Eruditorum Press

Cuck the police

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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Asylum, UK

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A rejigg of something I wrote for the old site on the subject of ‘Turn Left’, the best episode of series 4.

The alternate world that Davies conjures up in ‘Turn Left’ is not so far removed from our own. We might not (yet) see British soldiers patrolling our streets and pointing automatic weapons at unarmed women (though the recent behaviour of the police towards student protestors has been pretty savage)… but that sight would not be so unfamiliar to the people of Baghdad. Or Belfast, for that matter.

The nightmarish, decaying, dystopian Britain in this episode reflects aspects of our current social predicament… indeed, as Simon Kinnear pointed out in DWM, the episode seems prescient of the years ahead of it, of (to put it my way) recession/cuts torn Britain.

While it doesn’t get specific, or touch economics much, ‘Turn Left’ seems like the closest thing to a direct political attack on crisis-wracked British society that any mainstream TV show could possibly get away with. Let’s just recap: in an episode of that highly commercial kid’s romp known as Doctor Who, Russell T. Davies suggested that, in a time of crisis, the British state might institute a program of racist slavery, if not extermination. At the very least, we see people herded and treated like animals while patrolled by armed guardians of the state. Moreover, the people being treated that way are the poor, the dispossessed, the helpless. Brits get the kind of treatment meted out to refugees once they too become scapegoatable dependents.

I’m not sure that Davies intended the title as direct political advice (though it wouldn’t be bad advice) but it surely can’t be entirely an accident that Donna’s apocalyptic turn is a turn to the right, a turn that results in “England for the English”.

The Donna in the car at the start of ‘Turn Left’ might vote that way. She’s the same thoughtless, selfish Donna we met at the start of ‘The Runaway Bride’. She’s exactly the kind of self-involved, complacent brat who hardly notices as society crashes around her… until she is touched by it. Davies pulls no punches. We see her obsessing over stationary and offices grudges as the rest of Chowdry’s staff watch the TV, horrified, for news of the hospital. We see her asking “What’s for tea?” as news of Sarah Jane Smith’s death flashes on the screen.

I know people like that. Indeed, speaking as someone who lives in southern England – surely the global epicentre of reactionary complacency – it is very hard indeed not to derive a massive and delicious jolt of schadenfreude from the way Davies manages to turn the (surviving) population of the Sun and Daily Mail reading world into despised, harangued, jobless refugees. “Who’s going to listen to us?” asks Donna’s Mum, “Refugees. We haven’t even got a vote. We’re just no-one Donna. We don’t exist.” To put it another way: seek asylum and you’ll be locked up in one.

It’s ironic that as Donna’s society disintegrates, she suddenly discovers other people.…

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The Commodity Strikes Back

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Thoughts on ‘Planet of the Ood’

A very beautiful episode to look at. A stark pallet of whites and blues and greys, the exterior scenes harshly bathed in cold light… counterpointed by the dark warehouses and the red haze of the Ood rage.

Series 4 continues its apparent intent of readdressing moral lapses on the part of the Doctor/show. The inexcusable laxity of the treatment of slavery in ‘The Satan Pit’ (and the invisibility of the issue in the preceding episode) gets repudiated here. Big time.

Some would rather have had a story about a race that actually did crave servitude… but J. K. Rowling has already given the nation that sort of thing with her innately and happily subservient House Elves. And I don’t believe a sentient life form could evolve that wanted to be a commodity.  Indeed, to even suggest such a thing may be to fundamentally misunderstand what consciousness is.

This may be a straightforward polemical tale, but there’s nothing wrong with that. This is about ruthless, corporate capitalism exploiting people that it sees as nothing but a resource to be used. Sentient beings cut and sliced and spliced into shape as customisable toys and then packaged, branded, priced-up and shipped out in boxes. People in pacakaging. The gimmicks with their voices say it all: it’s like changeable novelty mobile-phone covers only with people.

This is a parable about commodification. About people turned into products and merchandise. About how relationships between living people become like relationships between things through the logic of the market. Halpen is, in his way, as much a victim of the commodification syndrome as the Ood. We see glimmers of decency in him, not least when he sends Ood Sigma back to his people. But he’s trapped within the logic of the impersonal system. Like the PR girl who – oh joy, oh bliss – does NOT have a yawnsome “crisis of conscience” but does her job, stays within the psychological confines of the system and stays true to her corporate loyalties. The PR/marketing slime in the hospitality lounge are as lobotomised as the Ood. Sharp suits and empty heads and crippled consciences.

Mr Halpen’s ultimate comeuppance is to become the thing he owned and traded in. That amazing gore moment that also, through the context, manages to be poetic, beautiful and moving. And satisfying. It’s a fantasy, but a pleasing one. Let’s put together a chain-gang starring Warren Buffet, Phil Nike, Rupert Murdoch, etc. See how those bastards like being at the bottom of the pile. Maybe sometimes, empathy must be imposed.

The episode does not flinch from showing the brutality or the necessity or the moral justifiability of violent revolt. No patronising sermons to the oppressed about non-violence.

The Doctor’s remark to Donna – “who do you think made your clothes?” – was quite startling at the time.  Under most circumstances, such little eruptions in mainstream drama can be accounted for as mere twinges of liberal guilt… but in a story like this one, which explicitly endorses violent revolution… well, it seems to have a bit more integrity than that.…

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Notes from the Bibbledrome

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AOL News ran a story this morning about a T-Mobile survey, asking “the public” (probably about seven people) which “personalities” they thought should be on the new UK money.  Apparently, the top choices were Pippa Middleton and Alan Sugar, with Keira Knightly and Simon Cowell as runners-up.

I think these are great ideas.  What could better express where our society is at?

Alan Sugar – an embarassing, thuggish, philistine, self-aggrandizing old shitsack, promoted as an idol by the media, a vaudeville capitalist mascot of a TV show that (along with many, many others) touts the virtues of the heroically self-interested utility-maximiser of neoliberal dogma – is a very good emblem of our society.  That’s the fiver sorted.

Pippa Middleton, by association, represents the vacuous and monotonous contentless bibble that passes for public discourse, and the sexism of a media class of drooling middle aged letches slavering over young women.  There’s the tenner for you.

Why not, instead of putting her face on the notes, put her arse on them.  That’d be honest.

Let’s have Tony Blair on the notes, standing on top of a pile of dead Iraqis, his hands dripping blood, a wolfish smile on his face.  That’d do the twenty nicely.

Then the fifty could be David Cameron bum-banging a public sector worker who has been tied up with lots of twisted-together copies of the Daily Mail.

And Simon Cowell could grace the pound coin instead of the Queen.  He’s omnipresent anyway, so why not have his greasy visage jangling in every pocket?  He – the incarnation of the smarmy, calculating, utterly insincere, ruthless, predatory, shit-flinging cultural vandal – is a much better representative of modern Britain than Elizabeth Windsor.…

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Veto Axons

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This is a round-up of my Timelash II stuff on Series 3… well, those bits of it that I haven’t already posted elsewhere.  The ‘Smith and Jones’ bit is a tweaked version of something from the old site.  There’s nothing about Axons in here, I just found myself amused by the anagram.

The Runaway Bride

The Doctor cold-bloodedly kills the Racnoss children… and the episode tries to have its cake and eat it by both giving the Doctor ‘no choice’ and implying that he ‘went too far’. The probably unintentional implication is that neocon logic is unpalatable but inescapable, that we need people who will ruthlessly kill on a massive scale in order to protect us from the forces of unreasoning hostility.

We’re a long way from “massive weapons of destruction” being a lie from a politician with an evil, greedy alien baby inside him. 

Smith and Jones

Russell reuses many of the ideas and techniques that made ‘Rose’ work as an introductory tale. There is a frenetic opening scene which introduces Martha, her family situation and her workplace. As in ‘Rose’, the new companion meets the Doctor at work and, as in ‘Rose’ he is already in the middle of an adventure. As in ‘Rose’, the Doctor and his new friend form an instant connection which takes the form of banter, intelligent co-operation in the midst of a crisis, lots of running and lots of holding hands. As in ‘Rose’, the new companion saves the Doctor’s life. As in ‘Rose’ we see her enter the TARDIS at night, in a London backstreet and immediately run out again in surprise (the only naturalistic way to portray a reaction to the TARDIS). Bits of the first Torchwood episode are reused too.

But there’s also a lot that’s different. Instead of beginning with the Doctor and showing us Martha from his P.O.V. or holding the Doctor in reserve and letting Martha encounter him at a moment of high drama (as in ‘Rose’), the episode instead allows him to pop up both after and before any of us were expecting to see him! Some of us might have thought he’d be in Scene One. Some of us, gulled by the opening scene’s echo of the structure of ‘Rose’, might have expected him to appear only when Martha needs rescuing from the Judoon. But instead he pops up when none of us were expecting him, does something entirely inexplicable, and then walks off.

Of course, it would have made sense to bring the Doctor in as soon as possible because the audience knows him whereas they don’t know Martha. But a pre-title sequence featuring the Doctor would destroy that Year Zero vibe that RTD is going for. For the moment, he wants us to feel like we’re beginning again. This is essential because he’s trying to make Martha – a brand new character in another character’s show – the central audience identification figure. Let’s pause for a moment to consider how incredibly difficult that is.…

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Rot & Brilliance

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Series 2.  The Great Disappointment.  Mostly Timelash II material… but some new stuff, especially on ‘Girl in the Fireplace’ and the Cybermen 2-parter.

The Christmas Invasion

Easily the best Christmas special.  Fun without being stupid.  Epic without being maniacally over-the-top.

I’ve never been sure about the putative Belgrano parallel, though its undoubtedly in there. Harriet’s actions seem far more rooted in the whole cultural atmosphere of the “war on terror”, with the ongoing public debate amongst liberals and lefties about ruthless pragmatism to protect “our civillisation” vs. principled non-aggression and/or anti-imperialism, etc…

It’s interesting to compare Harriet’s liberal ruthlessness with the Doctor’s much-vaunted “no second chances” thing. The Doctor, for all his hard-faced and unforgiving dispatching of the Sycorax leader, only kills when he has to – his foe has been warned, is breaking a promise, is directly attacking him, etc. Moreover, his act is man to man. Harriet’s actions are an act of state terrorism against a retreating enemy, done in the name of showing strength against possible future attacks.

New Earth

Apart from ‘The Empty Child’ (which is a whole can of worms by itself), this is the nearest the new series has come to doing a story about the body.

It has mutants, medicines, cat people and a grotesquely fat man who is turning to stone… the physical concerns continue into the main subplot, which is a ‘body-swap’ comedy of the type that Hollywood produced by the hundredweight in the late 80s (all of them, as far as I can recall, starring either Tom Hanks or people who built their entire careers on looking and sounding vaguely like Tom Hanks). It’s quite funny, but it goes on too long and gets tiresome.

Mind you, it should be noted just how much ‘New Earth’ owes to ‘Revelation of the Daleks’. In the secret, gothic depths below a swanky professional institution seemingly devoted to healing, ghastly experiments are afoot which treat humans as raw material, etc.

Sadly, little attention has been paid to making the plot make much sense on any level. The Face of Boe has something to tell the Doctor… and suddenly decides not to because he’s suddenly not dying anymore. The richest man on the planet is waiting in an open ward of a charity hospital. The more interesting visual and thematic ideas are neglected in favour of shambling zombies (who are, like, a metaphor about vivisection… or something) who get cured by a mixture of colours that can cure all known disease. One wonders why the cat nuns bother to do all those experiments, since they’re already in possession of a panacea based on colourful liquids.

The wet, Moffatesque, everybody lives, aren’t-humans-wonderful ending is pretty sickening, to be honest. RTD’s original idea was much better.

And how can we possibly be expected to sympathise with Cassandra? She’s a mass-murdering psychopath whose subdued final attitude stems entirely from self pity.

Loads of potentially great ideas, put in a blender and thrown against a wall. This is barely bearable precisely because its so nearly good.…

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I Do Tend To Get Involved (Spearhead From Space)

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It’s genuinely funny to imagine “Space Adventure” playing
over any of the Auton scenes, by the way. If you were
wondering.

It’s January 3, 1970. Rolf Harris is at number one with “Two Little Boys,”a version of 1902 song about the American Civil War, which is exactly what you’d expect to be at number one in the UK, yes? Other artists in the top ten include Kenny Rogers, Glen Campbell, and Elvis Presley. Rolf Harris holds number one for all four weeks this story is going on for. It’s not that there aren’t other things bubbling under the surface – there are. But apparently January in 1970 was a time for everyone to be mildly obsessed with the idea of American country music.

One aspect of the change to color that happens with this story is that the show cuts itself down to roughly 26 episode seasons, as opposed to the 40+ episode seasons it did for its first six years. This means in turn that the show has much longer summer breaks, having been off the air for six months now. In those six months, the Stonewall riots took place, kicking off the gay rights movement. The moon landing actually happens. Ted Kennedy drives his girlfriend off a bridge. That whole Woodstock thing happens, along with the beginning of prosecution for the My Lai massacre. . The Days of Rage take place in Chicago in a backlash against the trial of demonstrators from the 1968 Democratic Convention. Richard Nixon begins winding down the Vietnam War. Altamont also happens, seemingly trying to split the difference between Woodstock and My Lai. And, for the tech geeks, the UNIX epoch begins, just three days prior to the UNIT one.

And that’s just the setup before the Doctor crashes into the world. In the four weeks over which this story airs, Biafra finally capitulates, ending the Nigerian Civil War, and the Greater London Council announces the construction of the Thames Barrier to prevent flood damage to London.

While on television… see, the last time we did one of these, it was a story with the notable advantage that nobody could see. The Power of the Daleks is a story we peer at, trying to understand this mysterious transition. Being as it’s episodes 2-7 of the joint longest streak of missing episodes running, the transition to Troughton is something we try to figure out in hindsight.

Spearhead From Space, on the other hand, everybody knows – especially since its central iconography was reshaped into the launch of the 2005 series. This is one of the most iconic and classic Doctor Who stories in existence. Normally this means we have to do a lot of reconstruction to undo the glare of fandom, but in this case, watching the story in sequence right after The War Games, much of what is important about this story is extremely obvious, if not exactly the everyday reaction.

Of course, we’ve delayed a week instead of doing that here, but then, the show delayed six months.…

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