Chibshow: Prelude of Horror

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This a brand not your boy leave man
It’s a shitshow

You. Buy this toy.

So far I’ve made no secret of the two facts that a) I’m happy about Jodie Whittaker being cast as the Doctor and b) I’m quietly dreading Chibnall’s performance as showrunner. A couple of the posts here delight in angsty invective about the future of Doctor Who. Since that future is now a mere two weeks away, I’m thinking it’s about time to put my money where my mouth is.

My intention is to write at least one post encapsulating how I feel about each episode of Series 11 in the week after it airs. In these posts, among general rambling, I’ll be comparing the reality of S11 with some egregiously unfair and doom-laden predictions I’ve set prior to it airing. This is done with full awareness of the possibility it could backfire, S11 will be brilliant, and I’ll look very silly – in which I’ll have the fascinating experience of documenting my own conversion to the Chibnallian school. The second possibility is that I’m broadly right about everything, and I get to channel my despair into the cathartic activity of pointing and laughing. (There’s a third possibility, which is that S11 is good but I obsessively find excuses to attack it and make it conform to my pre-existing biases. I’m completely open to this as well. It would be the final step in my ascension as a Doctor Who fan.)

So how on earth did I get to this place? Why am I now one of the pre-emptive naysayers I usually hate so fucking much in any other context?

Atavism of the Daleks

Three linked discussion posts from September 16. Beginning in response to the accusation that The Magician’s Apprentice is ‘substanceless setup’.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with the first half of a two parter being a stage-setting exercise. Important tasks achieved in The Magician’s Apprentice:

• Introduce the main S9 theme of best friends who are bad for each other (12/Missy, most of Missy’s dialogue).
• Establish Clara’s power level via her standoff with Missy.
• Reframe 12’s character as the aging rockstar in denial. The hugging metaphor from Death in Heaven is made lopsided, to signify that the Doctor is the one who still can’t be honest to Clara.
• Demonstrate the Doctor’s inability to process the moral dilemma from the start of the episode, feeling he has no option but to accept his death (which he views as karmic).
• Introduce the snakes-disguised-as-person metaphor, representing Davros in part 2 who literally acts as the human face of the Dalek collective.
• Reveal the Daleks have created a nostalgic replica of their homeworld with the intent of continuing the cycle of violence.
• Characterise the Daleks as animalistic creatures whose sadism is borne out of instinct, and connect this to Davros’ fascist worldview (“Hunter and prey, locked in the ecstasy of crisis. Is this not life at its purest?”)
• Hang structural suspense on the question of how far the Doctor will go to avenge/revive Clara (a question which is central to Hell Bent).

The hugging metaphor from Death in Heaven is made lopsided, to signify that the Doctor is the one who still can’t be honest to Clara.

by the way, in setting 12 up as the one who is the most flawed, this prefigures him being the one whose memory must ultimately be wiped in Hell Bent.

Also.

Reveal the Daleks have created a nostalgic replica of their homeworld

This is not brought up nearly enough in my opinion. The inherent fanwank of bringing back classic Daleks and the Hartnell-era version of Skaro is literally put into practice BY THE DALEKS, as an extension of their ideology. Not only that, but it’s a version of Skaro where “Every Dalek Ever” (the forgotten marketing slogan for Asylum) freely congregates with the others in a big collection. This cuts distinctively against certain past interpretations of the Daleks where they’re either trying to advance themselves as a species, or destroy alternative versions of themselves. These Daleks don’t care about having other models of themselves bobbing around the place as long as they’re Dalek-shaped. And they put effort into even making the corridors the same shape as back in the old days. It’s implied by this that our fanwank desire to see classic Dalek shit brought back is a Dalek-like desire, connected to both the reactionary urge towards traditionalism and consumerist Dalekmania. This alone is closer to Jubilee than Shearman’s actual NuWho adaptation of Jubilee!

The dark side of loving Heaven Sent (short)

No, this still isn’t the proper Heaven Sent/Hell Bent writeup that may happen at some point (EDIT: it finally happened!), but it’s a step on the way there. Originally posted in a discussion on September 10.

Heaven Sent is in my top 3 NuWho stories but it’s the kind of episode that delights the kind of people who complain about the show becoming Clara Who, think that “politics” should be removed from all art, and demand that everything deliberately comedic be retroactively removed from canon. We spend the whole duration inside the head of a grand old Western man lamenting a woman who’s dead; it might feel radical for Doctor Who but for fiction as a whole it verges on regressive. I often hear from fans that it depicts a “universal experience of grief” but of course it fucking doesn’t; even Moffat’s atheism plays an important role in characterising the tone. Conversely, though, you could show Heaven Sent to a dyed-in-the-wool Nazi and they’d have near zero objections. They might even identify their beliefs with the Doctor’s struggle against the diamond wall.

The fact it’s such a towering work of technical and aesthetic beauty, that deals in abstract philosophical themes such as determinism and the persistence of consciousness, only sharpens its appeal to the reactionary. It reminds them of an imaginary “pure” version of sci-fi that’s able to be incredibly clever, while free of muddy things like crying, camp, and class struggle; that allows certain space to be about feelings so long as they’re stoically expressed and masculine; that can involve women as long as they remain vectors for male desire; that prioritises the triumphant feeling of “winning the day” over worrying about what’s actually being won. This wouldn’t be an issue except we all have an element of the reactionary within us, and part of why fandom consensus fetishises Heaven Sent as The Greatest Doctor Who Story Ever is because it tickles that bit of us so much that we don’t demand any more from it… Hell Bent is more important as a follow-up than people realise, because it counterbalances HS, contextualises it within a wider world, and arguably even undermines its themes, And That’s A Good Thing.
What I’m trying to say is that if you like Heaven Sent you’re basically Hitler.

(Some speculation for next time: is the Heaven Sent/Hell Bent conflict – specifically the disagreement about the Doctor’s motives during the former – actually an enormous, secret narrative substitution being performed by Moffat? Probably not, but we can worry about that when we get there.)

Politically Charged Image

Spearhead from Space. See Jack Graham’s ‘The Empire of Vanilla‘.

NEO: What do you think the most political image is in both RTD and Moffat’s era?

I don’t know. All of the “politically charged images” in NuWho are disappointing somehow. There is absolutely nothing in NuWho that is remotely on the level of the Spearhead screencap, probably because NuWho so rarely shows us scenes of workers engaged in the business of production, or looks at the inherent juxtapositions within global society, let alone stacks multiple on top of each other within one shot.

The Zygon Invasion [approx. 21:17]

This is one of the stronger ones, however, specifically because it gives us the drone operator’s (not just the drone’s) point of view; it gives us a screen within a screen, implicating us in the act of watching Doctor Who for ‘political images’ of developing countries in the first place; we get the environment rendered in the estranging monochrome of a computer’s eye rather than the realistic colour range of a human’s; we get a wide sweep of the ruin and poverty of the area juxtaposed with the inserted well-off-looking white father and son (who are also separated from the environment by a rectangle); we get the two of them acknowledging the drone operator(/us) directly through the screen; all of this bundles together into a host of barbed implications about imperialist wars and our capacity for empathy towards their victims.

When I was screencapping it I recall looking to see if there was a shot that included both a good view of the screen and the back of the drone operator’s head, but no luck.

Further notes

• The screen-within-a-screen is a recurring motif in this story, returning at the beginning of Inversion inside Clara’s dream pod. Probably something to be said about that, no idea what though.
• For a blink-and-you-miss it 7-frame interval, the larger rectangle surrounding the Zygons is replaced with two smaller ones highlighting their faces.The software is expressly designed to identify human beings, presumably as targets.
• Like the story it’s part of, what frustrates about this image and moment is what’s not said; the people who have been airbrushed from this imaginary developing nation to make way for the substitution of the Zygons; the processes that have actually brought it to this state of ‘developing’-ness in the first place – but by mirroring the drone operator’s family, the Zygons take this whitewashing to the next level, which is fascinating. Their ability to take images from the minds of those who view them, newly granted for this story, effectively turns them into canvases (or television screens) for familiarity…obscuring the more Otherised and less palatable reality.
  Corporate media like Doctor Who relies on this very same occlusion of the truth and it’s arguably what gives rise to a brief like “ISIS, but with Zygons instead of brown people” in the first place. Or the fictitious nation of ‘Turmezistan’, orphaned, without history or even life, an aesthetic cluster of contextless war photography. On one hand, if we keep ‘places like this’ as vague and unrepresentable wastelands, we can continue to rationalise waging war on them. On the other hand, if we strip out the context of what’s happened to them and aggressively sanitise the people who live there for Western consumption, perhaps throwing in a white presenter or two, we can scrounge up some donations to charity… Paradoxically the same apparatus is used both to humanise and dehumanise. (It’s almost like there’s only one force at work here, really.)
  By far the most compelling act of rebellion the Zygons achieve in this story is to turn this logic against itself, taking it to its endpoint by disguising themselves as that which is so familiar that we could never do anything to harm it. That’s enough for this tangent.

Bonus: A politically charged image from The Beast Below.