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Civilizations of Pure Thought (Planet of Evil)

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RARRRRR! I’m EEEEEVIL!

It’s September 27, 1975. Rod Stewart sails on at number one. He sinks, and David Essex arrives to demand, “Hold Me Close.” Pop music may be a fickle mistress, but the people of the United Kingdom obey and keep him at number one for the next three weeks. Art Garfunkel, Showaddywaddy, Leo Sayer, The Four Seasons, and ABBA all also chart.

In real news, The Spaghetti House siege, in which Marxist black nationalists hold up an Italian restaurant and end up staying for six days, takes place in London, an event that is mostly just a sensationalist news story to fill the space between episode one and two of Planet of Evil, but at least has an entertaining name and no fatalities. The Thrilla in Manilla happens, as does a bombing outside Green Park Tube Station, and the first episode of Saturday Night Live.

On television, for the first time since The Faceless Ones, the Doctor Who we’re talking about is actually intersecting with the point in the calendar I’m writing from. With The Faceless Ones, that was dead on – the final episode of that story aired on May 13th, which is also the day that entry posted on. Here it’s off by a day – the final episode aired on October 18th. Personally, since this is the last entry written in a six day stretch starting with The Sontaran Experiment, I’m writing from an unseasonably warm Sunday, October 9, 2011 in suburban Connecticut, having watched the final two episodes of this last night.

In the Pertwee era, Doctor Who intruded into its audience’s lives by using the familiar as its setting – unfolding dramas in real places, and creating allegories for current events. But the central turn of the Hinchcliffe era, as we’ve said, is that the Doctor fights ideas now. To use a word rendered meaningless by vague use in something approaching its literal sense, Doctor Who has taken a very cerebral turn. It’s not telling stories about the world around the viewer anymore. Instead it’s telling stories about the world inside the viewer.

And so instead of allegories and allusions to the real world, it embeds itself in the viewer’s world according to an altogether subtler logic. The move to an autumn/winter schedule for Doctor Who moves it into darker and colder evenings. Planet of Evil went out just as the sun was setting in most of England, and later in the season stories will start going out firmly after dark. But the change involved here is about far more than light levels.

Living in New England, the last week or two has been marked by that sensation  of cold the moment you set outside. Not the frigid and despairing cold of winter, although that is worth discussing in its own right, but an altogether more pleasant cold. It is a cold that causes the body to draw inward, to huddle inside of itself slightly. One becomes more aware of one’s self, of the crunching of leaves underfoot and the swirl of scents and spices that seem to waft continuously through the air.…

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Anxiety Satellite

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The indefatigable Mr. Oliver Wake has put together and released the latest issue of the print fanzine Panic Moon.  It can be ordered here.

It contains (amongst other things) a judicious appraisal of the ‘Day of the Daleks’ Special Edition, a look at the way Hartnell’s shade has taken to haunting the recent series, a clever thing about the way Daleks always seem to get some new physical ability in first episodes, an interesting look at the pre-Who 60s Pathfinders serials which are now out on DVD and an excellent analysis of ‘The Sun Makers’ which identifies some of its roots, going beyond the usual stuff about Bob Holmes being annoyed by a tax bill.

Once again, I’ve contributed two articles.  In one, I identify a blind spot in the lefty-liberal creds of ‘Colony in Space’ and try to tease out some of implications of this, leading me to briefly consider something badly amiss with liberalism itself.  In another article, I have a good old ramble about the various ways Doctor Who has creatively misrepresented evolution, often using it was a way of re-encoding mythic themes or addressing political concerns… though there is, I argue, one story that really is about evolution itself.

It’s good, so… umm… buy it.  Please?

(No career in advertising awaits me, I know.)…

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Forms Into Other Patterns (Terror of the Zygons)

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So complete is Terror of the Zygons’s appropriation of
the Pertwee era that it even includes a dodgy giant lizard
in honor of Malcolm Hulke.

It’s August 30, 1975. The Stylistics are at number one with “Can’t Give You Anything (But My Love),” one of the many Philadelphia soul songs to chart in the UK and not the US. They are unseated by Rod Stewart with “Sailing,” which is not the more famous bad Christopher Cross song, but really, it’s not like that justifies anything. It still lasts the remaining three weeks of this story. KC and the Sunshine Band, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Roger Whittaker, and Mike Batt with New Edition all also chart.

In the only two months since Doctor Who was last on our screens, there’s been a bit of a kerfuffle between the US and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the deadliest motorway accident in UK history, a referendum resulting in the UK staying in the European Community, and the release of the Rockefeller Commission’s report that concluded and made public at least some of just how evil the CIA had been being lately. This was the first of three major studies into the CIA in about a two year period that began to scratch the surface of how upsettingly bad things were with the CIA. Most of these revelations were strenuously opposed by officials in the Ford administration, most notably some guy named Donald Rumsfeld, whose political career was surely brought to an end by such a brazen attempt to cover up staggering abuses of power. There’s also the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation shoot-out, the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa, and the sentencing of the Birmingham Six.
While during this story’s transmission, the IRA bombs the London Hilton, Rembrandt’s Night Watch is slashed up by a vandal, and, though the second attempt happens two days after this story’s finale, the two and a half weeks in which everybody tries to kill Gerald Ford take place.
It has, you may notice, been a short break since Revenge of the Cybermen. This is where Doctor Who moves to the third of its five major transmission schedules. Originally the show ran basically from the end of summer to the beginning of summer, occupying 40 weeks of the schedule. Then, when the episode count got cut to 26 with the switch to color, it became a roughly Christmas to summer run. Now, in order to deal with what everyone at the BBC is assuming is going to be the juggernaut of Gerry Anderson’s Space: 1999, Doctor Who is moving to a Fall through Spring run with a break for Christmas – a run, I should note, that is widely tipped as what Moffat’s era is going to switch over to starting in 2012.
But since this was a move done to compete with an ITV show, this move is the only time Doctor Who has jumped around the calendar by shortening the gap between seasons instead of by lengthening it.
…

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Pop Between Realities, Home In Time For Tea 17 (Survivors)

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In one corner, we have Doctor Who running, with considerable vigor, away from the legacy of the Pertwee era. Not just in the sense of moving into a postmodern aesthetic instead of a glam one, or in the sense of its massive and definitive breaks with its history. But in a broader sense, the transition we’re following is in part a turn away from the materialism of the Pertwee era. The series is turning from the immediate concerns of the world back towards a realm of ideas and stories. The first great era of social realism in Doctor Who, which began to spark roughly with The Macra Terror, here is flickering to a close, and we’re still more than a decade out from its next real rise.

With Survivors, then, Terry Nation walks pointedly in the other direction: a science fiction series that is based almost entirely on social realism. A series that is 100%, unabashedly about the ethical issues seemingly raised in The War Games, and for that matter about the ones raised by The Daleks, in which the Doctor pointedly declines to stick around for the business of rebuilding. This is the polar opposite – a series in which rebuilding is the entire focus.

It is, of course, a disaster. It’s tough to call this a surprise. I mean, looking at Terry Nation’s Doctor Who scripts, cutting social realism is not what you’d call his wheelhouse. He’s king of the tedious moralizers. Genesis of the Daleks is a great script, yes, but that’s because he successfully uses the twin mythic giants of the Daleks and Nazi Germany to cover up the fact that Kaled society is astonishingly lazily designed and that the centuries-long war on Skaro is between two domed cities within walking distance of one another that have hilariously lax security. Yes, it’s very good, but the thing that is good about it is very obviously not that it depicts a remotely sane or realistic view of society.

And now he’s tackling a series where the entire idea is probing and realistic views of society. I mean, the premise here is straightforward: an overwhelming majority of the world’s population drops dead of a pandemic, and the survivors have to try to preserve human society. It is, in other words, a sort of prototypical Deadwood – a story about how civilization establishes itself and deals with its most basic problems like providing food or security. In other words, a story that demands the exact opposite of what Nation has proven himself good at.

In light of this, it’s actually surprising how good the show is. Or, at least, it could be taken as surprising. Actually, for all Nation’s inadequacies in portraying civilization, there are things Nation is good at that turn out to be very useful here. Most obviously, Nation has always been one of the best Doctor Who writers at the job of crafting situations of physical and material danger. To my surprise when reading About Time, apparently the scene at the start of Genesis of the Daleks in which the Doctor steps on a landmine is widely hated.…

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It was such a massive task to establish the Roman race

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“The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre.

*

Colonial system, public debts, heavy taxes, protection, commercial wars, &c., these children of the true manufacturing period, increase gigantically during the infancy of Modem Industry. The birth of the latter is heralded by a great slaughter of the innocents. Like the royal navy, the factories were recruited by means of the press-gang.

*

With the development of capitalist production during the manufacturing period, the public opinion of Europe had lost the last remnant of shame and conscience. The nations bragged cynically of every infamy that served them as a means to capitalistic accumulation.  …[I]t is trumpeted forth as a triumph of English statecraft that at the Peace of Utrecht, England extorted from the Spaniards by the Asiento Treaty the privilege of being allowed to ply the negro trade, until then only carried on between Africa and the English West Indies, between Africa and Spanish America as well. England thereby acquired the right of supplying Spanish America until 1743 with 4,800 negroes yearly. This threw, at the same time, an official cloak over British smuggling. Liverpool waxed fat on the slave trade. This was its method of primitive accumulation.

*

Whilst the cotton industry introduced child-slavery in England, it gave in the United States a stimulus to the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery, into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage workers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world.

Tantae molis erat, to establish the ‘eternal laws of Nature’ of the capitalist mode of production, to complete the process of separation between labourers and conditions of labour, to transform, at one pole, the social means of production and subsistence into capital, at the opposite pole, the mass of the population into wage labourers, into ‘free labouring poor,’ that artificial product of modern society. If money, according to Augier, ‘comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,’ capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”

– Karl Marx, Capital vol.1, Chapter 31.  My favourite bit.…

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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)

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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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