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Blow Away (For Bill)

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Blow Away (demo)
Blow Away

After the Tour of Life wrapped, Bush stayed out of the studio for a few months, giving herself room to breathe in between albums. By August, she’d gone to Abbey Road with engineer Jon Kelly to mix the EP On Stage, a collection of four live recordings from her tour and the only EP she’s ever produced herself (other Bush Eps have been promotional efforts by EMI). Shortly afterwards, Bush and Kelly moved to London AIR Studios to record Never for Ever. The initial 3-and-a-half-month-long sessions that followed heralded the masters of “Violin,” “Egypt,” “The Wedding List,” and “Blow Away.” Given that “Violin” dates from around 1976 and Bush wrote “Egypt” for her tour, “Blow Away” is the initial Never for Ever song, and it’s more beholden to her tour than most of the album. It’s the most directly autobiographical song, drawing as it does from both personal acquaintances of Bush and music history. Like “Violin” and “Egypt,” “Blow Away” made its debut onstage, when Bush performed it for the 75th anniversary of the London Symphony Orchestra in November of 1979, when Bush put in an appearance at the Royal Albert Hall. The song’s structure was nailed down pretty early on, as its demo is more or less a stripped down version of the master recording. It’s not clear exactly when Bush wrote “Blow Away,” as it could have been written on the road or during the summer between tour and album, but it’s definitely marks a newfound clarity in Bush’s songwriting, which become sharper, boasting more memorable hooks and keen structures than Lionheart’s more unruly songs.

Bush’s newfound confidence as a songwriter was accompanied by her newfound lack of certainty about the world. The songs of Never for Ever ask bigger questions than her first two albums do. “Blow Away” is one of Bush’s many songs to deal with death, and issues of consciousness. It’s an ethereal dirge, sung “For Bill,” referring to Bush’s engineer Bill Duffield, who was accidentally killed on the first night of her tour in an especially grim bout of party-pooping. It’s rare for Bush to sing about her personal life and friends, (we’re still far away from “Moments of Pleasure”) but there’s a whole song on her tertiary LP dedicated to an engineer she knew for a probably rather short period of time. Bush’s renowned generosity towards her collaborators extends to everyone on her team, as her charity concert for Duffield shows. Her use of “we” instead of “I” when discussing the making of her albums pretty much says it all.…

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I Don’t Speak German, Episode 24 – Conspiracy Theories and Online Radicalisation (with David Neiwert)

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This week, Daniel is joined by special guest David Neiwert, author of Alt-America and The Eliminationists, to discuss conspiracy theories and online radicalisation, Andy Ngo and concrete milkshakes, and David’s recent temporary Twitter suspension.

Content warnings, as always.

Direct Download / Permalink / IDSG on iTunes

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Show Notes:

Alt-America

Alt-America at Amazon

David Neiwert’s Orcinus blog

David Neiwert Twitter Suspension

David Neiwert discusses his Twitter suspension

Andy Ngo commits journalistic malpractice about hate crimes, a David Neiwert Twitter thread

Video of skirmish involving Andy Ngo

Vic Berger, “Andy Ngo Attacked! (In Context)”…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea: Rick and Morty

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On October 7th, 2017, just over two months after The Doctor Falls, police were called to several McDonald’s locations following a disastrous promotion in which the fast food restaurant brought back an obscure McNuggets dipping sauce, “Szechuan sauce,” that had briefly been released nearly twenty years earlier to tie-in with the release of Disney’s Mulan. The limited amount of sauce released to select McDonald’s was wildly insufficient for the crowds that arrived, which consisted of hundreds of people lining up for hours only to discover that restaurants had as few as twenty sauce packets. The result was bedlam—young men (the crowds were almost exclusively male) hurling obscenities and venting their frustration on minimum wage workers. On Twitter, people seriously suggested class action lawsuits and claimed that any workers who had a bad day deserved it because of the company’s bad actions.

The key bit of context needed to understand this madness is why McDonald’s was bringing back an ancient dipping sauce that Eater described as having “the color and consistency of strawberry jelly” and tasting “mainly like corn syrup with maybe a tiny bit of Worcestershire thrown in.” The answer is that several months earlier, when the third season premiere of Rick and Morty dropped unannounced on April 1st (so two weeks before The Pilot), the episode had culminated in a monologue in which Rick Sanchez, one of the two title characters, declares that his only real motivation in life is to eat that sauce again.

Well. Sort of. The more accurate description of what happens is that Rick stands above his grandson (Morty, the other eponymous character) as he cowers, whimpers, and sobs, angrily telling him that he deliberately broke up his parents’ marriage out of spite and to become “the de facto patriarch of your family and your universe” before threatening him if he ever tells anyone about this conversation and revealing his end goal of Szechuan sauce. It’s a genuinely distressing scene, in ways that are difficult to quite get a handle on. The distress is clearly intentional—the scene makes an active point of focusing on Morty’s fear and anguish, and on making the horror of what Rick is saying clear. But it’s also clear that the scene is meant to be funny, complete with Rick making a fourth-wall breaking claim that he’ll get the sauce “if it takes nine seasons.” 

This tension is not so much common for the show as the nominal point. If you assert that Rick and Morty is a bad television show on Twitter, you will quickly be assured by somebody that the show is in fact a critique of Rick’s nihilism. This is an interesting claim. Certainly the claim that Rick and Morty is a highly intelligent show that is routinely misunderstood is common enough that a chunk of copypasta beginning “to be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Rick and Morty” became a meme. And as the Szechuan sauce scene demonstrates, the show is open about the fact that Rick is a terrible person.…

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I Don’t Speak German Episode 23 – Andrew Anglin and The Daily Stormer

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This episode, Daniel tells Jack all about Andrew Anglin and The Daily Stormer.  Heavy duty content warnings for both show and notes below.

Direct Download / Permalink

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Cantwell news:

“As co-defendants fight discovery, Cantwell threatens lawyer,” The Daily Progress. https://www.dailyprogress.com/news/local/as-co-defendants-fight-discovery-cantwell-threatens-lawyer/article_619851ce-8ad9-599b-88fa-6f289e90d400.html

“On June 18 Cantwell posted an article about Roberta Kaplan, the lead lawyer on the case, to the messaging site Telegram, which is frequented by extremists.

“After this stupid kike whore loses this fraudulent lawsuit, we’re going to have a lot of fucking fun with her,” Cantwell wrote.

The threat was mentioned during a telephonic hearing Tuesday in federal court in Charlottesville, where lawyers discussed the snail’s pace of the discovery process in the lawsuit that alleges organizers and key participants in the Aug. 12, 2017, white supremacist rally planned and promoted violence against protected groups.

Cantwell has posted derogatory statements about Kaplan before, the plaintiffs’ lawyers wrote in a motion filed Tuesday, but his recent statement is a “thinly-veiled threat” that impairs the lawyers’ ability to carry out their work.

The lawyers asked the court to enjoin Cantwell to refrain from any future threats.

Cantwell already has been found guilty of assaulting and pepper-spraying activists on Aug. 11, 2017, and of violating conditions of his bond. He remains a defendant in another civil suit filed by people injured during the Unite the Right rally.

On Tuesday afternoon, shortly after news stories about the motion were published, Cantwell posted about Kaplan again on Telegram, calling Kaplan a “lying piece of Jewish filth.”

Show Notes:

The Daily Stormer: https://dailystormer.name

The Daily Stormer Style Guide: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/daily-stormer-nazi-style-guide_n_5a2ece19e4b0ce3b344492f2

“We are writing for the common man, so the language should be very simple, using a standard
8th grade vocabulary. The use of “college words” is extremely discouraged.

The only situation in which an uncommon word should be used in when it is unavoidable,
such as when it is needed to describe something technical, or a situation or phenomenon that
is so specific that it requires a unique description.”

[…]

“As a rule, every post should be filled with as much visual stimulation as possible. Pages should
look exciting and appeal to the ADHD culture. This can’t really be overdone.
These include:
•Straight images (pictures of persons, places, events)
•Meme images (that you make yourself or find on other sites – fresh memes are best but
old memes are good too)
•Funny gifs
•Twitter embeds
•YouTube videos (or other video from other sites if necessary, following the above
mentioned embed protocol).”

[…]

“Profanity should be used sparingly. An overuse of profanity can come across as goofy.

“Nigger” is okay to use sometimes, but shouldn’t be used constantly.

The following racial slurs are allowed and advisable:

•Negro/Negroid
•Monkey
•Ape
•Spic
•Wetback
•Beaner
•Beanperson
•Kike
•Yid
•Sheeny
•Christ-killer
•Haji
•Sandperson
•Paki (can be used for non-Pakistani Moslems, especially Arabs, because that’s funny)
•Muzzie
•Chink
•Gook
•Zipperhead

And others
The following are not allowed:
•Shitskin
•Latrino
•(Any others relating to poop)
•Mud (I just don’t really like this term, it seems too much like SF boomer talk)

While racial slurs are allowed/recommended, not every reference to non-white should not be
a slur and their use should be based on the tone of the article.…

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This Old Body of Mine (World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls)

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Moffat sent Capaldi off with an acting challenge to rival Heaven Sent, namely selling the line “A Mondasian Cyberman!”

It’s June 24th, 2017. Artists for Grenfell, a charity supergroup including Stormzy, Robbie Williams, Brian May, and Pete Townshend, are at number one with “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” which lasts for a week before “Despacito” makes its inevitable return. Little Mix, Rita Ora, and DJ Khaled also chart. In news, a terrorist attack occurs in Finsbury Park as a man drives a van into a crowd near a mosque while shouting “Kill all Muslims,” while ISIL destroys the Great Mosque of Al-Nuri in Mosul. And Theresa May finally reaches an agreement with the DUP to support her government for the low, low price of one billion pounds. 

While on television, the end, or at least, the beginning of it, as Moffat ultimately found himself persuaded to do one more Christmas special, as Chibnall wasn’t going to be ready for one yet. Indeed, this final duology serves to interestingly highlight the nature of a regeneration story by taking the two crucial elements of one and splitting them into different stories. Twice Upon a Timegets the marquee moment in which Peter Capaldi is bathed in glowing light and becomes Jodie Whittaker, which is indeed a crucial scene. But World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls is the one that gets the larger structural substance: an adventure that gets out of hand in which the Doctor wins at a terrible price. 

It is this part, I would suggest, that is the more important half of the experience. Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy, and John Hurt all had regeneration scenes, but they lacked stories of their phyrric victories leading up to those scenes, either going down for minimal reason at the start of their successor’s debut or departing in a scene tacked onto the end of their only story in order to avoid loose ends. And in each case there is something missing—far more of a something than the vaguely cut off and incomplete resolution of The War Games. 

No, there’s something crucial to the story of a Doctor’s fall—something ultimately far more important than getting a monologue about when the Doctor was him or a swirling montage of past companions. The story in which the Doctor loses allows an era to make at least some comment on its vision’s limitations. The fact that the Doctor doesn’t simply always triumph makes the extra-diegetic concerns of actor replacement into diegetic ones, giving each era the opportunity to tell a story that is in part about the need to change and move on. Done correctly, as with The War Games or The Caves of Androzani, the regeneration story becomes a piercing study of an era’s shortcomings. Done wrong, as with Planet of the Spiders or The Time of the Doctor, it’s still an utterly fascinating exercise in drawing a line under what has come before. (That’s not me knocking The Time of the Doctor in general, to be clear, nor even me knocking Planet of the Spiders; they’re just not coherent responses to their eras in the way that The War Games or The Caves of Androzani are.)…

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Egypt

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Egypt live at Manchester
Xmas special
Egypt

While Kate Bush was staging her only tour, the 1980s were being born. The Labour government of James Callaghan collapsed, and Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives came to power, a major step towards the austerity policies and neoliberalism that’s defined the last forty years.  The Camp David Accords were orchestrated by American President Jimmy Carter, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, and Israeli Prime Minister Menachim Begin, and the Egypt-Israel Peace treaty, effectively terminating the Israeli occupation of Sinai while also seeing to it Egypt began supplying Israel with oil. Soon afterwards, Carter lost a presidential election to Ronald Reagan, the American half of neoliberalism’s early regime. CNN was established, arcade video games were becoming a viable commercial presence, and John Lennon was killed in New York. To be an artist is to be a cultural marker for a moment in history. To be one in 1980 was to witness the world falling on its head.

The massive global upheaval is noticeable in music as well. Just look at the UK’s Top 10 singles of 1980: it’s topped by Don McLean’s “Crying,” and the other songs are apprehensive titles like The Police’s “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” and the MASH theme song. Even a catchy disco single like Odyssey’s “Use It Up and Wear It Out” sounds tense and minimalistic compared to something like “YMCA” or “Freak Out.” Also in the top 10 is ABBA’s “Super Trouper,” their last #1, which deals with being pursued and has a campily militaristic title. 1980’s albums tend to abandon some of the Seventies’ utopianism as well: punk had given way to the abjection of post-punk groups like Public Image Ltd and Magazine, synthpop was rearing its head in the form of Ultravox and The Human League, and new wave was speeding up with Blondie and Talking Heads. Rock veterans were also pushing themselves, like David Bowie, who made the violent and weird Scary Monsters and its turn-of-the-decade-anxiety single “Ashes to Ashes,” and Bruce Springsteen, who went all-out with the wildly undisciplined double-LP The River. Songwriters of Bush’s generation were forging ahead: Elvis Costello released Get Happy!, one of his longer and more sprawling albums, and Prince dropped his funk-cum-erotica LP Dirty Mind. In the music of 1980, popular music is torn between sensibilities: the drive of the Seventies and the call to innovation necessitated by the new decade.

Having just completed her triumphant European tour, Kate Bush was entering her imperial phase. Instead of working with producer Andrew Powell and the band of her first two albums again, she established control of her work by appointing herself co-producer with Jon Kelly, and finally using her own band for a whole LP.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else: The Missy Chronicles

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And so begins the endgame of an era, in which I traditionally wander around a bit and look at other things before actually resolving the era. We’ve two more Capaldi-era stories and five entries to cover them with. And today we dip into the BBC Books line for the fourth time this era because I want to talk a little more about Missy, and the alternative is Big Finish’s box set and, well, we don’t do that anymore. So instead we get BBC Books’ anthology of Missy-centric short stories.

Like most BBC Books products, it suffers from the obvious problem of dead weight writers. I’m sure Peter Anghelides is a lovely person (although really you’d think I’d have been burned enough times by the BBC-sanctioned pro-fan class to just stop with that assumption), but there’s simply no reason why one of the writers of The Ancestor Cell should be writing new release Doctor Who material in 2018 except for the fact that they haven’t actually changed editors since the book after that. And yes, there’s also an inevitable firmly adequate story by James Goss and an effort by Cavan Scott that includes metaphors like “a look that would wither Krynoids” and “I’ll gut you like a gumblejack if you use that tone again,” both of which are, charitably, about as well crafted as a Bandrill ambassador. 

But sometimes Richards’ EDA-era rolodex makes good, and this time it offers the delightful double dose of Paul Magrs and Jacqueline Rayner. Magrs is in particular a self-evidently brilliant choice for this—his brand of campy and postmodernist wackiness is an utterly delicious fit for Missy. His story features Missy as a 1920s governess with a bafflingly elaborate plan involving a sentient wish-granting teddy bear named Teddy Sparkles. It’s insane and at one point features a failed attempt to alter timelines that results in 1925 London being attacked by dinosaur skeletons. (“I’ve done it all wrong! I’ve mixed up plain reality with awful whimsy… and now there’s chaos everywhere!,” Teddy says, in the greatest Second Doctor line ever written for another character.)

Rayner’s inclusion, meanwhile, both avoids the deeply embarrassing goof Big Finish managed of having no female writers on Missy (although in this instance the TV series is just as bad—if we continue the assumption that the last scene of Eaters of Light was Moffat, Rayner is presently the only woman to have written Missy) and results in one of the most hilarious and delightful stories in the anthology. It’s an epistolary story taking the form of messages between the Doctor and Nardole coordinating Missy’s shopping lists while she’s in the vault, some automated e-mails from an Amazon-equivalent, a couple of news articles from the St. Luke’s Gazette about a robotic chicken attack, and a series of messages sent by Missy through the two-way space-time telegraph with time-scoop facility she builds with a helmic regulator, azimuth sprockets, sulphuric acid, mercury, and some sugar in which she attempts to incite various historical women into mass androcide.…

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The Tour of Life

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Tour of Life
Hammersmith Odeon
Manchester Apollo
Let It Be
I Don’t Remember
Nationwide documentary

The touring career of Kate Bush consists of 29 shows across 6 countries in roughly 6 weeks, with performances of 2 existing albums and a burgeoning third. Bush’s singular tour defines her career as much as “Wuthering Heights,” Hounds of Love, and her 12-year moratorium on new albums between The Red Shoes and Aerial. The difference between that music, that gap, and the tour, however, is accessibility. You can listen to Bush’s music pretty much whenever provided you have the physical media, or a steady Internet connection. The Tour of Life is Bush’s only tour — if you wanted to see her do a full concert outside of the UK, you could only have done so in April or May 1979. Sparseness is a key ingredient of Bush’s career, one that perhaps makes her especially suitable for a project like this blog. She builds her work piece by piece, letting it be an accumulation of important steps.

Planning for Bush’s tour (known then and during its existence just as the Kate Bush Tour) began at the end of December 1978 with a brainstorming session involving Bush and set designer David Jackson at EMI’s headquarters. Further preliminary meetings were held at East Wickham Farm in January, and shortly afterwards Bush was meeting wardrobe consultant Lisa Hayes. Rehearsals then began in earnest: Bush spent mornings at The Place performance center in Euston, preparing the tour’s dance routines with choreographer Anthony Van Laast (now of Mamma Mia! and Harry Potter fame) and dancers Stewart Avon Arnold and Gary Hurst. These sessions were as collaborative as they were instructive: Bush had worked with Van Laast before, as he’d appeared in the “Hammer Horror” music video as her masked dancing partner. They spent the mornings designing routines for the show, informed by Van Laast’s seasoned dancing skill and Bush’s mime training. It was a positive union: the resulting concerts have notable dancing which is inseparable from the songs it’s set to. As Bush had to both sing and dance onstage, she and Van Laast worked out choreography that would both work as dance and allow her to sing without losing her breath. The minimalism of “Moving” and Bush’s all-limb gesturing during it is one such careful work of planning, as is her most frenetic gun-happiness during the extended bridge of “James and the Cold Gun,” where she doesn’t sing.

Rehearsals for the tour’s music were staged initially at Wood Wharf Studios in Greenwich, before moving to Surrey’s eminent Shepperton Studios in March. The shows were precisely outlined, retaining the ideas of The Kick Inside and Lionheart while developing them further onstage. Lionheart is at its core a work of musical theater, and its stage incarnation helped it to be the best version of itself. Out was the ill-paced sequencing of the album, supplanted with a solid theatrical structure. Bush also had a different lineup of musicians than her two albums so far: she’d begun sneaking the KT Bush Band into the studio by including them on “Wow” and “Kashka from Baghdad,” but a proper reunion of the old touring group was mostly in swing onstage.…

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I Don’t Speak German – new episodes

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Once again, sorry for missing posts.  Several new episodes to share.

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Episode 20 – Gavin, Goad, and Edgelord Comedy (with Samantha Kutner)

Samantha Kutner returns to talk more about Gavin McInnes, including his book, his style, his appeal, and some of his influences.

Warnings apply.

Direct Download / Permalink / IDSG on iTunes

Show Notes:

Gavin McInnes “The Death of Cool.”

Jim Goad’s Group Hug

“The Surprisingly Mainstream History Of The Internet’s Favorite Anti-Semitic Image”
 
https://twitter.com/ashkenaz89/status/1115860103788412928

Proud Boys News Sources Samantha (@ashkenaz89) has been consulted with.

https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/inside-miami-alt-right-and-proud-boys-chapter-10945821

https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-the-proud-boys-became-roger-stones-personal-army-6

Incident map link.

https://twitter.com/ashkenaz89/status/1051237360338259969

Incident Map Support for Samantha

Patreon: patreon.com/ashkenaz89
Paypal: paypal.me/SKutner
Venmo: @ashkenaz89

The “misgendering” of Alex McNabb

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1RzRhazhV0

https://twitter.com/ashkenaz89/status/1131682498436427776

The Truth about Charlottesville

https://www.wired.com/story/leaked-alt-right-chat-logs-are-key-to-charlottesville-lawsuits/
https://www.bustle.com/p/leaked-unite-the-right-chats-prove-members-had-violent-intentions-for-charlottesville-79647

Edging Into Extremism

https://www.patreon.com/posts/edging-into-23433586

For Proud Boys and Others Considering Leaving

Insights from former Proud Boys

https://medium.com/@ashkenaz89/proud-of-your-boy-notes-on-leaving-94172fa2bbcf

Organizations that Can Help You Leave

https://twitter.com/ashkenaz89/status/1088954326402228224

http://www.lightuponlight.online/

Mental Health Resources for Men
https://mantherapy.org/

https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/

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Episode 21 – Sex and Gender and Nazis (with CV Vitolo-Haddad)

Another great guest this week.  Daniel is joined by CV Vitolo-Haddad to talk about sex, gender, misogyny, and transmisogyny on the far right.

(Note: This is late; sorry about that.  Also, we encountered technical difficulties with this one.  It’s been cleaned up as much as possible and is perfectly listenable if you’re prepared to briefly tolerate some occasional background noise.)

All sorts of content warnings.

 Direct Download / Permalink / IDSG on iTunes

Show Notes:

CV can be found on Twitter at @notcolloquial

CV’s Medium

CV’s YouTube

CV Vitolo-Haddad, “The Blood of Patriots: Symbolic Violence and ‘The West'”

Warski Live, “Alt-Hype vs CV- Does Race Exist?”

Halsey News: “Brian Hendrix vs. CV: Does White Privilege exist?”

Ozia Media: “Debating CV Over the Proud Boys”

Honest Red, “TBH: Low Hanging Fruit (Capitalism vs. Socialism)”

bell hooks, “The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love”

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Episode 22 – Sam Harris (is not a nazi)

Another departure for the show as Daniel and Jack chat about Sam Harris, inexplicably popular professional atheist, Intellectual Dark Webber, thought-experimenter, devil’s advocate, mysteriously perennial victim of malicious context-removal, and definitely not a member of the far-right.

Seriously… Sam Harris is not a nazi.  The fact that we’re talking about him on a podcast in which we normally talk about nazis (and fascists and white supremacists, etc) doesn’t mean we’re saying he is one.  We’re not.

Nevertheless, we think he’s relevant to our discussion.

Something of a cathartic experience for both of us.  We had fun.

Content warnings.

Direct Download / Permalink / IDSG on iTunes

Show Notes:

Sam Harris website: https://samharris.org/

Sam Harris podcast, “Making Sense.” https://samharris.org/podcast/

 

SPLC: McInnes, Molyneux, and 4chan: Investigating pathways to the alt-right

“The “skeptics” movement — whose adherents claim to challenge beliefs both scientific and spiritual by questioning the evidence and reasoning that underpin them — has also helped channel people into the alt-right by way of “human biodiversity.” Sam Harris has been one of the movement’s most public faces, and four posters on the TRS thread note his influence.…

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The Place is Different, but the Hunt Goes On (The Eaters of Light)

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Finally, he lives up to the name Doctor Disco.

It’s June 17th, 2017. Despacito continues its endless dominion over the charts, while Charlie Puth, Ariana Grande, Liam Payne, and David Guetta also chart, the latter featuring Justin Bieber, which means that he has three songs in the top ten without being the primary artist on any of them. Ed Sheeran has zero. In news, Otto Warmbier is returned home after over a year in a North Korean prison, with North Korea releasing him largely so he wouldn’t actually die in their custody. Tim Farron resigns as leader of the Liberal Democrats. Republican Congressman Steve Scalise is wounded by gunfire during practice for a Congressional baseball game. And, most significantly, the Grenfell Tower block erupts in flames when a malfunctioning refrigerator started an electrical fire that ignited the exterior aluminum cladding selected for its low cost. Seventy-two people are killed. Numerous buildings across the UK are still using similar cladding, and in many of the buildings that have had their cladding replaced the costs have been passed on to the residents, who often cannot afford them.

Meanwhile, on television, Doctor Who offers one of its most remarkable episodes in The Eaters of Light. The story provides us an extraordinary and singular opportunity to compare a single writer’s work on the classic series and the contemporary one. And yet most of what it turns out to do is frustrate the idea that this is an easy comparison to make. Off the bat, problems arise. Rona Munro, with only her second story, immediately takes the record for longest gap between first and last episodes (previously Terry Nation at fifteen years, nine months) with a twenty-seven year and seven month gap. She also takes the record for longest gap between two episodes (previously Gerry Davis, at seven years, seven months) with basically the same gap. And so what we have here is the difference between a thirty year old playwright who’d gotten into a BBC training course for writers and gotten poached by Andrew Cartmel, who routinely found new and interesting writers there, and a fifty-seven year old highly acclaimed veteran whose plays have gotten international stagings and numerous awards, and who has written screenplays for people like Ken Loach. This difference is, I would argue, on the whole larger than the difference between Terry Nation and Gerry Davis.

And that’s before you get to structural differences. Even if we downplay the thematic shifts around things like the role of the companion—easier to do with Munro than almost any other classic series writer given the particular story she wrote—Doctor Who in 2017 is a very different thing than Doctor Who in 1989, a gap that is after all literally longer than the gap between An Unearthly Child and Survival. With a five-minute and surely Moffat-penned Missy scene tacked onto the end, this is a thirty-eight minute episode, or just over half the length of Survival. The fact that it doesn’t have to take breaks for cliffhangers mitigates that a little bit, but the fact is still that this is a much smaller piece of televisual real estate than Munro had previously written Doctor Who upon, a fact that fundamentally changes what you can do with it.…

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