Eruditorum Press

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Can You Hear Me? Review

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I have repeatedly criticized the Chibnall era for its dubious notion of “aboutness.” With Can You Hear Me? we have a partial success on that front, but its partiality ends up revealing the depths of the problem. The question “what is Can You Hear Me? about” is straightforward—an idiot could answer it. It’s about mental illness. And yet I find myself imagining the pitch meeting here.

“So what’s your story about?”
“Oh, it’s about mental illness.”
“Cool! What do you say about mental illness?”
“Ummmm… it’s about mental illness.”

Herein lies the difficulty. To ask a question I’ve asked plenty of times before, what, exactly, is all of this for? What perspective on the world is Doctor Who offering? What does it have to say? And when it comes to mental illness and this episode, the answer really appears to be “nothing.” Some vague platitudes about facing your fears being the essence of humanity (which come perilously close to “you have an obligation to willpower your way out of depression,” even if they do later endorse getting help) and that’s it. There’s no insights here—no substance.

The common right-wing asshole complaint about the Whittaker era is that it’s full of “virtue signalling.” This is of course what they say about any media that isn’t entirely about the concerns of white men, and so it’s tremendously infuriating to admit that in this instance they’re actually right. All of the wokeness in Chibnall Doctor Who is entirely performative. We don’t have a diverse cast because we want to tell stories about different perspectives and different sorts of people. We aren’t telling stories about the environment or racism or mental illness because we have something to say. We aren’t doing any of this because it’s interesting or worthwhile on its own merits. We’re doing it because Chibnall has concluded that what the hip kids want is “woke” television. Diversity and a sort of after-school special mentality towards issues are ends in themselves. Which, sure, yes, diversity is an end in itself, but here it appears to be the *only* end in play. That’s doesn’t make the diversity a bad thing, obviously, but it lessens the degree to which it’s a good thing. And it certainly renders the big themes fairly innefectual and disposable. Mental illness is a great topic for Doctor Who to tackle, but this isn’t tackling it—it’s using it to get approving headlines from culture journalists on a tight deadline looking for an easy review they can write in their sleep. I refuse to accept that having something to say about the world is not a minimum standard for television. An it’s one Doctor Who hasn’t met with any regularity for years.

Past the ineffectual engagement with theme, we have a lot of vague competence. I’m put in mind of a tweet by Jamie Mathieson I saw this week, where he said that the challenge when writing a familiar trope for television is coming up with a new perspective on it, as merely doing it competently is boring.…

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Dust and Darkness; I Find That Good (The Enemy of the World)

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It’s December 23rd, 1967. Between now and January 27th, thirteen people will die in England when a train collides with a truck that had stalled on the tracks, 380 will die in a Sicilian earthquake, and 121 will die in a pair of submarine crashes in the Mediterranean. In addition, Mike Casparak will die of liver failure fifteen days after being the first successful recipient of a human heart transplant in the United States, while Bill Masterton will die of a brain injury sustained during a National Hockey League game, and huge numbers will die in the still-continuing Vietnam War. Also the world will progress ever-closer to the eschaton, and The Enemy of the World airs. 

The Enemy of the World is first and foremost a story about dictators. This is separate from being a story about dictatorship, which is the more usual way for science fiction to do this. There are tons of Doctor Who stories about dictatorship—it’s the default shape of dystopias, after all. But The Enemy of the World is not ultimately interested in the shape of a dictatorship—indeed, a dictatorship never actually arises within its confines. It’s not even particularly interested in the conditions out of which dictatorship arises—its vision of the futuristic world of 2018 with its system of zones is never fleshed out enough to serve as social commentary upon that setting. The Enemy of the World is instead about the people at the top—the sorts of people who seek abusive power.

Its answer to this is specific to a cultural moment. Many critics have reasonably pointed out the problems involved in Patrick Troughton blacking up and putting on a funny voice to play a treacherous Mexican, and they’re right to, especially given that this is yet another David Whitaker script with what can charitably be called dodgy racial politics. But if one is going to launch some desperately tedious project to justify ignoring racism because you really like an episode of television (no doubt fobbed off as a “redemptive reading” or some similar shit), The Enemy of the World leaves you more options than most. Salamander isn’t Mexican because of some arbitrary bit of racial prejudice—he’s Mexican because Whitaker looked at the world outside his window and engaged with it. This was written in an era where Fidel Castro and Che Gueverra were current events—charismatic men offering liberation and material social progress were coming to power, and specifically coming to power in Latin America. 

The obvious thing to point out here is that a story about demonizing leftist revolutionaries is only faintly better than one that’s just blandly racist. But that’s oversimplifying Whitaker’s game here. The Doctor, after all, is consistently, at times even ludicrously skeptical of everyone’s claims against Salamander (a position that is ultimately justified by the fact that the main person making them is also fundamentally untrustworthy), which clearly positioning him as instinctively sympathetic to the sort of leftist revolutionary Salamander is modeled after. But there’s only so far you can get with this—at the end of the day, the gravity of Salamander being a megalomaniac is pretty inescapable.…

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Praxeus Review

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Let’s start with the biggest upsides. The story did not end by suggesting environmentalists were the real problem. It didn’t conclude that disabled people should use fewer straws. Indeed, politically it was basically ideal—a clear moral and ethical point that was the backdrop for an actual adventure instead of being sledgehammered in a “the moral of this story was” ending. And on top of that, it had well-defined characters and a coherent plot.

Obviously this is Stockholm Syndrome. Once again we are in the position of being pleasantly delighted that a story has come in at “vaguely competent” with a minimum of trauma. Even better, it’s done it three stories in a row, two of them rewritten by Chibnall. (Who has apparently managed the impressive feat of rewriting every person of color on staff this year, given next week’s credits.) This feels like a result, and while we know it shouldn’t, that’s where we are.

Nevertheless, it’s harder this week to really revel in an adequate job done more or less competently than it has been for the past two. Mostly this is down to small things. To do an extreme globe-hopping adventure in Doctor Who always feels a bit pointless—using the TARDIS as an airplane feels rather like bringing a Tissue Compression Eliminator to a knife fight. And as a result none of the locations really resonate—nothing feels like a distinct or coherent place. The (momentarily quite interesting) decision to fully split up the TARDIS crew evaporates quickly, and instead we just ping pong among locations with more vigor than coherence. The longstanding tendency of the new series’ acceleration to make Doctor Who’s genre-hopping into an exercise in reducing every genre to a Doctor Who story here becomes something far more insidious, where everywhere in the world ends up feeling like a diversity-minded portrayal of the United Kingdom.

Whittaker also feels particularly on autopilot here. McTighe and Chibnall end up writing her as a collection of tics, and Whittaker finds herself lost in it, left with nothing to do but do the same basic “I have part of a plan” joke on repeat in between outbursts of particularly bad technobabble. This becomes something of a masterclass in how not to do a female Doctor—there’s what feels like a conscious decision not to make her angry or troubling at any point, and so she’s left to talk about humanity poisoning itself with microplastics with a big enthusiastic “I love teaching science” grin on her face. It’s instructive to imagine how much the testiness of Capaldi’s Doctor would help here—how much the “we don’t have time to mourn” bit out of Mummy on the Orient Express could have smoothed over the “Gabriela fails to really be very upset about her best friend dying” plot, for instance, or even just how a Doctor who was actually furious at Suki’s actions could have better set up the effort and failure to work with her in the climax so that it didn’t feel perfunctory. (And let’s not even talk about doing the “martyr yourself piloting the vehicle on a suicide mission” trope in the wake of Clara’s hairtie bit in Flatline.)…

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Everything Human Has Been Purged (The Evil of the Daleks)

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It’s May 20th, 1967. Between now and July 1st, a department store in Brussels will burn down, killing 323, 72 will die in a plain crash in Stockport, 34 will die on board the USS Liberty in an accidental Israeli attack, and the Six Day War will happen, which result in a death toll on the order of 14-20,000.  In addition Langston Hughes will die of complications from prostate cancer, both Dorothy Parker and Spencer Tracy will die of heart attacks, and the world will progress closer still to the eschaton. Also, The Evil of the Daleks airs.

For a certain brand of mysticism-obsessed Doctor Who critic that views the show mostly as an excuse to talk about mirrors (and occasionally chairs), The Evil of the Daleks forms something of an apex for the series. And this is entirely fair enough—it’s one of the most overtly magically-focused stories in Doctor Who history, featuring an antagonist whose motivation is literally “I want to do alchemy.” But in their rush to celebrate its magical weirdness there’s a frustrating failure to look with any depth or care at the precise details of what spell the show is weaving here. 

Let’s consider Philip Sandifer’s essay on the subject, in which he contrives to read the story in terms of David Whitaker’s larger alchemical project in which the Doctor defeats the Daleks through his mercurial sorcery. Sandifer is very gung ho about this, spinning out an extended alchemical metaphor out of this, Whitaker’s other stories, and occasionally stories Whitaker had only a partial hand in crafting. Sandifer is here cribbing from Miles and Wood’s entertaining essay “What Planet is David Whitaker” on, and the reading makes a certain amount of sense when applied to Whitaker’s ouvre as a whole. But The Evil of the Daleks is a puzzling place for Sandifer to make his grand stand for Whitaker’s alchemical master plan for Doctor Who. The story features an alchemist, yes, but what Sandifer seems to miss is that he’s the bad guy, and his desire to transmute lead into gold is mad folly. As for mercury, Sandifer’s essay uses the word “mercury” seven times, which is, as it happens, exactly seven more times than David Whitaker’s script for The Evil of the Daleks. Simply put, this rather complicates any efforts to claim that the story is about it, and sentimental references to Whitaker’s larger ouvre don’t actually paper over the gap.

This is not to say that there is no magic involved in this story; it’s just that reading it as a utopian parable about the inventive powers of mercury is wishful thinking. Let’s instead look at what actually is in the story: the distillation of the human and Dalek factors. These are framed clearly as alchemical opposites, with the Dalek factor being found in the negative space of the human factor much as Troughton’s Doctor found himself in the negative space of the Daleks in their last story.…

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Fugitive of the Judoon Review

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Less an episode than a trailer for some still unannounced finale, which is less of a problem than it should be. In many ways it benefits, not so much from the diminished expectations of the Chibnall era as from the specific pathologies the era has led us to expect. Sure, it can only narrowly be described as having a plot or being about anything, but that’s practically every episode these days. This one at least filled the vast chasms of space between it and a point with a lot of quality what the fuckery. 

Well. It filled the space with a lot of fan-trolling continuity porn. There’s a definite “what on Earth did the normies think of this,” feeling here. That said, Chibnall (who was surely behind the big picture decisions here) made reasonably savvy choices in that regard—a character who, while he hasn’t been seen in a decade, anchored a hit TV show in his own right and a reveal that’s long on implications for the series’ history, but that also plays as Big News in is own right even if you’re not the sort of person who goes “is this another Morbius Doctor or some sort of Season 6c thing?” The only thing actually likely to be normie-puzzling are the Judoon themselves, who were offered as the announced premise with plenty of time for Googling. 

Which leaves the spectacle of continuity shit. Your mileage may vary, but you’re reading Doctor Who reviews on a site that did a story-by-story blog of the entire freaking show, novels and all, so presumably this hits you in the same lizard-brain recesses that have a favorite opening sentence to a Terrence Dicks novelization and an unjustifiable fondness for The Five Doctors. Whether or not this is a particularly worthwhile pleasure is largely beside the point: it’s a concrete pleasure—a sense of there being a thing the show is for—in a way that the Chibnall era has previously not really had. That it’s an emptier masturbation with continuity than anything the Moffat era ever did is ultimately besides the point.

Of course, saying much more than that is also difficult. A secret past Doctor, Cybermen, the Timeless Child, the Master, Captain Jack, and the re-destruction of Gallifrey are all just bibs and bobs of a premise right now that we haven’t seen stitched into an actual story yet. It’s like if you reduced The Day of the Doctor to “a secret past Doctor, Zygons, David Tennant, Billie Piper, a barn, and the Time War,” or The Two Doctors to “Patrick Troughton, Frazer Hines, Sontarans, location filming in Spain, and a fish called the gumblejack.” And while you can argue that both of those stories really do basically reduce down to those lists, at the end of the day the gulf in quality between them makes it clear that there’s a lot of ways this can turn out. Of course, in the end it’s being done by the writer of The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos, so cause for actual hope remains thin on the ground. …

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I Made My Madness Reality (The War Machines)

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It’s June 25th, 1966. Between now and July 16th, a three-year-old girl will die at the Henry Vilas Zoo in Madison, Wisconsin after crawling under a restraining fence and being pulled into an elephant cage. Hundreds will die across the midwestern United States in a six-day heat wave, including 149 in St. Louis, and as many as 650 in new York City. Eight student nurses will die in Chicago when Richard Speck breaks into a dormitory and strangles them. This is in addition to numerous deaths in the Vietnam War, the deaths of Polish poet Jan Brzechwa, French painter Julie Manet, and the world edging ever closer to the eschaton. Also, The War Machines airs.

Looking at it in 2020, the two things that jump out about The War Machines are how prescent it is and how prescient it isn’t. On the one hand, its basic concerns about the destructive possibilities of computer technology are clearly ahead of its time. It’s not that evil computers were unknown in 1966—they started appearing in sci-fi literature in the 1950s, the same decade that Alan Turing broached the subject of whether a machine could think in his landmark paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” But the consequences of artificial intelligence were still firmly a niche concern, and The War Machines focus on them has more in common with the world a half-century later on than a lot of what’s around it in the series. That this is by the same writer as the bewilderingly blackface-based race reversal of The Savages immediately before it and was filmed just before the vapid piratical adventures of The Smugglers after it feels like a more profound juxtaposition than Doctor Who usually manages.

And yet on the other hand, much about The War Machines has aged poorly. The fundamental clumsiness of the computer, with its tediously slow synthesized speech, the even more clumsy War Machines, the weird overlaying of mind control onto the computer plot, all of this feels like an aggressively outdated bit of kitsch, which, to be fair, it unquestionably is. It is ahead of its time, but not nearly far enough ahead to avoid feeling comically outdated. 

On top of this tension, meanwhile, it shares The Daleks’ odd suspension between two apocalypses, although unlike The Daleks it focuses primarily on the ideologies involved instead of on the eschatons themselves. On the one hand, you have a computer named after Germanic gods, a point Ian Stuart Black doubles down on in the novelization by having the first War Machine be named after the Valkyries. Norse paganism isn’t always a marker for Naziism, but when you’ve got men shouting at the camera about their Teutonic digital master’s plan for world domination, well, to quote Tat Wood and Lawrence Miles, “it’s all looking a bit Nazi.”

But as Wood and Miles immediately turn around and note, other factors point towards standard rhetoric about Communism, most obviously Polly’s brainwashed comments about how she loves to work for a cause, and for that matter the brainwashing in general.…

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A Man On My Back (Me and a Gun)

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CW: Rape

Me and a Gun (1992)

Me and a Gun (live, 1992)

Me and a Gun (TV performance, 1992)

Me and a Gun (live, 1996)

Me and a Gun (live, 1997)

Me and a Gun (official bootleg, 2007, Pip set) 

Ibid, video version

It is one of the most harrowing things in the history of pop music. The bulk of adjectives for it seem to fall short, fatally undermined by the fact that they’ve already been used for so many lesser songs. Brave? Raw? Powerful? Obviously. But all of these are understatements. Ultimately, the vocabulary of pop music begins to falter here. “Me and a Gun” exists in a different space than anything else. Alex Reed, writing about industrial music in Assimilate, notes that nose forms an extreme limit that you cannot progress past: there is simply a boundary past which you cannot create more or harsher noise. In its own way, “Me and a Gun” does the same thing. Its aesthetic project is closed definitively after four minutes; nothing else like this can ever be done except as a pale and frankly offensive imitation.

In January of 1985, a few months after moving to Los Angeles, Tori Amos agreed to give a guy a ride home after a show at a bar. He raped her over the course of several hours holding her hostage. He demanded that she sing hymns for him, which she did while literally pissing herself, listening to his threats of how he’d take her to share with his friends and then kill and mutilate her. Eventually, needing a drug fix, he let her go.

For years, Amos was unable to deal meaningfully with the experience. Much of the vapidity of Y Kant Tori Read comes from the fundamentally doomed contradiction of an artist whose internal landscape is dominated by one thing trying desperately to write about anything but that. Even Little Earthquakes has an odd relationship to it, spending most of its time processing adjacent thoughts and emotions. But while in London in August of 1991, Amos went to see Thelma and Louise and found herself assailed by the memories of what had happened six and a half years earlier. Withdrawing into herself for several days, she wrote “Me and a Gun.”

It is easy to see “Me and a Gun” as a simpler thing than it is. Amos’s decision to arrange it a capella and its aggressively vulnerable autobiographical nature conspire to make it seem straightforward: a woman narrates the events of her rape. This obscures the degree to which the song is carefully crafted. To take the most obvious point, Amos’s rapist used a knife—Amos changed it to the more dramatic sounding title. And Amos makes a lot of careful choices about what to focus on. Obviously one cannot narrate one’s own rape without a degree of abjection, but Amos doesn’t really lean into that aspect of it—the detail of her urinating on herself, for instance, comes from an interview, not from the song.…

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Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror Review

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Were I of a cynical mind, I might suggest that the show is in dire straits when a great man of history story that proclaims the future to belong to a white guy and suggests that it’s good to be a billionaire stands out as a relative highlight of the season. Except we all know that the show is in embarrassing shape, with a showrunner who continues to struggle with the notion of aboutness in narrative. Why take an episode whose sins all fall under the heading of “basically the same shit the program does in all its celebrity historicals” and complain about that when it breaks a five episode streak of the show breaking down in far more fundamental ways?

All of which is to say that “Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror” is pretty good, which is to say that it has the basics down in a way nothing since “It Takes You Away” has really come close to. There’s a refreshing sense of conceptual unity—the conflict between Tesla and Edison, where Tesla is a visionary inventor and Edison a more cynically pragmatic and business-oriented sort, is mirrored by the technological scavenger villains. There’s a sense of actually getting the guns on the mantleplace to go off—Wardenclyffe is introduced early on, then becomes a cool location for a last stand. Tesla’s message from Mars (a real historical detail) is brought up, then made use of. And the basic ideas are just fun. Tesla is an obvious choice of historical figures for Doctor Who to do—an opportunity to do a big steampunk romp that matches well with Whittaker’s more “get her hands dirty working on stuff” character, at least when they remember to have that be a trait. 

There are oddities, but most of them aren’t the fault of this script. Even in the hands of a competent writer, three companions turns out to simply be too many to make work in a fifty minute episode when you also have to introduce a bespoke world. Nobody is well-served here, and it mostly feels like you could give different scenes to different people with no real substantive changes to the episode. The cast is unwieldy and everyone is suffering from it. There’s also a bizarre lack of consistency to the Doctor’s characterization as her pacifism goes out the window in order to have her revel in the potential destruction of an alien race. Guns remain bad, but giant lightning-shooting towers are great. But this is largely a good change to the character, whose passivity and lack of willingness to confront evil has been a major problem. Sure, it’s weird to see copyright infringement be the hill upon which she’ll kill, but the fact remains that this is Whittaker’s most (forgive me) electrifying villain confrontation yet.

In the end, though, the cynicism is inescapable. This is a daft celebrity historical romp. It’s the best story of the season to date, but that just means that this is a season where the daft historical romps are the standout highlights.…

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This Primitive Planet and Its Affairs (The Crusade)

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It’s March 27th, 1965. Between now and April 17th, 470 people will die in a dam burst and landslide in Chile, 20 will die when a car bomb is detonated outside the US embassy in Saigon, two will die when the first aircraft lost in air-to-air combat during the Vietnam War are shot down during a strike on the Thanh Hóa Bridge, and somewhere north of 250 people will die in the Midwestern United States in what are called the Palm Sunday Tornadoes, while Richard Hickock and Perry Smith will be executed by hanging for the murders of the Herbert Clutter family, Princess Mary wll die of a heart attack on the grounds of her estate at Harewood House, and the world will edge incrementally closer to the eschaton. Also, The Crusade airs.

Acclaimed Doctor Who critic Philip Sandifer (whatever happened to him?) once attempted to classify the historical stories into two moulds defined by the Season One writers of the genre. Like most of his work, this is insightful but ultimately over-simplified. The more productive approach is to read the historicals as advancing dialectically between John Lucarotti’s harder edged approach to historicals, in which they are a vehicle for exploring foreign cultures, and Dennis Spooner’s more comedic one, in which they are a vehicle for playing with genre tropes. In this reading, David Whittaker’s script for The Crusade serves as synthesis before the entire genre is ultimately collapsed by Spooner’s own season-ending story The Time Meddler, which short-circuits the entire serious-minded approach by instead synthesizing his own approach to historicals with the sci-fi genre that the show would ultimately settle into permanently. But that’s a discussion for later. 

Whittaker’s approach, meanwhile, is to run two separate historicals in parallel, with limited interplay between them. On one side we have the court of Richard the Lionheart, where the already well-regarded Julian Glover reigns over a bunch of courtiers who at times offer dialogue actually written in iambic pentameter. Here, in other words, we get Doctor Who having a romp in the grand realm of respectable BBC Shakespeare. Barbara and Ian, meanwhile, find themselves on the Arab side in the court of Saladin, where they explore much more uneasy ground and do a more Lucarottian exploration of foreign culture.

Whittaker does much to complicate this division—the Christian side may be a genre romp, but it’s the most respectable and highbrow genre open to the series, while the Muslim side finds plenty of opportunities for feats of derring-do and melodramatic set pieces such as Tutte Lemkow’s villainous thief Ibrahim tying Ian to the sand and threatening him with scaphism. This is, in other words, a true alchemical fusion, in which each of the two sides of the story are not just laid next to each other but tempered with each other to form something new. 

More to the point, however, Whitaker goes to considerable length to parallel the two sides of the story. Both Richard and Saladin are noble, judicious figures, but each has a key advisor who is altogether more unscrupulous and antagonistic.…

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Fair Boy Your Eyes (Song For Eric)

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Song for Eric (demo, 1990)

Song for Eric (live, 1991)

Song for Eric (1992)

Song for Eric (live, 1994)

Song for Eric (live, 1996)

The b-sides for Little Earthquakes are a mixture of fine songs that it’s difficult to see how missed the album, or that if it is clear, it comes down purely to tonal fit instead of quality—“Upside Down” and “Take to the Sky”—and the usual mix of songs that fall just short of the album tracks that did make it—“Mary” and “Sweet Dreams.” And then there is “Song for Eric,” the only song among the Little Earthquakes sessions to simply be bad. An a capella love song framed entirely in fantasy romance pablum about a “fair maiden” who will “wait all day for my sailor” that unironically includes the phrases “over hill and dale” and “you know me like the nightingale,” it is at best a cut rate version of “Etienne,” and at worst a rehash of the character-based love songs she wrote as a teenager. (It’s worth comparing specifically to “Rubies and Gold,” which is essentially the same song only with a baroquely complex musical arrangement instead of an a capella delivery.)

Exactly what happened here is hard to discern, not least because it’s one of only two Little Earthquakes-era songs upon which Amos has literally never made any sort of comment. It was on the rejected first version of Little Earthquakes, sequenced between “Sweet Dreams” and the terminally unreleased “Learn to Fly,” but the commercially released version (dumped on a limited edition reissue of “Silent All These Years” in the UK) comes from the London-based 1991 sessions with Ian Stanley that yielded “China.” 

Where the second set of sessions for Little Earthquakes were an effort to reconceptualize the album away from the excessive lightness of the Siegerson tracks, these London sessions were essentially just extra. After rejecting the first cut of the album and giving Amos no end of grief (as described in “Leather”), Atlantic executive Doug Ross called Amos up after the second version to say, in his own words, “I don’t know how to tell you this, but I’ve fallen in love with your record.” (Ironically, the track that grabbed him was “Winter,” one that had been on the original version.) Still puzzling over how to promote an artist as unusual as Amos, Morris decided that the easiest thing to do would be to ship Amos off to London for a year to work the British market. With a much smaller geographic area and national radio stations, the UK had always been a more hospitable market for odd artists. Amos performed a set for East West honcho Max Hole, who as a devoted Kate Bush fan, made the leap to Amos fandom with relative ease, and Amos was up and running. And in the course of her UK residency, she found herself in the studio with former Tears for Fears member Ian Stanley cutting another set of songs.

These sessions are something of a curiosity in general—they’re by far the least remarked upon recording block for Little Earthquakes, and the songs that came out of them are a baffling mix—a handful of new songs Amos had penned between the completion of the home sessions with Eric Rosse in late 1990, a couple of covers, and a few reworkings of old material such as “China” and “Song for Eric” (and possibly “Girl” under one theory of “Thoughts”’s provenance).…

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