Philip Sandifer's Blog, page 10

Praxeus Review

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.)

It’s depressing to still be looking at six year old stories and saying “gods, remember when the show did things like this?” But in the wake of Chibnall’s neo-Sawardian bullshit, that’s apparently just where we are, left with little to do besides hope he moves on before he damages the ratings too badly. The apparent tailspin that Orphan 55 and Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror are in, where the show is limping to the same middling ratings as late Capaldi despite a nominally better timeslot while getting AIs among the worst in new series history suggests that can’t come soon enough.

Until then, here stands the modern equivalent of The King’s Demons: it wasn’t entirely embarrassing. Maybe if we’re lucky we can manage it again next week.

At least we got Yaz doing things on her own, in a way that felt vaguely like character growth. All of the companions have a vague incoherence to them, but Yaz’s combination of “the most competent companion and the one the Doctor is emotionally closest to” and “the one who has gotten no character development” takes the cake. This does not actually do much in the way of fixing that, but it is nice to see a companion get a chance to be the Doctor again.
I saw Jon Blum on Facebook comparing the split TARDIS team to the Virgin New Adventures, which is a fair cop—this has a superficial similarity, in particular, to Cartmel’s eco-thrillers. The comparison mostly exposes the difference between a novel and a fifty minute roller coaster, though.
The effect where the Praxeus scale things engulf your body and then you turn into dust is pleasantly horrifying without actually being gruesome—in an era in which monster design has been a consistent weakness, this stands out, even if the actual concept is a pretty hazy sketch of an idea.
It’s hard to feel better about last season’s casual slaughter of gay characters when this episode is so heavily built around teasing the audience that they’re going to bury the gays again. And this immediately after an episode where Jack kissing Graham is played for comedy. (And non-consensually at that, which attracted much less fuss than the one in The Crimson Horror for some reason.) Can we not just, you know, have a character who is gay and gets to do cool shit?
In “facts that have changed in the time between my writing the main chunk of this review this morning and my finishing it up in the evening,” the final figures for Fugitive of the Judoon have dropped, and the show rebounded a bit with better catchup numbers to do appreciably better than the two stories before it. A rare win for Chibnall’s “reveal absolutely nothing about the story” strategy, albeit one that only works when you really do have a completely batshit reveal to drop.
Reviews should be back to a faster schedule next week.

Ranking

Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror
Fugitive of the Judoon
Praxeus
Orphan 55
Spyfall

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

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. For Whitaker, the Daleks remain what he helped Nation imply they might be in their original story—half-magical embodiments of death itself, as opposed to Terry Nation’s vision of them as deeply generic space nazis. And so humanity is defined in opposition to this in terms of a noble heroism, albeit clearly one that can be tainted by greed and hubris, as with Maxtible and Waterfield.

But for the moment let’s turn our attention to the process of distillation. The human factor is obtained over the course of the middle episode of the serial. This episode, widely viewed as filler among fans, features the Daleks studying Jamie as he attempts to rescue Victoria. Troughton has only a handful of short scenes, all pre-filmed so that he could take a week’s vacation, in which he sits at a large bank of switches and dials as he and the Daleks watch Jamie on monitors. The effect, especially given the visual similarities between the Doctor’s console and a vision mixer, is that the human factor is distilled by watching television, with Jamie starring in a sort of demented action-based game show. 

In this regard it is necessary to turn to the passage that is why the quasi-mystical squad obsess over this story—the description of the time machine that summoned the Daleks. In their rush to delight over the glorious nonsense of the science involved here, critics like Sandifer miss what is actually the key detail of this time machine: the fact that it treats the image within a mirror as a real and substantive thing—in other words, it views mirrors as a form of screen. When taken alongside the use of television to distill the human and Dalek factors, there becomes a much larger theme here in which the Daleks are understood as creatures of television. This makes sense—they did after all spend much of their first story watching the TARDIS crew on their monitors. 

The reading sustains itself further. As a number of critics have noted, this is a common dynamic for Troughton, who is often seen on television monitors. Indeed, it’s worth recalling that the TARDIS itself is initially described, in what is surely a passage heavily worked on by Whitaker, in terms of television. And so we are left with a tangle multiple competing philosophies of television, within which an alchemical opposition of human and Dalek is being staged. This is thorny, to say the least—the sort of semiotic jumble out of which multiple partially validated readings emerge. 

One obvious path to cut here is hierarchical. The Daleks obviously treat the TARDIS as the most refined version of television available—they have time travel of their own, after all, and yet seek to use the TARDIS as their vector for disseminating the Dalek factor across time and space. This opens up an appealing satirical reading in which the story is mocking Terry Nation’s huff where he attempted to cut off the BBC’s rights to the Daleks in favor of seeking out a multinational TV deal for them to be the stars of their own show, with the Daleks seeking to steal a better and more powerful means of television in order to literally widen their audience. This is funny, but ultimately it favors pettiness over ambition. There are far bigger issues at play. 

Let’s instead think about the triangle structure among the Daleks, the Doctor, and humanity. Within this structure the Daleks and humanity are cleanly opposed, with the Doctor existing tangibly outside it—a key plot point hinges on the fact that the Daleks’ machine to infuse humans with the Dalek factor fails to work on the Doctor. The Doctor mediates between the two, but exists outside and indeed above both. It is here that Sandifer’s reading of the Doctor as allied with mercury becomes least sustainable. If the Doctor is mediating between and indeed transmuting Dalek into human, he is not mercury which is a passive and feminine agent within alchemical symbolism—he is sulfur, the active solar force. He is the creator of change, not the thing which changes. But more broadly, he is simply the alchemist himself, manipulating the symbols and shifting their meanings. Seated behind his vision mixer, he is the avatar of television itself, with humans and Daleks his mere subjects.

With all of this in mind, it is time to finally turn our attention towards the actual process by which the human factor is distilled. On television, yes, and in a game show, but how exactly does this work? The answer in practice is that Jamie runs through a bunch of elaborate traps. Or, rather, Jamie and Kemel do. Kemel is one in a rather tedious chain of mute black strongmen during this period of Doctor Who—this time with the added “twist” of being Turkish, which is conveyed purely through stereotypes. His role is to fight and then team up with Jamie before being cynically killed off in the final episode. But his presence during the distillation of the human factor introduces troubling implications. Given the fact that the Dalek factor is derived through opposition, after all, it follows that the human factor must be as well. In other words, it’s not simply watching Jamie that establishes the human factor—it’s contrasting him to Kemel. And given that Kemel is a racist caricature that exists within a context of pseudo-scientific claims about the inherent intelligence and indeed humanity of black and white people, the implications of this are both clear and distressing. 

And, of course, this is scarcely the first story in which Whitaker has leaned on the racial contrast of moral and heroic British people and noble but markedly and definedly lesser Middle Eastern people. The Crusade trades on the exact same contrast, albeit to less overtly audacious ends. Here, however, we get it in its most disturbingly complete form—a claim that white British culture is the very soul of humanity.

Another furious monologue about the damnation of the world could easily follow here, but we scarcely need to bring in the future to bear on the situation; the alchemy of the story itself provides plenty of horror. After all, alchemical progress, like dialectical progress, focuses on the union of opposites. And The Evil of the Daleks spends much of its final episode doing exactly that, first implanting the Dalek factor into Maxtible and then implanting the human factor into a ton of Daleks.

The former, obviously, is a bad idea—a corruption, rather than an elevation. Maxtible is essentially a Dalek with acting chops and some vestiges of human thought. The human factor-infused Daleks, on the other hand, are more complex. They are the agents of the Daleks’ ultimate destruction—a feat nothing else has seemed capable of since they became a cultural phenomenon as opposed to the bug-eyed monsters in Doctor Who’s second story. But they are also ultimately treated as a means to an ends—the Doctor creates them in order for them to destroy themselves fighting the Daleks proper. This is chilling in its way, but more than that, it suggests a barrenness to the human factor as well as the Dalek factor.

Simply put, all the alchemical union of opposites seems to accomplish here is death and destruction.  Neither side of the equation can elevate the other. There is no ascension here—only death and carnage. Humanity cannot elevate the Daleks—each thing can only destroy the other. This is not entirely surprising—the one surviving interview with Whitaker suggests that he was wary of alchemy even as he was fascinated by it. That he would view it as only leading to destruction is entirely in keeping with his thought—another reason the doe-eyed mysticism brigade’s decision to embrace him is puzzling. The truth is that Whitaker is far more conservative than his most ardent fans would like to admit.

But if this dualism leads only to sterility, one escape exists: the Doctor continues to sit over the entire binary, transcending it all. And this is not Whitaker’s first version of the Doctor—the paternal figure observing the winding arc of history. This is his second, madder and more dangerous version—the mischievous and at times fundamentally untrustworthy figure who flits about the edges of things, always playing the dangerous clown. What are we to make of Whitaker’s decision to position him at the top of his system, transcending all its oppositions?

In the end, we must return to our observation that this is a story about television. The Doctor reigns supreme because he is aligned with the medium in which these stories exist. In the end, that is what matters. Terry Nation may be taking his ball and going home, but the show is quickly learning from his example—indeed it’s on the brink of rebranding itself into a fundamentally formulaic structure ideal for the export market. Never mind the ethics. From here on out, the real message of Doctor Who is the marketability of its aesthetics.

Fugitive of the Judoon Review

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. 

But that’s another review, or more likely two of them. For now we have a story where the Doctor spends most of it outsmarting villainous cops, where a middle-aged black woman gets to be the Doctor, where we get to see Whittaker’s Doctor on the back foot in a justified way instead of because she’s mysteriously unwilling to actually stand up for anything, and where all the plot beats feel basically earned. I’ll take it.

I’ve mostly left Captain Jack alone here, haven’t I? Part of it is a pretty severe disdain for John Barrowman at this point, between the transphobic jokes and the blatant lying about Moffat’s supposed grudge against him. But it’s also just… does a very middle aged John Barrowman doing a party piece rendition of a fifteen year old episode actually bring much to the table? I made a The Five Doctors comparison before, and nowhere is it more apt than here, with John Barrowman cast in essentially the same narrative role as Jon Pertwee. Except that Pertwee’s Doctor would actually be an effective source of Ominous Phrases, whereas Captain Jack is an odd choice for the role of, let’s be blunt here, River Song.
So what are our bets for how the Ruth Doctor fits in? Several things make having her be pre-Hartnell a continuity mess of epic and frustrating proportions, so I’m going with Season 6c personally.
Martin’s performance is interesting though. In many ways a more convincing iteration of the dark and dangerous Doctor than John Hurt, who was generally a bit too kindly grampa to really sell “I am the Doctor who spent his life doing terrible things.” 
I wonder what this episode would have felt like if the Judoon and Captain Jack were absent, giving the Jo Martin reveal room to breathe instead of being one of several explosions of continuity in a single fifty minute span. Probably a better episode, though less populistly thrilling
Relatedly, I wonder what bits were Chibnall. (My money is on him writing the Captain Jack material.)
It’s been pointed out to me that Bradley Walsh is taking around a week off every production block to do other things, a revelation that adds a fun game to watching Doctor Who. This time, note how he’s not required for anything save TARDIS and John Barrowman scenes, save for one very brief bit in the cafe—most blatantly, he’s not there when Ryan and Yaz meet back up with the Doctor, requiring a hard cut to the TARDIS interior to add him to the scene.
Next week’s review will be delayed a few days because of travel as well—probably around as delayed as this one, if not a day longer.

Ranking

Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror

Fugitive of the Judoon
Orphan 55
Spyfall

I Made My Madness Reality (The War Machines)

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. So we’re stuck between two ideologies that are being clumsily grouped under the heading of “authoritarianism.” As we’ve noted before, this rough equation of fascism and communism is egregiously misguided, but instead of screaming further into the void about the validity of Marxism like some Doctor Who critics, let’s try to come to a useful conclusion.

To wit, what does the conflation of these two ideologies with the nightmarish domination of technology over humanity actually point to? Why are these three things coinciding? One could turn to Ian Stuart Black’s other Doctor Who stories, which are similarly concerned with abusive and destructive systems of power, but that ultimately only gets at the reason he’s engaging in the drab collapse of two ideologies that are in practice aggressively different even if one does engage in the tediously misguided equation of Stalinism with communism at large. It doesn’t get at the presence of a computer here, which was a plot point offered by Kit Pedler, the first step in a series of science-based proposals he made to the series that roughly goes “evil computer, Cybermen, Cybermen attacking X.” This progression reveals further clues, mostly in the way in which both WOTAN and the Cybermen are built out of paranoia around machines going out of control and taking over.

This theme is borne out in Black’s script. Note Krimpton’s pleas as he tries to resist WOTAN’s control: “There’s nothing more important than human life. Machines cannot govern man.”And Brett’s monologue to Krimpton about why WOTAN is taking over similarly speaks to notions of machines exceeding their bounds—he notes that WOTAN has concluded that the world has reached the limit of its development under humans and that they must therefore be replaced. The similarities between this and the Cybermen, especially in The Tenth Planet, are marked. But where The Tenth Planet sets up the Cybermen as a sort of dark cosmic alternative to humanity that journeyed into the horrific Lovecraftian dark of space and came back wrong—a much more straightforwardly Quatermass-style narrative—The War Machines sticks more rigidly to our own creations, offering a doom that is entirely of our own making.

This again feels prescient—consider how fifty years on Steven Moffat would turn “the system goes out of control” into one of his standard plots. Or, for that matter, just consider how actual algorithmic design goes aggressively wrong in the world. But once again there’s a big anachronism as well. Almost all of the mechanized systems that in practice go mad and cause massive damage to the world are constructed by private industry. The War Machines, on the other hand, is largely devoid of techbros. Instead WOTAN is built by the government, and defined in terms of the way in which it interconnects various government services.

But strange as this feels in 2020, it fits the fears that were coalescing around computers in 1966. With computers still largely the province of the defense industry (consider the extensive role that the military had in the development of the Internet), the fear around computers came specifically from the idea that they would be put in charge of weapons systems and would decide to get into a war without human intervention. This helps explain why Black specifically has WOTAN unleash an army of military tanks onto the world, but it also highlights why this fear starts to bleed into Nazis and communism. Indeed, this ends up being one of the most forward-thinking things about The War Machines—its recognition that machines would spiral out of control in ways that were determined by ideology. 

But the ideologies that WOTAN most visibly mirrors are ideologies of the Other that we routinely cast as villainous. Which is to say, these are ideologies that are not seen as having to get out of control in order to be dangerous, but that are instead dangerous on their own terms, when they are working “properly.” But there’s an unresolved and indeed unacknowledged tension going on here: WOTAN is parroting a wealth of (in Black’s view) dangerous foreign ideologies, but he’s doing so as a technological accomplishment created by the General Post Office. 

It’s not clear whether Black is trying to write a story about the enemy within and simply failing to imagine anything other than external threats, or whether he’s writing a parable about totalitarianism and saying more than he intends. But wherever the tension originates from, it’s fraught with significance. There is, after all, no getting away from the sharply contemporary nature of The War Machines, which marks Doctor Who’s first major return to 1960s London since An Unearthly Child. Yes, there were the fleeting appearances in The Daleks’ Master Plan and The Massacre, but that’s markedly different to a story that’s actually set in the here and now. 

More than that, The War Machines positively drips with contemporary cool. The most obvious aspect of this is the Inferno nightclub, a TV-friendly mod hangout in which the Doctor, in a joke that has aged spectacularly poorly, is mistaken for Jimmy Savile. But the whole story, right down to the introduction of Ben and especially Polly, is firmly a case of Doctor Who embracing the swinging sixties and London’s re-emergence as an international center of cultural cool. To have this be the milieu out of which the totalitarian supercomputer arises is a remarkably striking decision.

And yet it’s not a senseless one. For one thing, it accurately captures how machines actually go wrong. When computers are destructive it is not because they have been programmed according to despised ideologies, but because they’ve been programmed according to the ideologies of those who built them. It’s not going to be someone else’s system that runs out of control and destroys us—it’s going to be ours.

Indeed, we probably won’t need the computer, unless some particularly niche theories of eschatology unexpectedly play out. More likely, the ideology of capitalism will simply continue to run out of control as it has already been doing. Fossil fuel extraction will continue apace, driving up CO2 levels until we finish toppling off of the climatological precipice that we’re already barely clinging to. The food chain will collapse, as the massive reduction in insect populations suggests it has already started to do. People will die. Literally billions of them. If we’re lucky, basic human adaptability will mean that the species is extinction-resistant. If we’re very lucky, the social structures that emerge from this will be ones that retain the best of existing cultures. Very likely it won't. This is what a system running out of control looks like—operating assumptions that made sense at one scale turning catastrophic at a larger one.

In this regard the story’s mod aesthetic is particularly apropos. For all its cool, after all, the mod aesthetic was ultimately just another case of stylish nationalism. This isn’t a critique unique to mod culture—any subculture associated with a specific place is in part about the glories of that place, and the UK is small enough that any subcultural movement there is going to be an element of national identity to it. 

But we know where this sort of thing can lead. Just look to the last aesthetic movement to define itself in terms of modernity. For all its art and poetry, modernism was also the aesthetic movement that fascism came out of. Sure, mods were more music and fashion, but the Nazis had Wagner and Hugo Boss. Heck, there’s even a line to be drawn from modernism to Hitler that goes straight through fashion: Coco Chanel went from providing lodging for Stravinsky to spying for the Third Reich. 

The point here isn’t that mods were secretly fascists in waiting. It’s that history isn’t an inevitability. Mod culture could have been many more things than just the bit of the sixties that came before the Summer of Love. And not all of those things were good. Scratch the surface and there’s ugly things beneath.

And for all its conceptual incoherence The War Machines captures that basic reality. It offers a swinging mod world in which British ingenuity creates a technological wonder. And then, lurking within that there turn out to be totalitarian horrors and tanks storming the streets of Britain. That it displaces these horrors into other systems and ideologies is a feint, but it’s ultimately just the show flinching away from the real fear.

And so in the end, once one scrapes away the minor details of fifty years of technological development, we have a story that is not suspended between prescience and anachronism, but rather between insight and repression. The War Machines is quick to se one of the deep terrors of the twentieth century, but cannot quite bring itself to look directly at what it sees, instead gliding off of it towards something that is almost, but not quite insightful. Even more than its decision to locate the space and time of Doctor Who’s narrative in the exact cultural location of its anxieties, this is how The War Machines serves as the archetype of much of where Doctor Who is to go next.

A Man On My Back (Me and a Gun)

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. As with the intimacies of “Leather” and “Precious Things,” this song’s brutal rawness is not simply the product of raw and unfiltered emotional openness; it’s something Amos has worked on and honed. 

More broadly, the song generates a very specific emotional tenor that is only one of many possible emotional reactions to rape. It does not, for instance, attempt to focus on the traumatizing fear for your life. It does not focus on the way in which you doubt your own memory of events, constantly asking yourself if you made it all up. It does not focus on the difficulties with consensual sexual activity (and indeed with the notion of your own consent) that follow. It doesn’t focus on the nightmares or the out of nowhere sobbing or the way that some minor detail of your assault will turn into a bewildering PTSD trigger for decades after so that you freak out every time you get water on your face in the shower. 

Instead, it is a song about dissociation. Its opening verse, with Amos narrating the hours after her assault, driving around aimlessly because she “can’t go home, obviously,” is one of the most chillingly familiar depictions of dissociation in pop music. But even more brutal is the song’s engagement with morbid humor, set up first by the leadup to its chorus-closing line: “you can laugh / it’s kind of funny / the things you think / at times like these / like I haven’t / seen Barbados / so I must / get out of this.” This continues into the strange absurdism of “yes I wore / a slinky red thing / does that mean / I should spread / for you / your friends/ your father / Mr. Ed,” a line that displays the sort of whimsical non sequitur that Amos does in other songs, (c.f. “I got the antichrist yelling at me from the kitchen again” or “I don’t believe you’re leaving cause me and Charles Manson like the same ice cream”) only with an effect of utter horror. And so on to the final verse, with its morbidly funny whiplash of “these things / go through your head / when there’s a man / on your back / you’re pushed / flat on your stomach/ it’s not a classic / Cadillac,” which is possibly an even better account of what being massively dissociated feels like than the opening verse.

Past that, it becomes difficult to know what to say about the song in its brutal singularity. Its scope deforms the album around it. Numerous other songs—“Leather,” “Silent All These Years,” and “Precious Things” to name just a few—take on new meanings and inflections in its wake, becoming songs that are, in addition to all of their surface meanings, also tangibly and meaningfully about survivorship. Other songs take on small but uncanny new tinges—“mother the car is here” carries a newly ominous implication, to name just one example. To name another, Amos’s concern with death in “Happy Phantom” feels far less like an intellectual exercise.

“Me and a Gun,” in other words, makes Little Earthquakes about something other than Amos getting her mojo back after recording a really bad first album. It’s why the album is so seminal and so landmark. Rape and survivorship simply weren’t topics pop music had considered in any confessional depth. To those for whom this was an agonizing oversight, “Me and a Gun” and Little Earthquakes were the first time pop music gave voice to them. Even to those fortunate enough not to have experienced sexual assault, there’s an obvious rebalancing of the scales here—of essential things being said.

All of this, of course, is rooted firmly in the context of 1992. In 2019, during what is endlessly referred to as the “#metoo era,” the door Amos broke down has been walked through countless times by women and men. Harrowing accounts of rape, albeit not ones this carefully aesthetically crafted, are seemingly routine elements of the endless parade of news stories about terrible people. Documentary exegeses of the crimes of various people, celebrity or otherwise, abound, not least in the immensely popular sphere of true crime podcasts. None of this makes “Me and a Gun” any less harrowing, but it makes its chilling horror less extraordinary, dimming its power. It becomes fair to ask what “Me and a Gun” is for anymore. Indeed, Amos has clearly asked this, deciding against performing the song on any of her tours after 2011, and mostly eliminating it after 2001. (It’s the third-most played song off of Little Earthquakes, with 356 documented performances, all but nine of which took place in 2001 or earlier; the lion’s share of these came on the Dew Drop Inn tour, where it was played at 99% of the shows.) Her reasons for doing so are unknowable, and could well be simple—one can scarcely begrudge someone for deciding that performatively reliving one’s own rape 356 times is enough. 

But it’s also worth considering carefully what performing “Me and a Gun” live does. Once the song is performed as “that well-known classic off of Tori Amos’s first album,” its transgressive power evaporates. One of the most perplexing and troubling experiences one can have watching Tori Amos performances on YouTube is watching as people in the audience cheer upon realizing that she’s begun playing “Me and a Gun.” It’s easy to see what’s happening there: fans are responding with instinctive thrill to finding out that a particularly beloved song is getting played at the concert they’re at. But there’s also no real way to make that reaction something other than “oh hey, it’s your rape! Awesome!” And at the point where that’s happening, it’s tough to seriously argue the song is doing anything other than potentially triggering survivors.

The culmination of these tensions arrived in 2007, in one of the final performances of the song. This was the American Doll Posse tour, in which every show was divided into a short opening set that Amos played as one of her four alter-egos that she’d designed for the album, followed by a lengthier set as herself. Amos had previously played the song twice on the tour, on a pair of Australian dates where it slotted into her solo piano portion of the set. But in November of 2007, at a Chicago date, Amos debuted a radical reworking of it during her opening set. The character for this occasion was Pip, the most aggressive and brash of Amos’s personae for the album—Amos describes her as “a warrior [who] does confront issues and sometimes it’s explosive, but I really love her energy and her casual approach to rubber.” A more useful fact might be the fact that she inserts a bridge into performances of “Cruel” in which she issues a screaming threat to would-be rapists that she’s going to rip their cock off.

Unsurprisingly, then, a Pip performance of “Me and a Gun” is unlike anything else that Amos has ever done with the song. Clad imposingly in a black and sparkly ensemble with positively kinky numbers of buckles, and following a barnstorming performance of “The Waitress” that ends with Amos panting convulsively into the mic as she rocks back and forth, Amos strides to the microphone, swaying ominously as her band provides a looping bass line with hypnotic drums. When she hits the first line of the song, which had never before been done with backing instrumentation, the audience is audibly stunned, with gasps of “oh my god” and “holy shit” continuing through the first verse. 

Amos effectively takes the song and reassembles it, making it into a self-cover. In her previous a capella versions, she sings the song as if in a dazed trance, almost seeming to dissociate anew in order to sing it. Here, however, her performance is a thing of ominous swagger. She is commanding, her delivery at times veering towards an unsettling sultriness. But this shatters abruptly in places, most obviously for the first “me and a gun / and a man on my back,” which she delivers in trembling, barely controlled fear. As she hits the second verse, she reaches over to her piano and pulls a knife on her audience, dancing seductively with it at first, them miming thrusting motions with it held phallicly at her crotch as she spitefully spits out the the “does that mean I should spread” section, and finally holding it to her own breast. Finally she pulls out a gun, holding it to her head as she sings the chorus with increasing pained, furious desperation.

It’s stunning, disturbing, and upsetting to watch. Is it, however, good? That’s harder to answer straightforwardly. Perusing reviews of the concert (essentially all of which discuss “Me and a Gun”), the overall theme is an audience that was enraptured, shocked, and at times outright terrified by the performance. In some abstract sense, this is good, in that it is an effective performance that skillfully conjures the emotional response it sets out to produce. But what is the value of this reaction? Again, one is forced to wonder how any survivors in the audience felt—indeed, even moreso than for a regular performance of the song, which at least invokes a part of Amos’s career they are probably familiar with and have navigated their relationship with. This performance is not that, and the emotional state it is designed to produce is not something anyone in the audience could reasonably have expected or prepared themselves for. More than that, though, it just feels cheap, reducing the song into a haze of abjection and retaliatory violence. A nuanced account of trauma written as part of a powerful act of self-reclamation becomes a leather-clad remake of I Spit on your Grave of the sort that requires discussions of the male gaze. Amos, in any case, declined to repeat the performance on any future American Doll Posse dates, playing the song precisely five more times since, all of them in its traditional a capella arrangement.  

More than most pop songs, and indeed more than almost any piece of art I can think of, the defense that the song is of its time feels substantial. Just consider going up to the woman who, after a dissociative fugue, has just engaged with and written about her sexual assault for the first time in six years and telling her, “ah, but there are keys ways in which the song ages out of relevance and so that wasn’t a worthwhile endeavor.” This is self-evidently an absurd thing to ask of an artist or a song. 

If the degree to which “Me and a Gun” was dangerous and important has faded over the quarter-century plus since its release, this is largely irrelevant. In 1992, it was both, and both to an absolutely stunning degree. And if it’s less so now, this owes more than a little bit to Amos and to “Me and a Gun.” By making her breakout album a work about survivorship, by playing the song on numerous TV appearances and forcing audiences to contend with this reality, by using her platform to advocate for the Rape and Incest National Network, and simply by visibly an openly being a survivor, Amos changed the way in which rape is talked about to the point where her own song became unnecessary. There are classic pop songs and great pop songs, but what we have here is something altogether rarer and more extraordinary: a song that changed the world.

Recorded in London in 1991, produced by Ian Stanley. Played regularly on tour before its retirement in 2011.

This will be the last Boys in Their Dresses post for the forseeable future.

Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror Review

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. That’s bad and depressing. And it’s ultimately not as though the ambient context of semi-competent drudgery actually improves this. I mean, I’ll probably get a better Eruditorum post out of it than anything around it, but this is still little more than a competently done iteration of what is usually one of Doctor Who’s most tediously obligatory subgenres. (It’s notable that Moffat quietly junked the format during the Capaldi era.) That’s worth celebrating, but it really shouldn’t be.

 

The guest cast in this is quite strong. Goran Višnjić’s Nikola Tesla is basically just a Robert Downey Jr, impression, which is a choice that’s obvious because it works, and he carries it off with the requisite charisma. Robert Glennister’s Thomas Edison is emphatically a piece of shit, meanwhile, which is, to be fair, a relatively satisfying note for the show to take with a Great Man of History.
For my money, however, the standout is Anjli Mohindra as Queen Skithra. Mohindra, previously best known within Doctor Who as Rani on Sarah Jane Adventures, launches a full-on attack on the scenery that, along with the delightful decision to have the Skithra be rubbish at chasing people because they keep tripping over each other, single-handedly elevate the Skithra above any Chibnall-era monster since the P’ting.
There seems to have been a decision to give Bradley Walsh a larger helping of lame comedic bits. This is mostly unfortunate, although his desperately incompetent attempt at explaining who Tesla was is rescued by Cole and Gill’s amused exasperation at his efforts. 
I’m terribly excited for Prisoner of the Judoon, although the news that Chibnall rewrote his best writer from last season is a bit wince-inducing. 
That said, schedule for the next two weeks will be a bit odd. I’m flying to the UK for a vacation on Sunday (I would love to see you, but alas unless we’ve already made plans my six days there are fully booked)—the first time I’ve been there since I was writing about the Key to Time saga. (Amusingly, it will be the second time I return home to immediately write about The Invasion.) Anyway, if my hotel TV has a nice, sensible way for me to pull up the previous day’s episode of Doctor Who then I’ll watch it Monday to stave off the jet lag. If it doesn’t, then I won’t be able to watch it until I get home the week of the 2nd, and that week will just contain two reviews. Either way, I’ll have no way of watching Praxeus until Monday. Other than that, however, posting will continue apace whilst I’m abroad. 

Rankings

Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror
Orphan 55
Spyfall

This Primitive Planet and Its Affairs (The Crusade)

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. And events in one court tend to implicitly mirror the other, most obviously in the detail that each court is visited by a deceitful merchant. Whittaker in no way portrays the two courts as interchangeable—indeed, he’s ultimately deeply invested in the notion that there are very real differences between them. But he is committed to the idea that they have equal dignity. 

This is made even clearer in Whittaker’s novelization of the story, where he adds a prologue in which the Doctor reflects on how “the only way to understand the folly, the stupidity and the horror of war [is] when both sides, in their own way, are totally right.” He has both Richard and Saladin lament the cruelty and human cost of war, and makes both men out to be heroic in their desire to put an end to the conflict. The story is clear and resolute in its morality.

But there are clear limits to this. To put it in the most obvious terms, while there are a number of people of color in background roles, the bulk of Saladin’s court, Saladin included, is made up of white actors blacking up to play the part. This is not quite minstrelsy, in that the actors are not doing this as part of a grotesque and fundamentally racist caricature, but that doesn’t come close to eliminating the racism involved. 

Actually, it’s not quite fair to say that nobody is engaged in grotesque racist caricature—Tutte Lemkow’s portrayal of the thief Ibrahim is unreconstructed racist caricature of the worst sort. That Lemekow was a Norwegian Jew with a distinctly idiosyncratic appearance who was largely typecast throughout his career as a procession of ethnic villains adds complexity to this, but again does not actually change the fact that what’s going on here is extremely racist on very fundamental levels.

And even if the acting is mostly not engaging in gross caricature, the writing is another matter. Consider the paralleled advisors who reject Richard and Saladin’s desires for peace. On the English side is the Earl of Leicester, who, while held in contempt by the Doctor for being a “stupid butcher,” is ultimately little more than a battle-hungry oaf. Oh the Muslim side, on the other hand, is the profoundly sadistic El Akir, who serves as the primary antagonist for the story and who repeatedly muses on how he’s going to torture Barbara and how it would be entertaining to see her dance on hot coals. There is ultimately not an equivalence here; no character on the English side comes close to this sort of depraved monstrosity. And more to the point, even if Walter Randall’s portrayal does not lean into the sort of over the top racial stereotyping of Tutte Lemkow’s, the entire character is a racist trope.

And this gets at the fundamental limitation of Whittaker’s sense of judicious equality: it’s rooted in a patronizing view of the Muslims. Whittaker finds nobility there, yes, but only by seriously entertaining the possibility that he might not. Likewise, while he finds fault in the English, the idea that they’re anything other than noble Shakespearean heroes is never seriously considered. Of course Richard the Lionheart is a Great Man of History deserving of our undying respect—the only surprise is that Saladin is too. And even this is decidedly limited in value—the European tradition of lionizing Saladin as “the good Muslim” is longstanding, and Whittaker is engaging with it on familiar terms in which Saladin’s moral character is only ever established by comparison with the apparently unquestionable character of his European foes. And Saladin is given far too much work to do anchoring the moral worth of the entire Muslim world—take him out and El Akir would be the most prominent Muslim character. Take Richard I out and you’d still have Des Preaux, and, for that matter, the entire TARDIS crew clearly demonstrating the nobility and heroism of the English. Whereas on the Muslim side, you’d have Haroun, who, while sympathetically motivated by murderous revenge, is still a clear step shy of deeply noble. 

But there’s an even larger issue here, which is that even saying that the two sides were of equal nobility is farcical. After all, one side was an invading force engaging in imperialist expansionism. The other side… wasn’t. By any reasonable moral standard the Crusades were an atrocity in which European countries sent armies across the world to butcher people and steal their land. That this would go on to be the blueprint for destroying the planet is a grim irony, but even on their own merits the crusades were barbaric. Richard I was a warmongering monster engaged in a war of brutal aggression. Whatever one might say about Saladin, who, as a member of the ruling class, was surely no innocent, he at least wasn’t that. He was fighting a defensive war to repel invaders and reclaim lands that they had taken. To portray Richard I as morally equivalent to this, little yet as tacitly superior to it, is appalling.

And yet this view is implicit in Whittaker’s larger approach to the nature of history. To turn again to the novelization, he has the Doctor explain in the prologue how “the fascination your planet has for me is that its Time pattern, that is, past, present and future, is all one—like a long, winding mountain path,” going on to clarify this account by telling the story of Clive of India, who “attempted to commit suicide as a young man by putting a pistol to his head. Three times he pulled the trigger and each time the gun failed to explode. Yet whenever he turned it away, the pistol fired perfectly. As you know, Robert Clive did eventually take his own life in 1774. The point is that Time, that great regulator, refused to let the man die before things were done that had to be done.” 

Leaving aside the fact that Robert Clive was an imperialist who manufactured deadly famines to line his own pockets, since at that point we’re just making the exact same point on different grounds, and the key point is the idea that Earth’s history, apparently unlike that of other planets, has a teleology. Within Doctor Who, this is obvious—all narratives have authorship and thus teleology. But this isn’t supposed to be a claim about the fictional world of Doctor Who—it’s supposed to be a claim about how history works. Whittaker is suggesting that history is directed towards a goal. This is an innately theistic claim—you cannot have a goal without a desire, which in turn requires there to be someone having the desire. If all of history is working towards a single end, then history has an author.

Two things follow from this, at least in terms of The Crusade. The first is obvious: Whitaker believes history to be written by a white man, and to reflect a white man’s concerns. He imagines a liberal white man who cares about the dignity of Muslims and of women, but he still unquestionably imagines a white man, and his view of history unquestionably holds those biases.

The other is that history’s author is monstrous. Whitaker makes at least some acknowledgment of this, having the Doctor muse on how “Life, death, the pattern of Time, are eternal mysteries to us. Here you find one man squandering his talents on wholesale slaughter, evil and terrible acts of indignity. There, another makes every effort for peace, goodwill and happiness. Inventors of medicines and advantages for others are laughed into insane asylums. Discoverers of murder weapons die in old age as millionaires. True love is set aside, hatred seems to flower” before concluding that “Time is constant. Look at history. You’ll find the brave have their share of successes. You’ll see that honesty, unselfishness and good works overflow in every generation.” 

The problem is that we know otherwise. Sure, there’s good in every generation—often profound levels of it. But there’s also an abundance of moral horror. And the claim that the good parts win out and exist in abundance is, in the end, cold comfort to the impressively large number of people it doesn’t work out for. The world looks a lot more like an abundance of good when you’re a middle class television writer in the UK than it does when you’re a Palestinian trying to survive the disastrous consequences of yet another wave of European imperialism. Even if one doesn’t climb a bit further along Whitaker’s mountain path to see it all plunge into the bleak horror of the anthropocene, just looking at the world into which he put The Crusade makes the limitations of his concept of history painfully obvious. If history has an author, it’s a butcher to whom human suffering is a cheap currency with which to buy nebulous moral points. Or worse still, it’s just us, and our longstanding collective failure to stop destroying the world. As Whitaker himself notes, “Until we know, until we can control greed, destructive ambition, hatred and the dozen and one other flaws that plague us, we are not worthy to breath.”

We’re not.

 

Fair Boy Your Eyes (Song For Eric)

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). Some of these are absolutely extraordinary tracks—we’ll talk about the most obvious one next time—but the sessions as a whole feel vaguely directionless. This raises the question, however, of exactly when Amos actually penned “Song for Eric.” Was it one of the songs written in late 1989/early 1990 as Amos sat within her fairy circle summoning up the first version of Little Earthquakes? Or is it a bit of old schmaltz that actually does date to around the same time as “Etienne” and the other Y Kant Tori Read songs that its complete lack of emotional depth or nuance most resembles?

As for Eric, he is of course Eric Rosse, Amos’s then-boyfriend and co-producer. Rosse had been with Amos dating back to the Y Kant Tori Read days—Joe Chiccarelli recalls him hanging around the studio. And he’d been a major figure of encouragement in the wake of the album—Amos recalls that he was “one of the first to encourage me” afterwards, listening to her piano work and being astonished that she’d never showed it to anyone. 

But for all of that, there’s a preening quality to many of Rosse’s own comments on Amos. He’s not the nightmarish controlling male figure of countless female pop origins—it’s clear that Rosse has tremendous regard for Amos’s abilities. But he also visibly wants to be a key part of her narrative—he talks in interviews of the song’s he’s proud of, and uses phrasings that take more credit than is due, such as noting that Amos “sang and played piano at the same time on one song, but for the others, I did not have her sing and record at the same time,” a phrasing that implies he had wildly more to do with “China” and indeed much of the album than his co-producer credit on four songs actually warrants. His respect for her talents and her art is clearly tremendous, but he also tangibly sees himself as being The Guy Who Discovered Tori Amos and Got Her To Follow Her Art. 

And while it’s true that Rosse produced one of Amos’s best albums and four tracks off of another, it’s also true that the album Amos wrote in part about their breakup and that she solo-produced for the first time was Boys for Pele. Which is to say that whatever emotional role Rosse had in Amos’s recovery from Y Kant Tori Read, he was never essential to what she was. And if this song is any indication, moving away from him was far more important than anything he actually did.

Recorded in London in 1991, produced by Ian Stanley. Played occasionally before being retired in 1998.

Orphan 55 Review

An episode with its heart in the right place and its head largely on the moon. In this regard it resembles Himes’ previous effort. The problem is that where “It Takes You Away” moved among a bunch of elements that were batshit weird and largely unlike anything we’d ever seen before, “Orphan 55” moves through a bunch of Doctor Who standards. These are generally among the more interesting Doctor Who standards—a dodgy resort a la The Macra Terror or Delta and the Bannermen, the main reveal from The Mysterious Planet, and a big heavy-handed environmental message like it’s The Green Death. These are all basically good components.

Unfortunately, Himes’s sugar rush sense of momentum keeps any of them from going anywhere. The supporting cast is overstuffed and undercooked, feeling at times like a cut-rate Voyage of the Damned. Interesting ideas flop oddly around the screen, briefly contemplating becoming significant plot threads before declining to. What exactly are the Dregs doing, killing some people and weirdly torturing Benni in a way that doesn’t actually make him stop being a weird comic relief character? What’s the actual substance of the relationship between Kane and Bella? There are stories here, but they’re being rushed past in favor of something that structurally feels more or less like The Ghost Monument.

This remains extremely puzzling to see. There’s a continual failure to quite remember what stories are supposed to look like. This is structured like a serial that we’re watching all the parts of in 45 minutes. And the parts appear to be about six minutes long. This is a more coherent structure than Chibnall himself generally manages, but it’s baffling to see Doctor Who suddenly attain the basic narrative cohesion of a shitty 90s cult television show. Ian Levine’s hilarious “friendship over with Doctor Who, now Babylon 5 is my best friend” bit two years ago actually makes a vague amount of sense in a world where Doctor Who feels like it’s on the same basic quality level of Seaquest DSV. It’s like a peek into the universe where Fox picked Doctor Who over Sliders in 1996. 

Reviewing it ends up feeling a lot like when I did comic reviews—that immensely frustrating sense week after week of going “you are failing at the most basic tasks of actually telling a coherent story.” Except comics are a low-paying medium run by companies more exploitative of both employees and customers than usual in which the reason people work is usually fannish love instead of actual talent. This is BBC One in the age of Peak Fucking Television, and it leaves you wishing they’d go hire Dan Weiss and David Benioff, who at least understand what earning your dramatic payoff should look like in the abstract, even if they can’t actually make it work. This isn’t even broadly shaped like coherent televisual narrative—it’s just vomiting a random set of concepts at the screen and hoping a point comes out somewhere.

Actually, that’s unfair—it’s perfectly willing to hammer you in the face with its point. And to its credit, its point is basically sympathetic. Not doing a climate change episode in 2020 would have been inconceivable. Given that, the utter lack of compromise in its message and the unwillingness to hide behind allegory was admirable. And sure, I’ve learned not to have any real hope that Doctor Who is going to suggest anything than warm platitudes about individual heroism. Obviously the strongest message about climate change that we can realistically hope for is “so recycle more” and not “so drag the billionaires who are profiting on the destruction of the world out of their houses and drown them.” It’s fine. Honestly, the cynical line about how the elites will abandon the planet and leave us all to die was better than I’d hoped for. Like I said, this is an episode with its heart in the right place. 

It’s just that it lacks literally any of the technical skill needed to make that heart remotely effective.

So… how does time work now? The declaration that it’s climate change that does humanity in makes it clear that the orphaning of the planet is near term instead of long term—this clearly isn’t happening in parallel with Starship UK or the whole Wirrin incident. So this is clearly the existence of a timeline in which large swaths of the future history of Earth that we’re familiar with doesn’t happen. And the Doctor’s declaration that this is one of a number of possible timelines is extremely weird and not how the future has ever appeared to work before. Moving between alternate universes is supposed to be hard, and yet it now appears to be how time travel works.
For that matter, when is the present? What parts of history are written? How subject to rewrites are they anymore? And more to the point when the fuck did all of this change?
Obvious answer, of course, is the re-destruction of Gallifrey. The fact that this didn’t happen after the Time War is just down to the Time Lords not actually being destroyed. Now they really are gone, so time works differently. And since this new understanding of time is obviously going to be completely ignored by every future story, it won’t be a problem when Gallifrey is inevitably brought back and time silently goes back to actually making a goddamn bit of sense.
And hey, at least the Doctor’s reaction to being the last of her kind is just to be a bit surly instead of vast cosmic angst. I suppose when you’ve lost the planet multiple times you stop being quite so upset about it. Honestly her reaction is probably more about “ugh I have to go fix that and that’s probably going to mean seeing the fucking Time Lords again” than it is “oh woe I am once more the last of my kind.”
Getting back to review instead of wild continuity speculation, I think the thing that really makes this episode so frustrating is that it’s probably going to remain in the top couple for the season. This is what success looks like these days. How utterly dispiriting.

Ranking

Orphan 55
Spyfall

He'll Burn Everything; Us Too (The Daleks)

It’s December 21st, 1963. Between now and February 1st, 1964 128 people will die in a cruise ship fire north of Madeira, 25 people will die in riots in the Panama Canal Zone, 100 will die in anti-Muslim riots in Calcutta, three will die when an American fighter jet accidentally strays into East German space and is shot down, while Pamela Johnson will be murdered in Manchester, New Hampshire, T.H. White will die of heart failure, and the world will edge incrementally closer to the eschaton. Also, The Daleks will air on television.

The Daleks sits suspended between two eschatons, the seemingly defeated threat of fascism on one side, the thus-far averted threat of nuclear annihilation on the other. In one sense these are distinct threats, although 1960s Britain remained broadly aware that fascism was not eliminated forever and that it required a perpetual vigilance lest it arise in a period where it could find itself in control of a nuclear arsenal. But the Daleks are both too much and too little to quite fit into the straightforward “what if Hitler had the bomb” framework. It is a truism that pop culture nazis are curiously devoid of substance—an empty pair of jackboots into which any meaning can be shoehorned so long as it’s evil. But The Daleks exists too close to the Third Reich to engage in this amnesia—details like the fact that the Daleks were once a race of teachers and philosophers who live in a conspicuously expressionist city, or their chilling assertion that killing the Thals isn’t murder, it’s extermination make it clear that this is written with a vivid and real memory of Nazi Germany.

And yet other details fundamentally undermine this link. Most strangely is the degree to which the Thals are depicted as, in Susan’s words, “perfect,” and more to the point the degree to which that perfection is specifically rooted in their status as muscular blonde men of the exact sort that Nazis revered as a physical and racial ideal. This is a mere detail, albeit a deeply strange one. More substantial is the Daleks’ status as monsters created by the aftermath of nuclear war, mutated by radiation. This is, to state the obvious, not why the Germans became Nazis. It moves fascism from something that happens within societies as a result of specific social forces to something that happens to them because of external forces.

We could even sharpen this observation, noting the quasi-supernatural nature of radiation here. There is always a touch of the fantastic in our rhetoric around radiation, whether in the chilling and prophetic horror of “this is not a place of honor” or the openly gothic “walking ghost” phase after radiation poisoning. And its nature enables this—insidious, pervasive, and yet invisible, undetectable save for its lethality. It exemplifies the strange divide between Weird and Gothic, existing as a product of physics as it begins to get strange and yet behaving like nothing so much as a ghost. And The Daleks leans into this—the Daleks themselves are firmly Weird, with a design that leans hard into the inhuman by discarding as many vestiges of the human form as is plausible while still being able to stick an actual person inside it, and their city leans hard into this. And yet outside we have a petrified jungle, an ossified, pale and haunted remnant of a world that was.

The key moment comes with the revelation that the Daleks now depend on radiation to survive. Following on the TARDIS crew’s genuinely harrowing radiation sickness sequences in the first few episodes, this has the practical effect of establishing the Daleks as creatures that are literally fueled by and living on death. There is something deeply and terrifyingly qlippothic to them in this moment, in excess of what they project elsewhere in this story where they tend to come off as a slightly goofy prototype of the apocalyptic killing machines they eventually develop into being.

This tension is ultimately unresolvable. The Daleks are too specifically rooted in the material and still vividly remembered history of the Nazis to be qlippothic horrors of the nuclear age, but they are also too much the latter to simply read as space Nazis. Each reading excludes the other, and fits too well to call the decorative trappings placed around the other one’s substance. But as we learned last story, Doctor Who is first and foremost a series about fear, and fear is in no sense bound to the rational. The two frameworks may exclude each other, but in the fevered twitchings of England’s nightmares they don’t have to cohere. The last war and the next war can happen in uncanny and impossible simultaneity. 

The question then becomes why. Mundane historical answers abound. 1963 is still firmly in World War II’s shadow even as the Cold War festers. Terry Nation’s childhood was during wartime, and of course those memories color every future depiction of war and annihilation he’s going to do. But this is a persuasive answer to something that is not quite the actual question. The more specific question is something like “what is the substance of this liminal space between two apocalypses?” 

In this regard, it is helpful as ever to turn to the fantasy Doctor Who offers of how to avert them. As with An Unearthly Child (and ultimately as with most Doctor Who), this reduces to liberalism, but enough is lost in the distillation that it’s worth looking at the details. The most striking moment in this regard comes with Ian’s manipulation of the Thals into fighting. Set aside the crass sexual politics of the Thals only breaking their pacifism to defend their women and look at the substance of this. While the Thal’s pacifism is emphatically rejected as inadequate, it’s not treated with the sneering mockery of hippies that will show up a few years later in The Dominators, not least because we’re too early for that. Instead it’s put within a framework that actually takes their rejection of war seriously. The idea that they’re cowards is explicitly rejected, with their pacifism instead being a hard-won lesson from the astonishing destruction of nuclear war.

Nation has them reject this, a move that fits into the “it’s about the Nazis” end of the story’s anxieties, calling back to the failures of appeasement. And fair enough—nonviolence’s track record in successfully opposing fascism is limited. Nazis do, in fact, urgently need to be fought with any and all tools available, violence included. And yet in the juxtaposition with the Cold War, an irony emerges. Standing up and fighting was the solution to fascism, but had the US-led powers decided to stand up and fight the USSR the result would have been something much more akin to the status quo at the start of the story than to the Thals’ triumph and resultant sense of a hopeful future. This is not just because the USSR was never the force of sheer moral horror that the Third Reich was, although any moral theory rooted in their equation is already hopelessly compromised, but rather because the atomic bomb actually changes the basic logic of confrontation. I’m not going to rehash the underlying logic of mutually assured destruction, but the cruelly funny reality is that for all its blatant insanity as an approach, it ended up working. Yes, the fact that it’s a sample size of one is probably more relevant than its success per se, but the fact remains that once planet-destroying weapons are added to the equation deciding that you’re just not going to pick a fight with the people who have them is a pretty good idea. Yes, of course the story carefully stacks the deck to have “attack the guys with nuclear weapons” be the right choice. That’s ultimately the point of its ambivalence between World War II and the Cold War—to get away with telling a story about the USSR where there’s no difference between Nikita Krushchev and Adolf Hitler. 

It’s worth noting that we’re discussing things on the level of nation-states here. This raises several complications with regards to both apocalypses. In terms of fascism, this once again substantially muddies things. It doubles down on Nation’s disinterest in considering any material origins for fascism in favor of essentially supernatural ones, moving all responsibility to combatting fascism to the macro level, where it’s a thing “we” have to do to “them.” In terms of the Cold War, meanwhile, it at least appears more straightforward. After all, the Cold War was fought on the level of nation states. The discourse of how a “civilized” and “great” nation could fall to communism was never really part of the discourse in the first place. Sure, one had to root out communist spies, but there was never the sort of “could it happen here” discourse around the Cold War. 

But let’s look at The Daleks itself. The profound limitations of the BBC, Lime Grove Studios, and indeed of television as a medium mean that both the Daleks and the Thals get to exist simultaneously as small groups of individuals and as nation states. There are only four Dalek costumes, and so four Daleks need to stand in for the entire surviving species. And this is written to make sense, with each species being a small band of survivors. But the TARDIS crew’s intervention in this is complex. They, after all, are not a nation state, but a bunch of individuals who collectively embody a particular view of British exceptionalism. 

This is not extraordinary for Doctor Who, which routinely sketches societies out of a handful of Great Men of History and then has the ruggedly individual protagonists who are, one way or another, just a couple of Brits on holiday swan in and change the course of history. But it’s worth considering how this shifts the eschatology of the story. Nuclear annihilation is a story that only makes sense told on a macro level, about nation states. But Nation spins a fantasy whereby it moves to the level of individuals. And then he has those individuals save the day and defeat the nuclear power, and indeed to do it in the exact way that in practice would have proven most catastrophic.

And so we get the ugly and fatal lie at the heart of this all. The twentieth century’s methodical damnation of the planet was built on many things, but at its heart, at the end of the day, this was its bedrock: the heroic myth. The idea that the world is changed by individuals. Doctor Who is about Britain’s ever-shifting anxieties, but it is also always about its naive fantasies of what might repel them: a madman in a box and his intrepid band of ordinary people. And this always further embedded in the nationalist delusion—that the very country whose dreams of empire and brutal desire to rule the world drove the first half of the century, helped set the stage for the farcical butchery of the first World War, then the petulant and vengeful economic conditions that allowed German fascism to fester, that slaughtered millions in its own racist conquests and called this the moral high ground, called this “civilization,” that built the industrial age whose dark satanic mills went on to cook the planet—that they would be the ones to swoop in, over and over again, and rescue the world from their own demons.

This is always contemptible, but sometimes is at least harmless. When the nightmares are silly things—murderous teddy bears in toilets or bloodthirsty statues—then the show is no more harmful than any other it of escapist adventure fiction, which is to say no more harmful than any other bit of imperialist propaganda. But other times it becomes staggeringly perverse. And not simply when the show is overtly and deliberately tilting in a right-wing direction. This happens from time to time, but it is usually the least interesting version of the phenomenon. No, the true horror is in stories like The Daleks, where the show looks evil right in the eyestalk, vows to defeat it, and then offers something as blithely destructive as “so attack the bad guys with nuclear weapons and it'll all be fine” while making it feel like a moral triumph.

That’s how you exterminate a planet.