Eruditorum Press

Siding with bugs is praxis

Tiny Metal Minds (Revenge of the Cybermen)

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Some monsters appear and give an immediate sense of
terror and awe. Other monsters appear and make you go
“Oh. It’s them.”

It’s April 19, 1975. The Bay City Rollers are at number one with “Bye Bye Baby,” which lasts for two weeks before Mud overtake them with “Oh Boy,” an a cappella cover of an old Buddy Holly song, which also lasts for two weeks. Peter Shelley, The Goodies, 10cc, and, in the highest concentration of Tammy’s ever seen in the top ten, Tammy Wynette and Tammy Jones all chart as well.

While in real news, the Red Army Faction takes over the West German embassy in Stockholm, then promptly inadvertently blow themselves up, leading to West Germany changing to a “we don’t negotiate with terrorists” policy. That’s about all that happens in these four weeks. Well, that and the Vietnam War ending. But that’s nothing, right?

While on television, we have Revenge of the Cybermen. On the surface, this is straightforward – a story commissioned under Letts and made under Hinchcliffe, written by Gerry Davis, a writer who was frankly rubbish even in his prime, and thus desperately rewritten by Robert Holmes in a not-entirely-successful effort to salvage it, it’s a lackluster story of the sort new production teams do in their first year. And that’s not a completely unfair reading of it. But for once, it’s instructive just how this story gets snared between the Letts and Hinchcliffe approaches, and in particular how it follows (and fails to follow) from the doors blasted open by Genesis of the Daleks.

Letts, for his part, had been trying to bring the Cybermen back for a while. This is not surprising – one of the ways in which Letts dramatically evolved the show was in how actively and savvily it manipulated and engaged with audiences and audience expectations. Occasionally this backfired, as with the dropping of the dinosaurs from the episode title for the first part of Invasion of the Dinosaurs, or the shoehorned Daleks in Day of the Daleks, but more often it led to tour de forces like the reveal of the Daleks in Frontier in Space. So of course he would have gone for bringing back the “other classic monster.” And Letts was savvy enough to have a good angle on how to do it as well – hire back one of the writers who had done that monster last who was also still a respectable television man (Davis was only three years out from Doomwatch here) to do it so that it feels nice and nostalgic.

But neither Hinchcliffe nor Holmes are particularly enamored with nostalgia and classic monsters. In fact, after this and the next story, they basically don’t use nostalgia as a major story appeal again until The Deadly Assassin, and there it’s one of the most stark breaks with the past of the relevant concept imaginable. So it’s not quite a surprise that the Hinchcliffe era balks at doing a straight nostalgia piece. But…

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The Face of the Devil Himself (Genesis of the Daleks)

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In one of the least shocking twists in Doctor Who history,
the guy in white is A) the first Kaled we meet not to wear
black, and B) the first one to turn out to be a good guy.

It’s March 8th, 1975. Telly Savalas is at number one with “If,” which, in layman’s terms, means that the star of Kojak is at number one with a spoken word cover of a Bread song from 1971. This lasts for two weeks before the Bay City Rollers clean things up with “Bye Bye Baby,” holding #1 for the other four weeks of this story. Mud, Johnny Mathis, Barry White, Guys ‘n’ Dolls, and The Sweet also chart.


In real news, the UN proclaims International Women’s Day, the Rocky Horror Picture Show debuts on Broadway, Bobby Fischer concedes his world chess championship title to Anatoly Karpov by refusing to play against him, and Bill Gates founds Microsoft. In bigger events, the Vietnam War moves towards its conclusion as North Vietnamese troops close on Saigon. Operation Babylift, an attempt to evacuate children from Vietnam, gets off to a terrible start as the first plane crashes, killing 138. Rio Di Janeiro becomes the capital of Brazil after the state of Rio Di Janeiro merges with Estado de Guanabara. And the body of Lesley Whittle, the teenage heiress kidnapped back during Robot, is found. 

While on television… I mean, what is there to say. It’s Genesis of the Daleks. The latter three words of which are wholly unimportant. There are a handful of stories in Doctor Who history that can be shortened to one word titles where the title is not the monster. But if you talk to a Doctor Who fan about Genesis, they know what you’re talking about, and it’s not Peter Gabriel’s old band. This story is flat-out one of the most iconic stories of Doctor Who. Given that our approach to the series is tinged with the alchemical, and that we do take an actively mystical view of the series at times, we must tread with some care here. This is, if you will, a piece of sacred ground in the psychochronography of this territory.

It’s not that the story is without flaw. Under the hood, it’s still very much a Terry Nation story, with all the attendant problems. But for the first time in decades, it’s also a Terry Nation story with all the attendant benefits. His knack for adventure, his ability to keep a plot moving, his ability to create properly scary villains, all of that is firmly in play here. Even the things that can be hit or miss – his tendency towards tedious moralizing – end up working here, albeit as much because the actors are top notch as anything else. On top of that, the director, David Maloney, is absolutely on fire here, using everything he learned about Daleks last time he did them and then building on it. 

And then there’s the aspect of this story in legend.
…

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Enterprise & Initiative

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Star Trek is liberal bourgeois to the bone.

Show me more of this Earth thing called “shopping” 

The Federation is supposedly post-capitalist, post-money, etc., yet it has many of the important hallmarks of advanced capitalist social organisation. A highly organised and stratified division of labour, a deep separation between workplace and home life, work shifts, career promotion, private nuclear families, a socially-separate education system providing training and qualifications, a professional liberal media, massive military expenditure (of resources if not money), hierarchical political and military arrangements combined with liberal ideology, a separate political class, etc. In one of the films, someone even mentions “opinion polls”.  So, the Federation clearly has what looks like a capitalist state, capitalist superstructure and capitalist social arrangements.  What of the economy?  Well, they still have privately owned and run restaurants, for example, though supposedly people run them for the love of it… and in DS9, the Federation people mesh perfectly into the economy of Bajor, with its Ferengi businessmen, etc… to the point where you have Federation officers trading goods and paying credits for booze. When they want to make a ‘darker’, grungier version of their utopia, they take characters from the utopia and cast them amongst the money-using barbarians on the frontiers. But the Utopians have little difficulty dealing with the money-users in a natural way, whatever their occasional disdain.  The facile nature of the pretence that the Federation is post-capitalist is revealed by the ease with which the Federation types merge into Quark’s bar. 

Meanwhile, capitalism is turned into a kind of quaint pathology, espoused as a blatant and impudent ethic of acquisition, by a race that it’d be easy to mistake for a bunch of submerged Jewish stereotypes (even down to ballbusting mothers). The utter misunderstanding of capitalism – indeed, of all human history – is best expressed in the scene where Quark, tired of being endlessly patronized and insulted by the holier-than-thou humans, compares his culture with the culture of Earth, pointing out that Ferengos (or whatever the silly place is called) has no history of things like concentration camps.  The implication is that humans must blame their own species-nature for the horrors of the 20th century… which fails to notice the role of competing capitalist imperialisms and fascist reaction (against socialist challenges to capitalism) in creating the wars that lead to concentration camps.  Capitalism itself is absolved, since it has been practiced by the Ferengi and lead to no comparable horrors, merely social eccentricities.  Even the sexism of Ferengi culture is seen as a mere cultural malformation, with DS9 repeatedly showing female Ferengis achieving liberation through their equal ability to participate in ruthless trade, etc., whenever they manage to trick or force the men into giving them a chance.  Capitalism is thus so entirely acquitted of any involvement in patriarchy that it is instead offered as a way of defeating it.  This is entirely consonant with the heavily peddled ideas that free markets will eventually result in populations of free individuals, that the liberty of trade is the liberty of people, that liberalisation of market economies brings liberalisation of societies, that personal self-promotion is the best way to overcome cultural disadvantages. …

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On Your Television Screen, You Can Do What Seemed Impossible (The Sontaran Experiment)

12

And yet despite this scene, it was the Zygons who were
brought back in a softcore video nasty in the 90s. 

It’s February 22, 1975. Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel are at number one with “Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me,” and continue to be through to the next week. The Carpenters, Helen Reddy, and Johnny Wakeland and the Kishasa Band also chart.

In the US, Daylight Savings Time kicks off two months early to deal with the energy crisis that has by now wound its way over there. A fleeing IRA member fatally shoots a chasing London police officer, setting off most of what you’d expect. The IRA member, Liam Quinn, went on to a several-decades long career as a cause celebrate. The Movement 2 June, an anarchist group allied with the Baader-Meinhof Gang, kidnaps a West German politician, managing to secure the release of five of their members from prison doing so. A massive tube crash at Moorgate station kills 43 people. And, on the day the second and final episode of this story airs, Aston Villa defeats Norwich City in the Football League Cup, now known as the Carling Cup.

While on television, it’s The Sontaran Experiment – the only two-part Doctor Who story between 1965 and 1982. This alone should raise some red flags from our perspective, in that it clearly does not quite fit with the normal order of things. Doctor Who, in the period we’re talking about, does four and six part stories. This is the only Doctor Who story from 1972-1981 not to be either four or six episodes long.

The previous two two-part stories had relatively straightforward reasons behind them. The Edge of Destruction existed to fill out an initial thirteen-episode order on the cheap. The Rescue existed because it was the first time the show had tried introducing a new character. And given that both were written by the incomparable David Whitaker, both fulfilled a clear narrative function, dealing with character points. The Sontaran Experiment, however, does not have nearly so lofty a set of goals. Its reasons for existing are entirely technical. Its storytelling is minimal, and ill-paced.

Part of this is the writers. Giving this story to Baker and Martin made sense for the reasons it was actually done, but there are major problems with the decision. Baker and Martin are best at coming up with weird ideas, and at their weakest in the specific mechanics and craft of scriptwriting. A two episode story is necessarily one that prioritizes having one or two ideas but being carefully crafted. Instead we get one that seems to have been written as a four-parter with the first episode done straightforwardly and the last three parts condensed into the second episode. All of this seems to have been to maintain the traditional first episode cliffhanger of the monster reveal. And while I am not among the critics who laugh at the basic idea of holding back the monster reveal in a story named after the monster, recognizing as I do that this is based not around surprise but around the anticipation of the spectacle, it’s also very obviously a dumb and pointless move in a two-parter because of what it does to the pacing. As…

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The Logic of the Work

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“Interested parties explain the culture industry in technological terms. It is alleged that because millions participate in it, certain reproduction processes are necessary that inevitably require identical needs in innumerable places to be satisfied with identical goods. The technical contrast between the few production centers and the large number of widely dispersed consumption points is said to demand organisation and planning by management. Furthermore, it is claimed that standards were based in the first place on consumers’ needs, and for that reason were accepted with so little resistance. The result is the circle of manipulation and retroactive need in which the unity of the system grows ever stronger. No mention is made of the fact that the basis on which technology acquires power over society is the power of those whose economic hold over society is greatest. A technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself. It is the coercive nature of society alienated from itself. Automobiles, bombs, and movies keep the whole thing together until their leveling element shows its strength in the very wrong which it furthered. It has made the technology of the culture industry no more than the achievement of standardisation and mass production, sacrificing whatever involved a distinction between the logic of the work and that of the social system.

***

But any trace of spontaneity from the public in official broadcasting is controlled and absorbed by talent scouts, studio competitions and official programs of every kind selected by professionals. Talented performers belong to the industry long before it displays them; otherwise they would not be so eager to fit in. The attitude of the public, which ostensibly and actually favours the system of the culture industry, is a part of the system and not an excuse for it. If one branch of art follows the same formula as one with a very different medium and content; if the dramatic intrigue of broadcast soap operas becomes no more than useful material for showing how to master technical problems at both ends of the scale of musical experience – real jazz or a cheap imitation; or if a movement from a Beethoven symphony is crudely “adapted” for a film sound-track in the same way as a Tolstoy novel is garbled in a film script: then the claim that this is done to satisfy the spontaneous wishes of the public is no more than hot air.

We are closer to the facts if we explain these phenomena as inherent in the technical and personnel apparatus which, down to its last cog, itself forms part of the economic mechanism of selection. In addition there is the agreement – or at least the determination – of all executive authorities not to produce or sanction anything that in any way differs from their own rules, their own ideas about consumers, or above all themselves.

In our age the objective social tendency is incarnate in the hidden subjective purposes of company directors, the foremost among whom are in the most powerful sectors of industry – steel, petroleum, electricity, and chemicals.…

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Monsters are Real (The Ark in Space)

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I won’t lie. It’s a man with bubble wrap glued to him. But
it’s the scariest man with bubble wrap glued to him ever.

It’s January 25, 1975. The Tymes, a Philadelphia soul group, are at number one with “Ms Grace.” (This is something of a golden age for this genre of music, and it spills over to the UK. In return, David Bowie slips over to the US and records Young Americans – which he’s just putting the finishing touches on now. Young Americans is his version of a soul album – an album that would spawn his first number one single in the US, “Fame,” which merely hits 17 in the UK.) It lasts one week before giving way to Pilot, a splinter group of the Bay City Rollers, with “January,” which stays on top for the remainder of this story. Gloria Gaynor, Marie and Donnie Osmond, The Carpenters, Helen Reddy, and Wigan’s Chosen Few also chart.

In real news, the Weather Underground bombs the US State Department, hurting absolutely nobody and generally continuing their reputation as the fluffy bunnies of the terrorist world. An earthquake takes place in Haicheng, China, killing over two thousand people, but here the real news is that it did so as expected, being as it was the first ever successfully predicted earthquake. An unsuccessful attempt to partition Cyprus following last summer’s Turkish invasion of it takes place. And, for our purposes most interesting of all, Margaret Thatcher defeats Edward Heath to become the new leader of the Conservative Party.

While on television, we have a legend. It is not that The Ark in Space is the best story of the Hinchcliffe era. It’s not. But there are a handful of points in the history of Doctor Who in which an episode airs that clearly marks a sudden leap forward in quality: a point where you can basically say that nothing that has come before is quite this good. The tendency I’ve discussed before whereby storytelling techniques get ever savvier and lead to a general trend of improvement for all television helps make this happen, but the point remains: watching The Ark in Space, it is clear that we have just moved to an entirely new level.

In this regard, what is most striking about the episode is that it’s so much grimmer. Not since Terror of the Autons has the series engaged in such a concentrated and extended effort to be scary. And even there, the fear was wedded to a sense of the spectacular and the emerging glam aesthetic. The last time the show spent a lot of time being scary for its own sake was The Wheel in Space. But here, all of a sudden, the show is all about fear, and lingering in moments of fear. I’d say “again,” but that would obscure things somewhat. Even in the Troughton era, at the height of the golden age of monsters in season five, the show did not go for this sort of unrelenting horror.…

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Where There’s Life (Robot)

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The real highlight of this story is watching the robot body
catch reflections of the green screen and occasionally blink
out of existence in places. That and singing Kraftwerk
to yourself. Mmmm. Werk. By far Philip Morris’s best
product.

It’s December 28, 1974. Mud are “Lonely This Christmas,” and apparently a lot of people care and are trying to buy their single to make them feel less alone. After three weeks of this they finally plummet down the charts as people realize Christmas has been over for a while, and Status Quo’s “Down Down” takes the number one spot. Also in the charts are Barry White, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Gloria Gaynor, Disco Tex and the Sex-O-Lettes (I promise I did not make that up), and, once again, The Wombles, who make their fifth and final top ten placing.

Since Pertwee’s regeneration, the 1974 FIFA World Cup has happened, sans England, but with Scotland, so that’s nice and frustratingly rarely mentioned when people decide to list England’s failure to qualify as a reason why the Heath government fell. Nixon resigns, essentially kicking off the American sleepy period equivalent to the British one we’ve already discussed. Haille Selassie was deposed in Ethiopia, and Ceefax began in the UK, and Ali defeats Foreman in the Rumble in the Jungle. More tragically, the Birmingham pub bombings take place, killing 21 and injuring another 182. The exact cause is under some dispute, with the IRA being widely blamed, a Marxist splinter group called Red Flag 74 trying to take the blame despite probably not being responsible, and a group of Irishmen known familiarly as the Birmingham Six ultimately being arrested and, after some truly spectacular police corruption, convicted and sent to prison for sixteen years.

While during this story, the British government abandons another attempt at a Channel Tunnel, Wheel of Fortune debuts, and Lesley Whittle, a 17 year old heiress, is kidnapped by Donald Neilson. Also, International Women’s Year is kicked off in the UK, which I note not because I’m particularly enamored with commemoration-style politics like that but because I haven’t cited a lot of news stories that point to the degree to which these are golden years for feminism, so I figured I should.

I, of course, am still off in 1992, in the basement. I think, though I honestly don’t remember vividly, that I actually marathoned that entire tape in one day, so while we’ve jumped over six months in world history since Planet of the Spiders, I’m pretty sure from my perspective we’ve had lunch. Still, this is perhaps advantageous – it’s not clear that there is any story to date in Doctor Who more suitable for watching when you are A) ten, and B) have no idea what the show is supposed to be like.

Robot is, by necessity, an odd duck. By convention, Doctor Who has, for the past few seasons, banked an episode across seasons. The Time Warrior was actually made immediately after The Green Death, Carnival of Monsters immediately after The Time Monster.…

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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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A Free Addendum

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Mostly because it interested me to do so, and because they were among the first Doctor Who stories I watched, here’s a brief summary of my dredged up memories of Pertwee stories. These are the sorts of things that I’ll be mentioning from now on, having opened the door to that strand of the project. (I have no particular reflections on Troughton and Hartnell, which I watched so sporadically and rarely that I have little to say beyond “I didn’t much like Hartnell as a kid/teenager, and very much liked Troughton.”) So I thought, in the interests of playing fair, I’d add a quick postscript to the Pertwee era in which I summed those bits up.

Inferno: I remember mostly being struck by how old this one was. Even without looking at an episode guide, the bizarre opening credits and lack of either of the Pertwee companions I recognized made it clear that I was off in an odd end of the Pertwee era – presumably the early days, since I’d seen the latter days. I remember thinking parts were cool, but finding the whole story off-putting, and being in shock when it turned out to be seven episodes long – probably the first point where I realized that sometimes Doctor Who stories were the length they were for less than stellar reasons. So yes, I’ve actually always hated Inferno.

The Claws of Axos: I thought this was improbably silly at the time, and it ends up exemplifying for me what I hated about the Pertwee era. A stupid Trojan Horse plot with silly gold men and gaudy colors that struck me as impossibly boring. Which is amusing, because it was one of my favorites on this pass.

Day of the Daleks: I think this was my first Dalek story, and I popped it in eagerly because I knew the Daleks were the big enemy and I couldn’t wait to see them. You can see where this is going – utter disappointment at the degree to which the Daleks are just not a part of this story. Though I remember even at the time thinking the basic idea was cool. I remembered this story as much more timey wimey than it was, which suggests that the time travel aspects did stick.

The Sea Devils: Unlabeled on a tape that contained other things, this one took me ages to actually discover, and was one of the last stories I did discover my parents’ copies of. I actually quite liked this one, but it was in digest form with the cliffhangers edited out, which on the plus side meant I only had to watch the sword fight once, but on the minus side means that the Master just sits in prison for 90 minutes straight, which turns out to be a bit of a letdown, and is something I still can’t un-notice watching it episodically.

The Time Monster: One side effect of being a fan for whom every new Doctor Who story – even the Pertwee ones – was a treat that one never knew when one would have again – is that I completely failed to have any idea what stories I was supposed to hate.…

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Be Childish Sometimes (Planet of the Spiders)

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You mean not only is this not Metebelis Three, it’s not
even a planet? And I’m on after Being Human? Crap.

It’s mid-September, 1992. The Shamen are at number one with “Ebeneezer Goode.” At least, in the UK. In the US, somewhat less fortunately, “End of the Road” by Boyz II Men is at number one. As it was for three months that year. Perhaps more importantly, at least for our purposes, in a small town in Western Connecticut, a newly minted ten year old flips through a book he just got from a family friend a week or so after his birthday. By a man he’s never heard of called John Nathan-Turner, about a television show he’s vaguely heard of called Doctor Who, the book is called The Companions. After the friend leaves, and it is no longer rude to do so, he asks his mother what this Doctor Who thing is. She looks around in a drawer, and hands him a VHS tape, which he goes to the basement to watch. The Delia Derbyshire theme, familiar to so many people, plays, and something called Planet of Spiders comes on. And so, in the wrong country, in the wrong decade, but every inch at the right time, I became a Doctor Who fan.

Oh. Um. Hi. I mean, not that I haven’t been obviously skulking about these blog entries for some time now, though I’ve tried not to make a nuisance of myself. But here I am forced to make a somewhat more formal and more permanent entrance. I have talked before about moments in Doctor Who that fans can’t quite see past – the introduction of the Time Lords, or the legendarily (though not actually) bad The Gunfighters. But past that, there’s another horizon that it’s impossible for anyone steeped in Doctor Who to quite see past, and that’s our own growing up with the show. As the slogan emblazoned on countless different t-shirts goes, you never forget your first Doctor.

And mine was Pertwee, with Planet of the Spiders. And I’ve always known this entry would mark a turning point in the blog, not just because it’s an era-divider, but because this is where I enter the story. This is the earliest Doctor Who story that I just cannot talk about or think about without my own childhood memories bleeding into the mix. I mean, he’s not the earliest Doctor I saw as a kid. It’s just that I’d not seen a lot of Hartnell or Troughton  prior to starting this project – I believe just The Dalek Invasion of Earth, The Rescue, The Romans, The Web Planet, and The Chase for Hartnell. I’d seen about as much Troughton, but it formed a much higher percentage of the existing episodes – Tomb of the Cybermen, The Mind Robber, The Invasion, The Seeds of Death, and The War Games. As a child, I found Hartnell mean and boring, and Troughton delightful. But both were Doctors I came to late, on bought VHS tapes imported and played on a multi-region VCR.…

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