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’.

Space over kids

October 2022 – a short sequel to 2019’s post on Kill The Moon.

“Second-hand space shuttle, third-hand astronauts.”

“It was in a museum. They’d cut the back off it so kids could ride in it. We’d stopped going into space. Nobody cared.”

At one point the Doctor flippantly makes, by any metric, a poor argument against blowing up the Space-Dragon-Chicken: “you might have some very difficult conversations to have with your kids”. Given that the apparent alternative is risking the deaths of said kids, difficult conversations aren’t that scary a prospect. (Some people think difficult conversations with kids should be shut down at all cost, but they tend to be the sort who don’t respect kids’ autonomy at all…I digress.)

Undaunted by this prospect, Lundvik fires back, “I don’t have any kids.” Except this isn’t so much a rebuke to the Doctor’s point, as to his crude assumption that she’d feel threatened by the thought of kids being upset at something done for their own safety. And we know she’s taking kids’ safety into consideration from what she asks Clara later:

“OK, 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?”

Following that line of logic, however, if Lundvik had kids then surely she’d be more eager to destroy the creature than she already is, not less. Kids represent a degree of personal investment in the Earth. Far from a softening force that would magically make her more defensive of the dragon-chicken, having children can be the exact opposite. Many adults would, and do, happily kill anyone and anything in the name of protecting kids.
So what’s the true significance of her having no kids?

A glaring answer to this question – and a marker of this story’s actual themes – lie in what she’s done with her life instead. She’s an astronaut in a world where astronauts no longer exist.

Did Witch’s Familiar really ruin the Daleks?

Back on my Dalek bullshit again…

This discourse refuses to die, so we need to get the heart of it. During The Witch’s Familiar, Missy neutralises a Dalek patrolling the sewers, then wires Clara into its casing as the new operator. As both a demonstration and twisted experiment, she commands Clara to say some seemingly innocuous phrases, which don’t come out of the Dalek’s speakers the way Clara expected:

MISSY: Say ‘I love you’. Those exact words. Don’t ask me why, just say it.
CLARA: I love you.
DALEK: Exterminate.
MISSY: Say, ‘you are different from me’.
CLARA: You are different from me.
DALEK: Exterminate! Exterminate!

Trapped inside the Dalek, Clara finds it increasingly difficult to communicate when it really matters; later on in the story, she cries “I’m your friend!” and it emerges as “I am your enemy”. Everything she’s trying to say is being warped into things you’d expect a Dalek to say instead.

The problem – the accusation that here Moffat is ‘ruining’ the Daleks, ‘damaging the franchise’, etc. – stems from the assumption that this means the casing is the evil part of a Dalek, and the mutant inside the casing would actually be innocent (even friendly!) without this insidious censorship happening to them. The charge is that Moffat’s trying to make all of Dalek history out to have been the same kind of verbal miscommunication that we see happening to Clara. This would certainly neuter the concept of the Daleks quite a lot, making the mutants redundant and the casings equivalent to autonomous robots.

Bent Sent

On resolving the schism within the Capaldi era’s most famous duology.

Reversion to draft?

In which I make a damning, obsequious climb-down from all my earlier rhetoric about NuWho being dead in light of the exciting, somewhat surreal new showrunner appointment…well, not exactly.

Because the possibility of someone interesting taking over the show always existed. The issue is really that whoever they are, they’d sort of need to start from scratch – not in continuity terms, that’s irrelevant; just in terms of assembling ingredients that make a fresh case for anyone bothering to watch. A well of yet-untapped possibility. NuWho 2, for real this time.

The original well’s been tainted by a couple years of unpleasant evidence that if you just keep playing the notes without the song – the notes here being the basics established by RTD’s 2005 revival – you leave open a gap which proves a fertile bed for the absolute worst fetishistic tendencies of cultural institutions (and indeed of consumer fiction). A Doctor Who that wields its social currency like a bludgeon. The embarrassing uncle at the get-together that people tolerate out of familial piety, even when he descends into an uninterrupted several-minute monologue at dinner expositing on the origins of the Time Lords, or interrupts them mid-sentence to insist on the canonicity of the Morbius Doctors.
This Doctor Who has transcended merely being uncool and become something far worse. When all interest or insight in life outside, beyond its own knotted continuity and near-meaningless rituals, has become a mere afterthought…its persistent hanging around becomes a continual symbol of imprisonment. A constant reminder of our inability to escape, to break patterns even when they are doing us no good; of the infinite vortex of impotent pointlessness threatening to emerge beneath every story, and ultimately just beneath every human mind. A putrefied cultural memory, a rotting culture reflecting a rotting society, an undead world.
And all because it’s resorted to coasting on the wisp of a memory of what was working for RTD at one point, blithely assuming people will love it provided you “just make that, really“. Still somehow inhabiting the cultural space painstakingly carved out for NuWho over a decade ago, despite barely possessing enough of its own voice to cast an echo in that vast hall.

There’s such a thing as violating a trust, burning a bridge. So many millions of people piled in to catch the debut of the first woman to play the Doctor, so many still stuck around another week to be rewarded with The Ghost Monument. It wouldn’t have taken much, really – any character, even just one, possessing what felt like their own identity or a bit of charm to inject into our lives, would probably have done the trick. Instead we got, you know, Series 11. And instead of rectifying…that, Series 12 began throwing return after hollow return at the screen, breathlessly hyping up the cataclysmic portents of a story arc with (as it quickly turned out) no tangible emotional stakes. On nearly all fronts, this era – the fact it was even permitted to transmit – provided a clanging signal to the millions that Doctor Who wasn’t just something they’d personally lost interest in; it was something that scorned their interest, that was satisfied with pre-programmed, ritualised worship regardless of its content. Send her victorious, happy and glorious, long to reign over us… ♪

We have to escape. We have to get far, far away – keep driving until the very notion of a show that gives 1/10th of a fuck about Morbius Doctors is no longer even a speck in the rearview mirror. Not that anyone will remember a bad series finale from 2020 before very long, of course…especially given how relatively few people even watched it…but everything about this iteration of Who lingers amid the culture-in-general like an eggy funk, the dark corner you don’t want to look at, the knowledge that it’s still out there and forestalling the existence of something better. (Its desertion of Christmas, which already features enough unpleasant relatives, is probably a mercy.) The next iteration has to clear the air. Redeem a tainted idea. Restore faith that something, anything at all, is possible. Follow death with rebirth.

Bill’s story hits different – and rightly so

A perspective from someone the same colour as Bill.
(Concerns the events of World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls.)