Philip Sandifer's Blog, page 9

A Vermin Race (The Sea Devils)

It’s February 26th, 1972. Between now and April 1st, 125 will die in a coal sludge spill in West Virginia, 19 will die in an avalanche on Mount Fuji, and the Easter Offensive wll begin in the Vietnam War, lasting into Octoer and resulting in somewhere between fifty and a hundred thousand deaths. In addition, M.C. Escher will die in a hospital in the Netherlands, the world will inch ever closer to the eschaton, and The Sea Devils will air.

Within the innate conservatism of the Pertwee era, Malcolm Hulke remains one of the most interesting figures. At one point in his life, he was a member of the Communist Party, and while this membership at some point lapsed, he appears to have been a lifelong socialist and leftist. And yet the era of Doctor Who he’s associated with is one of its most resolutely conservative. More to the point, his stories are not the ones that most challenge that tendency. Three of his Pertwee stories are earth-based military action pieces that trend away from the era’s nominally progressive glam instincts. The other two are space-based stories displaying the most uncomplicated liberalism imaginable. The overall impression is of the sort of bland centrist who imagines himself to be progressive—a Buttigieg voter, to use a contemporary metaphor. 

But implicit within that image is the presence of some genuinely progressive instinct that is subsequently smothered under the blandness of centrist liberalism—a moment in which some sort of serious political engagement is entertained. And Hulke generally displays that as well—Colony in Space, with its setup of a bunch of working class miners oppressed by an evil corporation, is probably the clearest case, but the interest in the moral question of how legitimate the Silurians’ claim to the planet is in their eponymous story is also clear. In both cases, the end results are disappointing, but you can see the vague consideration of being interesting before the stories commit to their worst political instincts.

But neither of these stories compare with The Sea Devils, which elevates political confusion into an art form. On the one hand you have Hulke revisiting the concept of The Silurians. On the other, you have Barry Letts dictating that they do a propaganda piece for the Royal Navy. The result is a tangle of influences and directions. One case, pushed by Tat Wood, is that the story (at least as director Michael Briant conceives it) is about consumption, shot from a perspective where the Sea Devils are the sense of normality and the humans are the weird ones, as apparently evidenced by the (admittedly peculiar) frequency with which they’re seen eating and the odd camera angles. It’s certainly an interesting interpretation, but even Wood is forced to admit that it’s only marginally in the actual story. You certainly could do a story about the indigenous lizard people of the world and their horrified bewilderment at human consumption—it’s even a pretty good idea for a story. But Hulke hasn’t actually written that story, and Briant can’t conjure it into existence with a few odd camera angles and shots of sandwich eating.

What Hulke has actually written is immensely compromised, even for him. One cannot imagine that Royal Navy propaganda was a brief that he was excited about. Nor is there any reason to think he’d be straightforwardly enthused by “that thing you wrote two years ago—can you do it again only with the Master?” There was, in other words, precious little room to manuever here, given how much time was needed showing off the shiny military hardware the Navy had agreed to lend them, or giving the Doctor and the Master a tediously long sword fight. The result, along with the fact that he’s got one fewer episode than he had last time around, is that not only can Hulke not expand on the moral debate from The Silurians, he has to dramatically contract it. Compared with their land-based cousins, the Sea Devils are a bunch of war-crazed brutes—they entertain the notion of peace only briefly before getting talked by the Master into war, and seem ready to respond to the slightest provocation with declarations that no mercy will be shown. They also simply have less sense of culture and personality—only one of them speaks, and so we never see them interacting with each other. The Silurians can be fairly criticized as being overly scant in its treatment of the titular creatures, but it’s nothing compared to The Sea Devils, where everything has to be condensed down to two scenes. The issue is even more pronounced in the novelization, where Hulke ends up reducing the period where the Sea Devils contemplate peace to a mere half a page.

In the absence of any treatment of this moral debate, then, what do we have? Well, the truth of it is that we have what may be the single most racist story in Doctor Who. True, it does not actually directly invoke any racial groups, but at the end of the day, The Sea Devils and The Silurians are both stories about indigenous populations responding to colonization. True, they put their fingers on the scale, creating colonialism without colonists by having the indigenous reptiles retreat into hibernation in error and then try to reclaim their land from an entirely oblivious human population. This is an appalling sleight of hand that serves no purpose other than trying to construct a story about colonialism in which the colonial power is entirely blameless, lacking any culpability. It is entirely divorced from the reality of any actual people to whom the indigenous reptiles might be equated, removing the reality of generational trauma and invariably brutal oppression. 

But with The Sea Devils Hulke takes things even further than he did with The Silurians. There, as mentioned, the Silurians contemplate peace, and display internal political tensions. Ultimately the Doctor is forced to act against them, but even then moves not to kill them, but rather to force them back into hibernation with a goal of negotiating peace again later. (The Brigadier foils this by killing them after all, but that’s presented as horrible, if not horrible enough to stay a problem more than a few lines into The Ambassadors of Death.) Here, though, the Sea Devils are utterly unsympathetic—uninterested in compromise and determined to wipe out humanity. This serves to justify hostile action against them—indeed, outright genocide, as the Doctor ends things by blowing up the Sea Devil nest in exactly the manner he condemned the Brigadier for two seasons earlier. This time, apparently, it’s fine. Sure, there’s some hand-wringing, with Hulke writing the government minister who pushes the humans to attack as a noxious buffoon, but at the end of the day this is a story that portrays indigenous people as bloodthirsty warmongers deserving of genocide. As, ultimately, is evidenced by the fact that the indigenous people are called the fucking Sea Devils, which is to say that a disparaging slur used against native people (see Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden,” specifically “your new-caught sullen people / half devil and half child,” for instance) is worked directly into their name. And how do they get this name? The Doctor just calmly parrots the description given by the repair man who sees them, apparently thinking that this is a perfectly acceptable thing to call the indigenous reptiles. It is, to put it bluntly, monstrously fucked up, depicting literally the worst possible biases to have against indigenous populations. 

So Hulke ends up writing propaganda for the Royal Navy that goes well beyond merely putting a lot of ships in it, but that instead serves as an apologia for the centuries of imperialist warfare conducted by that same navy. It’s a shocking result from a writer nominally so leftist he used to be a communist—one that confirms, in many ways, just how toxic the basic conception of the series right now is. From its decision to center proceedings around the military in the first place to its heavy reliance on a black-hatted villain whose motivations consist purely of “be evil,” this is an era of the show that is singularly unable to offer the sort of nuance that a story about indigenous people requires. 

That, at least, is the charitable view. But the fact that the Silurians (let’s just use that term for both species, having unpicked the ugliness of the title) have turned up in multiple other eras of Doctor Who largely puts the lie to this. The truth is that taking out the worst instincts of the Pertwee era do nothing to fix the problems here. When the terrestrial and aquatic versions both come back in Warriors of the Deep, the same exact problems we see here are in evidence. A generation later, Chris Chibnall attempted to revamp them for the Matt Smith era, and while he sands off the worst instincts of the two Hulke stories, most obviously by having one of the Silurians be responsible for forcing his people back into hibernation and by not having anyone commit fucking genocide at the end, he still relies on the presence of an entrenched and unwaveringly xenophobic faction within Silurian society, against which he’s only willing to pair humans who are reacting out of sympathetic fears like “our son has been kidnapped” and “one of us has been poisoned and is dying.” The closest anyone has come to making the concept anything other than politically toxic comes with Steven Moffat’s subsequent development of Madame Vastra, who essentially works by detaching the concept from the idea of a larger indigenous culture, and then making a stereotypical and racist idea of the spiritually wise native woman work by pairing it with a bunch of dissonant elements that don’t go with the stereotype, making her a lesbian cannibal Sherlock Holmes riff. The result arguably avoids being politically offensive in any serious way, but at the expense of being anything other than titillating spectacle.

The truth is that to do a Silurian story with any moral integrity, you’d have to approach it in a way that is fundamentally and massively hostile to the entire cultural context in which Doctor Who is made. Doctor Who is a show that is made by an extremely wealthy country—a country with one of the largest economies in the world due virtually entirely to the fact that it spent centuries violently looting the world. To do a story about the displaced indigenous population of the world that is at all minded towards justice, one would have to fundamentally reject the very idea that the United Kingdom should exist in the first place. The thread that Hulke half-heartedly offers in the novelization, where the Master’s case against peace with humanity is based not on the events of The Silurians but on the environmental damage and extinctions caused by capitalism, would have to be expanded into the primary meat of the story, with the Silurians asking, in all seriousness, why humanity should be allowed further stewardship of a planet they have plunged into a mass extinction. The genocidal warmongers would have to belong, as in practice they do, to human society, whose reaction to the existence of an indigenous population would have to be the same disinterested sadism with which the British historically attempted genocide. Perhaps a near-future setting in which “peace” has been established with the Silurians only for the humans to attempt to manufacture a famine. The viable solution, presented as the only way with the same grim solemnity with which the Doctor repeatedly slaughters the Silurians, would have to be for human civilization and capitalism to renounce its control over the world, giving way to a fundamentally different shape of society—one in which the Silurians are at the very least equal stakeholders.

This is, of course, impossible—for one thing, it would force us to confront the fact that there is literally not a single future-based story in which the Silurians are shown as a major part of Earth culture. (The 90s Virgin New Adventures made fleeting effort to establish otherwise, but the gravity of the TV series is inexorable.) But more to the point, it would involve violating the implicit line that Doctor Who simply cannot cross—the one that involves seriously considering the possibility that liberal capitalism might not be an eternal structure. It would, in short, involve being a show about the possibilities of the universe and about imagining new things, instead of the cold reality of what it is: a show about projecting liberal capitalism onto every textual surface imaginable in the name of reassuring a nation fat on the blood-drenched wealth of empire that its most rancid paranoias are valid.

IDSG Ep45 - Nazis for Bloomberg

New Episode Alert!  A shiny new news round-up episode, featuring Cantwell News, Atomwaffen Division, Nick Fuentes, and Nazis talking about Michael Bloomberg.

Sorry about how lackadaisical we are about posting IDSG here. 

Content Warnings.

Libsyn: http://idontspeakgerman.libsyn.com/website/episode-45-nazis-for-bloomberg

Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-841528318-482060319/idsg-ep45-nazis-for-bloomberg

IDSG on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1

IDSG on Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/idontspeakgerman/i-dont-speak-german

IDSG on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5UzvkKfT9fzziZwR966Q81

*

Notes/Links:

Rachel Sheffield and Robert Rector, "The War on Poverty After 50 Years." The source of Episode 44's "22 trillion dollars" claim. https://www.heritage.org/poverty-and-inequality/report/the-war-poverty-after-50-years

Christopher Cantwell Trial Docket: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/16743597/united-states-v-cantwell/?filed_after=&filed_before=&entry_gte=&entry_lte=&order_by=desc

Christopher Cantwell Order of Detention Pending Trial: https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nhd.53269/gov.uscourts.nhd.53269.20.0.pdf

"In this case, the government argued that the defendant’s release posed a risk of flight and danger to the community. After weighing the evidence - taking into consideration the pretrial services report, the parties’ proffers, pleadings, and the testimony of Brett Fernald, FBI Task Force Officer - and balancing the factors laid out in 18 U.S.C. § 3142(g), the court finds that the government met its burden of proof on dangerousness, but failed to show by a preponderance of the evidence that the defendant is a flight risk. The government established by clear and convincing evidence that there are no conditions that will reasonably assure the safety of any other person and the community. The defendant is charged with crimes that involve threats of violence. The evidence against the defendant, which includes a copy of the threatening communication and defendant’s admission that he sent the message, is strong."

Hilary Sargent Twitter: http://twitter.com/lilsarg

Hilary Sargent, "United States v. Christopher Cantwell." https://twitter.com/lilsarg/status/1231973006618046464?s=20

Nick Martin, The Informant, "The Atomwaffen Evidence." https://www.informant.news/p/the-atomwaffen-evidence

Nick Martin, The Informant, "Key Atomwaffen Member to be Sentenced." https://www.informant.news/p/key-atomwaffen-member-to-be-sentenced

Angry White Men. "Far-Right Extremists React to the Coronavirus With Conspiracies and Racist Mockery." https://angrywhitemen.org/2020/02/14/far-right-extremists-react-to-the-coronavirus-with-conspiracies-and-racist-mockery/

Angry White Men, "YouTube Finally Bans Racist Podcaster Nick Fuentes." https://angrywhitemen.org/2020/02/15/youtube-finally-bans-racist-podcaster-nick-fuentes/

AFPAC videos: https://www.youtube.com/user/Jrgnj15/videos

Twenty-seven second clip of Michelle Malkin spewing Nazi talking points at AFPC: https://twitter.com/JewishWorker/status/1234216230136971265?s=20

Wikipedia page for "In Defense of Internment," by Michelle Malkin, 2004. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Defense_of_Internment

Michael Bloomberg on Stop-and-Frisk in 2015. https://twitter.com/parscale/status/1227236086176518144

"You are arresting kids for marijuana that are all minorities. Yes, that's true. Why? Because we put all the cops in the minority neighborhoods. Yes, that's true. Why do we do it? Because that's where all the crime is. And the way you get the guns out of the kids' hands is to throw them up against the walls and frisk them."

Bloomberg Press Conference 2013 declaring intention to appeal ruling that Stop and Frisk was unconstitutional in NY State. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iw8BMrF7r8Y

NPI/Radix, "Based Bloomberg?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6Vqa...

 

 

The Timeless Child Review

I suppose there’s nowhere to begin other than the big reveal, given that it is by an outlandish margin the single worst lore reveal in the entire history of Doctor Who. Making the Doctor the secret origin of all of the Time Lords is absolutely appalling—the sort of “the main character must be the center of the mythology” crap that Doctor Who is historically at its best when it rebels against. Instead of being the schlubby mediocrity who ran away and stumbled through becoming a hero without ever realizing that was what they were working towards, the Doctor is now the Most Specialist Time Lord That Ever Did Time Lord, with magic powers above and beyond the other Time Lords and origins stretching back beyond even the days of Rassilon. The series is now committed to an endless parade of reveals about the secret history of Gallifrey, all of which the Doctor was apparently there for. It’s genuinely terrible—a reveal that takes the dumbest instincts of the Virgin era and strips off the brakes and hedges. It’s not the Other but the Doctor themself that’s at the heart of Gallifreyan history now. It’s as if the Cartmel Masterplan fucked the Leekley Bible and then gave the illegitimate child away to Ian Levine to foster.

Astonishingly, though, none of that actually captures how bad it is. It’s worth actually explaining the reveal out loud with words, so as to actually make your mind confront what happened here. The Shabogans are the indigenous people of Gallifrey who became the Time Lords by stealing the secrets of regeneration from the Doctor’s DNA. Seriously. Say that sentence out loud. Walk up to your bathroom mirror and look yourself in the eyes as you deliver those exact words in an even and calm tone. Repeat until you can do it with conviction, without bursting out laughing. It’ll be a good, healing experience.

As for the episode around it… it’s tempting to just derisively laugh and say “what episode around it.” The Doctor stands around for forty-five minutes while men explain the plot to her. Then, for a resolution, a character whose narrative importance after two episodes consists of “he’s played by a guy who was a minor character in Game of Thrones” swoops in to save the day. The companions have nothing to do but make tepid contributions to the tedious action sequences that fill the gaps between the equally tedious infodumps. The only characters with motivation are the Master and the Cybermen, whose motivation consists of a tattered post-it note saying “be evil.” Macguffins are simply vomited forth out of the ruins of Gallifrey whenever called for, most trashily as the Master casually goes “oh, but I kept all the bodies around.” A key piece of information is delivered to the Doctor in the form of “handily, there’s a legend that addresses the specific thing you’re wondering about.” The specific thing she’s wondering about, incidentally, is actually called the “death particle.” You may want to head back to the mirror and tell yourself that with a straight face too.

Throughout the series I’ve been asking who this is for. Now we have our answer: Series 12 of Doctor Who is a lengthy missive to Ian Levine, groveling at his feet and begging him to come back. “I’ll do anything. I’ll do a fourth R of the Daleks story. I’ll bring back the block-headed Cybermen. I’ll confirm the Morbius Doctors. Just come back.” There’s nothing else here. No other message or insight into the world. Just fanwank for the sake of fanwank. Big revelations about lore that come down to “the fan favorite bits are absolutely the most important things in the series and we promise to never actually challenge or disrupt you in any way.” Finally, we can all see what The Rise of Skywalker would have looked like on a shitty BBC budget.

Is there a way back from this? It’s honestly tough to say. Doctor Who has ignored revelations this big before (indeed, it’s difficult to see how “half human on my mother’s side” could possibly be true now, despite apparently being confirmed by Hell Bent, which, to be fair, it remains unclear whether Chibnall has actually seen), but that was aided by nine years off the air and a revival that spent a few years being deathly allergic to continuity. This is obviously going to be picked up on next season. And by asking specific questions tied to big chunks of lore, it effectively hangs a loaded gun on the mantlepiece. Unlike the Hybrid, where Moffat cleaned up after himself and ensured that nobody would ever have to deal with his earth-shattering revelations about the Doctor’s origin again, Chibnall has set this up to be reckoned with. Obviously his story is ongoing and he has reveals to include, but he’s deliberately opened a gap larger than he can fill. Any revelation about the past lore of Gallifrey now has the Doctor written into it as a major figure.

Much like someone was (and is) always going to bring back Gallifrey, some writer is going to give in to the easy temptation of delving into the vast secret history of the Doctor/Time Lords. We are very likely stuck with this radically different view of what Doctor Who lore is like. Much like Robert Holmes’s “twelve regenerations” line, this is something that’s going to come back. Except that Holmes was just hurriedly solving a plot problem in the story he was writing. Chibnall absolutely intends to be forcing every future writer to play in his sandbox. His goal is to shove Doctor Who into the straitjacket of bog standard cult SF lore reveals. That the result doesn’t make a goddamn bit of sense, trampling gamely on continuity from An Unearthly Child (why the hell is the Ruth Doctor’s TARDIS a police box? To say nothing of the characterization in that story as the Doctor learns to be a hero, something he apparently always was given his status as a Super Secret Agent for the Time Lords) to Time of the Doctor (so what, did the Time Lords just send an idle wisp of energy at the Doctor for show?) is beside the point. This is the lore now. Even if some subsequent writer goes to the heroic lengths to ignore this that it deserves, we’re stuck with this as a Major Revelation to be explored. Maybe something not terrible can come out of this. More likely, this is the rare story that does permanent damage to what Doctor Who is.

I’d say “we’ll see,” but I’m honestly not sure. For the first time since the TV Movie, I feel prepared to walk away from Doctor Who. I honestly don’t know if I’m going to review Revolution of the Daleks. I honestly don’t know if I’m going to do a Whittaker-era Eruditorum. I don’t actually think there’s anything to be said about this era of Doctor Who, and I’m not sure I care about anything that follows up on rendering the show a piece of generic sci-fi television for the convention crowd. This isn’t good television. It isn’t interesting television. And while I reserve the right to change my mind, I honestly don’t think I want to watch it anymore.

Ranking

Somewhere between the TV Movie and The Twin Dilemma.

Praxeus Breeds in Plastic (Terror of the Autons)

The rule, apparently, is that anyone talking seriously about this story has to start with Paul Cornell’s 1993 review of it. I’m not entirely sure why this is the rule—presumably because Cornell is surely terribly embarrassed by the review now that he’s firmly into the “everything is lovely, especially fandom and the Pertwee era, let’s all just get along and support New Labour” phase of his career instead of the “actually doing anything worthwhile” one. Or perhaps just because, in spite of Cornell’s latter day shame at having ever had interesting opinions, the review remains one of the most solid and important things ever said about the Pertwee era. It’s not that Cornell is correct per se—his vituperative denunciations of the entire cast along with everyone else involved in the story is excessive, not least in his claim that there are only two competent actors in the era, which more than doubles the actual number, although he at least correctly identifies one of them. It’s just that it’s petty, mean-spirited, and therefore exactly what the era needs, culminating in the utterly savage kicker that Barry Letts and Terrence Dicks “exiled the Doctor to Earth and made him a Tory.”

Part of the brutal efficiency of this comes from the fact that Terror of the Autons is, on a surface level, one of the least conservative Pertwee stories. I mean, the next story is a racist fantasy that posits that evil is a tangible thing. There’s two stories that look at the genocide of indigenous populations and offer a firm “well there’s good points on both sides.” This, meanwhile, is the ur-text for the era’s glam rock inclinations, which introduces three of the queerest characters in series history. It’s one of the maddest stories in the series to date—an explosion of color, spectacle, and basic weirdness. It is, in other words, an odd story to use as your staging ground for an attack on the Pertwee era’s right-wing politics. It’s like trying to go up an escalator on a unicycle: this should be easy, but not the way you’re doing it.

In a real sense, this is the appeal of Cornell’s approach. By going after one of the most straightforwardly appealing and consensus beloved stories of the era—one where its political foibles are quieter and its gonzo glam excesses are pronounced—Cornell goes for the throat. Complain about the politics of The Mind of Evil and you can semi-reasonably be answered “yeah, but it’s not all like that.” Complain about the politics of Terror of the Autons and the era’s defenders have relatively few retreats open to them. But Cornell does not actually go for the throat. Instead he takes drab swipes at the acting and production. As I said, it’s not that Cornell is wrong per se about the acting in the Pertwee era—almost everyone involved is various forms of dreadful. But what of it? The next era of Doctor Who is going to prove beyond all doubt that you can build a great show around a poor actor so long as you structure it to use their flaws. And by and large the Pertwee era uses its actors’ flaws. I am not interested in becoming the sort of Doctor Who blogger who parses fine production details, but surely even the most committed Pertwee skeptics have to admit that bulk of the core cast assembled here—Pertwee, Manning, Delgado, Courtney, and Levene at least—form a functional core. Perhaps what most of them are doing isn’t “good” in some objective craft sense, but in the context of everyone else on screen their decisions all work, to an extent that leaves Cornell looking like more of an impish troll than he needs to be given that he is, at the heart of it, still right.

No, the real angle to take here is to cast a skeptical eye on the politics of glam. In most useful regards, glam was the first post-hippie subculture, and revealed the true pattern of post-war subcultures that had not been truly apparent when the only data points were hippies, mods, and the various 50s prototypes. With hippies it was just about possible to convince yourself that this was really an entirely organic process—an emerging phenomenon of Haight-Ashbury that went culturally pandemic. The degree to which it was tied to genuinely radical politics obscured the extent to which it was still what every other subculture is: a matter of branding and marketing. (Indeed, the subsequent crashing and burning of the baby boomer generation into drab conservatism suggests just how much this really was true of the hippies)

Glam has no such cover. There’s no separating it from its commercial aspects because capitalist media was always a part f what it was. This is obvious in David Bowie—the commerce of being a rock star was always at the heart of the narrative in The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. But its also implicit in glam rock’s innate nostalgia. This was always a movement that romanticized and reimagined early rock and roll for the first generation too young to remember it. Yes, it queered the past in an attractively gaudy spectacle of color, but the point of all that color was precisely its salability.

At the heart of this was a transition in drug culture. The iconic drug of the 1960s was, of course, LSD—a non-addictive drug whose effects are introspective and spiritual. But the 1970s and the rise of glam saw a shift away from psychedelics and towards cocaine and amphetamines. These drugs were not only addictive (and thus better suited to capitalism by ensuring long-term brand loyalty), but their effects were essentially aligned with capitalism: manic, hyperfocused energy. Why offer a drug that makes you want to stare at your ceiling contemplating the spiritual nature of the universe, that had a several days refractory period before it was effective again, and that often gives users a strong sense of having had enough when you could offer one that made you want to go out dancing and then buy another dose to stave off the withdrawal symptoms, repeating ad infinitum until eventual overdose?

This was not a small shift in the culture—indeed, it was one of the largest shifts in the nature of culture until the post-9/11 transition from depression to anxiety as the dominant mental illness. And glam fed off of this shift, exchanging the swirling colors of psychedelic perceptual shifts for the eclectic and gaudy colors of, well, a new television. And in the UK market where glam would hold the biggest sway, Doctor Who was the show that took the most advantage of that. With Terror of the Autons, a story whose structure could fairly be described as “coked out,” the alliance of children’s television and subcultural appeal hit its zenith.

It’s fitting, in this regard, that the monster of Terror of the Autons is plastic. Plastic, of course, was firmly in the zeigeist as a threat at this point—consider Cybemen creators’ Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis’s show Doomwatch, which opened with an episode of plastic paranoia. But Terror of the Autons further focuses this by centering the fear not on plastic as a material that conjured a sense of artificiality, but on plastic as a mass produced consumer product. The Autons’ first appearance, Spearhead From Space, began to play at this with its use of deadly mannequins (thus associating the monsters with sales) or its shot of a production line creating an endless profusion of identical doll heads, but Terror of the Autons dials this in even further, with the Master’s plot being, essentially, a massive sales pitch. All of these things, ultimately, are tightly knotted together to form a grimly perfect enapsulation of what glam is. That it includes “fun” along with “consumerist,” “coke-fueled,” and (this is a Robert Holmes story after all) “cynical” is indisputable, but, well.

But let’s back up. I alluded earlier to the existence of two types of Pertwee stories—glam ones like Terror of the Autons and more militaristic ones like Inferno or The Mind of Evil. This dichotomy, as applied to the Pertwee era, is largely pioneered by Phil Sandifer, although one could fairly accuse him of just having filed the serial numbers off of Gareth Roberts and Kate Orman’s old frock/gun distinction. But the real error of this division is the basic idea that these two impulses within the Pertwee era exist at cross-purposes. pulling it in opposite and contradictory directions. This is based on a naive reading of glam where, because it’s vaguely queer, it must be good. As we’ve already seen, this strains credulity.

With the era’s glam instincts no longer read as liberatory, the interplay between them and its glorification of militarized action starts to become clearer as something other than an oppositional force. Instead it becomes possible to read the glam instincts as a means of rehabilitating the military fetishism. By making the military a fundamentally camp institution headed by a man who finds himself wryly ensnared in the conflict between two opposite but equally ridiculous forces, and employing the absurd force of nature that is Jo Grant, the series is selling militarism as a potentially coherent piece of the larger glam aesthetic. In the period in question, as the Vietnam War wound down in the United States and it became evident that the World War II-era sense of unwavering faith in the institution of the military was waning. Although Doctor Who would sometimes serve to address this through ruthlessly straightforward means (next season will have a story that is literally a propaganda piece for the Royal Navy), the more general approach is represented here, where the military is a sweet and beloved facet of a wild and youthful glam aesthetic, offers a far subtler and more insidious attempt at rehabilitating the military’s image.

The same can be said of Pertwee’s Doctor. Cornell is onto something when he snarks about the Doctor becoming a Tory. Certainly Pertwee is a figure of the establishment—his outfit may be ridiculous, but it’s ridiculous in a way that’s firmly upper class. And, as Cornell rightly notes, he’s a creature of the establishment in this story, tossing off bon mots about how gentlemen only ever talk about money and being on a nickname basis with government figures. This should be as insufferable as Cornell suggests, and the fact that it ultimately isn’t speaks volumes about how effective the strategy of wedding these tropes to the hip, contemporary, and youth-focused sheen of glam rock is.

My point here is not to trace some sort of chain of causality where the children of 1971 become the adults who sanction their governments’ war crimes in the Falklands War a decade later. This is too simplistic, and my argument has never been that Doctor Who is a leading cause of the 20th and 21st century’s depravities. Doctor Who is only ever a leading indicator—an effective way of getting one’s bearings within the madness. Nevertheless, if one does want to make an argument for Doctor Who as a causal force, Terror of the Autons would provide a better example than most. Its basic playbook of piggybacking on youth culture to promote the interests of established power is going to be followed repeatedly in the future by all sorts of nasty entities seeking reputation laundering. It’s absurd to say that it invents the process—the basic means are firmly identified by the Guy Debord in Society of the Spectacle when he talks about detournement and recuperation. But Doctor Who offers an early and brutally direct approach to using the late 20th century progression of youth subcultures to do it. It may not have invented the process, nor even perfected it, but much like color separation overlay, it was unequivocally one of the first to make heavy use of it.

Ascension of the Cybermen Review

And so Chibnall, having egregiously whiffed the one-part finale structure (no shame in it, nobody else has ever made that work save for Moffat who cheated by having Heaven Sent work as a sort of first part), decides to fall back on a proven structure. This is not always a balm for Chibnall, who often seems to struggle with understanding how and why tropes work, instead simply faithfully repeating them shorn of key bits of context like a man in an increasingly bizarre quest to demonstrate how Searle’s Chinese room thought experiment might work in practice. Ascension of the Cybermen plays into that tendency, certainly. But there are relatively few misplaced steps compared to other Chibnall efforts. And this isn’t entirely because Chibnall is playing on easy mode. Yes, the basic structure pioneered by Moffat and Davies—a sense of mounting tension leading to a story-breaking reveal—is one of the easier ones to get to work, with the real challenge being in the back half. But Chibnall declines to go with the sort of zero frills monster runaround that he could have, instead interleaving the seemingly entirely disconnected story of Brendan the cop. 

This is, to Chibnall’s credit, a very Moffat move in which the tension is “wait, what kind of story am I watching?” And the decision to go with no reveal about it, leaving it as an incongruous detail to be connected later, is unexpected and probably the most interesting thing ever to happen in a Chibnall script. The answer is probably going to disappoint—I’ll put my bet on “he’s a timeless child” and not on something Cybermen-related, but that’s a next week discussion. This week, his presence made the story weirder, less predictable, and far more interesting.

Unfortunately once you get past him, were into pretty bog standard Chibnall filler. The promotional material stressed the guest role of Ravio as a super-competent fighter against the Cybermen. It sounds cool. But tell me honestly: are you 100% confident you can remember which of the disposable supporting cast she is? (Remembering which actress plays her is cheating.) Can you actually name another secondary character? I can’t. One of them had really buggy eyes. That’s about all I remember. Yaz and Graham get to do the Doctoring for a bit, which is a nice touch. But mostly, this is frighteningly generic Cybermen doing frightfully generic Cybermen things. (The moment of peak bathos, for me, was when they uncover some boxy-head classic models of Cybermen and attempt to, with a straight face, suggest that these were always the “warrior” caste of Cybermen. Past that, we’ve got, what? A lot of action scenes so adamantly no nonsense that Eric Saward would blanche and add a few jokes? A ranting cult leader Cyberman whose final fate (full conversion that strips him of his “unique” qualities) couldn’t be more clearly telegraphed? None of it is objectionable, but none of it is interesting.

The real problem, though, is the ending. It’s not just the aggressive non-shock of the Master being back. (And bragging preposterously about making a good entrance. Honey, you used to ride down on a parasol like a homicidal Mary Poppins, or pull off an increasingly ludicrous series of latex prosthetics. Teleporting in as soon as Segun Akinola begins the “the cliffhanger is coming” crescendo is not impressive.) It’s the fact that the entire episode is spent getting to the exact place we all knew it had to end as soon as its second part was announced as The Timeless Children. There’s not even a cool reveal tying Gallifrey lore to the Cybermen. It’s just “ooh, a magic portal to the thing this story is actually about.” It’s one of the worst instances yet of Chibnall’s absurd spoilerphobia existing mostly to cover the fact that he hasn’t got anything worth spoiling.

As I said earlier, the structure of “part one of a two-part season finale” is forgiving. Often, these episodes are the thrilling, watchable pleasures of their stories, leading into lumpy, flawed masterpieces of actual finales. And while this was by no means wretchedly flawed, it’s difficult to imagine it being that. If Chibnall performs as expected, with a half-baked mess of a finale, nothing in this will compel watching it anyway. If he pulls out a shocker and nails the finale, this will be the disposable fifty minutes of hype leading into it. Neither outcome feels like a triumph.

There’s a kind of beautiful moment of incompetent marketing in the trailer, which decides to play with our expectations by suggesting that they really might kill Graham and Yaz off-camera in the b story of a cliffhanger, and then includes clips of the people they’re with so as to confrm that people get out alive.
Between the Master and Captain Jack, Chibnall really is falling into a habit of having characters show up to deliver slogans to the audience instead of actually interact with the characters around him.
There certainly is some anxiety of influence in Chibnall revamping the two villains that were revamped during the Capaldi era, then combining them the same way the Capaldi era did. The only difference is that Moffat was revamping two enemies that hadn’t worked in ages, whereas Chibnall was revamping two that had just worked very well. The results are, shall we say, predictable.
It is vaguely interesting to see Doctor Who attempting to recreate the memories of Saward-era fans. Many of Chibnall’s failings seem shared with 80s Doctor Who, but this sort of “here’s what I remember Earthshock being like” story is a strange thing to have exist. Not because Earthshock is bad per se, but because, in true Chibnall fashion, it seems to be understood here outside of the context of anything around it—a vague marker for “the Cybermen were stompy action movie monsters and it was cool.” 
At least we have a story with the word “ascension” in it with a prominent chair scene. Somewhere, Jane is smiling. If she’s still watching. Unlike me, she’s not paid to.

Ranking

Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror
Fugitive of the Judoon
The Haunting of Villa Diodati
Can You Hear Me?
Ascension of the Cybermen
Praxeus
Orphan 55
Spyfall

Before the Cataclysm (Inferno)

It’s May 9th, 1970. Between now and June 20th, Henry Marrow will be killed in North Carolina in a racist hate crime, two will die when police fire into a crowd at a demonstration at Jackson State University, a fourteen-year old fan will die after being struck in the head by a foul ball at a Major League Baseball game, eleven will die in Israel in a Palestinian terrorist attack, six when a plane crashes into an Interstate Highway in Florida. In addition, E.M. Forster will die of a stroke, Abraham Maslow will die of a heart attack, and unnumbered people will die in the ongoing Vietnam War whilst the world slides ever closer to the eschaton. Also, Inferno airs.

With Inferno, Doctor Who proffers a startling sense of lucidity, presenting a world in which drilling for energy sources destroys the world. That it is allegorized through an over the top “they dug too deep” narrative is of course a hedge, but only in the sense of doing the bare minimum necessary to pass this off as children’s entertainment. Within the pit of near universal awfulness that is Doctor Who fandom, this sense of apocalyptic frenzy is taken to make this a “serious,” “epic” story widely praised as a high point of its era. As Philip Sandifer has noted, this is puzzling given that the story is a semi-coherently plotted jumble, but it’s easy enough to see why fans are so seduced. Inferno may not function as a story, but Doctor Who has gotten by on nothing save for sheer verve before and will do so again. And the truth is, this is an unusual bit of verve.

What’s interesting is not simply the world being destroyed, although this is a relatively rare occurence for Doctor Who, but rather episodes five and six, in which the characters on the fascist parallel Earth spend the whole time aware that their planet is doomed and figuring out what to do with this news. This provides a sense of apocalyptic dread, yes, but what’s more interesting is simply the emotional content—the specific ways in which characters react to the impending end of the world. 

Obviously, this is a 1970s sci-fi adventure story and not some Peak Television drama about people moodily staring off into the middle distance, although the confusion is understandable given how the speaking cast is basically all middle-aged white men. Regardless, the emotional content is not long on subtle depths; this is not a piece of television where much is to be gained talking about “interiority.” This isn’t about the complex psychology of the doomed, but rather about staking out a moral position about lost causes.

The key dispute within Eyepatch World is over whether and how to prioritize returning the Doctor to Eyeball World so that he can save it. On one side is the Brigade Leader, who faces the end of the world with an insistence that the Doctor try to save him. This is portrayed as selfish cowardice, in contrast to Greg Sutton, the paragon of resolute masculinity (who, notably, is portrayed as a political dissident) who immediately sides with the Doctor’s “save another world” argument. The swing vote becomes Section Leader Elizabeth Shaw, who has spent several episodes being slowly tempted towards the Doctor’s point of view, and who ultimately shoots the Brigade Leader to allow the Doctor to escape. The overall message is clear: in the face of a lost cause one must make a heroic stand to save what can be saved.

It’s not a bad message by any means. Certainly it’s more persuasive than banal fatalism. And yet there’s a strange hollowness to it as well that cannot quite be ignored—a sense that the deck has been quietly stacked to ensure that the heroic and tragic last stand is the only viable outcome. The most flagrant moment here comes after the fact, in the final episode when the Doctor gets his famed “so free will is not an illusion after all” line. Several things about this line are incredible, none of which are its basic quality, but the most striking is that it’s completely unjustified by anything in the previous four episodes.

The Doctor’s contention appears to be that because events in Eyepatch World played out differently than Eyeball World, free will must exist. But this in no way follows from anything observed. Perhaps if the two universes had been identical save for some crucial decision in the course of this story we might conclude that free will exists, but in such starkly different universes as these, all we’ve really shown is that dramatically different starting conditions can lead to dramatically different results. Given such different circumstances as “a fascist Earth” and “not a fascist Earth,” one doesn’t need to involve free will to explain things turning out differently. Indeed, the circumstance that prompts the Doctor to proclaim free will’s existence—the survival of Sir Keith—does not actually appear to come down to free will. There’s no decision in Eyeball World that allows Sir Keith to survive where he did not in Eyepatch World. It appears to be something more akin to a blind contingency.

Even more damning than the differences between the worlds, however, are the similarities. Simply put, if free will is not an illusion then it’s pretty difficult to explain why the same basic group of people should be at the same big scientific project in two different universes. The idea that the world could change enough that the royal family is executed by a fascist regime but that Elizabeth Shaw, John Benton, Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, Professor Stahlman, Petra Williams, Greg Sutton, and Keith Gold would still all come together in the same place and the same time does not suggest the existence of free will—it suggests that huge aspects of the universe are actually fundamentally and necessarily the same across timelines. Heck, the fact that all of these people are alive and have the same names is pretty stunning—apparently the universes run so similarly that the same sets of people have sex on the same days in each universe, and that the same sperm fertilizes the same egg in each case. This isn’t so much an argument for free will as definitive proof of its non-existence. 

This is not a small point either, at least in terms of the story’s moral point. The existence of free will is a fundamental predicate to the heroic last stand that gets advocated—the sense that in extremis, what matters are individual decisions and choices, and a sense of personal virtue. More to the point, the notion of free will and of heroic narrative underpins the entire tradition of liberal capitalism out of which this catastrophe (and more to the point the real-world catastrophes it most directly allegorizes) arises. Most obviously, it’s behind Stahlman’s maniacal zeal to, as a latter proponent of the ideology put it, drill baby drill. Stahlman is in pursuit of individual glory as the genius originator of the project whose name will be upon the energy source the project yields. He wants to be a hero of the sort that is only possible in a world where free will is not only believed in but fetishized as the heart of what is human.

This ugly fact leaves Inferno trapped in a strange position where it must furiously disavow any suggestion that individualist liberalism is to blame for what it’s depicting while also remaining silent on the very possibility that it might be lest the fact that it obviously is become evident. The Doctor’s non-sequitur invocation of free will is the most obvious part of this ball-hiding project, but its extreme visibility is the tipoff that it cannot be the bulk of it. 

No, the larger displacement comes around the entire business of a fascist alternate universe, which allows Inferno to construct an account of the end of the world that’s tacitly explanatory. But, as Sandifer notes, it really is entirely tacit. There’s never an apparent reason Eyepatch World is so far ahead of Eyeball World in the drilling—fascism just seems inherently slightly more efficient. The world doesn’t end because of fascism. Actually, virtually nothing happens because of fascism except that Caroline John gets to wear a wig and Nicholas Courtney gets to wear an eyepatch. The detail that Eyepatch World is fascist is catchy and high concept, but it’s flavoring—a particularly ornate version of using fascism as a generic way of flagging “these are the bad guys” instead of a substantive engagement.

To extend Sandifer’s observation into the realm of actual usefulness, not only does the fascism not matter to the resolution of the story, it doesn’t actually matter to Eyepatch World. There’s a little bit of sketching of the background—the execution of the royal family (which is bewilderingly suggested to be the thing standing between Britain and authoritarianism)—but there’s no real sense of how this world works. There’s a supreme leader of some sort, and a single tolerated political party, but this is in no way an exploration of a fascist Earth, and its idea of what our main characters would be like under fascism is so cartoonish as to, well, consist of slapping an eyepatch on Nicholas Courtney.

Perhaps the world will end in a fascist inferno. Certainly we’ve got both of the requisite ingredients in distressing quantities. But the truth is that either term is more than capable of existing on its own. The fash-adjacent governments of the contemporary world are doing more than their share to speed climatological apocalypse, yes, but blaming late-stage accelerationism for a catastrophe that was caused and nurtured by the basic operations of capitalism is disingenuous. The two are, in reality, unrelated.

And yet for all of this, there’s a strange prescience to this. Inferno comes ever so slightly too early to plausibly be about climate change—concerns existed about global warming, but were not quite penetrating popular consciousness enough to inspire a Doctor Who story. (Indeed, the popular conception still trended more towards global cooling as the direction of the catastrophe.) But this doesn’t mean that Inferno is not at its core ecological—the Doctor’s line about the planet crying out its rage makes it clear that this is about the environment, even if it’s coincidental how well its components map onto the environmental concerns of a half-century later. That it juxtaposes these with fascism, however timidly, adds to the sense of uncanny prescience. That this is all illusory, covering up a story that’s running on pure bluster and intensity, is a criticism, yes, but the illusion remains shockingly convincing even when you see through it.

In the end, however, it is the Doctor’s line about the planet’s rage that stands out most vividly. It positions the end of the world not simply as a human error, but as an act of planetary revenge. It’s not that humanity breaks the planet, but that they cross a line and the planet simply swats them (and life itself) down. It’s here that the “dug too deep” iconography starts to feel substantive, with the Earth treated as a jealous entity that, when a boundary is crossed, lashes back with brutal fury. There’s a touch of cosmic horror here—the uncontrollable and dehumanizing transformation of people into monsters is played more as a straight monster movie than as body or psychological horror (although there is the obligatory “look in horror at your glowing green hand” sequence), but it wouldn’t be out of place there. The notion of a cosmos that is disinterestedly hostile to human life is implicit underneath all of this.

And it is here that the story veers closest to any sort of substance or honesty. The reality is that we are trapped on a rock surrounded by an infinitude of deadly vacuum—the most perfect and enclosed prison it is possible to imagine. There’s no way out, the temperature is rising, and we’re in the hands of cartoonish fascists stomping around in the pursuit of their own delicate egos. Inferno may lack anything to say about this state of affairs, but there’s something to be said for the value of simply reporting the world as it is.

The Haunting of Villa Diodati Review

*deep, calming breaths*

OK, so it’s a highlight of the Chibnall era. It features several of Jodie Whittaker’s best moments as the Doctor. It has an effective sense of mood and creepiness throughout. The arrival of the Cyberman at the halfway point effectively turns the entire story on its head. It uses the Cyberman well, drawing more body horror out of the concept than anything since… OK, since the last Cybermen story, but it at least has the decency to acknowledge that the Capaldi era actually happened, and anyway, this is getting an appreciably different sort of body horror off the concept. Despite having the oversized TARDIS crew and a large supporting cast, everyone actually feels like they have a character and gets at least one clear-cut moment to themselves. And there’s a bevy of clever bits—the skull and hand in the cradle is one of the best jump scares in recent Doctor Who memory, and giving Shelley a vision of his death is poetic and unsettling. Oh, and the Cyberman quoting Shelley is magnificently fucked up. Really, this is not merely competent, it’s well-executed. If the show were this well-made every week I wouldn’t be a burnt out and cynical husk of a fan who writes ostentatiously pessimistic parodies of her own work.

Unfortunately, all of this quality is in the service of a fucking “the Cyermen inspire Frankenstein” story. This is not so much bordering on self-parody as the capitol city. This is the sort of thing that when your sixteen-year-old cousin does in a Doctor Who fanfic you go “oh, bless.” It’s an idea that when Big Finish did, everyone went “well that’s a bit obvious, isn’t it?” It’s the most tedious, unimagnative “going with your first idea” bit of bullshit the series has coughed up in recent memory—an idea that is not merely bad but insulting.

It’s ironic that this should air the day that the Dalek Eruditorum post on The Invasion goes up, because it takes the cynicism of that story and dials it up to eleven. Never mind parading the Cybermen around a bunch of London landmarks to trumpet the series—we can take the entire literary tradition from which they originate and go claim that they’re inspired by Doctor Who. The show has flirted with this before, obviously, but always as a textual joke—the Doctor inspires The Mystery of Edwin Drood and Martha is the dark lady in Shakespare—but this is pitched in a largely serious story, as the core concept instead of as a joke at the end. Also, The Shakespeare Code was trash. Doctor Who’s tendency to romanticize great (wo)men of history is routinely annoying, but I’ll take the most mawkish speech about genius that Russell T Davies ever rewrote over the vapid exaltation of Doctor Who as the wellspring for all creativity. 

And on top of that we get the deeply fucked up morality of “sure, billions will die, but Percy Shelley is more important.” Never mind the “all of you will cease to exist” bit, which manages to make how time works incoherent in the exact opposite way of Orphan 55, this is a genuinely horrible line of thought, and one that’s only there to force the Doctor’s hand in letting the Cyberium out, which could have been achieved through dozens of other means, several of which would also involve restructuring the scene so that Mary Shelley actually accomplishes anything in it. But more to the point, this scene’s interactions with the “the Cybermen inspired Frankenstein” plot are particularly horrible. Percy Shelley: his poetry is so important that it’s worth a billion lives. Mary Shelley: only important cause she ripped off Kit Pedler. 

Other problems prevail. Key beats are unearned, most obviously the Doctor deciding she can’t win and is going to give the Cyberman what it wants. (Seriously, it’s one partially converted Cyberman. The Doctor has routinely fought armies of the things. Hell, Season One Torchwood could handle a partially converted Cyberman; why is the Doctor throwing up her hands in despair and letting it win?) Major revelations generally come ever so slightly before they’re adequately set up. (The Cyberman turning up is trying to mask its suddenness with OMG zeal, for instance.) For all that it manages to balance its cast, it still can’t actually find anything for Ryan to do besides be lame comic relief, and literally has nothing for any of the celebrities to do except have Mary Shelley be around in a scene so she can be inspired to write Frankenstein. 

And yet for all of this, from fundamentally bad premise to flawed moments of execution, this is fully functional, quality Doctor Who—a thing we haven’t had in well over a year. It gives the show some real momentum heading into its finale—a thing we haven’t had since Clara died. If you’re capable of foolish and rash optimism, it’s possible to believe that it’s going to go well over the next two weeks and that Series 12 will come out to basically successful.

God I hope I’m pleasantly surprised to be wrong.

I really am astonished by how extraneous the historical setting ultimately was. As Annie Fish pointed out on Twitter, this could have just been a story where some people in a house are menaced by what turn out to be Cybermen, and it would have been stronger for it. 
The flip side of this is how much of a waste it feels like to burn our Lord Byron and our Mary Shelley historicals on this. I mean, good lord, there’s at least a dozen more interesting Byron stories to be done than this. 
At least there’s a grim satisfaction in a story that claims Mary Shelley based Frankenstein on the Cybermen making the Cybermen scary by ripping off the Borg.
It’s notable that Chibnall’s approach to bringing back classic monsters has been to rip off Dalek twice now. In neither case does he seem to quite get what makes the lone survivor approach to a monster story work. 
So, at what point in the finale do we reckon the Master shows up? Will they go for the double Master cliffhanger? The title of part two tells us that it’s got to get a bit Time Lordy somewhere in there. (Follow-up question, obviously, is what point RuthDoctor shows up.)
It’s weird, but this season, despite being clearly better than Series 11, has actually managed to be even more demoralizing. I think because now that you can see what bits can and will improve, you can also see what bits are just going to be stuck at Eric Saward tier bullshit forever.
All right. See you all next week. I… can definitely wait.

Ranking

Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror
Fugitive of the Judoon
The Haunting of Villa Diodati
Can You Hear Me?
Praxeus
Orphan 55
Spyfall

Until We Could Be Almost Completely Replaced (The Invasion)

It’s November 2nd, 1968. Between now and December 21st, a mine explosion will kill seventy-eight in West Virginia, twenty-two will die in a factory fire in Glasgow, two will be shot by the Zodiac Killer, and numerous people will die in the Vietnam War, including 374 civilians in Laos when the US Military targets a cave in the incorrect belief that it housed Viet Cong troops and not refugees. In addition, Upton Sinclair will die in a nursing home in New Jersey, Enid Blyton will die in a nursing home in London, and John Steinbeck will die of heart failure in New York. A flu pandemic rages, ultimately killing one million, and the world drifts ever-closer to the eschaton. Also, The Invasion airs.

Miles and Woods begin their elaborately judicious review of The Invasion—a document that manages to at no point actually indicate if they like the story—by noting the peculiarity of its title. This is the definite article, as the saying goes—not an invasion of Dinosaurs, Androids, Zygons, nor even of Daleks, but simply the invasion—a type specimen against which all others are to be recognized. Given this, any interpretation must start with the money shot—the Cybermen marching down the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral. Contrary to Philip Sandifer’s lengthy attempt to brag about having been to London/plagiarize Alan Moore, the relevant fact here is not which London landmark the Cybermen are tottering down (St Paul’s is mostly notable for having a staircase down from an instantly recognizable view, as opposed to any larger mystical significance) but simply the sense of juxtaposition between iconic cityscape and iconic monster. 

Let’s pivot from here to the moment immediately before the invasion cliffhanger, in which Isobel and Captain Turner reflect on the serene, peaceful nature of morning in London right before this peace is shattered. The episode is not subtle about this—the scene is meant to build up tension, with Isobel’s last line immediately before the invasion begins being to reflect on how "Looking at all that peace out there, it's so difficult to imagine” the Cybermen attacking. This is a familiar line of thought about the nature of civilization and society, and the way in which its seemingly solid and constant normalcy can abruptly shatter—one that resonates even more in 2020 as we waltz with unsettling calm into the jaws of climate change than it did in 1968 as cultural memory of the second World War began to fade into the seeming permanence of the Pax Americana.

This impermanence is increasingly shifting to be a part of Doctor Who’s brand. From The War Machines through the Troughton era we’ve watched as the base under siege formula, with its paranoid dread and BBC-achievable claustrophobia, became the default setting of the series. But The War Machines always promised an even more direct simplification of this: having the monsters attack contemporary Britain. The Invasion was consciously designed as a trial for this approach, establishing UNIT as a ready-made set of supporting characters for a regeared version of Doctor Who that would, in fact, mostly consist of various aliens invading contemporary Britain.

Because this is a sales pitch, it gets the lavish treatment—ergo St. Paul’s. But let’s look closely at whats actually being sold here. The usual line, coined by Troughton’s successor (who will spend most of his tenure remaking this story), is the fabled “a Yeti on your loo in Tooting Bec.” The implication here is twofold—first, that the horror is more personal and intimate than, say, dying of radiation poisoning in an alien city. The second, that the familiar location of your toilet is going to be made strange by the addition of a robotic Abominable Snowman. Both of these claims are, however, tenuous. One need only watch the agonies suffered in the early episodes of The Daleks to see that this is a horror far more profound than a homicidal teddy bear. And as for making things strange, well, The Invasion puts paid to that. There’s nothing strange about the Cybermen. They’ve made five appearances in the last three years, slotting relatively seamlessly into the role vacated by the Daleks as the marketed attraction of the series. Their presence does not make anything strange—quite the opposite. They trumpet out the presence of the brand. 

In this regard, their presence at St. Paul’s Cathedral is telling. The Cybermen are not taking a shit in South London—they’re parading down a tourist attraction. Medium and content are, in other words perfectly aligned, with everything set not in the realm of the familiar and the intimate, but in the realm of the (nationalistically) branded epic. What is this about? How you should tune in next week.

It’s fitting, then, that the Cybermen’s human co-conspirator should be an electronics magnate who says shit like “Uniformity, duplication. My whole empire is based on that principle. The very essence of business efficiency.” This is a description of the Cybermen, yes, but it’s also a mission statement for Doctor Who. 

That it’s a description of the Cybermen, however, marks yet another change in the basic notion of what the monsters are. In their debut they are a notion of humanity gone wrong rooted in Lovecraftian notions of space as a source of horror. A few months later they’re lurking communist infiltrators threatening humanity’s future in space. Then they take a turn as the villains in a Mummy story before lurching back towards the commies at the end of the season. Now they’re back and are connected to the growth of consumer electronics. This malleability (shall we troll Mr. Sandifer and call them mercurial?) reinforces their status as brand ambassadors, but that doesn’t invalidate the truth of what they are here, in this story.

For one thing, it makes sense. The Tenth Planet Cybermen may be beloved by a certain flavor of fan, but they are sufficiently idiosyncratic that it is difficult, in a vacuum, to see them as recurring monsters suitable for replacing the Daleks. It makes slightly more sense when you consider that they were co-created by the script editor, but even still, they were obviously in need of some sort of overhaul before they could work as iconic recurring threats. The ensuing three stories, which ironically formed the whole of the period where they were the replacements for the Daleks, featured a lot of casting about obvious ideas that had nothing to actually do with the concept of the Cybermen. But here, with The Invasion, the show finds something that makes sense, rooting them in the emerging world of consumer electronics.

This is tremendously prescient. The prefix “cyber” is widely associated with computers, but this association dates to the 1980s when sci-fi writer Bruce Bethke coined the word “cyberpunk” shortly before William Gibson deemed the shared virtual computerspace of his novel Neuromancer “cyberspace.” Prior to this, “cyber” was associated with machines in the context of their interface with humanity, a notion rooted in the prefix’s original Greek meaning of steering or control. The Cybermen of The Tenth Planet make sense in these terms—people who have been replaced with artificial parts. But as the body horror of this was steadily stripped out, they became generic machine men. Connecting them with electronics makes total sense, with the added strange prescience of linking the word “cyber” more broadly with consumer technology. (Particularly on the nose is the fact that Vaughn’s office has a computer receptionist.)

This prescience explains, perhaps, why after finally figuring out how to use the Cybermen the show proceeded to abandon them, giving them precisely one story over the next thirteen years. The Cybermen make sense, but only proleptically, in a way that reaches forward towards a world that was still coming into view.

The story’s prescience is clearest around Vaughn, who as an evil tech company overlord, is even more alarmingly on the nose than the Cybermen. Veering constantly from uncomfortable charm to outbursts of petulant rage, Vaughn near perfectly predicts the techbro in all regards save for age. (And even there, with an actor who’s 47 he’s squarely between the ages of Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos.) This is no small thing—The Invasion successfully predicts the direction in which capitalism will expand and comes startlingly close to guessing the face that it will wear. Even the Cybermen, with their inevitable betrayal of Vaughn and insistence on converting the whole of the planet, feel on target, an accurate assessment of what computer technology, and indeed capitalism run rampant will be like—algorithms running out of control, blindly following their ideological biases without any contrary instincts.

And yet what is all of this prescience and insight ultimately in service of? The story is not a condemnation of technology and capitalist expansion. Vaughn is at least partially redeemed, even if his reasons for helping the Doctor in the final episode are, as he puts it, “The world is weak, vulnerable, a mess of uncoordinated and impossible ideals. It needs a strong man, a single mind. A leader!”, and the Cybermen destroyed his dream of becoming it. (So the story predicts Mencius Moldbug too.) He may be a delusional nutter, but in the end he’s our delusional nutter. This isn’t a story about resisting him—it’s a story about how in spite of his horrors we ultimately need him.

Taken together with its purpose selling the new future of Doctor Who, this is chilling. Sure, the future of capitalism and consumer electronics breeds cybernetic horrors from the sewers, but if our reaction to those horrors is to simply say, “dude, that’s awesome” and dutifully tune in next week, we can scarcely call that a bad outcome. The observation that as the sequels pile up audience sympathies trend inexorably towards the monsters is trite, obvious, and every once in a while tremendously insightful in spite of itself. Cybermen may be the monstrous consequence of mass production, but in the end, the conclusion we’re meant to draw is that we want more, exactly like this. (In light of this the fact that the Cybermen’s plan involves beaming a signal across the world out of consumer electronics products feels almost too obvious.)

The irony is that, in all of this, there’s relatively little for the Doctor to do. Wendy Padbury may be the one who has a week off this story, but there’s really no reason why Patrick Troughton needed to be around for most of the back half of the story, which sees him in a lab fiddling with wires virtually the whole time. People are disposable. It’s the abstract form of this that matters—the brand/icon. This is perhaps unsurprising given that the show is intending to trade in the key aspect of it premise—the TARDIS—in order to basically become Doomwatch with aliens.

We have remarked before that Doctor Who is a chronicle of British anxiety. Here that finally collapses into a glorious singularity. In grappling with Britain’s anxiety over the hegemony of mass production, Doctor Who turns into a mass produced product, ready to stamp out an endless procession of aliens processing endlessly through the country. The solution to the Cybermen is to watch them. 

Recounting the news in detail every Doctor Who story is someone else’s style, but it’s fitting that this story was airing as the final British colonial flag went down in Africa. Much of Doctor Who and the world it imagines extended from British imperialism. But the world it exists in is that of Britain’s post-empire. That the last gasp of that transition should come as Doctor Who embraces naval gazing and self-absorption over any sense of external adventure is altogether fitting. The point of marching the Cybermen down the steps of St. Paul’s isn’t to make London strange or uncanny. It’s far more prosaic than that—it’s to make the rapidly shrinking horizons of Britain seem like they still might be interesting. What do you do in the face of the collapse of imperial glory? Buy more Cybermen. 

Can You Hear Me? Review

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

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

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

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

Past the ineffectual engagement with theme, we have a lot of vague competence. I’m put in mind of a tweet by Jamie Mathieson I saw this week, where he said that the challenge when writing a familiar trope for television is coming up with a new perspective on it, as merely doing it competently is boring. I don’t imagine he was consciously dragging the Chibnall era, but he may as well have been. Here we have “Doctor Who confronts a god” done entirely competently, but without any flare or innovation. The references to The Ribos Operation and Enlightenment only serve to highlight the difference between this and television that has something to say. 

So yes, this is competent. And yes, that makes four stories in a row that managed that, although to be fair that’s how the non-Chibnall portion of last season went too. But even when things are going well, we’re coming in at the level of what Jack has witheringly described as “visual Big Finish”—a parade of intermittent competence that never seems to have any reason for existing other than producing more Doctor Who. I’m desperately, painfully tired of it. And nothing about this week has changed that.

We seem to be hinting at companion departures at the end of the season. Gods willing, we’ll go down to a single companion next season. It’s naive to imagine anything is going to fix all or even most of the Chibnall era’s problems, but a cast small enough that anyone actually gets focus or development would be a nice start.
Can’t say I’m impressed by hastily filling in some backstory for Yaz like this. The tone of “oh shit, she’s leaving in three episodes and we’ve still literally never found anything for her to do” is dispiriting, as is the tedium of filling in a secret origin for her being a cop. Imagine how much braver this would have been if they’d done something with the bullying besides gesturing aimlessly at it.
A Grace cameo is always nice, I suppose. There’s still a temptation to call her one of the most wasted opportunities of the Chibnall era, but, well, there’s so much competition at this point that it’s hard to really talk about that at all.
Not particularly germane to this episode, but I’m bemused by Chibnall’s declaration that we’re not going to see Captain Jack again this season. Bringing him back to offer cryptic finale teases to the companions without actually meeting the Doctor seems a very perverse bit of fanservice, even if it is clear we’ve got one more season of Whittaker after this.
I see a lot of reviews praising the detachable fingers, which I will admit did not go over well with the family. Monsters who give you wet willies are certainly long on originality, but the consensus appears to be that they are more bathetic than scary.
Looking ahead, I admit to a certain amount of dread over Ascension of the Cybermen, the most El-baiting title since In the Forest of the Night, and one that seems as though it promises even more thoroughly to disappoint.

Ranking

Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror
Fugitive of the Judoon
Can You Hear Me?
Praxeus
Orphan 55
Spyfall

 

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

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

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

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

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

Equally, this is no more a parable about the evils of communism than it is an exploration of the social conditions leading to dictatorship. Latin American revolutionaries provide a sense of texture here, but they are not the content. Neither is the oft-noted point of comparison of James Bond films, which might provide the underlying structure of the initial beach chase, but which fall by the wayside by the time the story settles into the form it takes for the bulk of its runtime. No, at the end of the day the structure governing The Enemy of the World is more classical than all of that. A story about political intrigue, betrayal, schemes, plots, and, the dead giveaway, a double who has to impersonate someone else can only really be said to have one antecedent: Shakespeare.

More specifically, we’re in the realm of Shakespeare’s histories. (An amusing move from Whitaker, who had just watched the Doctor Who historical get chucked out the window in favor of a generically structured monster story, and is now pointedly writing the one story in Season Five to completely reject this structure.) This is not an entirely faithful bit of genre fealty on Whitaker’s part—note most obviously that the impersonating double plot belongs to the comedies (although see Henry IV, Part 1 for an obvious antecedent)—but it’s remarkably close. Broadly speaking, Shakespeare’s histories have two purposes. The first is to straightforwardly carry political water for the ruling class, lionizing the direct ancestors of the ruling Tudors and demonizing those who  opposed them. This purpose we see fairly straightforwardly preserved in the already discussed demonization of leftist revolutionaries. But while the histories serve as propaganda, this is a commentary on message, not form. In terms of their dramatic function, they serve as meditations on the characteristics of leaders, whether valorous (the Henry V trilogy) or villainous (anything about a Richard).

The Enemy of the World obviously belongs to the latter category. Indeed, its most obvious point of comparison is Richard III, which similarly evinces a morbidly delighted fascination with the machinations of a conniving murderer. But there’s a key difference here—Shakespeare’s King Richard is constantly offering monologues to the audience in which he explains and justifies his actions. These are (deliberately) unpersuasive accounts, but they exist, allowing the audience insight into Richard’s self-mythology. Nothing of this sort exists for Salamander. We only occasionally see him on his own, typically acting in ways that communicate how he’s lying to people. On one occasion he gloats over the body of a man he’s just murdered, but the content of this offers nothing other than a reiteration of his ruthlessness. I’d describe him as a motiveless malignancy, but of course that phrase also describes a monologuing sociopath. Instead Salamander is left private, his motivations unremarked upon. We get no real portrait of his origins—just a trivia fact about his hometown and the knowledge that he invented something. He is not motiveless, but rather entirely occluded, his motives made impossible to discern. 

Nevertheless, similarities to Shakespeare’s Richard III abound. Most obviously, both men find success within their story by wielding a meta-awareness of what they are doing within the story. Richard is not merely a liar, but an actor who slips into whatever role is called for at a given moment, appearing to the other characters as if he is something other than what he has plainly told the audience that he is. Salamander has a similar gulf between his public and private faces, but more to the point Salamander displays a mastery of form and genre. 

Nowhere is this clearer than Salamander’s secret bunker of natural disaster causing scientists. Philip Sandifer has described this, in one of his more lucid moments, as Salamander slipping out the back door of the narrative he’s in. Certainly it’s a jarring and surprising reveal—very little has set it up, and it turns the shape of the story abruptly on its head, introducing an element that’s very different to the Shakespearean power games up to that point. Sandifer is broadly correct to read this in terms of genre-hopping, a point that’s supported by the mirroring of Salamander and the Doctor. Salamander has power because he’s able to alter the rules of his story. So we are left with the ultimately fairly obvious claim that the heart of the story hinges on the differences between its two identical genre-hopping characters. Something makes the Doctor superior to Salamander, allowing him to ultimately come out on top in their game of escalating narrative manipulations. What is it?

The obvious answer is morality, rendering the story a simple parable about good and evil. This makes additional sense in the current era of Doctor Who, with a Doctor who openly talks about fighting evil and who is consistently opposed to horrible monsters as opposed to the more ethically fraught situations into which Hartnell found himself thrust. And yet this fails utterly to work for The Enemy of the World, which is after all a story in which Whitaker is reacting against this reframing of Doctor Who as being about a puckish hero who fights monsters, typically as they lay siege to some sort of base. Whitaker’s Doctor Who had always been more morally ambivalent than this—recall that he had Hartnell only fighting the Daleks out of necessity, because he needed to recover the fluid link that he’d only lost because he was being selfish and dishonest to his companions. To say nothing of nearly smashing a man’s brains out with a rock. Even in his two Troughton stories to date, his Doctor is fundamentally not quite trustworthy, manipulating and taking advantage of Jamie in The Evil of the Daleks and spending most of The Power of the Daleks as a fundamental source of anxiety for both his companions and the audience. 

Indeed, if there is someone who has morality it is Salamander. He is, after all, feeding millions and making the world a more equitable place for the masses. It’s only because Whitaker resolutely places the camera amidst the palace intrigue instead of showing us the general public that this is obscured. Sure, there’s all the lies and murder, but if one takes seriously the idea that Salamander has ideological motivations—and the Castro/Guevera parallels really do force that—then it is he, not the Doctor, who can claim to be moral. Sure, it’s a very ends justify the means sort of ethics, but that’s still a moral position, especially when compared with “what law, who’s philosophy?” The truth is that the Doctor, in this story, is only vaguely interested in doing good. He wants to play at the beach and avoid trouble; circumstances don’t let him, and much like a Season One Hartnell story, he ends up doing good as the most expedient way to get out of the situation without actively doing bad.

But let’s not forget the question we’re answering here: why the Doctor ends up on top in his battle of narrative trickery with Salamander. And it appears that the answer is a degree of amorality. And yet in a battle of narrative games, it makes sense that this would be an advantage. All narratives, in the end, are political, expressing ideologies and worldviews. To be able to cast one off and slip into another is, as Richard III and Salamander both realize, a form of power. But each of them are in the end bound by petty concerns—their own material interests and desires. They can switch around within the terms of a single narrative, or perhaps a related cluster.

The Doctor is something else—a figure who can move within a relatively unbounded set of narratives. Not completely unbounded, certainly—at the end of the day he is still bound by the political realities of what can and can’t get made for the BBC, which include a number of ideological commitments. But these constraints necessarily bind anyone he might encounter as well. Ultimately, within whatever pond the Doctor might in practice exist within, he is the biggest fish.

Or at least he can be. Outside of Whitaker’s stories, he finds himself increasingly constrained, bound into a more and more traditional notion of heroism. The Enemy of the World strikes back against that on a number of fronts, serving as one of Whitaker’s final arguments for a version of the Doctor fundamentally less connected to any notions of human goodness. It is an argument he is already losing, and will always lose. But equally, it is never one he loses entirely—the possibility of the Doctor’s amorality will always persist.

What do we make of this? To some extent very little—the spectral possibility of amorality is simply not a very large hope. But within the confines of BBC morality, with all its implicit defenses of imperialisms old and new, it is at least something. It is other things as well—most obviously a move towards a sort of capitalist medial permeability that allows the character to be sold anew in the face of decades of social change. But it is also a flicker of subversion. Does this flicker serve the endless commercial production of Doctor Who? Of course it does; that’s how subversion within capitalism works. But it can serve other things as well. We have seen, over the past few David Whitaker stories, a figure that is much more troubling, imperialist, and racist than his defenders like to admit. Even here, he has at the end of the day written a story about the evils of leftist revolutionaries. And yet we must grudgingly admit that his admirers have a point: if there is some animating spirit in Doctor Who that is worth preserving on its own merits, as opposed to because of its quality as a diagnostic instrument, it was laid there by his strange insistence on the amorality of its central character.