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.

Dark Water > World Enough and Time (short)

Originally posted in a discussion about ranking Capaldi’s finale episodes on June 2, 2018.

WEAT is just Moffat doing his slow path gimmick yet again but with a different excuse for it, and something horrible happening to the girl this time, plus some decent horror scenes he could probably have turned out in his sleep. It’s pure mechanical setup for the real thematic content in the second episode. I’m not saying it’s not great but it’s just a working execution of an established Moffat formula, by his standards it’s unchallenging.

From its opening minutes Dark Water is a blazing assault on everything that was thought possible in NuWho. It’s a bleak and perverse piece of writing infused with existential despair, anchored around deliciously long and complicated dialogues, where the question is not something so banal as “will the Doctor will save his companion from being made inhuman”, but “will his ruthlessness actually be what drives her to the point of inhumanity?” There’s no hope or escape to be found even in death. It is far more than just a finale setup episode, it is a remarkable work of art unto itself.

Expanding ‘Hell Bent’ (2016)

Originally written on June 13, 2016 as part of a discussion about how successful Hell Bent was as ‘a return to Gallifrey’ and whether it could have been improved on. In the intervening two years I’ve come to appreciate the episode more for how it sidelines Gallifrey, but I still salivate at some of the ideas I proposed in this overly excitable rant, so I’ll include it here – with some criticisms and thoughts I have about it now added at the bottom.

The Witch’s Familiar has a good resolution

Originally posted in a discussion on July 19, 2018, in response to the proposition that the episode would be better if the Doctor didn’t know about the sewers.

Making the Doctor an idiot who fucks himself over out of wanting to show compassion to Davros – effectively proving Davros right – would ruin the story and add nothing other than shock value.

What the Doctor actually does is offer compassion with a catch, allowing Davros to bring about his own karmic undoing if (and only if) he tries to cheat the Doctor. In other words, he adopts a sensible and nuanced approach which is compatible with real life.

The “too scared to make the Doctor fallible” complaint is silly because Moffat spends more than enough time exploring that theme in other episodes, Hell Bent anyone? That’s not what this episode is about – it’s about why the Doctor’s way of living is actually good despite Davros’ rhetorical attempts to undermine it. The joyful climax of the two-parter complete with the TARDIS reappearing is a very, very deliberate choice; it’s a liberating Doctor Who romp emerging from the ruins of a gritty angsty moral-questioning episode.

[NOTE ADDED IN POST: This take owes a debt to Jack Graham’s excellent write-up of the episode.]

See also The Witch’s Familiar observations.