The Children of Fenric

War makes people into puppets. Figures whose worth is in the space they take up, the orders they follow, interchangeably. They are a resource spent as simple flesh; the damage to their unique lives and minds is just an inefficient transfer of energy in the relocation of the flesh marionettes.

One of the biggest obstacles to this profligate handling of life is that mending people after they’re damaged, a delicate but necessary process, costs so much labour time. A solution is speculated at in Doctor Who’s The Empty Child (2005), wherein the Doctor encounters nanogenes – floating swarms of imperceptibly tiny robots, designed to identify and patch up injuries. The story’s climax reveals that a crashed warship from an alien world has leaked its own variant of nanogene, a type specifically for use in a battlefield ambulance; mending soldiers in an instant so that they might go straight back to war. Rapid, airborne transmission of the genes enables such a war to be fought on an inconceivable scale. Thus a facility that nominally exists to save lives, even care for them, is in practice one that cheapens life by cheapening the act of repair: matters of life and death ascribed to an inanimate, autonomous computer programme, left to its own devices.

Unfolding across the story is the horror of what happens when that technology fails to self-correct. It contains a template of the alien warrior it’s meant to rebuild, but knows nothing of mankind. It assumes its own crude programming will apply to everyone. Diligently following their own logic to its conclusion and then repeating, the nanogenes begin editing human beings into illogical abominations. They’re unaware of the harm they wreak; they’re physically incapable of independent interpretation, imagination, or evaluation, because their ignorant data set is their entire existence. As a result, the human victims of this ‘treatment’ undergo a reduction of everything they are. Because they did not factor in the creation of this data, but are nonetheless abandoned to its system, they are rendered subhuman – ’empty’.

CHIBSHOW: 10+1. Refugee

< Prelude | 01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | 07 | 08 | 09 | 10 | 10+1 | Postlude >

A long time ago, in the battlefields of Bristol, a lone writer came to pose himself an impossible challenge – beyond his wildest nightmares. This unlikely project scrutinised eleven of the most opaque of episodes…but only just. The final opponent was so vast, so fearsome, its resistance to any all-encompassing statement was absolute.

So I t- I mean he took a creative liberty. He split his opinion into countless smaller segments, to be buried at the far corners of his imagination, and vowed that the pieces would remain forever “coming soon”. With the unyielding might of the Three Custodians – scope creep, procrastination, and depression – the terrifying blog entry was to be erased from history, in the hopes that everyone would just forget I was ever supposed to release it. And time moved on…

…until five minutes ago, when the pieces magically teleported themselves back together. The resulting completed post is below, with all divisions clearly indicated. Because even when a broken thing is made whole again, some scars never fade.

• Slice I: Restitution
• Slice II: Absolution
• Slice III: Revolution
• Slice IV: Dissolution
• Slice V: Resignation

Compiled 2019-2020.

Kill The Moon is pro-abortion.

LUNDVIK: Oh, you want to talk about babies?. You’ve probably got babies down there now. You want to have babies? […] Okay. You imagine you’ve got children down there on Earth now, right? Grandchildren maybe. You want that thing to get out? Kill them all? You want today to be the day life on Earth stopped because you couldn’t make an unfair decision?

One of the most misunderstood stories in all of Doctor Who (though you can say this about multiple key Clara episodes), Kill the Moon has attracted a number of anti-abortion readings. CatholicVote.org has called it “the most pro-life Doctor Who ever”. I’m not here to point out why this interpretation is superficial and riddled with holes; others have done more than enough of that. Rather, I’m dissatisfied with the usual defences – I don’t think it goes far enough to say that KTM isn’t an anti-abortion episode, or even that it’s a pro-choice episode. I would like to argue that KTM is in fact a pro-abortion episode. Which is to say, it is actively opposed to the ideology of reproduction itself; to any sense of obligation where continuing the species is concerned.

CHIBSHOW: 08. Witchfinders United

< Prelude | 01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | 07 | 08 | 09 | 10 | 11 (Special) | Postlude >

1. CATEGORY: Visual Big Finish
2. CATEGORY: Nostalgia
3. CATEGORY: Faux-hope
4. CATEGORY: Actor usage
5. CATEGORY: Writers’ Room
6. “The Ahistocrats!”

CHIBSHOW: 07. Pop.

< Prelude | 01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | 07 | 08 | 09 | 10 | 11 (Special) | Postlude >

1. CATEGORY: Writers’ Room
2. CATEGORY: Nostalgia
3. CATEGORY: Visual Big Finish
4. CATEGORY: The Acting
5. CATEGORY: Political content
6. The Oxygen Inversion

CHIBSHOW: 05. A Man In Labour

< Prelude | 01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | 07 | 08 | 09 | 10 | 11 (Special) | Postlude >

1. Limit Case
2. CATEGORY: Writers’ Room
3. CATEGORY: Visual Big Finish
4. CATEGORY: Nostalgia
5. CATEGORY: Whittaker
6. CATEGORY: Faux-woke

hocus breaking in and centering / broke in and gave up on everything everything