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No nationalism but Terry Nationalism

The Lie of the Land Review

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Let’s start with the mid-episode twist, i.e. the point where any hope that Toby Whithouse was going to do anything other than Whithouse all over the damn floor died. At this precise moment, a ton of threads that have been going on for a while are converging. Most immediately, we’re doing the trailered regeneration. We’re also at the climax of the trailered “the Doctor has joined the monks and Bill stands against him” plot, which is the hook this episode was previewed on since the initial Radio Times summaries. And, of course, we’re at the halfway point of the climax of the ballyhooed “Monk Trilogy,” resolving fully three weeks of storytelling. What do we get, then? A scene in which a room full of people literally cracks up that we fell for any of it.

It’s not, obviously, that I mind narrative substitution. I mean, I coined the phrase and all. But the substitution has to actually mean something instead of just being an empty placeholder. The point of narrative substitution is that the second narrative critiques the first one. It’s not just chucking out a plot because you’re bored with it and laughing at the audience for being so naive as to think you might actually have something to say.

And I mean, it’s not as though the Doctor apparently being with the bad guys that have brainwashed the world was a hugely interesting plot as opposed to a hackneyed genre TV standard, but it was something. For a brief moment, just after we learned Missy was in it, it even looked like it might tip into interesting. Bill and Missy teaming up to fight the Doctor? That’s a story worth telling. But even the hackneyed standard of “evil Doctor” would have been something. Hell, even a 1984 knockoff so banal it can’t be bothered to do more than substitute “memory crime” for “thoughtcrime” would have been something. A world whose history has been completely reshaped by the Monks could have been at least interesting. And the script clearly knows that, with its aggressively on-point lines about historical warnings of fascism and fake news. But the one scene that grapples with any of this consists of the Doctor spouting obviously wrong defenses of totalitarian order and Bill making non sequitur replies cribbed from fifty-four years of liberal moralizing in Doctor Who. It doesn’t even try – Bill’s defense of free will is literally just “you made me write a paper about it.”

But OK. At least the episode we’re substituting is Missy. Even Toby Whithouse can’t fuck up “team up with Missy to save the world,” can he? Ha. Of course he can! Sure, Moffat can’t have expected Whithouse to do anything interesting with “Missy tries to turn good,” not least because even Moffat can’t possibly be going to do anything other than the obvious “but she fails” with the concept because the odds of him breaking the concept of the Master in his last year on the program are nil.…

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The Corbynite Manoeuvre

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Okay, first let me apologise for the paucity of long-form written pieces here at Shabgraff lately.  Normal service will (hopefully) be resumed fairly soon, or a proper announcement of some new normal will have to be made.

Next, let me remind you all of the existence of two new(ish) podcasts featuring me. 

There’s a new episode of Oi! Spaceman, in which I join Shana and Daniel to – for reasons that now elude me – talk about ‘The Return of Doctor Mysterio’. HERE.

And there’s a bonus mini-episode of Wrong With Authority, featuring myself in conversation with Daniel about the 2007 David Fincher movie Zodiac. HERE.

We may do more of these (comparatively) short extra episodes in future, with just a couple of us chatting about a movie outside our main sequence.  We’ve decided to call them Footnotes.  Because we’re just so damn cute.

On the subject of podcasts, there are some great Shabcasts coming up, including another Drunken Whocast (which seems to be genuinely becoming a new regular thing) and a fantastic chat between myself and Sam Keeper of Storming the Ivory Tower on Star Wars, Rogue One, etc.  We talked about, amongst other things, fans who say destroying the Death Star was bad because the economy, or something.  As if on cue, someone then wrote an online article arguing that Offred in The Hamdmaid’s Tale doesn’t have it that bad.  Ho hum.  Watch this space, as someone or other used to say.

I’d also like to thank everyone who donates to my Patreon.  It is a genuine source of amazement to me that anyone is prepared to pay even small amounts of money to help me produce my nonsense articles and podcasts, but they do… and god love the poor fools.  I’m not ashamed of asking for contributions, but I cant help ruefully reflecting on the fact that waiters in St. Petersburg during the Russian Revolution started demanding an end to tipping as a degrading custom.

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Now, a word on more current politics.  If you’re in the UK, for god’s sake vote Labour. I don’t expect them to win, but the better their showing, the stronger it makes their position, and the more there is to build on in the future.  Jeremy Corbyn will lose, but if he can lose well, that alone will be worth having, a poke in the eye to a media and political establishment that has concertedly undermined him and pooh-poohed him from day one, and – by extention – the people he represents.  If he stays on as leader even in the face of a defeat, as I expect and hope he will, then the closer-run the election, the better.  Corbyn was, as I have always said, always a gamble and a long game.  But what else have we meaningfully got, other than yet another surrender?  And what have we got to lose?

Is Corbyn’s Labour perfect?  Far from it.  Deeper ideological issues aside, I’m still furious about the manifesto’s acceptance that free movement will have to end. …

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Myriad Universes: Ill Wind Part Four

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The Mestral is stunned, but not for long.

Rav implores that he only wants her “safe” (which the Mestral quite aptly reads as “tame”). He claims he’s trying to protect her from the factions trying to assassinate and usurp her. But the Mestral sees right though his ploy-He’s working for one of the other factions, and they’re trying to use her own feelings of love and loyalty to cloud her judgment. And she can play the same game: Having directly threatened her, Rav must be arrested and tried, and the only way for him to escape sentence is to kill her. Which she knows he won’t do, because he loves her.

The Mestral covertly opens an audio channel to the Enterprise, and, by cleverly rephrasing an exposition recap into a challenge (“You used that phaser on Venant, Rav, but you won’t use it on me…So you may as well put it away”), she manipulates Rav into revealing his plan to the Enterprise crew. He knows he can’t shoot her and that she won’t back down, so he and his co-conspirators are planning to kidnap her and bring her back to Eldalis where she’ll be “mentally reprogrammed”, brainwashed into becoming more placid and obedient. Captain Picard is appalled, and immediately has Doctor Crusher, Commander Riker, Data and a security team beam over to the Mestral’s ship to intervene. The transporter chiefs warn the solar flares will cause problems, but they’ll do their best. On the yacht, the Mestral declare she’ll die before she becomes “a cherished puppet with a lover’s hands on the strings”. Another struggle ensues and it looks like this time Rav might get the upper hand, but then Commander Riker beams in and takes him into custody.

The problem now is that the solar flare activity has picked up enough it’s impossible to transport back to the Enterprise, so Will and Data are going to have to sail out themselves. Rav offers to help pilot, but, as Will pointedly snaps “I’m a little short on blind trust at the moment. You sit down where I can see you and stay away from the controls”. Data begins to start the emergency backup engine, but Rav says it’s broken. Will muses “How would you know? Unless, of course you had something to do with it”. Will and Data are going to have to do it the old fashioned way, but thankfully Captain Picard is an expert and offers to talk them through what they have to do. Just then, the Mestral’s support tender arrives, but Worf observes it’s curiously well-armed. He, Captain Picard and Commander Riker all come to the same conclusion at once: This is the getaway vehicle for Rav and his co-conspirators, timed to arrive just when the star would be flaring such that transporters would be inoperable. Knowing the yachts are so small and fragile they couldn’t survive even one hit, Captain Picard puts the Enterprise between the tender and the sailboat and prepares for battle, while Commander Riker does his best to get out of the way.…

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The Proverbs of Hell 10/39: Buffet Froid

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BUFFET FROID: Literally “cold buffet,” referring specifically to a charcuterie platter of thin-sliced meats. In this context, a joke about Georgia Madden’s shredding skin.

It goes without saying that there is a strange unreality here, but this is presented very differently from how Hannibal usually proceeds. It’s never before had to conjure a disposable POV character just to kill her off a few minutes later. Part of this is the peculiarities of Georgia Madden – she’s unsuitable to be a POV character herself, and there’s only one other choice. But a more basic reason is that this is the opening of a horror movie, with Madden being positioned as something that comes at the show from an odd angle She doesn’t quite belong in this series. Unlike with “Œuf,” a previous case of a killer of the week who’s not quite right for Hannibal, this is something the show is at least conscious of  this time.

Timeline of events.

  • May 2013: “Buffet Froid” airs.
  • July 2013: Steven Moffat casts Lars Mikkelsen, brother of Mads Mikkelsen, in “His Last Vow”
  • February 2014: Moffat writes “Listen,” featuring a monster that grabs your ankle from under the bed.

I leave you to your own conclusions.

HANNIBAL: We both know the unreality of taking a life, of people who die when we have no other choice. We know in those moments they’re not flesh, but light and air and color.

WILL GRAHAM: Isn’t that what it is to be alive.

Hannibal’s line here is a characteristically interesting blend of deceit and honesty. His account of people becoming “light and air and color” is quite untethered to the handful of instances of actual necessity in which Hannibal has killed someone, and for that matter an unusual description for Hannibal, whose victims are pointedly never “not flesh.” Some explanation is offered by the source, which is unsurprisingly the Thomas Harris novels, where a similar account is given by Francis Dolarhyde, who describes killing this way while projecting this assessment onto Hannibal. Its repurposing into a half life with which Hannibal ensnares Will into mutual aesthetic appreciation is clever.

The misdrawn clocks are one of the defining images of the latter part of the first season – an immediately arresting image that communicates wrongness and sinister intent without actually having anything overtly horrifying about them. In this regard they are much like the trypophobic food designs, the cluster of numbers and vast expanse of white space both communicating a sense that this is not right even beyond the contextual horror of Hannibal’s manipulations, which are suddenly revealed to be far more advanced than the audience had realized. Note, of course, the consistent feature of Will’s breakdown: the decoherence of time.

JACK CRAWFORD: You contaminated the crime scene.

WILL GRAHAM: I thought I was responsible for it.

JACK CRAWFORD: You thought you killed that woman?

WILL GRAHAM: Sometimes with what I do —

JACK CRAWFORD: What you do is take whatever evidence there is and extrapolate. You reconstruct the thinking of a killer, not think you are a killer.

…

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The Pyramid at the End of the World Review

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A recurrent and to my mind fascinating theme of Peter Harness’s Doctor Who work has been its distinct hostility to democracy. Kill the Moon hinges on the flagrant disregard of the expressed wishes of humanity, while the Zygon two-parter ultimately endorses the existence of unelected guardians who lie to people in order to keep them under control. I should stress, if it’s not obvious, that my fondness for this is not straightforwardly a quasi-neoreactionary rejection of democracy or endorsement of dictatorship – rather it is specifically the extent to which the episodes themselves seem conflicted on this. It’s a bit of grit that complicates the show’s default ethos of liberal centrism – something that extends naturally out of its embrace of rebelliousness and dissent, but that the show usually avoids having to look at head-on.

So it’s not especially a surprise that Harness, writing in the heat of 2016, turns in a script that is more explicitly about the terrible decisions that humanity makes than ever before. This time there is no undemocratic savior to be had. Indeed, there’s not a savior of any kind – the bad decision is taken and the bad guys win. The Doctor’s scheme to stop them is basically for naught. For the most part it’s an even bigger defeat for the Doctor than Extremis was, and is certainly the most bluntly pessimistic thing Harness has written for the show.

For the most part, this works. Certainly it’s something I’m glad the series did. But as with Oxygen, there’s a grimness to it that keeps it from ever quite being fun. There are moments of humor, to be sure, and it’s difficult to seriously suggest that an episode marching towards an ending like this while also situating itself as the middle part of a trilogy that starts with Extremis would be very frock. But there’s a nagging frustration – a sense that “geopolitical thriller” is not the Doctor Who subgenre that Harness was best pigeonholed into. I mean, I can see why it happened – many of the best bits of both Kill the Moon and the Zygon story were the overtly political bits. But what made those stories really sing was the juxtaposition between the snarling politics and the baroque ridiculousness. Here, lacking a fundamental part of the equation, Harness is… well, still fantastic, to be clear, but not at the ecstatic heights of the last two seasons. Which, to be fair, you can thus far say about Series 10, which is starting to shape up a lot like the back half of Series 7: no disasters, but no stone cold classics either.  

And of course, we should be clear: this is an absolutely bonkers political thriller. Which is to say, it’s still clearly Doctor Who, and not just because of touches like the corpse monks or the “strands of history” plastic tubing. The Doctor Whoness of it comes as much from what isn’t there, like even a vague account of why the Russian, American, and Chinese militaries are in close proximity in a foreign country or where the hell the entire rest of the chain of command is.…

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Shabcast 33 – the NHS, the Tories, the Republicans, and the US Health System

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Hello there… bit of a serious Shabcast this time, though there are some laughs along the way. 

Download here.

(EDIT: I forgot to say that I’m joined by James – who really knows about this stuff – and Daniel – who really knows about this stuff in America.)

This episode was prompted by the ‘Dementia Tax’ story, and became about the crisis in the NHS generally, and also about the horrors of the American system.  It was recorded before the ‘Dementia Tax’ story developed (with Theresa May’s humiliating kindasorta u-turn) and also before the attack in Manchester, so it’s a bit of a relic… but even so, these are live issues, and a lot of what we say hasn’t gone out of date.  The NHS is still in crisis, and its still the Tories’ fault, but also still tracks back to New Labour.  And the American system is still awful, and the few improvements made by Obama may still be about to be destroyed, and we in the UK are still headed in that privatised, profit-driven direction.

I’d appreciate people sharing this about, for propaganda/electioneering purposes.  You never know, it might help a bit.

The audio sample at the start is from this video, which I’d also suggest sharing around.

And here are the links (promised in the show) to the information about the 30,000 excess deaths in 2015 owing to NHS underfunding (I was going to link to the study itself but that doesn’t seem to be possible):

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/feb/17/health-cuts-most-likely-cause-major-rise-mortality-study-claims

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-02-analysis-links-excess-deaths-health.html

And I ask a simple question: if its terrorism to set off a bomb in a concert, killing 22 people (and it undoubtedly is), then what do you call knowingly and deliberately underfunding a health service that people depend on for their survival, needlessly causing 30,000 extra deaths?  For reasons grounded in political ideology?

On a slightly lighter note, here’s a link to the podcast about Bill O’Reilly’s book that Daniel mentions… unless I cut that bit out, I don’t remember at this point.  Good podcast anyway.

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EDIT: Here’s something Kit wrote, which acts as a companion (an equal one) to this Shabcast:

http://kitpowerwriter.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/uk-general-election-2-dementia-tax-u.html?spref=tw

 

 …

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Myriad Universes: Ill Wind Part Three

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Geordi La Forge, Doctor Crusher and Worf are in the holodeck, reviewing security sensor footage. The ship’s internal sensors detected the mysterious humanoid figure who we saw creeping through the engineering deck hallways to the shuttlebay in the teaser at the end of issue one, and now the crew is trying to determine who this person was because that’s how they got access to the Scherdat ship in order to place a bomb on its hull. Although the figure was too far away to be captured in full detail, Goerdi, Bev and Worf see enough to make some general observations: Although they look humanoid, the outline of the body is odd and unnatural, particularly around the midsection. This is almost certainly a skinsuit disguise of some kind.

Geordi can pick up thermal signatures from the sensor feed through his VISOR. Although he can’t yet get much on the figure itself, he can tell it’s carrying a plasma bomb, though it hadn’t yet been armed (which explains why the ship’s sensors didn’t immediately detect it as well). Once the figure enters the shuttlebay, Geordi can get more information because the sensors are more sensitive there. That the figure’s internal body temperature of 320K confirms it is most certainly not human: Worf asks “Is 320K bad in human terms?”, to which Doctor Crusher responds “It’s dead in human terms”. Furthermore, Bev can discern that the figure has no heart and no stomach but does have “a selectively absorptive gut”, a “nondiastolic perfusion system” and six kidneys. Unusual and excessive for a humanoid, but not for the Carrighae. In other words, this person is a Carrig disguised, albeit somewhat clunkily, as a humanoid in order to throw suspicion onto one of the other teams.

Such a breach of the ethics agreement as attempting to murder one of the other teams is an automatic disqualification, so Worf, Geordi and Beverly go to see Captain Picard. Surprisingly, Jean-Luc decides to not do anything at all…At least not until the end of the race. His first explanation is to glibly state that the information must be “properly authenticated” and ensured that it goes through all the necessary channels. Of course, this also means that the Carrighae will have to “sweat and strain like all the rest, assuming that they do sweat”. After everything runs its natural course, Captain Picard will then turn the information over to race officials. When Geordi asks what will happen if the Carrighae win, Captain Picard says “All the better. Just imagine their reaction when they discover what their own dirty trick has done to them. Let them go home and file litigations until they’re blue in the face, or whatever color they routinely turn at such times. Starfleet will tell them where to get off, and in short order, too”.

Worf asks if this counts as vengeance or retribution. Jean-Luc insists that it’s justice, but that “sometimes it’s more of a pleasure serving it than others”. Worf tells the Captain that with a bit more work, he’d make a fine Klingon.…

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The Proverbs of Hell 9/39: Trou Normand

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TROU NORMAND: A palate cleansing drink of apple brandy, sometimes with a small amount of sorbet. Your guess is as good as mine, frankly.

One of the show’s most emphatically memorable murder tableaus – probably the only one to give Eldon Stammetz and his mushroom people a run for their money. It also serves, however, as a case study in the schizoid nature of this season. More than anywhere else in the first season, “Trou Nourmand” demonstrates the degree to which these cases of the week are a charade. The totem pole murders are barely a feature of the episode, squared away with almost comical efficiency midway through the fourth act while the plot focuses instead on Will’s psychological collapse and new developments with Abigail.

BRIAN ZELLER: The world’s sickest jigsaw puzzle.

JIMMY PRICE: Where are the corners? My mom always said start a jigsaw with the corners…

BRIAN ZELLER: I guess the heads are the corners?

BEVERLY KATZ: We’ve got too many corners. Seven graves. Way more heads.

In which Zeller, Price, and Katz demonstrate that the aesthetics of murder tableaus are not their strong suit.

WILL GRAHAM: I planned this moment… This monument with precision. Collected all my raw materials in advance. I position the bodies carefully, according each its rightful place. Peace in the pieces disassembled. My latest victim I save for last. I want him to watch me work. I want him to know my design.

This monologue, especially the bit about “according each its rightful place,” evokes one of the less explicit ancestors of Hannibal, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell, and particularly the memorable anecdote in which Moore made an error describing the placement of a severed breast within a historical murder tableau, only realizing the error after Campbell had drawn the page and several further. His solution is to have the killer pause several pages later, look at the severed breast, think for a moment, and rearrange it to better fit his strange and awful aesthetic.

WILL GRAHAM: I was on a beach in Grafton, West Virginia… I blinked and then I was waking up in your waiting room. Except I wasn’t asleep.

HANNIBAL: Grafton, West Virginia is three-and a-half hours from here. You lost time.

WILL GRAHAM: Something is wrong with me.

As Crowley would put it, Will’s encephalitis is a disease of editing.

HANNIBAL: I’m your friend, Will. I don’t care about the lives you save. I care about your life. And your life is separating from reality.

WILL GRAHAM: I’ve been sleepwalking. I’m experiencing hallucinations. Maybe I should get a brain scan.

HANNIBAL: Damnit, Will. Stop looking in the wrong corner for an answer to this.

(Will is briefly startled by Hannibal’s passionate concern.)

HANNIBAL: You were at a crime scene when you disassociated. Tell me about it.

This scene requires that we read it in the context of “Fromage” and its resolution and thus assume that Hannibal is motivated by a sincere desire for friendship with Will.…

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