Eruditorum Press

Don’t look at the future. We drew something awful on it.

This Pretty Little Thing Here (The Claws of Axos)

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I’d make a snarky comment here, but A, nobody ever even
mentions the captions in the comments, and B, what is
there to say about this picture that the picture doesn’t
say itself?
It’s March 13, 1971. Mungo Jerry is at number one still, followed by dueling ex-Beatles with McCartney and Harrison. But it’s week two of the story where it finally happens. T. Rex hits number one with Hot Love, establishing glam rock as no longer the next big thing but simply as the big thing. It’s worth pausing here and looking at T. Rex’s Top of the Pops appearance for this song just to see the way in which the visual styles of pop music and Doctor Who had merged into a single aesthetic. Elsewhere in the charts are Deep Purple and John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band.
In real news, Bangladesh splits off from Pakistan, William Calley is found guilty of the Mai Lai massacre, the Ed Sullivan Show airs its final episode in the US, and the 47 day British postal workers strike ends. There’s going to be a lot of strikes over the next few years, so keep your eyes on that.
But let’s get back to T. Rex. T. Rex is one of those bands that really consist of a single creative force – Mark Bolan. This was, to be fair, not always true. In the late 60s, under the fuller name of Tyrannosaurus Rex, Bolan and Steve Peregrin Took brought psychedelic folk to not quite the masses before Bolan sacked the hobbit and created glam rock. The nature of this transition is a watershed moment in popular culture, and gets at a point I made some time ago and didn’t really pick up on – the fact that the crash-and-burn of 60s counterculture that occurred in France and the US simply didn’t happen in the UK. Instead, after a bit of fussing about, the psychedelic and counterculture aspects of culture made a coherent and traceable transition into glam. 
But actually defining glam is hard. And since this isn’t primarily a music blog, I’ll leave that to more capable people. Instead, let’s note that glam and Doctor Who existed in parallel and developed together. Doctor Who from 1971-1973 is as glam as glam rock, and what we called Ballard Pertwee on Wednesday can just as well be called glam Pertwee – perhaps even more accurately. 
All of which is an extremely lengthy way of circling around to the fact that The Claws of Axos pushes this aspect of the series further than it has been pushed to date, and in some ways further than it will ever be pushed again. Tat Wood refers to this story as the moment when Doctor Who was more glam than glam rock. And much as with Mind of Evil on Wednesday, the same bits that make it brilliant are the bits everyone complains about. So just as on Wednesday we explored what made the action Pertwee version of the show work, let’s look at how the glam version works. 
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Your last memory is of receiving a contact from an unknown agency: me. Everything since has been erased from your minds. (The Mind of Evil)

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And the child prayed, “God, will you make it so The Mind
of Evil is in black and white so we don’t have to look at
Jon Pertwee’s horrible purple jacket?” And God said, “Yes,
my child, but I must leave one photo behind as a warning
to all.” And so it was done.

It’s January 30, 1971. George Harrison is at number one with “My Sweet Lord,” having unseated Mr. Dunn. He enjoys a five week run before Mungo Jerry’s “Baby Jump” unseats him. Lower on the charts, T. Rex still stalks about upon a White Swan. The Supremes are on the charts with “Stoned Love,” a song that is actually probably not about sex while smoking cannabis, not that that has any real relevance to its interpretation. Judy Collins, Paul McCartney, Neil Diamond, and Elton John also chart.

In other news, Idi Amin, or as he’ll eventually become known, His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular, deposes Milton Obote in Uganda. Charles Manson is convicted. The Apollo 14 mission takes place to rapidly diminishing interest. Rolls-Royce, one of the great symbols of luxury, goes bankrupt and is nationalized by the Heath government. The Seabed Treaty, outlawing nuclear weapons on the ocean floor, is signed by the major countries who should sign something like that. The Weather Underground, in a rare stab at effectiveness, manages to bomb a bathroom in the US Capitol building. The UN formally establishes Earth Day, signaling that the environmental movement has thoroughly gotten underway, and also manages the Convention on Psychotropic Substances, formalizing an international effort to crack down on psychedelics. But perhaps most importantly, it’s Decimalization Day! One of the things that most firmly sticks the UNIT era in the 1970s was the fact that back in Season 7, it visibly used pre-decimal currency. All that comes to an end and we finally learn that Susan was Right as, on February 15th, the UK adopts decimal currency.

While on television, it’s The Mind of Evil. One of the last “missing stories,” like chunks of The Ambassadors of Death, it exists only in black and white now despite having originally been transmitted in color. The result is a mixed bag for the story. On the one hand, the general consensus is that The Mind of Evil actually looks better in black and white than it did in color. On the other hand, being in black and white has left this one of the least remarked upon Pertwee stories (On the Doctor Who Ratings Guide, it has the fourth fewest reviews of any of the Pertwee stories).

Although it may not prove useful through to the end of the Pertwee era, at the moment it is useful to think of the Pertwee era as fundamentally schizoid. There are, if you will, the Two Pertwees.…

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He Was a Friend at First (Terror of the Autons)

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The Doctor is so irritated at Mike and Jo that he’s begun
voluntary conversion into a Cyberman just to stop feeling
emotions about them.

It’s January 2nd, 1971. Dave Edmunds is at #1 with “I Hear You Knocking.” It’s unseated the next week by Clive Dunn’s “Granddad,” a piece of Victorian nostalgia by one of the stars of the sitcom Dad’s Army, which holds #1 for the next three weeks. Lower in the charts are the Jackson 5, Neil Diamond, Glen Campbell, and Andy Williams. But the real action starts at number ten in the first week, rising up to a peak position of #2 the final week “Granddad” is on top, namely T. Rex’s chart debut with “Ride a White Swan,” recognized as the real start of glam rock. Tat Wood argues that Terror of the Autons is an equal partner in the start of glam rock, which is an interesting argument, if not one I’m completely sold on. But in any case, glam will serve as the primary musical accompaniment to the Pertwee era from here on out.
In other news, we’ve done a season transition, which means six months to catch up on. Deep breath: The US withdraws from Cambodia. Thor Heyerdahl’s Ra II expedition is completed successfully. The Aswan High Dam opens in Egypt. The largest rock festival of all time happens on the Isle of Wight. Jimi Hendrix dies of an OD in London. Janis Joplin follows suit in LA. The US’s ridiculously meager and pathetic version of the BBC, PBS, begins broadcasting, which will turn out to have profound ramifications for Doctor Who as, with minimal budget, importing BBC shows is a cost-effective policy for them, resulting in Doctor Who’s US debut in 1972. The October Crisis begins in Canada when, in a series of events that seems deeply bemusing given Canada’s current stereotypical reputation, Quebecois separatist terrorists kidnapped the British Trade Commissioner and held him for 60 days.
Which catches us up to 1971, where a stairway crush at a Scottish football match between the Old Firm results in 66 deaths. (For those playing along at home, the Old Firm refers to Celtic and Rangers, two Glaswegian football teams whose sporting rivalry serves as a proxy rivalry for Catholic/Protestant sectarian disputes and thus, by extension, for the Troubles that continued to calmly rear their heads. Harold Wilson’s flagship venture, the Open University, began. And the worlds first ODI cricket match is played between Australia and the UK.
Whew. I miss when Doctor Who was on for 3/4 of the year, you know? So, Terror of the Autons. On the one hand, this is one of the most beloved of Pertwee stories, full of classic scary moments and, furthermore, the debut of three classic characters in Jo Grant, Mike Yates, and the Master. On the other hand…
I’ve talked before about the Pertwee backlash of the 1990s. This story is what we might call exhibit A in this regard. That’s down largely to Paul Cornell’s full-throated, bomb-throwing savaging of this story in DWB… oh God, I need to cover this, don’t I?
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Going Native

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Avatar is progressive in many ways.  It represents racism towards native people as stemming from imperialism.  It notices that imperialism is about capital accumulation, indicting a corporation along the way.  It shows an ‘economy’ in which spines can be repaired, but only if you have the dosh.  It metaphorically revisits the violent imperialist foundations of America – and any such settler colonial state – in a forthrightly disapproving way.  It supports the right of native people to violently resist conquest, even when Americans are doing the conquering.

Fair enough.

However, it is also deeply patronising towards native people.  To quote David Brooks’ article in the New York Times:

It rests on the stereotype that white people are rationalist and technocratic while colonial victims are spiritual and athletic. It rests on the assumption that nonwhites need the White Messiah to lead their crusades. It rests on the assumption that illiteracy is the path to grace. It also creates a sort of two-edged cultural imperialism. Natives can either have their history shaped by cruel imperialists or benevolent ones, but either way, they are going to be supporting actors in our journey to self-admiration.

And, even better, here‘s Annalee Newitz at io9.com, on the subject of Avatar and movies like it:

These are movies about white guilt. Our main white characters realize that they are complicit in a system which is destroying aliens, AKA people of color – their cultures, their habitats, and their populations. The whites realize this when they begin to assimilate into the “alien” cultures and see things from a new perspective. To purge their overwhelming sense of guilt, they switch sides, become “race traitors,” and fight against their old comrades. But then they go beyond assimilation and become leaders of the people they once oppressed. This is the essence of the white guilt fantasy, laid bare. It’s not just a wish to be absolved of the crimes whites have committed against people of color; it’s not just a wish to join the side of moral justice in battle. It’s a wish to lead people of color from the inside rather than from the (oppressive, white) outside.

Think of it this way. Avatar is a fantasy about ceasing to be white, giving up the old human meatsack to join the blue people, but never losing white privilege.

All true, if old news.

My interest here is in the fact that ‘The Power of Kroll’, a Doctor Who serial from 1978-9 that could only have dreamt of having a hundredth of the budget of Avatar (and that not even many Doctor Who fans like) did much, much better.

It covers much of the same ground as Avatar politically.  It represents racism towards native people as stemming from imperialism.  It notices that imperialism is about capital accumulation, indicting a corporation along the way.  It metaphorically revisits the violent imperialist foundations of America – and any such settler colonial state – in a forthrightly disapproving way.  It supports the right of native people to violently resist conquest, even when Brits are doing the conquering.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 9: The Scales of Injustice (Gary Russell, Virgin Books, 1996)

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It’s July 1996, right in the middle of that awkward period where everyone is shifting uncomfortably following the TV movie, by this point not yet sure what it means for the future of Doctor Who, but quite sure that the answer is not, at least in the short to medium term, going to be anything good. The now moribund Virgin Books line releases Gary Russell’s Third Doctor novel The Scales of Injustice.

Gary Russell has something of a reputation for what is generally referred to as “fanwank.” That is to say, he’s known for writing books that are packed to the gills with continuity references for the sake of continuity references. Now, a sane person could and perhaps even should ask what the difference is between fanwank and, for instance, having the Macra pop up forty years after their last appearance for a cameo. And plenty of people have asked that. If nothing else, then, The Scales of Injustice serves to explore that line.

Because this book is not so much continuity heavy as it is capable of producing continuity gravity. Direct references exist not only to the four Pertwee stories preceding it but also to Time Flight, Remembrance of the Daleks, The War Machines, The Invasion, The Web of Fear, The Sea Devils, Warriors of the Deep, and probably a fair swath more that I didn’t even notice. One thing you may notice about that list is that not all of the stories are links. That is because many of them are stories that haven’t actually aired by the point in the series this novel takes place in.

Which means we’re in the wild and wonderful world of future continuity, a topic we’ve picked up in a couple of these Time Can Be Rewritten columns. (Incidentally, a reader found a counter-example to my claim that no stories set pre-The War Games ever mention the Time Lords. Apparently John Lucarotti’s novelization of The Massacre does.) But more even than The Dark Path, this is a book about reconciling Doctor Who stories and squaring away continuity errors. It tackles not only the nature of the Brigadier’s love life (glimpsed in Planet of Spiders and Battlefield), Mike Yates’s assignment to UNIT and promotion to Captain (complete with a gratuitous scene to explain why Benton didn’t get the promotion), Liz Shaw’s departure (more later), but also, for the horde of people who were concerned about it, the question of why the Doctor claimed to have twice negotiated with the Silurians for peace in Warriors of the Deep when in fact he only did so once.

Let’s pause here for a moment and look at that. I don’t want to get too far into Warriors of the Deep some thirteen seasons too early, but accounting for this supposed continuity error is trivial. First, a bit of context for anyone who is actually trying to use this blog to learn about early Doctor Who. Warriors of the Deep is a 1984 story in which the Fifth Doctor faces both the Silurians and the Sea Devils, the latter being cousins of the Silurians introduced in season nine.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 11 (Doomwatch, The Atrocity Exhibition)

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As we watch the at times compelling, at times just kind of sad spectacle of Doctor Who frantically trying to reinvent itself on a brand new formula and premise, it may be worth looking at other contemporaneous British attempts at Earth-based science fiction to get some idea of what genre Doctor Who is trying to impose itself on. It’s not, of course, as if Doctor Who has never imposed itself on other genres before. The historicals, in their latter days, were all about genre crossing. But note the specific wording – a story like The Gunfighters was about taking Doctor Who and crashing it into the western then filming the explosion. With the UNIT stories we are by and large seeing something different: a fair swath of the production team does not seem to be trying to cross Doctor Who into another genre. They’re trying to make Doctor Who as an example of another genre. Until we understand what that genre is, it’s going to be difficult to say what can be accomplished by turning Doctor Who into that genre.

To some extent we’ve already seen what that genre is via Monty Python. Or, more to the point, we’ve seen that whatever Doctor Who is trying to do, it’s so flamingly obvious within the context of British culture that it can be parodied prior to Doctor Who doing it. Of course, if we rewatch the Science Fiction sketch, we can see that it’s just as much a parody of the old Quatermass formula. In other words, there’s an established sort of science fiction here that Nigel Kneale invented with Quatermass that Doctor Who, under UNIT, comes perilously close to faithfully and blindly discharging. Of course, we’ve also seen with the Brigadier the beginnings of a response, which we’ll see expanded on when we get to Terror of the Autons.

But Doctor Who wasn’t even the only contemporary sci-fi thriller airing on BBC1, little yet the only one being made in Britain at the turn of the decade, so let’s look at two others to set up some signposts. The first is obvious – Doomwatch, created by Gerry Davis and Kit Pedler, is, like Adam Adamant Lives!, a case of “what Doctor Who people did next.” And like Adam Adamant Lives!, the answer is “something that is almost, but not quite, what Doctor Who did next.” Just as Adam Adamant Lives! prefigured the charismatic lead model of the Troughton years, Doomwatch was an attempt by Davis and Pedler to work through their issues (well, Pedler’s issues mainly) regarding contemporary science via contemporary earth-based sci-fi.

Perhaps the most alarming thing about Doomwatch is that it’s actually quite good. This is alarming because the creative talent on it was, as I mentioned, Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis. We discussed the seeming nature of Pedler’s Doctor Who scripts in the past. Gerry Davis, on the other hand, is responsible for The Celestial Toymaker, The Tomb of the Cybermen, and, to be fair, The Tenth Planet.…

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Potterless

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I can scarcely believe I’m doing this…

Saw the Potterocalypse.  Well crafted.  I’ve had worse afternoons in the cinema.

One of the most interesting things about the films is how much better they are than the books.  That goes for all of them.  This last is no exception.

Rowling is a poor novelist but Kloves is an excellent adaptor.  It’s quite amazing how he streamlines the windy, pompous, digression-ridden plots so that audiences can follow them without flowcharts. 

Also, the films have always made Harry easier to like than the books, partly because Radcliffe is naturally likeable and partly because cinema can’t give us what Rowling insists on foisting upon readers: unfettered access to Harry’s every self-obsessed, uncharitable, weak-willed, petulant thought.  Again, in this latest film, Kloves helps mightily by snipping out acres of Potterian sulking and obsessing over irrelevancies, like the ancient and brief moral failures of mentors, etc.. 

Harry’s wobbles over loyalty to his dead headmaster go on for faaaaaar toooooo loooooong in the book… and yet, in the film, even after all the set-up from the last film, we get only the briefest hint of Aberforth’s resentments before Harry states that he trusted Dumbledore And That’s All There Is To It.  Harry doesn’t even ask the spectral Dumbledore about it in the dream/afterlife bit (which is filmed in a pleasingly 2001: A Space Odyssey-ish way).  I’m not complaining about this, but it’s odd how breezy is the treatment of the whole Dark Dumbledore Backstory in Deathly Hallows Part 2, given how much attention the set-up stuff (i.e. conversations at the wedding, Rita Skeeter’s book) gets in Deathly Hallows Part 1.  This is an odd but ultimately minor stumble, largely because this subplot is fundamentally uninteresting and they are quite right to sideline it. 

One of the worst of Rowling’s many, many, many flaws as a novelist is that she doesn’t understand her own characters.  She knows who she wants them to be… no, hang on… a better way of putting it would be that she knows how she wants her readers to view them, but this often fails to jive with how they actually behave.  For example, she damn-nigh instructs the reader to love Harry because he’s kind and brave and heroic and full of love, etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum, but actually depicts him (especially in the final book) as a thoughtless, selfish, grumpy, maudlin, indecisive, clueless little irritant.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with having a flawed hero – especially if that hero is a teenage boy, since they’re usually pretty damn flawed – but it becomes a problem when the authorial voice fails to percieve the flaws, and has the embodiment of moral authority in the books (Dumbledore) treat Harry as though he’s a ruthlessly efficient intellectual humanitarian.

But then the embodiment of moral authority is deeply flawed too.  His actions make him – to any disinterested observer – a cynical, calculating manipulator with a revolting streak of sentimentality and an outrageously brazen habit of indulgent and permissive favouritism towards certain of his pupils. …

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Go Down Go Down Go Down Go Down (Inferno)

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Sometimes Wikipedia picks the weirdest frames as its
images…

It’s May 9, 1970. Norman Greenbaum continues to be at number one. More alarmingly, at number two is the England World Cup Squad with “Back Home,” the first of many post-1966 humiliations England’s national football team would suffer. Worse, a week later the England World Cup Squad takes number one, holding it for three weeks. It’s unseated by “Yellow River” by Christie, a song in the classic “soldier returning home” subgenre. This lasts a week before Mungo Jerry’s “In the Summertime” plays us out of season seven. The Hollies, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Tom Jones, The Moody Blues, Fleetwood Mac, and The Supremes also chart.

Since The Ambassadors of Death wrapped, the most obvious news story is the Kent State Massacre. This is because 2/3 of my readers are Americans, and mistake inspiring a really good Neil Young song with mattering. All Kent State amounts to is a confirmation that the hippie/anti-war movement was successfully so marginalized that affixing bayonets, advancing towards them, and shooting them dead is not entirely outside of the mainstream. More interesting for us is actually something like Thor Heyerdahl setting sail with a papyrus boat called Ra II to try to prove that it was theoretically possible for the ancient Egyptians to have influenced the design sensibilities of South American civilizations. This is proper 1970s stuff – bewilderingly overreaching theories of human development held together by sticky tape and charisma.

But perhaps most interesting for our purposes, two days before the final episode of this story aired, the UK held a general election in which, in a shock result, Harold Wilson’s Labour government fell and Tory Edward Heath became Prime Minister. Exactly why Wilson went down is a matter of debate, with theories ranging from the fairly improbable (that England did poorly in the World Cup) to the quite likely (a raft of poor economic data doing in the not actively unpopular but not particularly popular Labour government), to the marginal and frankly disturbing (Tories were fired up following Enoch Powell’s River of Blood speech, discussed here). We’ll track the consequences of this through most of the Pertwee era, with one particular consequence taking us all the way through 1990.

While on television… this one’s interesting. Somewhat surprisingly, the Doctor Who Magazine Mighty 200 poll ranks this as the best Pertwee story. Given that I can’t even see how you’d argue it as the best story of season seven, this is a bit of a surprise. Tat Wood suggests that people are more enamored with the idea of Inferno than they are with the actual episodes, and I suspect this is more or less on target.

The biggest problem that Inferno appears to have when you start watching it is a crushing sense that we’ve seen this before. Here we are after two seven part adventures set in scientific installations where mysterious things were afoot, and what do we get? Another scientific installation with mysterious deaths and monsters.…

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Where Spacemen Live (The Ambassadors of Death)

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What do you mean “homoerotic undertones to the UNIT
era?”

It’s March 21, 1970. Lee Marvin continues the apparent obsession with country and western in UK music with “Wand’rin Star,” unseated after only one more week by Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” which lasts until mid-April before being unseated by Dana’s “All Kinds of Everything,” the 1970 Eurovision winner. This is actually mildly controversial, given that Dana herself is from Northern Ireland, but in Eurovision represented the Republic of Ireland. (As you will recall, The Troubles, the lengthy period of unrest between the UK and Ireland, were getting into full force here). Dana is in turn unseated by Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky.” Spirit in the Sky is an interesting piece. Looking at its single cover, in 2011, it looks, frankly, redneck – a bright red cover featuring a photo of a long-haired man in front of an American flag. However in practice, the song is a vaguely psychedelic piece about the afterlife that is treated as a precursor for a lot of glam rock. Andy Williams, Kenny Rogers, Stevie Wonder, and Steam also make appearances.

In other news, the Concorde makes its first flight and the first Earth Day proclamation is made. Ian Paisley wins a by-election to the House of Commons. But more importantly, the seven weeks of these stories surround Apollo 13’s launch, catastrophic malfunctions, and eventual (and damn near miraculous) safe landing – essentially the last time that the public followed space story as an ongoing matter instead of in the aftermath of a fatal catastrophe. But perhaps the most important news story is one of music. This is also the story that was on when The Beatles, who had provided, in many ways, the nearest analogue for the artistic movements of Doctor Who throughout the 1960s, announced their imminent breakup.

I’m not even sure where to begin in terms of pointing out the fitting connections here. The fact that the first stirrings of glam rock – Doctor Who’s next musical parallel – hit #1 the same month as Doctor Who is running an oddly David Bowie-inflected story and where its previous musical influence, the Beatles, breaks up? Or the fact that as the Beatles depart so does David Whitaker, the show’s strongest creative force to date? Or that Doctor Who has its last big space story just as the world’s last big space story is going? We are, as they say, spoiled for choice.

But for me, of course, it has to begin with Whitaker. And end there. And really, be all about that. There’s a lot going on in this story, but look, nothing beats the fact that this is Whitaker’s departure. Mind you, this is not quite a David Whitaker story, whatever the credits might say. Indeed, the last solo story by Whitaker was the sublimely good The Enemy of the World, since The Wheel in Space was a joint venture with Kit Pedler. In this case, Whitaker apparently had trouble working in the new format for Doctor Who (which, to be fair, so was everyone else, as the bewildering ending of The Silurians demonstrated), and furthermore was moving to Australia.…

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Welcome Matt

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Timelash II.  Series 5.  You know the drill.  Thank goodness this tiresome, needless, self-imposed task is now almost over.

The Eleventh Hour

How interesting that, whereas RTD usually got public figures to play themselves in contexts that took the piss out of them (even if they didn’t realise it), Moffat drafts Patrick Moore and casts him as a prestigious and influential expert with a naughty twinkle in his eye, rather than as a sexist, right-wing old pratt.

I’ll post seperately on The Beast Below.  I’ve looked at the heavily biased and ideological representation of Churchill in Victory of the Daleks here.  The only other thing to note about that wretched story is the cynicism with which the Daleks have been redesigned in order to launch a new range of toys. 

The Angels Two-Parter

I like the bit with the angel on the screen.  Nice bit of appropriation from J-horror.

Otherwise… well, I’ll once again quote my friend vgrattidge-1, who captures it concisely:

Just what ‘Who’ needed – another straight-to-video style ‘Aliens’ rip-off that undermines a brilliant (one-off!) monster and makes them behave in illogical ways for plot expediency, plus the smug and annoying River Song (I just can’t bring myself to care what relationship she has with the Doctor) and well, not much else. It’s hollow stuff with the Doc making another tough-guy speech before firing a gun…Yawn

One interesting thing about this story is the matter of the Church Soldiers (related to the Church Police perhaps… will they be investigating dead Bishops on the landing and rat tart?). I remember Paul Cornell saying he was grateful to Moffat for his generosity in portraying relgious people in a positive light. So… Paul sees it as positive when monks are shown going around in fatigues, obeying orders within a military hierarchy and carrying machine guns? How telling.

Vampires of Venice was too boring to write about.  Here is my (positive) look at Amy’s Choice.

The Hungry Earth / Whatever the Other One was Called

The Silurians become dull, generic reptile aliens… and, as I recall, such reptile aliens featured in one of the very few half-decent episodes of ST: Voyager, which actually tried to intelligently investigate some of the cultural ramifications of ‘common descent’, etc. It comes to something when Who can’t even do reptile aliens better than Voyager.

The less likeable side of Star Trek actually provides the inspiration for story. It resembles the worst excesses of Trek when it’s in liberal-moralising-allegory mode. There is the fatuous treatment of racial suspicion, the vapid semi-allusions to Israel/Palestine (lets get round the table and sort out a deal… all we need is a reasonable negotiating partner!), etc.

Worse, it wants to have its cake an eat it. On the one hand there is the morally myopic liberal fingerwagging at nasty old inherently-xenophobic humans… but this contradicts the half-assed (bordering on offensive) subtext about Guantanamo Bay / Abu Ghraib, where the mother who tortures a recalcitrant and inherently hostile Arab terrorist… sorry, I mean a Silurian… for information is shown to be acting from understandable necessity.…

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