can really do to find that other way is to spend a lot of my time writing the sort of stuff I wish existed in the world and trying to find fair ways to let people pay me for it.

I don’t want to get rich off of writing about Doctor Who. I do want to, off of the work I’ve spent my life training to be good at, eventually be able to afford my own place and support a family. Right now I can do neither. I mean, I’m not on the streets – I have a strong support system that will make sure I’m taken care of and a comfortable life. If you want to find someone to throw charity at, I’m not the guy. But on the other hand, if the issues I talk about in this blog are ones that matter to you, well, they’re ones that matter to me in a very real sense too. And if you think that independent scholarship on popular culture that’s aimed at a general audience instead of an insular academic one is something that should exist, well, you can help.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 22 (Fawlty Towers, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)

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You know those days where I blow a topic that I should have saved for an academic essay on a blog post for the sole reason that adding the citations and thorough review of existing scholarship would take weeks whereas I can bash this out in a couple of hours and say the word “fuck” more? Yeah. It’s one of those days. If you like when this blog kicks back and idly sketches out some big cultural connections, this is going to be one of those entries you love. If you prefer when I just talk sensibly about Doctor Who, well, The Ribos Operation comes Friday.

There is a strain of British popular culture – one perhaps more visible to Americans than it is in Britain itself – that is oddly focused on Cambridge. This is not in and of itself surprising, given the size and prestige of Cambridge as a university, but it’s still worth remarking on the sheer quantity of Cambridge-educated people among the pool of British people Americans like: Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, Graham Chapman, Eric Idle, John Cleese, Sacha Baron Cohen, John Oliver, and, most important for our purposes today, Douglas Adams. And those are just the ones who were members of the Footlights club there. The list is practically a who’s who of British comedians to have hit it big in the US. (Oxford’s equivalent organization, on the other hand, has Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Rowan Atkinson, and Richard Curtis.)

The nature of this is worth discussing for two reasons. First, we’re about to enter the two year stretch of Doctor Who where Douglas Adams was a driving creative influence, and so we should probably square away what’s going on with him. Second, however, we’re entering the period where Doctor Who begins to get marketed aggressively in the United States. Although the first set of Tom Baker stories flogged cuts off at The Invasion of Time and thus didn’t have any Douglas Adams-penned material, the fact remains that Douglas Adams and Doctor Who broke out in the US more or less simultaneously.

Unlike Star Wars, there’s not a ground zero in the transition to this outbreak of Anglophilia. It is, after all, a less talked about moment of British influence in American culture than either the 1960s or 1980s musical waves, or even the 1980s wave of British comics creators. It’s tough to point out exactly when what we may as well call the Cambridge Invasion took place. Indeed, 1978 is a bit of an odd year to run this – in particular given that I ostensibly want to stop off at Fawlty Towers, which aired in 1975 and 1979, and that the “Doctor Who in America” moment is still a year or two off. But I think there’s a strong case to be made that Douglas Adams is the central figure in the Cambridge Invasion. Certainly it’s worth noting that his time on Doctor Who and his best-known creation coincided almost perfectly. But despite all of that, let’s start with Fawlty Towers, since it unambiguously comes out of the same Cambridge circle as Douglas Adams, is one of the most successful pieces of British comedy, but, notably, is miles from the science fiction end of the pool and thus works as a control experiment before the sci-fi geek stuff comes in.…

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Meanwhiles and Neverweres (The Invasion of Time)

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Wingardium Leviosa!

It’s February 4th, 1978. “The Mull of Kintyre” has finally been unseated at the top of the charts by Althia and Donna’s “Uptown Top Ranking,” a nice little reggae number. It makes it a week before Brotherhood of Man unseat it with “Figaro,” a song widely accused of ripping off ABBA, who, coincidentally, knock it off a week later with “Take a Chance on Me,” which has a three week run before Kate Bush storms to number one with “Wuthering Heights,” which is, quite frankly, a fantastic song, doubly so for having been written in the space of a few hours by an eighteen-year-old, which is the sort of thing that makes those of us who are pushing 30 feel desperately old and like we have wasted our lives. This song is also worth pointing to on the grounds that the New Romanticism movement is generally dated as kicking off at least a year later, which makes this a bewilderingly massive hit a good year or two before the movement that it obviously belongs to actually existed. Bonnie Tyler, Bob Marley and the Wailers, Rod Stewart, Blondie Electric Light Orchestra, and the Bee Gees also chart, the latter with “Stayin’ Alive.”

While in real news, Ian Smith, prime minister of Rhodesia, agrees to transfer power to black majority rule, attempting to end a saga that we’ve been following since The Myth Makers. It doesn’t work. Electrical workers in Mexico City unexpectedly discover the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan in the middle of the city, which is the sort of thing that just doesn’t happen in most of our lives. Larry Flynt is shot and paralyzed in the US, a hijacking of a bus on Israel’s Coastal Highway by Palestinian terrorists leaves 38 civilians dead, and China lifts a ban on works by Dickens, Aristotle, and Shakespeare.

While on television, and speaking of Shakespeare, we have one of the most overtly Shakespeare-inspired Doctor Who stories in the entire run as the Doctor nicks Hamlet’s whole “acting mad to confuse everyone” plan. The result, like most of Season Fifteen, is a mixed bag. This is a tremendously rough, transitional season that saw a non-trivial number of viewers change the channel and not come back as long as ITV was actually on the air. Under Hinchcliffe the program reliably got viewers in the ten to twelve million range. Under Williams, barring a massive ITV strike, the show was solidly in the seven to nine million range – still fine ratings, but a visible drop.

And while we’ve been staying positive about this season, let’s be clear, it’s not hard to understand why the viewers gave up. The entire aesthetic apparatus of the show imploded on short notice, the level of basic competence that could be expected in the production plummeted, and the artistic goals of almost every story this season have not extended much beyond “oh God, let’s just get this made.” And this story is no exception in that department – a recurrence of the industrial disputes that happened almost annually at the BBC and the fact that the original script had bottomed out spectacularly (by legend it was abandoned after it was found to require a night shoot in a stadium full of cats) meant that this script was assembled under pressure and with lots of decisions being made because all of the sensible ways to accomplish something were off the table for whatever reason.…

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My Thoughts on the Missing Episode Finds

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Just wanted to note that my thoughts on the missing episode finds are up on Bleeding Cool. I’ll post a rewritten version of the blog posts for Galaxy Four and The Underwater Menace once the episodes become fully available to the public and I can review them.

And while I’m putting a high profile post at the top of my blog while it’s probably about to experience heavy traffic, let me say welcome to any incoming Bleeders. If you like what you see here, please do note that the book version of my Hartnell columns, including considerable bonus material not up on the website, is available from Amazon.

Those of you interested in comic books – which I imagine is most anyone coming from Bleeding Cool – may also be interested in my proposed Wonder Woman book, which is currently seeking funding over at Kickstarter.…

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Playing Pat-a-Cake With The Wall (Underworld)

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The Doctor enjoys the wonders of things he can’t
arbitrarily walk through.

It’s January 7th, 1978. Wings remain at number one with “Mull of Kintyre,” and, as mentioned, stay there for the whole story. Bonnie Tyler, Donna Summer and The Bee Gees also chart. So that’s not entirely exciting.

Since Doctor Who went on its Christmas break, the Copyright Act of 1976 took effect in the United States, changing American copyright law to be based on the life of the author instead of the date of publication. A referendum in Chile supported Augusto Pinochet’s policies, which is a less impressive electoral feat than it sounds given Pinochet’s overt fondness for the mass slaughter of his political opponents. And the United States returned the Holy Crown of Hungary to Hungary, having been keeping it safe in Fort Knox since World War II.

While during this story, riots erupt in Nicaragua after the assassination of a leading critic of the government. Rose Dugdale and Eddie Gallagher become the first people to marry in prison in the Republic of Ireland. And speaking of Ireland, the European Court of Human Rights acquits the United Kingdom of torturing prisoners in Northern Ireland, but does find that they mistreated prisoners.

While on television, it’s one of the great punching bags of Doctor Who: Underworld. A story that I could simply and cavalierly lay into for a myriad of faults and get absolutely no comments from anybody suggesting that I was being too hard on the story or being unfair. This is the one Tom Baker story to slot in the bottom ten on the Doctor Who Magazine Mighty 200 poll. Lawrence Miles declares it the worst story of the 1970s. It’s crap. it’s garbage. I kinda liked it.

I mean, it wasn’t good by any measure, but it’s not even the worst Baker and Martin script of Season Fifteen, little yet the worst Doctor Who story of the 1970s. (I’m not through the 1970s yet, but I’m pretty sure The Monster of Peladon is the single worst.) For the most part, on this story at least, Tat Wood’s review in About Time is spot on – there’s nothing bad that you can say about this that can’t also be said about The Time Monster, and unlike The Time Monster there are at least some valid production reasons for why their backs were so up against the wall.

Star Wars was a mixed blessing for Doctor Who. This is an altogether more positive interpretation than most people would give you. The more common view would have to be that Star Wars was a disaster for Doctor Who because Doctor Who could never hope to match its effects and so looked cheap and silly after Star Wars. This, at least, is clearly nonsense – The Invisible Enemy looked cheap and silly just fine on its own.

All of which said… Underworld is horrendously cheap and silly. Amusingly, one aspect of the story manages to simultaneously be the most appallingly cheap looking and the part of the story that served as a road map for future stories, which is the CSO work.…

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Skulltopus 3: Yes, We Have No Macra

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If any monster in the history of Who was ever a gothic, hauntological thing embodying the ‘return of the repressed’, it was the Macra.

All the ostentatious happiness of the Colony is there to cover unease.  They know there’s something wrong, otherwise why deny it so desperately?  Why would the Colony go to such lengths to contain and silence Medok unless he was speaking the unspeakable truth that everybody else wants to deny?  The Macra haunt the Colony, scuttling around at night, hiding in the shadows, unseen then glimpsed and then disappearing.  They haunt the people, who all know about them (even down to having a name for them) but claim to disbelieve in them.  They represent repressed knowledge that is insisting upon being remembered.  This is pure gothic.

But… they’re also a bit Weird, in the sense of the ‘Weird fiction’ of early 20th century horror (something I’ve discussed in previous Skulltopus posts).  William Hope Hodgson, one of the greatest Weird writers, used giant crabs a lot in his peculiar and deeply unsettling maritime tales.  As previous noted, the author China Miéville has written that the Weird (at least classic, ‘haute Weird’ of the late 19th-early 20th century) was an attempt to express the meaningless and unrecognisable, and that it thus stands in “non-dialectical superposition” to the gothic (or  the ‘hauntological’), which is about the buried secret, the thing we recognise but refuse, that which we know but wish (need) to deny.  The tentacled thing is the quintessential Weird monster type… a type unprecedented in Western fantastic fiction before the Weird.  But Hodgson’s tentacled things co-exist with giant crabs.  I’m not sure how precedented giant crabs were in the Western uncanny.  Certainly, people in the West had seen crabs before… but then, as Miéville acknowledges, they’d seen tentacled things too.  It’s not about unfamiliarity so much as literary unprecedentedness, as an absence of semiotic baggage and any tradition of previous meanings.  In any case, whereas the haunting thing is frightening because we recognise it, and recognise that it means something, the Weird thing is frightening because it is something meaningless and incomprehensible, stalking us for no reason that we can ken.

The Macra are TV monsters from 1967… and this is very different to literary monsters in 1917… but that’s a minefield I’ll try to traverse in another post.  But, shunting that massive problem to one side just for now, the Macra genuinely do seem to me to be Weird, but also to be hauntological.  They haunt because, as noted, they are recognised and not recognised, seen and denied, fled from because of the repressed knowledge that they represent.  On the other hand, they are not spectral or phantasmic, for all their elusiveness.  They’re giant crabs for heaven’s sake.  Or are they?

Because here’s the really strange thing: the Macra don’t really seem to be giant crabs at all!  The original titles of this story were ‘The Spidermen’ and ‘The Insect-Men’.  The characters in the story are uncertain what the Macra are, even – especially – when they see them. …

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 21 (Star Wars)

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I never drank the Kool-Aid here. I mean, Star Wars was fine. I enjoyed the movies when I watched them – probably third grade? But the fact that I have to ask the question shows pretty clearly the extent to which this was not a rabbit hole I fell down. I attentively rented the entire trilogy from my local grocery store (ah, the 90s), if only to finally suss out the difference between it and Star Trek, watched them, and was later very puzzled by people who fell in love with them. I still find them terribly overrated, and the continual grating of my ambivalence against people who do love Star Wars has pretty much worn me down to active dislike of the franchise. So, you know. We’re doing this because we have to, not because I’m jumping for joy at the entry. Or maybe because I’m secretly a bitter misanthrope who delights in the wave of comments that this will inevitably generate.


Still, regardless of my feelings, there’s no arguing with the film’s historical importance. There is a clear line that can be drawn across the history of science fiction, splitting it into “before Star Wars” and “after Star Wars.” Doubly so if the science fiction is in a visual medium. So for Doctor Who, there’s a huge difference in how The Sun Makers, the last story to air before Star Wars opened in the UK, was watched, and how Friday’s story, Underworld, the first to air after it. And we can’t not talk about it.

But knowing that Star Wars was transformative is not equivalent to understanding why. Let’s first set aside the question of innovation. Whether or not Star Wars was, in fact, innovative in terms of what it does with science fiction (I don’t think it particularly was), there’s really no way to argue that Star Wars didn’t mark a huge turning point in how science fiction was seen by the broader culture. It’s clearly not that Star Wars was when science fiction broke into the mainstream – there are far too many successful sci-fi movies from previous decades to take that claim seriously. But Star Wars is the tipping point in a transition between two modes of science fiction that we’ve been talking about since nearly two seasons ago. And for those who have been keeping track, that means that Star Wars is, in the broader culture, the point where Doctor Who’s view of science fiction becomes the dominant one. So that’s interesting.

Some history. The question of what the first piece of science fiction was is one with a wealth of possible answers. On the other hand, the point where science fiction emerged as a distinct genre is rather easier to pin down – it happened in 1926 when Hugo Gernsback created Amazing Stories – the first pulp to be devoted entirely to science fiction. The first thing we should note about this, then, is that science fiction in its original form did not exist in its “hard” manifestation.
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Wrong With Authority (The Sun Makers)

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It’s Marlon Brando playing Professor X!

It’s November 26, 1977. ABBA remain at number one with “Name of the Game,” but are overtaken by Wings with “Mull of Kintyre,” a Paul McCartney-penned ode to Scotland that will manage a nine week run at #1 that will keep it in place through Christmas and, indeed, through the next story. Queen, the Bee Gees, and the Brighouse and Rastrick Brass Band also chart.

In real news, British Airways establishes regular Concorde service between New York and London. The International Fund for Agricultural Development is established at the UN. The President of the Central African Republic declares himself emperor, and in the US the cable channel Nickelodeon launches, albeit under its original name of Pinwheel, which would last about eighteen months before the channel relaunched as Nickelodeon.

While on television we have Robert Holmes, frequent genius and occasional cynical dick, penning his departure script. This was actually filmed prior to Image of the Fendahl, which was the script Holmes actually departed during, with Anthony Read picking up midway through. But in running order it serves to continue the spurious tradition Dicks cited of the outgoing script editor getting a script on or around his departure date. (Actually, as I noted at the time Dicks pulled the trick on Holmes, the tradition was kind of real. In practice, Dicks was the seventh regular script editor of Doctor Who, and four of his six predecessors got a writing credit in the story after they left.)

The Sun Makers is a bit of an odd duck. Much like The Horror of Fang Rock, it is a story that it is currently very much trendy to enjoy. But whereas Fang Rock is very much a rediscovered classic that everyone now appreciates, The Sun Makers serves as more of a shibboleth – a story used to determine whether someone is a trendy Doctor Who fan or simply a traditionalist spouting received wisdom. Real fans love this story as an overlooked classic.

Except, of course, the problem with trendy classics is that there quickly becomes the countertrend. Now that everyone knows to revere The Sun Makers as an inadvertent triumph for Robert Holmes, the trendy thing to do is to complain about it. The easiest way to do this is to be political about it, which is easy enough if you’re a leftist nut job like me. Because this story is overtly a political satire about the horrors of taxes. And if you, say, happen to live in a country where one of the two political parties is stringently opposed to any tax increases whatsoever even though the tax rates are at a near historic low and even though this is one of the two major reasons for a massive budget deficit… well, it’s just kind of hard to get excited about a story that rails against the evils of taxation.

This is not quite fair, though. First of all, a blanket position that taxes are always good is as ludicrous as the belief that cutting taxes is always a good idea.…

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