Philip Sandifer's Blog, page 8

It's Funny, Isn't It? (The Pirate Planet)

It’s September 30th, 1978. Between now and October 21st, three people will be murdered by Bruce John Preston in the Australian town of Mount Isa, numerous people will die in Cambodia following a Vietnamese invasion, and an unknown number of people die in the African National Congress following an attempt to poison 500 people to kill an unidentified infiltrator. Also, Frederick Valentich dies in an aviation accident shortly after encountering what he described as an unidentified flying object, Jacques Brel dies of cancer in France, the world comes closer still to the eschaton, and The Pirate Planet airs on BBC One.

In The Pirate Planet, Doctor Who presents one of the most confused central metaphors of its long and generally confused history. The concept is admittedly ingenious: Zanak, a hollow planet that materializes around other planets and then consumes them in their entirety. On top of that, as is gradually revealed over the course of four episodes, all of this exists to feed power to the elaborate machines keeping the tyrannical Queen Xanxia alive and with a facsimile of her youthful body. So on the one hand we have a brutal metaphor for capitalist/imperialist expansion and the way in which it leads to devastating destruction purely for the benefit of a handful of parasitic elites.

On the other hand the final episode, in which Douglas Adams creates an added source of tension by establishing that Zanak’s next target is Earth, comes dangerously close to misunderstanding the entire affair. Suddenly the subject of the metaphor becomes a curiously guiltless victim of it. More to the point, however, this collapse of a story largely concerned with metaphor into a story in which the Earth is in imminent peril serves to highlight the fact that the central conceit—a planet that consumes other planets for wealth—dramatically misses the reality, which is that planets consume themselves.

This is doubly interesting when taken in the context of Douglas Adams’s larger career. Adams is an extremely easy writer to like—a jaw-dropping prosesmith with one of the wickedest senses of humor in literary history. And yet it is hard not to come to the conclusion that his reputation was helped enormously by the fact that he died in 2001. A brief perusal of Adams’s social circle, after all, does not turn up a long list of people who have enjoyed cancellation-free dotages. Instead you get people like Richard Dawkins, rightly pilloried as a racist, sexist old windbag, or Monty Python, whose surviving members seem increasingly determined to become edgelordy Brexiteers who complain about how people are easily offended snowflakes. Douglas Adams, meanwhile, has spent the time in which his friends have squandered their own reputations keeping quiet and, for that matter, only taking a slight dent to his productivity compared to the last decade or so of his life.

But even if he’s avoided sticking his foot in it, he remains fundamentally a technophilic humanist. He admirably had more of an environmentalist streak than many in his cohort and wasn’t nearly as invested in utopianism as many, finding more of interest in computers than space travel. But in this regard he was ultimately just slightly ahead of his time, fitting smoothly into the generation of smug idiots following his that took the creation of a general artificial intelligence as the door to their imagined techno-utopia instead of faster than light travel.

But Adams is a useful figure to think about all of this in light of precisely because he was always relatively disinterested in utopia. Instead Adams wielded a curiously nihilistic streak, as evidenced by his best known work, in which he imagines the Earth being casually destroyed for the most specious of reasons while suggesting that the universe is a sort of dadaist joke best explained by the number 42 and a deeply unknowable question leading to that answer. Adams, unlike Holmes, largely sees the universe as a bleakly and oppressively meaningless place—note the “space is big” speech and the total perspective vortex in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. He remains interested in the perspective of the common man within this, but is far less inclined to give him a sense of dignity. Adams’s everyman protagonists are more likely to flail helplessly at a truly insane world than to figure out crafty ways of operating within it.

Adams accompanies this with a curious disinterest in many of the moral standards of science fiction. One of the ideas that went into the early drafts of The Pirate Planet came from his experience of East Berlin—he imagined a story in which the Doctor found a corrupt dystopia that was nevertheless keeping its citizens happy and well-fed, presenting a moral dilemma in whether to bring it down. Although the final script went in very different directions, there’s still artifacts of this visible, most notably in the character of Balaton, who spends the first episode and the opening of the second arguing that all of this talk of rebellion is a terrible idea, that life as it is perfectly nice, and that it’s dangerous and destructive to try to change things. The plot obviously doesn’t go this way (and it’s hard to imagine the more pure East Berlin-inspired version of the story wouldn’t have gone the same way by having the Doctor ultimately try to overthrow things, since that’s the way in which you actually have a plot), but it’s remarkable that this viewpoint gets expressed at all.

Despite all of this, however, The Pirate Planet has one of the most striking moments of moral clarity of the Tom Baker era. The sputtering, uncomprehending rage with which the Doctor explodes at the Captain, first horrified that “you commit mass destruction and murder on a scale that's almost inconceivable and you ask me to appreciate it” and then flustered as he demands “then what’s it for” is in many ways the most relatable interaction between the Doctor and utter evil in the course of the series, capturing almost exactly the emotional state generated by looking at fascist propaganda and philosophy and trying to understand the “reason” within. (The quote never fit into Neoreaction a Basilisk, but I was thinking of it almost constantly while contemplating the nuances of Mencius Moldbug and Nick Land.)

But it’s notable that evil, for Adams, is not best captured by the actual destruction or cruelty caused by Zanek’s operation—one need only look at the bathetic thud with which the line “Bandraginus Five, by every last breath in my body, you'll be avenged” lands to see that his heart is not actually in cruelty and exploitation. (Unlike Holmes, notably.) For Adams, it’s specifically the uncomprehending horror of it—the sense of absurd pointlessness of it. In this regard, the fact that the answer to the Doctor’s flummoxed question is “it’s for a piece of petty revenge against a mad queen who’s equally pettily chasing immortality” fits the larger point being made. Evil, for Adams, isn’t defined by harm but out of an aesthetic sense of its unnecessary sadism.

This shines some light on Adams’s cohort, particularly the way in which they proved so disappointing and how that relates to their triumphs. On the one hand, after all, what Adams identifies here is insightful. A very real part of the horror of late capitalist collapse is the sheer excess sadism of it. “The cruelty is the point,” as one popularly shared think piece puts it. In a very real sense, after all, it is not enough to ransack planets in pursuit of profit. It is not enough to have more money than it’s possible to spend. It’s not even enough to have power beyond the point where an alternative is possible. At the end of the day, none of this matters without some act of petty, bullying dominance. None of it counts unless there’s a victim and the victim knows it. If nobody is left sputtering about the pointlessness of it then it doesn’t really have a point. Adams gets this, as, to be fair, did a number of his contemporaries—Monty Python is rich with appreciation of the sadism of power.

And yet there’s also a cavernous blind spot here. For all the perceptiveness involved in identifying cruelty as a defining aspect of evil, the fact that it’s viewed as a formal structure instead of in terms of actual harm is, in the end, disastrous. Ironically, Adams’s insight only offers empathy for the sadists, whose desire for crass and bullying acts of domination is understood even as it’s reviled. Victims—people living with the boot on their neck—simply don’t really register. They’re not interesting, and in practice that translates into Adams not caring for them. He cares more, in fact, for well-off people who are superficially benefitting from the exploitation and with how understandable it is that they go along with it than he does for people who are suffering. It’s no surprise that this approach, in others, leads to an eventual cratering failure to take seriously the objections of marginalized people who say “this is hurting me.” It’s cruelty that’s interesting, not pain.

But this points at broader prey than the late career deflation of many of Adams’s cohort. Because this isn’t just a failing of a particular group of smarmy male Oxbridge graduates, but a failing of comedy in general. The real problem, after all, is that people who are suffering aren’t funny, but abusive fuckwits are. This exposes a fundamental lie at the heart of many of comedy’s pretensions. Its alleged social utility, after all, is that it allegedly speaks truth to power. Like most lies, this is not entirely wrong.  As Adams demonstrates, comedy is a laceratingly effective way of highlighting the absurdity of power. But in all of this there is one truth that comedy cannot tell—a cutting jibe it cannot make. It cannot say that power is not the center of the narrative. It cannot disrupt the heroic narrative of the great men of history. It can rewrite the story as bleak absurdism, yes, but it cannot actually tell a different story.

This is not to say that comedy of the oppressed cannot and does not exist. Of course it does—one can go find it if one wants, the same as any other art by marginalized people. But within the hegemonic discourse of entitled white men, comedy has no special standing as a revolutionary practice. It has no more ability to disrupt or undercut the systems of power than publicly funded sci-fi adventure. Perhaps with sufficient vigor and motivated reasoning one might find some isolated example of an individual tyrannical bigot being brought down in part by the efforts of comedians. But one will find exactly zero instances of a larger system of oppression being usefully challenged by comedy. More likely, what one will find is that comedy has repeatedly normalized the idea that power is supposed to be corrupt, absurd, and stupid, and that while one might complain about this, there’s no realistic prospect of changing it. Indeed, one might find that what happens is that comedians make jokes about planets that are ruled by universally hated reptilian tyrants, but where the people inevitably vote for the lizards anyway on the grounds that “if they didn’t vote for a lizard, the wrong lizard might get in.”

Meanwhile, the world continues much apace, a thin and parasitic shell of wealthy sociopaths rapidly sucking it dry of the very prospect of sustaining life. Maybe this is what always happens; one can easily imagine that if Douglas Adams were alive today he’d make jokes about the Great Filter and how it’s some completely mundane aspect of capitalist existence. Maybe there is some sort of alternative lurking in the shadows—a way things could be that isn’t this. It’s difficult to say. What’s clear is this: none of this is even remotely funny.

Thanks for the support. I look forward to having some Last War in Albion to share with you.

Changing Times

Just a quick announcement. Dalek Eruditorum has been proving frustrating to write—I think I was overly optimistic in thinking I could get to 39 posts out of the idea, and in practice around 13 or so it started becoming an exercise in pulling teeth. Posts were going out to Patrons on Fridays or later after having been written in short spurts of 3-400 words that took all day to even begin to figure out. It's been pretty miserable. And so I've decided that I'm going to accelerate a decision that I'd been planning on making when I finished Dalek Eruditorum: I'm refocusing on longer form writing. 

What this means in practice is that this site is not going to be a weekly maintained blog. I'll still put things up here—the first thing I'm doing is going back to Last War in Albion, and that'll still get posted here in chapter-sized chunks. And other sub-book stuff that I write will probably find a home over here. But I feel like the 2000 word blog post is not really working for me anymore, and like I need to get out of that format and sink my teeth back into some stuff that facilitates mad ambition. I've got the Pirate Planet essay nearly done, so that'll go out Monday, but that'll be the last weekly post here for the forseeable.

I'm still running the patreon over at https://www.patreon.com/elizabethsandifer, and still dependent on your support. Patrons are currently getting work in progress updates—written chunks of text and also behind the scenes peaks at my research notes, outlines, and the like. I'm planning on targeting the same monthly word count as I've been doing, if not higher because it won't be quite so torturous, but a lot more of it will be gated to Patrons for a longer time before it makes its way out here.

And if you want updates, a lot of those will be on my Twitter at https://twitter.com/ElSandifer. I'll still post big things like book launches over here, but if you want regular notification of what I'm up to, those sources are going to be your best bet going forward.

To do a quick spray of likely questions: Eruditorum v6 reprint needs me to spend a day or two's work on it. The added essay is written, but with Amazon not really shipping paper books I haven't felt a ton of pressure to get it typeset. Figure the next couple of weeks there. Volume 7 is now three essays from completion, and is going to be a major focus of May. And the next chapter of Last War in Albion is... well, started. And exciting. And requiring a lot of reading, which I'm going to get back to now.

Thanks to all for the support. I can't wait to show you some big, new, exciting stuff.

We Change Things. We Make Things Happen (The Sun Makers)

It’s November 26th, 1977. Between now and December 17th, an airplane carrying the University of Evansville basketball team will crash, killing the entire team, another plane crash at Madeira Airport in Portugal kills a hundred and thirty-one, and sex worker Marilyn Moore is injured in an attack by the Yorkshire Ripper. Despite the relative paucity of major disasters, the world still creeps ever closer to the eschaton and The Sun Makers airs.

The usual observation about The Sun Makers is that Robert Holmes attempted to whine about his taxes and accidentally wrote a Marxist parable. Annoyingly, the usual observation is in this instance correct. The Sun Makers is, on a superficial level, about taxes—there’s a joke about a “P45 return corridor,” several cracks about needing a “wily accountant,” and the basic fact that all of the crippling payments the population of Pluto is forced to make are explicitly called taxes. And yet any attempt to interpret it as the whinging of a conservative writer grumpy that he should actually be expected to contribute to the greater society swiftly runs aground in the face of practically everything that isn’t one of these details.

The biggest problem is that Pluto is not so much a state as a work colony.  And while there are countless tax jokes throughout the story, the larger focus ends up being on the labor conditions, with emphasis put on the fact that everybody works double shifts and gets precious little allotment of “sleep time.” Perhaps most importantly, the “taxes” are levied by “the company,” which is also the planet’s sole employer. This fundamentally shifts what the story is about away from taxes and towards exploitation, since what’s happening is effectively that the “taxes” are just a failure to pay wages disguised as taxation. 

There are complexities here that can’t be reduced entirely—if one wants to be precise what Holmes has depicted is a grotesque form of state capitalism, which is to say that Holmes is still making an attack on the left, at least as understood by the right—Thatcher railed against state capitalism by name in the House of Commons, declaring that “where there is state capitalism there will never be political freedom” around the time this was being written. And the decision to make The Collector a visual parody of Denis Healey ultimately makes it hard to remove the idea that this story is just a flat-out endorsement of Thatcherism in the buildup to her eventual triumph in the 1979 general election. 

And yet all of this has to be balanced against the fact that this is a story in which the workers stage a mass revolt to secure the means of production in the face of a system that sees them as nothing other than raw materials to exploit for profit and then abandon to die, where the ruling class is literally hurled off the roof of a building, and where all of the focus sits upon the dignity of the common worker and the horror is at the degradation he experiences. 

The obvious question is how these two things can come together. Both the Thatcherite and Marxist readings of the story are tremendously well-supported, after all, to the point where it’s impossible to isolate one and proclaim it the correct reading. Even the blunt instrument of biographical criticism seems insufficient. Sure, Robert Holmes really was an ex-cop who was complaining about his taxes, and anyone imagining he didn’t vote Tory in 1979 is probably deluding themselves. But he’s also always had an eye on the lower ends of the social totem pole and a passion for con men and petty criminals that made him a strange bedfellow at best for the establishment.

None of this is mysterious—most can be explained as a special and mildly idiosyncratic iteration of the well documented tendency for conservatism to mask itself in the trappings of radicalism and rebellion. But there’s a fundamental insincerity to this—it’s only ever the trappings of rebellion. Conservatism cosplays as radicalism, but it’s not actually engaged in it. Holmes, on the other hand, clearly has genuine and authentic love for grifters and working stiffs. More to the point, he’s skilled enough to make them shine in his hands. His underclass characters sparkle with a vibrance that introduces sincere radicalism, especially when it includes characters like Vorg in Carnival of Monsters or Garron in The Ribos Operation. The Sun Makers doesn’t go quite this far—the equivalent character would be Mandrel, and while he makes good in the end he spends an awful long time being a bloodthirsty asshole. But the Doctor is close enough to the con men characters to still get the overall effect. 

What, then, are we to make of this breathtakingly unstable political system? The answer does not have to be coherent—most politics aren’t in practice. If they were, they’d either openly admit to being apocalyptic death cults or actually do something about the destruction of the planet. With all mainstream political views thus eliminated, we are left with views that, like The Sun Makers, fundamentally contradict themselves. These are still interesting, however.

In Holmes’s case, the contradiction is informed on one hand by his deep skepticism of the people in charge and a genuine sense that people on the bottom have more insight than those at the top. It’s not hard to see how an ex-soldier and cop might come by this perspective. It’s far from the only way these things can go, but there certainly is a significant body of people who come out of regimented social structures such as those with an immense mistrust for the chain of command and a sense that the world consists of enormously competent people being managed by fools. To get from here to a love of con men and grifters is similarly easy—they’re lowly types who find a way to exist outside the regimented structure, fundamentally disconnected from their alleged place in the order of things.

Where the conservatism comes in is in the fact that Holmes is fundamentally disinterested in imagining any sort of alternative to this. He is at the end of the day a cynic, more interested in depicting the world’s failings than in their correction. This is clear in the run of previously discussed gothic stories, in which he pastiches genres without ever really challenging their structures, sending them up whilst remaining fundamentally faithful to them, including many of their worst and most racist aspects. Indeed, this observation helps make sense of what is otherwise a curious, if rarely remarked upon aspect of Holmes’s larger Doctor Who career—the fact that the period in which he’s helping run the show is the one in which he turns out a bunch of genre pastiches in which con men and a perspective that starts at the bottom of society are prevalent. He contributes these heavily to the Pertwee era—Terror of the Autons and Carnival of Monsters fit the bill—and as soon as he’s no longer running things he turns out The Sun Makers and The Ribos Operation, but in the period where he’s in charge there’s relatively little of it save for occasional glimpses in stories that are mostly focused on other things such as doing unreconstructed Fu Manchu riffs or accidentally endorsing fascism. Once one recognizes the precise nature of Holmes’s ribbings of society, however, these genre pastiches begin to fall into something resembling context.

But The Sun Makers still vexes this. After all, it does propose a solution: a workers’ revolution. It’s entirely clear-headed about this. And yet there’s a strange contentlessness to the revolution. Doctor Who is never very interested in sticking around to clean up and establish a new status quo, but events are rarely so completely presented as a class revolt as they are here. Nor are the transformations of the status quo usually quite so free of content. The form is all there—working class rebellion and, in a very “current for 1977” way, a specific focus on how the media is central to a revolt. But there’s still no sense of ideology on the part of the rebels—a jarring omission.

All of which leads towards the most striking thing about this revolution: what needs to be done in order to accomplish it. It’s gradually established over the first two episodes that the Company maintains control by constantly pumping an anxiety-inducing chemical into the air, which the Doctor describes as “eliminating freedom.” Successfully destroying this system finally allows the population the courage to rebel. 

As Macguffins go it’s fine enough, but in a story in which so much has aged well it’s a surprisingly duff note. Looking at The Sun Makers now, the conceit that a murderous dictatorship needs to illicitly dose the people with mind control drugs in order to ensure their compliance feels almost cruel in its ludicrous optimism. The reality—entirely omitted from The Sun Makers despite its inclusion of a media dimension to revolution—is that a light patina of propaganda can get an alarming chunk of te populace to cheer for their own demise. One can simply look at the protests going on across the United States, for instance, to see that it’s entirely possible to get people to show up to a protest and angrily demand the right to go back to work in the middle of a pandemic. Easier, in fact, than it is to get a substantial social movement together to give frontline medical workers adequate equipment and wages even remotely commensurate with their importance.

Indeed, one of the great horrors of the world is the sheer degree of inertia against revolution. One need only look at the last few years of American history to get a vivid and sickening sense of just how unlikely a revolution is. Wildly unchecked corruption, concentration camps for infants, catastrophic lacks of basic competence, multiple sexual assaults, and now the aggressive mismanagement of a pandemic that is killing tens of thousands of people have so far led to no significant populist uprising or indeed pressure for one. The left’s most plausible plan was “what if we meekly endure four years of this and then vote for a socialist whose socialism is so dilluted as to be homeopathic,” and when this failed to pan out their sole revision was “Ok, well how about the same candidate we ran last time only as an old white guy?” Indeed, the most plausible populist uprising in America right now is probably a full-on fascist one to install Donald Trump as a dictator for life. 

It’s ironic, in other words, that The Sun Makers should seem to so thoroughly reject the vision of The Deadly Assassin in favor of suggesting that history and change can happen, and happen on a grassroots level at that. Because the vision it provides is, ultimately, one that is so utterly implausible as to suggest that stasis really is the only way of things. 

But this is, in the end, how revolution works. It is an alluring fantasy, precisely because it seems as thought it can solve most problems. The world is, after all, cruel, exploitative, and fundamentally fucked on a deep and troubling level. Dramatic change to it seems like the option. And yet there is precious little reason to think that this is actually an option. The reality is that populist revolution, while obviously desirable, is an absent god that will not come no matter how much we plead. The apocalypse will not be averted by changing this world for a better one, no matter how much we dream.

The Information, The Strategy, The Consciousness (The Deadly Assassin)

It is impossible to talk about The Deadly Assassin without getting into the weeds of Doctor Who continuity, a sentence that is arguably the most depressing thing yet written in this project. Phil Sandifer manages to belch forth nearly 13,000 words of typically fanciful speculation (although at least this time he manages to avoid anything quite so masturbatorily pat as “the Doctor is from the Land of Fiction,” a critical conclusion so sickeningly self-congratulatory that it’s no wonder its author has disappeared off the face of the Internet and indeed the planet), but he’s hardly alone. Vast swaths of what Doctor Who gets up to when its worst instincts are indulged—waffle about the Eye of Harmony, Rassilon, Shabogans, and indeed Gallifreyan lore in general—all find their origin point here.

The degree to which this is a flimsy reed upon which to build a mythology is more than faintly staggering. It is not that, as (probably) Tat Wood suggests, this is a badly written mess. It’s just that what it actually is isn’t a self-conscious major epic that’s trying to set a huge swath of lore down but a daft bit of satire of British politics and the Kennedy assassination. It’s the sort of episode where Roger Murray-Leach designs some genuinely fantastic collars for the Time Lords that then get used for a ridiculous sight gag of a chalk outline of the President’s body, collar and all. Structurally, this is bizarre and focused largely on serialization—the first two episodes are fairly coherent build, the third is an ostentatious and not entirely well thought out dream sequence, and the fourth is a slightly rushed conclusion. It is, all in all, a bizarre thing to hang a mythology on.

And yet there is a strange honesty to it. A consistent theme of these essays has been the reality that Doctor Who is about nothing save for the world in which it is made. Here Robert Holmes literalizes this by going to the heart of the show’s mythology and then designing it as a mordant satire of the world. The Time Lords are a bunch of harumphing old men who complain that things change too fast nowadays and Presidents don’t stick around more than a couple of centuries. They gossip and engage in preening over what “chapter” they’re a member of and wear silly robes of different colors to show how important they think they are. They create inane schemes and conspiracies, and when a crisis comes along worry more about public perception than about actually managing it. They are, in other words, recognizably human, and more to the point recognizably made up of at least one vision of human flaws.

But it’s also a very specific vision of human flaws. The Time Lords’ taste for ceremony and pomp and the derision with which Cardinal Borusa treats Runcible is enough to imply a class system, but there’s no real sense that poverty or deprivation exist. There’s a fleeting mention of “Shabogan vandalism” that some writers have constructed an elaborate and fanciful mythology around in what are easily some of the most astonishingly confused attempts at Marxist revolution ever contrived, but the notion of exploitation is so far outside this story’s vision as to seem entirely nonexistent. 

Instead the flaws of the literal Lords of Time are firmly those that a grumpy middle class Tory would see in the world. The politicians are all corrupt, incompetent, or both, and everyone is simultaneously stuck in the past and losing track of the actual meanings of things. The big giveaway here is Castellan Spandrell, who fills the companion role in the interregnum between Sarah Jane and Leela. Spandrell has possibly the least suitable job for a companion, which is to say that he’s a cop. But he’s a heroic cop as written by Robert Holmes, who is himself an ex-cop, and is thus essentially a self-insert: sardonic, pragmatic, and put upon. He’s not so much the one honest man in a world of criminals as the one quietly competent one in a world of corrupt blowhards. It is not that Spandrell has any particular insight into the nature of the Time Lords—indeed, like Holmes he doesn’t actually seem to give a fuck about their lore. He’s just a basically decent guy with a good head on his shoulders. 

It’s worth recalling explicitly that the world of 1976 was not one in which anyone in professional television production was thinking about things in terms of “lore” and “canon” and, for that matter, “the fans.” Sure, there’s the famous Jan Vincent-Rudzki review of it for the Doctor Who Appreciation Society, but that group had only formed five months earlier. It wasn’t something that Robert Holmes gave a flying fuck about. Nor was long-term continuity, or any question of what a future showrunner might do with these details forty-four years later. This really is just Robert Holmes using a cool “the first story set on Gallifrey” hook for larking around with the Kennedy Assassination in amidst giving Philip Hinchcliffe an answer to his “what if an entire episode was a nightmare” question. 

There are things we might say about this. The underlying fascination with the Kennedy assassination is part and parcel of a turn towards conspiracy theories, which can be understood as a variation of the bartering phase of grief as applied to the end of the world. “OK, we’re all screwed, but there’s secretly someone in charge of it all, right?” The conspiracy theory is a furious disavowel of the nature of history—a desperate attempt to invoke a secret author to events that don’t have one.

But already we find ourselves back where every other writer on The Deadly Assassin does. If we’re talking about the nature of history in a story about the Time Lords, after all, we’re stuck talking about lore and what it actually means to be a Lord of Time. Lord implies a sense of feudal dominion, which in turn suggests that time is a domain that is producing some good or product. There are many things this could in theory be, but the most obvious one is that time produces history. This is consistent with the ideology espoused by the First Doctor under David Whitaker, which is very protective not only of history but of the historical process. 

Phil Sandifer makes some stabs in this direction that are uncharacteristically interesting. He wisely picks up on the paradox that the Time Lords keep an archive of the minds of all of the deceased Time Lords but also don’t know key details of their own fundamental history like who Rassilon is and what he did. Sandifer’s conclusion is that the Time Lords consider history primarily through memory, which he treats as largely a matter of individual subjectivity. This is compelling, but ultimately doesn’t work. The biggest problem is that there’s literally nothing in the episode or indeed history of the show up to this point that suggests an individualistic model of Time Lord society. Individualism, in fact, seems wholly antithetical to what we see. The Time Lords who forge off on their own to explore the universe and experience things are, in this story, largely forgotten: nobody has heard of the Doctor or of the Master up front, and they’re certainly not infamous renegades. Even the Gallifreyan leadership seems less than individualistic: Cardinal Borusa seems to aspire to disappear into the background of the system. Chancellor Goth is ambitious and charismatic, but this leads to his being rejected as a future President. 

No, for the most part Time Lord society seems engineered to protect its framework. What are shown to be important are not people but institutions—the various chapters, the pageantry of Presidential succession, etc. Perhaps most notably, the office of President is not actually one of authority: “he holds the symbols of office, but otherwise he’s no different from any other Time Lord.” This is difficult to square away with other lines in the episode—Borusa and Goth talk of the President making difficult decisions, for instance. And there clearly is some sense of leadership going on—Borusa demonstrably carries some sort of authority. Nevertheless, there’s a sense of a government consisting purely of civil servants, carrying out functions without any political leadership per se.

This would be thoroughly impossible were it not for the conceit of the Matrix—the aforementioned archive of deceased Time Lords. What is key to realize about this technology (and what Sandifer predictably misses) is that it is as its name suggests—a composited system of brains. It is not, in other words, a matter of millions of deceased Time Lords sitting around being talked to, but rather a gestalt entity. (The giveaway here is that when the Doctor and Goth enter it, they do not end up in a series of conversations with dead Time Lords, but in a virtual world.) Its job is “monitoring and predicting” what happens in the capital. This makes some sense of the main ceremonial chamber being known as the Panopticon. The term comes from Jeremy Bentham, who proposed a prison in which any prisoner could be monitored at any time. As used in Doctor Who, the term is most often taken to refer to the Time Lords’ own practice of watching events throughout space and time, but given the apparent role of the Matrix within Gallifreyan society, it can just as easily apply to the way in which they themselves can be watched at any moment by the Matrix.

The sense here, supported by the fact that Bentham’s panopticon was a prison designed to make controlling the prisoners easier, is of the Matrix as a system for tightly regulating Time Lord society. And given that it is comprised entirely of the minds and memories dead Time Lords, it necessarily is a regulation with an eye on the past. Things will run the way they have always run. It’s notable the extent to which this imposes a sense of stasis upon the Time Lords. Never mind their “life of ordered calm” or the fact that they’ve wholly forgotten how their own civilization formed because, apparently, the content of history is not as important to them as the form of it. Consider the rarely remarked upon line about how the Time Lords “turned aside from the barren road of technology.” There’s an overwhelming sense here that the Time Lords have cut themselves off from any notion of change or progress. Things are not supposed to advance. They’re not supposed to change. The process of history is instead defined by stasis—by the fact that it does not advance, and things do not change. 

The late theorist Mark Fisher famously coined the notion of “capitalist realism” to describe the sense that there is no imaginable alternative to capitalism. And while Holmes’s Time Lords are not overtly capitalist, they are clearly the product of a capitalist world. Indeed, Fisher’s idea can find few better representations than the Time Lords of The Deadly Assassin. Under capitalist realism, capitalism is simply a system that exists and self-perpetuates without end. It’s not run by anyone, it doesn’t answer to anyone, and it has no goals other than its own continued existence. And under Robert Holmes, it is not just contemporary society that runs this way, but time itself. In many ways, it is the most cynical and pessimistic vision ever offered by Doctor Who: the engine of history exists only to stay still, spinning its wheels in place, a machine stamping out endless images of itself—forever.

After All, You Have No Choice (The Pyramids of Mars)

It’s October 25th, 1975. Between now and November 15th  one person will die in a school shooting in Ottawa, fourteen people will die in the Netherlands following an explosion at a petroleum facility, and twenty-nine people will die when the Edmund Fitzgerald sinks on Lake Superior,.Furthermore, Wilma McCann will become the first of Peter Sutcliffe’s victims, Pier Paolo Pasolini will be repeatedly run over by his own car on a beach in Ostia, and Lionel Trilling will die of stomach cancer. Meanwhile, the world will slide ever closer to the eschaton, and Pyramids of Mars airs.

Of the stories to be held as consensus greats by Doctor Who fandom, Pyramids of Mars is one of the most puzzling. In many ways, it is the least remarkable story of its era. There are stories that are remarkably good, a few that are remarkably bad, and several that are remarkable in the sense that they’re unusual and unlike the things around them. Pyramids of Mars is none of these things. It does a variety of things well, it’s true, but none of them to such an extraordinary degree that it stands out for them, while on a number of fronts it has obvious and glaring deficiencies, most obviously the profoundly stupid riddle solving final episode. And in terms of the basic scope of the episode, it is very close to the archetypal Hinchcliffe-era story.

Which means that at long last we’re going to have to talk about the gothic.. If you ask any fan, after all, this is the defining aspect of the Hinchcliffe era. Unusually, this remains true even if you ask a fan who generally knows what they’re talking about. Degrees of nuance vary, from fans who dutifully repeat the “Hammer Horror” canard with or without ever having seen a single Hammer film to ones such as Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood, who are capable of actually formulating an account of the word that has content, noting the tendency of the era to feature long-defeated foes making a final, terrible return. This is indeed common: Revenge of the Cybermen, The Brain of Morbius, The Seeds of Doom, The Hand of Fear, The Deadly Assassin, The Talons of Weng-Chiang, and indeed  Pyramids of Mars all feature variations of this trope. And more to the point, it is indeed broadly in line with the gothic. One of the standard markers of the gothic is the sense of the unburied dead. To quote a sometime theorist and notable sexual abuser, “Hauntology, a category positing, presuming, implying a ‘time out of joint’, a present stained with traces of the ghostly, the dead-but-unquiet, estranges reality in an almost precisely opposite fashion to the Weird: with a radicalised uncanny – ‘something which is secretly familiar, which has undergone repression and then returned from it’.” (“Hauntological” being, essentially, “gothic” for people who like syllables.)

There is much to unpack here. The connection between death/burial and repression is non-intuitive, and yet its realization draws a line between the gothic romance, with its brooding hero who is inevitably harboring some sort of dark secret, and gothic horror, with its literal undead monsters. Obviously it is the latter cluster of narratives that most directly influences Doctor Who, but recognizing that this is not a separate genre from the gothic romance, and that death and repression exist in a spectrum as opposed to as distinctly different phenomena that are lumped under the gothic umbrella.

This becomes relevant when one begins to interrogate the nature of the gothic monster. While it is by no means a universal law, it is notable that the gothic monster most often harbors some sense of “exotic” foreignness. Sometimes this is a nearish sort of foreignness, such as Dracula’s close association with Eastern Europe. Other times it is more orientalist, with villains relying on “dark magics” from the east. While it’s not accurate to say that Doctor Who under Hinchcliffe and Holmes usually trends in this direction, it certainly does this, as in the infamously racist The Talons of Weng-Chiang and, of course, in Pyramids of Mars, which uses ancient Egypt as the source of its buried horrors. 

It is not coincidental that the mummy as a subject of horror originated alongside European colonization of Egypt. The question of what this particular horror represses is straightforward: populations that should have been brought to heel by the British Empire rising up to strike it down. Similarly, the evolution of the mummy as a monster is easy to track, from its 19th century literary role, in which mummies were mostly ghostly Egyptian queens who romanced European characters (“Egypt is sexy, let’s take it”) to the 1930s turn towards the villainous and destructive mummy, which fed not only off of the media fervor for the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 but also off of the fact that this was the year Egypt gained independence from the United Kingdom. From this perspective, it’s easy to see why the colonialist gothic made a resurgence in Doctor Who in 1975, following the swift decline of the British Empire as country after country declared its independence from the United Kingdom, each one rendering the anxiety of the repressed exotic Other rising up newly potent. (Note that, even though it avoids the classical gothic formulation, this is also what The Ark in Space does, another piece of evidence for the oft-expressed gothic/weird superposition argument.)

Unlike The Talons of Weng-Chiang, in which this anxiety is expressed with a shocking directness in the form of a barely reconstructed Fu Manchu riff in which the Fu Manchu character is played in appalling yellowface, Pyramids of Mars is capable of keeping the quiet part quiet. Its post-colonial anxiety is displaced by the simple fact that the horrible menace is not, in fact, Egyptian. Instead we’ve got a nice von Däniken thing where the Egyptian pantheon is actually just a recounting of a bunch of ancient aliens. This has its own racism (von Däniken, whose theories focused disproportionately on the accomplishments of civilizations that had been subject to European colonization, is essentially just saying that the cultures the Europeans wiped out were already colonial cultures and not “real” human civilization), but it still shifts the underlying dynamic away from “the repressed colonial subject rises up” and towards something more abstracted.

Indeed, Sutekh is unlike anything that has been seen in Doctor Who up to this point. The Doctor has faced a handful of evil cosmic entities before—the Animus in The Web Planet and the Great Intelligence in The Abominable Snowmen and The Web of Fear, both of which were read in 90s quasi-official fanfiction as actually being Lovecraftian Great Old Ones. But Sutekh is the first time he has faced something that is essentially depicted as an unreconstructed god. Much of the tension in Pyramids of Mars comes from the unusual degree of horror with which the Doctor treats the threat of Sutekh. He seems throughout the story to actually be afraid of the villain and of what might happen if he succeeds. This is the closest thing to a remarkable aspect about it, although variations on it are done in many of the other gothic Hinchcliffe stories (The Seeds of Doom is particularly notable for the way in which the Doctor is driven to an unusually serious panic). 

But Sutekh seems to earn it in new ways. For one thing, there’s the curious jaunt forward to Sarah Jane’s present (1980, allegedly) to see what will happen if the Doctor doesn’t stop him. This is difficult to reconcile with other depictions of how time works in Doctor Who. The Doctor (or more accurately Robert Holmes) makes a vague handwave about alternative time. But the real monent of importance is the Doctor’s assertion that Sutekh, as a being of “almost limitless power,” is able to destroy or rework the future at wll, in contrast to the altogether more mild capacity of ordinary humans to make small changes to the course of history. It’s not merely the trite lie of great man theory, but one in which the only great men are gods beyond the reach of mere humanity. 

More to the point, he’s a figure of stark and shocking nihilism who casually declares the goodness of reducing the world to “dust and darkness,” and who seeks to bring the “gift of death to all humanity.” This is not merely a Dalek-like commitment to destruction out of some lust for power or racial purity, but an embrace of destruction for destruction’s own sake. It is only barely an ideological evil—Sutekh represents a sort of absolute nullity.

This poses a significant quandary for our purposes. This project is, after all, committedly nihilistic. This is usually not a position that requires much internecine feuding, simply because you can usually avoid encountering fellow philosophical nihilists. But here we are suddenly and unexpectedly on the hook, faced with an arch-villain espousing a viewpoint that is recognizably nihilism. Suddenly and alarmingly, we’re on the hook for a character’s actual moral position. We have to decide what kind of nihilists we want to be, and how that relates to other flavors.

Thankfully, Sutekh is to nihilism what the Cybermen are to communism, which is to say that he’s a grotesque parody of the position used to be an easy villain. For one thing, he’s proactively nihilistic, which is to say that he actively desires to destroy things. This is not nihilism—it’s a lust for destruction. Nihilism is not nearly so ambitious. This is not to downplay the grim appeal of widespread destruction, which can and does feel at times like a just response to a world as capriciously broken and suicidal as ours, but this is not an ideology. It’s just anger. Righteous and justified, perhaps, but still just anger.

The truth is, as ever, far colder. It does not take a being of limitless power to destroy the future. Nor does it take a great man. All it ever took was humanity, driven mad with perceived power by the horror myth of individualism and let loose upon the planet. The horrid and inevitable consequences of attempting limitless growth within the aggressively finite confines of a planet trap are exactly what they seem upon a moment’s inspection: the cataclysmic destruction of the future. Nihilism does not require any sort of desire, nor does it preclude a sense of grief or sorrow about this fact. It merely acknowledges that it is, in actuality, a fact, and that there is no discernible historical process currently in progress that seems capable of arresting this fact.

It is tempting to make some claim like that this is the real gothic horror lurking beneath the world, but this is an oversimplification in pursuit of a trite ending. There is nothing repressed about the end of the world that anyone can see happening outside their window. There may be something Weird about it, but as interesting as that superposition may be (and certainly Doctor Who critics can’t stop banging on about it), it’s not entirely relevant to the matter at hand.

No, what haunts a doomed world is simpler and subtler: alternatives. What is repressed by a world bent on inevitable destruction is anything outside that inevitability. The possibility that there is any other sort of world than this one. Some of these possibilities exist in the past—suppressed and forgotten alternatives to the way the world is. Others exist in imagination. But they exist, lurking at the edges. This is the appeal of the gothic in the face of the nihilist imagination. It is not even an offer of salvation. If it is hope, it need only be hope for after the fall—the idea that maybe these repressed alternatives will, in the face of collapse, finally rise up and take hold. The possibility worth entertaining is not for some godlike being to destroy the future, nor for some heroic individual to change or shape it. It is that some line of thought, uncanny and unfavorable, might haunt it.

IDSG Ep47 - Silicon Valley Nazis (with Corey Pein)

This time, Daniel is joined by special guest Corey Pein, author of Live Work Work Work Die, to talk about Silicon Valley Nazis.

Content Warning as ever.

Permalink

IDSG is also on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, and Soundcloud

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Notes / Links:

Live Work Work Work Die at Powell's: https://www.powells.com/book/live-work-work-work-die-9781627794855

Corey Pein Twitter: https://twitter.com/coreypein

Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press: https://www.netflix.com/title/80168227

News From Nowhere Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/newsfromnowhere

The Portal with James O'Keefe: https://player.fm/series/the-portal/ep-26-james-okeefe-what-is-and-isnt-journalism-in-the-21st-century

The End Newsletter: https://t.co/jHnbFuSMVs?amp=1

Neoreaction a Basilisk: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Neoreaction-Basilisk-Essays-Around-Alt-Right/dp/1981596518

Strong And Fierce In You Like a Cancer (The Ark in Space)

It’s January 25th, 1975. Between now and February 15th, Edward Wilson and Robert McCullough will both die in attacks in Belfast, Clyde Hay will be the final viction of the Skid Row Slasher, a hundred and three civilians will be slaughtered by Ethiopian troops in Woki Duba, and two thousand and forty one will die in an earthquake in China. In addition, CEO of United Brands (formerly United Fruit) Eli M. Black will commit suicide shortly before it emerges that he paid a large bribe to the President of Honduras, P.G. Wodehouse will die of a heart attack in a hospital in Long Island, and Richard Ratsimandrava, the recently installed President of Madagascar, will be assassinated, sparking a civil war. Also, the world will slide ever closer to the eschaton, and The Ark in Space will air.

The Ark in Space marks the first time since The Daleks that Doctor Who has done an outright post-apocalyptic story, and the first time in which this happens on Earth, instead of on a Planet of the Convenient Metaphor People. Instead Doctor Who has entered the phase where it begins to fantasize about the end of the world. This fantasy, speaking broadly as opposed to about one specific television show, comes in two main flavors. The first is “this is awesome,” in which the spectacle of destruction is fixated upon and, often though not always, eroticized. This isn’t entirely impossible for Doctor Who to do—The Dalek Invasion of Earth is on the brink of it—but it’s ultimately unsuitable for a show in which the hero reliably saves the day.

Instead Doctor Who must indulge in the second flavor of apocalyptic fantasy: the post-apocalypse. One could easily write a book on the ways in which the post-apocalypse has been imagined, and it’s a serious possibility when I finally decide that the week to week grind of blogging is destroying my soul. But in lieu of a full taxonomy, let’s simply categorize The Ark in Space. The basic shape of its post-apocalypse—a time capsule of humanity held in suspended animation—is familiar. But what sort of humanity, exactly? There’s clearly been some sort of effort to select a particular type of person—Noah talks about balancing the “genetic pool” and fears the possibility of introducing “regressives” into the gene pool, while Vira talks about “dawn-timers” and “the chosen.” There’s unquestionably some eugenics going on here, in other words. Which makes the fact that the entire Ark appears to be white rather alarming. Sure, the Doctor has a nice line about “The entire human race in one room. All colours, all creeds. All differences finally forgotten,” but this is before the pods actually open up. 

The truth is that this appears to be an Ark full of Nazis. This was not Robert Holmes’s intention—he specified that Vira should be black. But director Rodney Bennett ignored this, and so we got an all-white ark full of eugenicists. One might fairly object that the Doctor probably wouldn’t be quite so gung ho about saving a bunch of Nazis, but the nature of Tom Baker’s performance largely covers for this. The decision to make the Doctor so giddily happy about danger and monsters in their own right—a sort of crazed thrill-seeker who finds mortal peril fun—makes it strangely believable that this Doctor could just sort of fail to notice that he’s surrounded by Nazis as long as there was a horrible slime monster to distract him. (Although given his comment that “Earth is for humans” later, maybe we don’t even need that justification.)

Which brings us to the horrible slime monster. The Wirrn are, first and foremost, creatures of consumption: they eat people and gain their memories and knowledges, and their plan is to simply consume the whole of humanity. This is a good match for the post-apocalyptic setting, or at least would have been for a post-apocalypse coming off of any of the ecological concerns of the past five seasons. Interestingly, however, the destruction of this Earth is largely arbitrary, outside of human fault. (And, as we learn in the next story, largely overstated.) Instead, the Wirrn find themselves peculiarly aligned to the accidental Naziism of the Ark itself. 

The key concept is the sense of bodily invasion, particularly the astonishing opening to episode three in which Noah and the Wirrn war for control of his rapidly colonized body. The scene is one of staggering body horror, but it’s impossible not to read this in light of Noah’s obsession with genetic purity an episode earlier. The horror isn’t just mind control and bubble wrap, but of bodily corruption and impurity. The Nazis are forcibly impregnated with another species’ babies, which then eat them alive. Worse yet, their goal isn’t simply destruction, but to absorb humanity’s knowledge and culture and then go on to propagate themselves along similar lines. It’s a literalizing of the white nationalist phobia of a “great replacement”—humanity carried on by a literal vermin race.

Pushing the interpretation even further is the Wirrn’s motivations. As they explain, “long ago humans came to the old lands. For a thousand years the Wirrn fought them, but you humans destroyed the breeding colonies.” The fact that Vira’s immediate response to this is to talk about the success of the “star pioneers” makes clear that this is the consequence of a human colonization effort. So the Wirrn are a diaspora population of a planet violently colonized by the humans. Only the fact that they’re not rats or something stops this interpretation from more or less running the table, and honestly insects is pretty much the second choice there anyway.

The problem with this interpretation is that along with being more or less convincing there’s not actually anything that undermines or subverts it. The story really does basically read as a white nationalist horror story. Its resolution—that Noah remembers his heritage long enough to destroy the Wirrn—is part and parcel of a story that consistently valorizes and romanticizes the nature of humanity while portraying a bunch of eugenicist white people as the whole of it. I mean, fuck, the story even does “Earth for the Earthmen” at one point. This isn’t an idiosyncratic bum note in a story that’s otherwise only standard levels of imperialism-fetishizing bullshit. It’s not even a story with a huge chunk of racism baked into a premise that is still being used to explore other things. This is a story with a coherent full-on fascist interpretation. 

That this is the first place in which we try to imagine a post-apocalyptic future is thus ironic and more than slightly frustrating. The post-apocalypse is interesting in no small part because it presents an opportunity for radical imagination. Utopian fiction is one thing, but its instincts are towards seamless continuity with the present—utopia is something that happens to this world. The post-apocalypse, however, imagines a radical break between the present and the future. What’s relevant here is not the rupture itself (although the nature of the end typically gives some clue to the aftermath—consider the relationship between a blameless apocalypse and a fascist post-apocalypse), but the fact that the post-apocalyptic creates an opportunity for starting over, designing a world from first principles.

This is clear in The Ark in Space. There are connections to the past, to be sure—Noah being arrested by the voice of Earth High Minister, for instance, makes it clear that the Ark is being run along the ideology of the regime that built it. Which is, of course, an obvious thing—indeed, a necessary component of the cryo-ark shape of post-eschaton. The result of this is that the Ark offers an aggressively rigid view of the future—Vira, for instance, is a med-tech, and Harry and the Doctor remark on her lack of inclination to try to stop them, with the Doctor explaining that “By the thirtieth century, human society was highly compartmentalised. Vira is a med-tech, and I suspect we're an executive problem.”

This isn’t uncommon—plenty of post-apocalyptic visions assume that an extremely regimented society in which everybody has strict rules is necessary. The logic is clear enough—in a crisis, a centralized system with clearly defined roles is often imposed as a means of handling it. (Think about Incident Command System-style management.) Given that there are few crises more absolute than the apocalypse, it stands to reason that society as a whole would orient along these lines, especially when the whole point of the post-apocalypse is to maintain cultural continuity with what came before. 

What’s interesting in all of this is the contrast between that and what we might expect from the credited writer, Robert Holmes. Holmes is renowned for his mocking disdain for bureaucracy and structure, and to be fair there are flashes of this in The Ark in Space, most obviously when the cranky engineer Rogan wakes up and immediately begins complaining about shoddy management. But for the most part, well, as we’ve already established the story does precious little to subvert authoritarianism. There are possible reasons for this—this isn’t Holmes writing his own idea, but rather Holmes hastily stepping in when a script fell through after the producer had already structured two other stories around its existence, and then the replacement script written under a variety of constraints in order to keep those other two stories afloat also fell through. And it’s fair to point out that The Ark in Space is unlike the stories Holmes writes when left to his own devices, with its focus in fundamentally different places than the bedraggled and larger than life hucksters Holmes prefers.

But ultimately, the easiest explanation is that Holmes has never been as simple as his most reductive fan legacy. Yes, Holmes is prone to displaying an anti-authoriy streak, but this is scarcely incompatible with fascism, which routinely involves a superficial anti-authority posture even as it pursues authoritarian ends. (Consider the extended fascination of various conservative politicians with being described as “mavericks.”) Holmes is, at the end of the day, a classically conservative writer—an ex-cop who winged about his taxes and wrote a story made up in a large part of anti-Chinese stereotypes. The existence of various fascinating pathologies within his writing that have led various critics to create reasonably persuasive leftist interpretations of some of his stories does not change the fact that Holmes himself is a firmly conservative writer. And so it can scarcely be called a surprise when one of his stories turns out to have an entirely plausible fascist reading as well. 

The usual line about The Ark in Space is to note its intense scariness. And it’s true, this is a story interested in the lurking, the crawling, and the barely spoken of dread—a pivot towards the era’s previously discussed fascination with the gothic. But here we are suspended in the middle of the pivot, dialing up the sense of horror while still remaining fixated on the Pertwee era’s love of the weird. And yet as we’ve seen, there is a lurking menace here. When Doctor Who began, fascism was a viscerally remembered, still-immediate threat. Eleven years and change later, it can hide in plain sight. The oft-made suggestion that Doctor Who and David Bowie moved in some sort of mystical synchronization is surely a couple of self-important bloggers over-hyping the obvious fact that both of them are constantly playing off the tensions and anxieties of the British public, but it’s probably worth noting that this is around the time that Bowie began sinking into his notorious Thin White Duke persona. Something was in the air, or more accurately, in the blood—an old infection thought suppressed but now flaring up anew, still quiet and in the background, only detectable in hindsight.

My summaries of history that open these essays focus on destruction, not mere politics. But it is perhaps worth adding one additional headline to the mix: the election of Margaret Thatcher as the leader of the Conservative party. My point is not anything so bland as the assertion that Thatcher was straightforwardly a fascist. But there’s a seamless line from her to Boris Johnson, a Prime Minister whose chief advisor came up in the Overcoming Bias and LessWrong forums, both places where the hyper-planned eugenicist approach of the Ark would have gotten a perfectly approving reception.

Plenty of people have spoken of the nightmares that The Ark in Space gave a generation of British children. But the real nightmares it augured festered elsewhere, in a world beginning its final, fatal descent into madness.

I Never Liked This Planet (Invasion of the Dinosaurs)

It’s January 12th, 1974. Between now and February 16th, twelve people will die in an IRA bmombing of a coach bus on the M62, and a hundred and seventy three people will die in a fire in Sāo Paulo. The implementation of the three-day week will cause massive economic strain on the United Kingdom, which does not directly kill anybody, but is linked to large spikes in crime and mental illness. In addition, Batman creator Bill Finger will die of a heart attack and movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn will die of old age. Beyond that, the world moves ever closer to the eschaton and Invasion of the Dinosaurs airs on the BBC.

There are two key strands of thought in Invasion of the Dinosaurs, both of which come filtered through the oddities of Malcolm Hulke’s politics. The first, as noted by Tat Wood in About Time, sees Hulke responding to The Green Death by offering his own take on the conspiracy-minded thriller within Doctor Who. Wood proceeds to suggest several antecedents for this, making a selective but nevertheless fairly broad accounting of the genre to show where Hulke might have been pulling in contrast to Sloman and Letts, whose work Wood frames primarily in terms of monster movies.

The real place to look for the change, however, is in the two stories’ treatment of the left. In The Green Death, Professor Jones and the nuthutch are presented as an idyllic alternative to Global Chemicals and indeed to modernity in general. They are without fail good people who do the right thing—people into whom our trust can and should be placed. In Invasion of the Dinosaurs, meanwhile, the left are the bad guys. Brilliant visionaries with noble and respectable priorities consistently turn out to be antagonists, whether they’re plotting the wholesale slaughter of most of the world or angrily crushing all dissent and rejecting any threats to their worldview. Lip service is constantly given to the importance of environmentalism, but actual environmentalists all turn out to be the villains.

It is difficult not to read an autobiographical bent in this. A former member of the Communist Party writing a story in which the leftists are all corrupt, megalomaniacal, and profoundly closed-minded is difficult not to read as a settling of accounts, with Hulke writing his own frustrations with leftist radicalism into the story. Certainly what he ends up with is a laundry list of standard leftist failure modes—indeed, not for the first time within Hulke’s Doctor Who career he’s ended up writing Doctor Who that serves comfortably as right-wing propaganda. The failures of Grover and Ruth are essentially the things that the Tories and Republicans accuse leftism of doing, whether silencing dissent or actually being mass murderers. Ruth, in particular, given that she’s played by Carmen Silvera, who would eventually become well known as a comedic accent from her appearances on ‘Allo ‘Allo, feels almost exactly like what Gareth Roberts would do with Doctor Who if he weren’t too much of an absolute asshole to actually get employment on it anymore.

In the face of this, the Doctor’s lip service about environmentalism feels intensely hollow. His final observation that greed is destroying the world is presented with agonizing pessimism, with the Brigadier shrugging it off and everybody going back to normal. The story believes in ecological catastrophe while adamantly rejecting the idea that there might be anything to do about it. It’s perspective is of an ex-leftist not in the sense of having abandoned the desires or ideals, but in the sense of having abandoned all actual hope or investment in progress. This is relatable in its bleakness, but still striking within the glam aesthetics of the Pertwee era.

Which bring us to the other major strand of this story. The Pertwee era, fueled by the fact that its production schedule was appreciably less likely to kill its lead actors, stretched on for five years where the Hartnell and Troughton eras stopped at three. And a practical result of this was that in its later years it discovered nostalgia for the first time in the series. This began, unsurprisingly, with the tenth season, which opened with The Three Doctors before coming around to a retro-fueled story that deliberately imitated the Hartnell-era The Daleks Masterplan. But with Pertwee’s final season, with everyone reflecting on the impending end of an era, the gaze turned inward, with the Pertwee era being largely nostalgic for itself. Across five stories we have another retro Dalek story, a remake of a Season Nine story, an era-capping grand statement, and, well, this.

On the surface, this is not an unduly nostalgic story. It’s a UNIT story, sure, but that’s only nostalgic inasmuch as the show is no longer earthbound and so doesn’t have this as a forced default anymore. And yet throughout the story there’s a recurring motif of UNIT being treated in a way rooted in its intense familiarity. From the wry humor of the Brigadier’s meeting with the Doctor to the overstated nobility of Benton’s invitation to the Doctor to knock him out, this is a story that leans on the length of time that UNIT has been around and the way in which the audience is assumed to have affection for them.

The key part of this, of course, is Mike Yates. It is Mike who gets the plot with any motion, becoming a traitor to UNIT. All reports of how this plot point was developed say that it was a response to his being mind controlled into betraying UNIT in The Green Death. But this isn’t actually pointed to in any active way. There’s no discussion of Mike’s trauma or sense that he’s had it rough recently. Hulke fills in a little bit of this in the novelization, suggesting actively that Yates has been under a lot of strain, but in the actual televised story there’s no real accounting for why he becomes a traitor. He simply does, largely because he sort of has already.

One school of thought, favored by people like Philip Sandifer who view Doctor Who as essentially a progress narrative, is that this marks the beginning of character development as a thing in Doctor Who. And maybe it does—certainly there are other green shoots of this in the vicinity of the Pertwee era, such as Jo’s developing hypnosis resistance in Frontier in Space. And there’s a fair case to be made for character development from here to Planet of the Spiders where Mike redeems himself after his betrayal here. But the betrayal itself is unmotivated, even if they take advantage of it down the road.

No, a more accurate assessment is that Mike Yates turns traitor simply to wring some emotion out of the audience’s assumed investment in UNIT. Yates is a sensible choice for this, with the Brigadier being unthinkable and Benton being too square-jawed and, for that matter, beloved by female viewers. Yates, on the other hand, has always been hobbled by Richard Franklin’s performance, which leaves him as a character familiar enough to audiences to make his betrayal seem big, but in no way beloved enough to make it upsetting. It is, in other words, still basically rooted in a sense of the era’s nostalgia for itself.

But even as the production begins to buy its own hype and eat its own tail, Hulke retains a bracing suspicion of nostalgia. The specific goal of the evil leftists is to turn back time to before civilization ruined it so they can try again—a project called Operation Golden Age. The key scene on this front is the Doctor’s confrontation with Mike Yates (which, in fitting with the lack of actual arc around his betrayal, never actually gets to a point where the Doctor changes Mike’s mind), which contains the story’s best known line, the Doctor’s adage that “there never was a golden age.” This is framed in broader terms, as a commentary on a political tendency, but it is difficult not to read it as an aesthetic barb as well.

The commonality between these two strands is straightforward: in neither case is Hulke offering any sort of positive alternative. Just as there is no visible option for fixing the pollution of the world beyond the corrupt and maniacal leftists, there is no forward vision in amidst the rejection of nostalgia. Invasion of the Dinosaurs, in all regards, comes to a dead end and stops. 

It is worth, then, reflecting on the Pertwee era. As we have noted, the era combines an innate conservatism with a curious and appealing willingness to portray a hostile and antihumanist planet. These instincts are not, of course, incompatible—just ask Nick Land. But one of them, at least, seems basically accurate, while the other seems like the underlying reason why the first is so likely to prove lethal on an upsetting scale. (She writes on the day the first COVID-19 case is confirmed in her county.) Nevertheless, their comorbidity is ultimately a dead end. The notion of a hostile planet, when combined with conservatism, cannot actually go anywhere. The only possible responses to the planet’s murderous indifference are intensely radical. Conservatism, even when pushed into the frenzied and manically reactionary mode of Nick Land, is unable to offer any response other than a grim slouch towards extinction. 

The Pertwee era attempts to deny this gravity with an incandescent burst of glam aesthetics and an outward gaze, both in the now discredited notion that there’s any future in space and in the quasi-Christian fantasy of extraterrestrial intervention somehow saving humanity. (This is, of course, intensely compatible with glam, being the basic hook of Ziggy Stardust.) But these are both entirely fantasies. Space is so vast and inhospitable as to be an entirely useless future without casual violation of the basic laws of physics. Aliens are not going to come, and if they do the reason to believe they’ll save us instead of being as implacably hostile as the planet are a short list that consists entirely of the statement “I am a naive and blinded utopianist.”

Put another way, the Pertwee era sees Doctor Who make a simultaneous investment in the weird and disinvestment in the notion of change and multiplicity. This combination is perverse, and could ride successfully on that perversity for some time, but as Hulke deftly shows here it is ultimately a dead end, with nothing to show beyond its surface perversity. It would obviously be absurd for me to treat “nihilist” as a pejorative but there’s a hollowness to the way in which this era has nothing to offer but a doomed world and a CSO effect. Nihilism need not be self-absorbed, superficial, and certainly not so unproductive.

We will have plenty of time to discuss how and where Doctor Who turns from here. The discussion of the Pertwee era as largely weird, however, tips my hand at least somewhat, as for that matter does even a cursory knowledge of the forthcoming Hinchcliffe era of the show. The answer, obviously, will not be towards something that is in some sense productive. Its orientation towards the weird or towards the notion of a hostile planet may change, but at the end of the day its conservatism cannot and will not. Nevertheless, there are things to do with the apocalypse besides sit, rapturously consumed by how stylish it is. Hulke, who has himself turned away from any productive vision in favor of becoming a cynical ex-communist, has no sense of what those things might be. But by demanding them, he’s still shown himself to have more foresight than almost anyone else in the room. 

IDSG Ep46 - Tom Kawczynski (with guest Crash Barry)

Permalink here: http://idontspeakgerman.libsyn.com/website/46-tom-kawcynzski-with-crash-barry

Daniel is joined by Crash Barry, Editor-at-Large of The Mainer, to talk about Tom Kawczynski (and a little bit about Jared Howe).

Content Warnings.

Show Notes and Links to follow.

Stay safe everyone. 

The Masters of the Earth (The Green Death)

It’s May 19th, 1973. Between now and June 23rd, forty-eight will die in a plane crash in India, six will die in a pair of IRA bombings in Coleraine, thirteen will die in Argentina when snipers open fire on protesters in the Ezeiza massacre, and six year old boy in Kingston upon Hull will die in the first fire of Peter Dinsdale’s near decade-long spree of arson. This relatively sparse major death toll masks the steady progression of the world towards the eschaton. Also, The Green Death airs.

The Green Death offers a genuinely uncanny trick of perspective—like one of those lenticular images that shifts as you move in front of it. One second it’s the most 1973 thing imaginable, a cornucopia of glam semiotics. The next it’s a strangely contemporary thing, with concerns that have not aged a day. The obvious explanation for this is that very little has changed in forty-seven years—corporations continue to be killing the world according to the logic of a supposedly dispassionate algorithm. Sure, the climate crisis has edged out industrial waste and the sheer size of the computers has ratcheted downwards, but the basic concerns really are the same. We knew what needed to be done a half-century ago, we didn’t do it, and now we’re watching nervously as the inevitable cascade begins.

None of this is wrong per se. The Green Death’s earnest environmentalism really has aged quite well, looking more like clear-headed moral certainty than po-faced lecturing. The story remains stylistically of its time, but in a way that feels like a reverse remake—a story from the 2020s that got a campy 1970s remake. This, however, is veering dangerously into Philip Sandifer territory. Let’s not get too wrapped up in supernatural implications. After all, this is scarcely the first oddly prescient Doctor Who story we’ve seen, and you can hardly be surprised that 1973 is more prescient than 1963. Watching the present emerge into focus is an even more boring way to watch Doctor Who than trying to decode the secret alchemical messages about utopia.

Let’s ask instead what’s changed between this and the previous evil computer story, The War Machines. The most obvious difference is between WOTAN and BOSS on the level of personality. Which, I suppose the more basic one is that BOSS has a personality. WOTAN is simply a system of automation run amok—an analogue for capitalism where the wrong value is pursued with a ruthless maximalism that suddenly highlights the flaw in the value. And this is true of most of the computers up to this point. Consider the unthinking rigidity of the computer in The Ice Warriors, or, more broadly, the treatment of the Cybermen as forces of dispassionate, emotionless control. In every case, computers are fundamentally remote, doing what they are programmed to do, only to an extent catastrophically unanticipated by their programmers.

BOSS is a tremendous departure from this. As explained, he was connected to a human brain and learned the vast and magic power of inefficiency, with which he ascended to godhood. There’s a lot going on here, very little of which makes “sense” in the conventionally understood meaning of that word, but all of which is interesting. The most obvious thing to notice is that the anxiety over computers has advanced to the point where defensiveness has gone from being a matter of basic principle (“There's nothing more important than human life. Machines cannot govern man!”) to self-justifying, anxiously offering reasons why humans might be superior to computers. More to the point, the justifications have a desperate, slightly unhinged quality to them. Humans are better than computers because inefficiency is good actually. It’s magical thinking—a desperate clutch based not on principle but on a frenzied insistence that humanity must be better than computers and therefore that any trait humanity has must be valuable. Even in BOSS’s description of it, there’s a clear element of magical thinking: “the secret of human creativity is inefficiency. The human brain is a very poor computer indeed. It makes illogical guesses which turn out to be more logical than logic itself.” There’s no reasoning here—just blind hope in the supernatural efficacy of human frailties.

But alongside that is another, equally significant shift. When WOTAN rose up and tried to take over the world it attained a level of sentience, but remained fundamentally without personality. It spoke, but only in the sense of giving directions and orders. BOSS, on the other hand, absolutely drips with personality. It is alternately funny, sardonic, and jealous, routinely stealing scenes from everyone around it. This is, in other words, even more of a fantasy than WOTAN, marking Doctor Who’s first experiments with the idea of artificial intelligence producing actual people.

Like most first efforts, this is incoherent—an episode after his bemusing praise of inefficiency, BOSS gets a nice villainous rant about maximizing efficiency, while the Doctor delivers a stirring speech about the awful consequences of this efficiency. And the story is still doing the classic banal nonsense of “the computer can’t handle a paradox.” So the move towards thinking of artificial intelligences as people is incomplete—indeed, the story seems to be betraying itself slightly, accidentally presenting BOSS as more human than it means to by sheer dint of John Dearth’s inspired vocal performance. 

That stirring speech of the Doctor’s is revealing as to more of what’s going on here. To quote it in full, “Stevens, listen to me. You've seen where this efficiency of yours leads. Wholesale pollution of the countryside. Devilish creatures spawned by the filthy by-products of your technology. Men walking around like brainless vegetables. Death. Disease. Destruction.” This isn’t just ecological catastrophe, but something more qlippothic and in line with cosmic horror. There’s a sense of being closer to something like Inferno’s “this planet screaming out its rage.” The oversized deadly maggots are of course a pretty standard “mutated by toxic waste” trope, but the emphasis isn’t actually there—the word “mutation” only appears once, as Cliff Jones theorizes that “oil waste from Global Chemicals must have contaminated some of the maggots causing an atavistic mutation.”  The specific technobabble here, with the sense of the maggots reaching back to some primordial form, emphasizes the sense of planetary revenge, as does the fact that what Global Chemicals are doing in practice is somehow extracting more petrol out of a given quantity of crude oil. It makes further sense that this would be the scheme of a computer that has merged its consciousness with humanity and ascended into some supposedly higher order of being—the sense of making things that are unnatural and should not be as a grave sin. 

This gets at one of the places where The Green Death seems least prescient. The apparent environmental concern and the reason that Jones and his followers apparently have for opposing Global Chemicals’ approach is that “we’re using up the world’s supply of oil.” This oversimplifies slightly, as later Jones suggests that they’re “doubling the atmospheric pollution,” which one could argue is the first acknowledgment of global warming in Doctor Who, but it’s a stretch, and in the same sentence Jones expresses the same concern about exhausting the oil supply, with the turn to renewable energy seemingly being more about not running out of energy than about the environmental impact of it. This doesn’t quite line up with modern thought on environmentalism, skewing more towards a model of “fossil fuels are bad because we’re pillaging the Earth,” where the Earth’s response of “I curse thee with my death maggots” reads as a response to the hubris of trying to get even more out of her crude oil than she’s already giving.

Philip Sandifer, looking at this, has one of his periodic moments of actual insight when he notes that the result of this is an opposition between two forms of putrefaction—Global Chemicals’ maggots and the nuthutch’s fungus. But in focusing on the question of which form of putrefaction is superior, Sandifer misses the real question, which is why the world has been reduced to two forms of putrefaction in the first place. (Ironic that a self-identified postmodernist would so spectacularly miss the opportunity to question a binary opposition, but that’s Sandifer for you, and, for that matter, postmodernists.) 

This is, after all, not a small matter. Putrefaction, in an alchemical sense (which of course is how Sandifer spins it, being almost as obsessed with Wikipedia summaries of occultism than he is with postmodernism), is a concept of death, destruction, and confrontation with the abyss as a productive matter. It is the destruction before one begins to build towards higher things. And so by blinding accepting The Green Death’s hippy-inflected love of wholesome fungus, Sandifer ultimately sells out the actual purpose of the exercise. After all, there is nothing particularly dark or destructive about the nuthutch. They’re a bunch of loveable lefty kids. Fungus may work as a symbol of putrefaction, but there’s no serious putrefaction in what the nuthutch offers. Ultimately, after all, they’re working with heavily processed fungus—typically powders. If this is alchemy, they are off to the albedo or the rubedo. That what they’re doing represents a better approach to life than Global Chemicals is thus obvious.

But if so, then the putrefaction of Global Chemicals has its place in the alchemical cycle as well. Which means that it cannot be idly dismissed as without value. Indeed, if one wanted to construct a serious postmodernist occultist reading of The Green Death, this seems the only angle to take. If The Green Death can be said to be setting up an alchemical hierarchy, then this hierarchy still positions Global Chemicals and their giant death maggots in a position of sacred privilege. Whatever enlightenment this story is offering, it requires a confrontation with the putrefied horror. 

What might we conclude from this? A truth worth acknowledging: the planet is hostile to human hubris. If life itself is not inimicable to its existence, at the very least capitalist civilization is. The planet resents human ambition—it resents attempts to master it. And more to the point, its resentment takes blunt and murderous form, unleashing Weird terrors upon humanity for its sins. This is exaggerated, yes. And yet there is an essential truth to it—one that is worth expressing in this period. After all, even if the Doctor is no longer earthbound (and indeed, his ability to pop off to Metebelis Three is a key plot point), this story is still a part of the period where he was, relying on the supporting cast introduced when the show was reimagined without the TARDIS

And the truth is, there is no TARDIS. Nor are there spaceships, or anything else waiting to take us off of the planet. As discussed back in the Inferno essay, the Earth is a terrifyingly inescapable prison—a rock surrounded by an infinite vacuum, tethered to a single power source in the form of a slowly dying star. This is not a situation that seeks to foster life. Indeed, a contemplation of the larger universe makes a compelling case that civilization is only meant to exist within strict limits. Otherwise, why configure the place with such deadly vast expanses of nothing? If the cosmos has any relationship with life, it is to try to ensure that it is as rare and contained as possible. And it is good that Doctor Who acknowledges this during the period where it largely decides to forego imagining alternatives to Earth. The Green Death does not just offer a useful environmental message, but a grimly realist warning: humanity lives at the mercy of its jailer.