Eruditorum Press

Less organic intellectuals than morbid symptoms

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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Eh? Doctor Who? (The Silurians)

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Fun fact: The third eye can both burn a hole through a wall
and repair it again after. Steven Moffat should really
have used that in A Good Man Goes to War.

It’s January 31st, 1970. Edison Lighthouse have been so kind as to depose Rolf Harris, reaching number one with “Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes).” It holds number one for five weeks before being unseated by Lee Marvin’s “Wand’rin Star,”  Peter, Paul, and Mary, Jethro Tull, the Jackson 5, Simon and Garfunkel, and Chicago are also in the charts, but perhaps the most interesting thing is the Beatles “Let it Be” debuting at its chart peak position of #2 in the last week of this story. Also in music news, Black Sabbath releases their first album, effectively establishing heavy metal music.

Elsewhere, avalanches and train crashes give everything a nice disastrous feel. But here’s perhaps the more interesting thing. Something we have to remember about 1970 was that what we now call “the sixties” was not entirely and firmly tied to the calendar decade. What I mean by this was that hippies and the like did not simply roll over and die at the strike of midnight on January 1st. Case in point, Jeffrey R. MacDonald, a US Army officer, murdered his entire family and then claimed “drugged out hippies” had done it. This, however, is really just a reference to the Manson murders, another story that unwound over the six months between seasons. The significant thing about the Manson murders is not the murders themselves, which are just a sightly more homicidal version of Jim Jones, David Koresh, or the Heaven’s Gate cult. No, what’s significant about the Manson killings is the fact that they fed a story that hippies were dangerous. Note that the prosecution in the Manson murders stuck closely to arguing the connection between the Beatles and hippie culture. The central idea of the Manson murders and the reason they grabbed the popular imagination was because they featured the real fear of evil hippies. This, again, shows us how quickly things were collapsing and changing.

Other news involves the Weathermen, America’s most hilariously toothless domestic terrorist organization, inadvertently blowing three of their own members up (two more than the death toll of non-members across their bombing campaigns). The Poseidon bubble, a bizarre speculative bubble involving Australian nickel mining, bursts. Rhodesia fully separates from the UK, and still nobody supports their existence. And the Chicago Seven are acquitted.

Interesting times in other words. On television it’s interesting as well, with The Silurians, mistakenly broadcast under the title Doctor Who and the Silurians, airing. The Silurians is interesting for a couple of reasons. It’s the first solo script of Malcolm Hulke, who has previously co-authored for both Season 4 and Season 6. But this is perhaps less interesting than the fact that it’s the first Pertwee script by an avowed skeptic of the Pertwee era. This is ironic given that of the eight scripts Hulke was involved in for Doctor Who, six are in the Pertwee era.…

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Little People

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The inevitable round-up of my Timelash II stuff on Series 4 and the ‘specials’.  It’s a bumpy ride.

Voyage of the Damned

In this story, fat people or little people are there to sacrifice themselves when the plot needs them to, having shown some fatuous mechanical bravery and/or expressed some mawkish emotion-by-numbers. Sexy, pretty people are inherently of more value, whatever their intellectual vapidity and hollowness as characters, as evidenced by the Doctor’s laughably protracted and exaggerated heartbreak over the death of anonymous, mechanised dummy Astrid (seriously, I was waiting for her to be revealed as an Auton). The episode itself mourns her too, with its frankly revolting music and hilarious over-emphasis on her passing (one last kiss with the radiant ghost, a shooting star, etc…)

We’re supposed to gasp with awe at the way RTD Subverts Expectations by letting Unpleasant Posh Bloke survive while ‘good’ people die (oooh, have a little pat on the head you good little people – you have done your master’s bidding and died on cue like the plot fodder you always were)… but so what? Bad people don’t always get their comeuppance? Wow, thanks for that.

And, in any case, this ‘message’ is undercut by the way we’re obviously supposed to consider the death of Astrid more important than all the other deaths in the episode. Why is this? Well, RTD makes the Minogue character into a lowly waitress… but this only suggests that he’s desperately trying to deny the patently obvious: she’s more important in the story because she’s played by a star.

Remember that bit in ‘The Stolen Earth’ when Davros taunts the Doctor about how he turns ordinary people into killers and the Doctor then has a maudlin (and irrelevant) series of flashbacks of all the people he’s known who’ve died? We get a flash of Astrid. Do we get flashes of Morvin, Foon and Banakafalatta? In a pig’s arse. Little people. Not important. That’s why it’s so unintentionally revealing when, in ‘Waters of Mars’, we’re supposed to be shocked by the Doctor using the actual phrase “little people”. Thing is, the show itself has been thinking like that for ages. Even in ‘Waters of Mars’, the death of the Lindsy Duncan character is more earthshattering because she’s played by Lindsy Duncan.

As Lawrence Miles said, RTD is now so thoroughly trapped in the self-celebrating Meedja echo chamber that he now has the Doctor being chased by BAFTAs.

Yes, the villain turns out to be a ruthless capitalist (who – as in Bond films – is bad because he’s a criminal, not because he’s a capitalist) but this hardly says anything at all… not in an episode in which we’re also supposed to think that Wilf’s patriotic bibble is cute and lovable, in which the Doctor is implied to be a friend of the Queen, in which his big achievement is to save Buckingham Palace. The implications are thoroughly and mindlessly reactionary. Right-wing, Little Englander, flag-waving, royalty-saluters are Lovable British Eccentrics. The British state and aristocracy are Lovable British Eccentrics.…

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