Nall Gone

This little island we live on is an endless exercise in the elevation of emptiness. For example, the class of people who get to decide what happens to us all – and whose best mates usually decide how it should be reported, mediated, commentated, processed – are a squalid collection of vacuous failures. Animated by vapid, cruel fantasies rather than insight or knowledge, they generally operate the country by slamming it into a wall over and over until money falls out (for them to pocket). When this starts to look to people like the senseless violence it is, official reasons are soon invented for why There Is No Alternative. A bit of creative mathematics here, a bit of xenophobia there. None of them actually make sense. Not one mote of this has ever made sense; all of it’s just an empty rationale for plunder and poverty. Our consensus reality, our culture, is a matryoshka doll of bullshit.

And no culture can accept that it’s an enormous sham. Not when its participants need the emotional safety net it provides.
So instead of being chased away or made to suffer every human indignity they’ve inflicted on the masses, the leaders of our political and media establishments enjoy widespread tribute to their emptiness. They attend a perpetual banquet of adulation and unearned trust. It’s heaped upon them in the genuine belief that they somehow deserve it, they’re better, they’re qualified, because they must be, because that’s the only way the way things are makes any sense whatsoever. All they have to do in return is play up to our subterranean expectations of them.

Decades of this have watered down our hopes and desires to such ephemeral levels, it’s spiritual homeopathy. An atom of the most half-hearted pandering appears magnified in this barren landscape, in the eyes of consumers so numbed to the desert that they’re hypersensitive to the smallest drop – the faintest acknowledgement they exist. Viewers as raw nerves waiting for a puff of air in their direction, convulsing from head to foot when one at last skims them. This is the product of training. Human beings can be trained to react the same way to an empty visual cue as you might to a great victory, a confession of love, the safe return of a dear family member. Trained to interpret a handful of crumbs as a three-course meal. It’s achieved by stifling their curiosity, their capacity to even imagine a life beyond their own.

Only in the utter absence of counterexamples can a nostalgic farce government look like a safe pair of hands, a briefcase-dragging tribute act sound like a champion, a hierarchy of sadism feel like a loving family. Only there might we see carceral fanatics as valiant protectors. Apologists for inaction as fearless wits. Shallow signifiers as substance. This suite of dim iconography has become a substitute for our interest in fellow humans, in each other, even in our own thoughts. Why am I feeling these things? What is happening in my brain? Why do I like this? Why do I dislike that? What made me this way? Why do others think differently? Who are these people on my screen and why are they saying those words?
People who’ve given up asking those questions, force-fed the truism of “this is just the way things are“, only get any fulfilment when the icons slot into place. The momentary thrill of recognition replaces hope itself. The reassurance that the same old gruel can still be spooned out transcends any evaluation of said gruel. Opinions can only be had on the presence or absence of the signifiers – not on why they exist or whether they should.

This inverted world, this conceptual black hole, is where the quality of life goes to die. Compassion? Emotional honesty? Self-respect? All demolished. Nothing can ever be made right when we no longer even care to notice we’re upside down.

Which is a roundabout way of saying this is the episode we deserve:

ACE: Gold bullets, tin-heads! Did you think UNIT wouldn’t be ready?
TEGAN: Why isn’t it working?!
ASHAD: We long ago developed resistance to gold.

Thassion of the Chris

On the last-minute martyring of fandom’s favourite Chibnall Who couple.

Thasmin was the soul of Chib Who. For better or worse.

In the absence of rich potential directions for any of its characters, a romantic attachment between the thirteenth Doctor and Yasmin Khan (who was always at a remove from the Graham-Ryan drama of Series 11, and also seemed to lack drives or motives beyond liking the Doctor a whole lot) filled itself in as a de facto candidate for the Whittaker era’s emotional centre. It was a no-brainer. Who could fault fans for wanting love – between two women on the TARDIS, no less – in an otherwise rather barren cosmos?
Having textually raised the idea himself as early on as his fourth episode, showrunner Chris Chibnall guaranteed that people would be constantly searching, scanning, hoping, waiting…every passing minute with no development on this front became a problem. In a situation where our first glimpse of Yaz’s past and interiority came near the end of her second season (Can You Hear Me?), the possibility of Thasmin became the last hope for the show having real characters in it at all. If the two of them were girlfriends, that would at least mean something had been happening all this while; that the first female Doctor wasn’t consigned to a spiritually empty nightmare of a run, where her immediate predecessors each traversed their own agony and ecstasy. Essentially, no Thasmin would mean no soul.

So in spite of it being very, very, very late, Chibnall’s decision to finally confront Yaz’s feelings for the Doctor head-on in Eve of the Daleks was greeted with rapture. At long last, Thasmin is indisputably canon.

Except that it’s Chibnall’s version of Thasmin. And in this strange, sudden, short streak of specials just before it all vanishes from us utterly, his Doctor Who bares its soul like never before.

Ryan’s exit almost meant something

There are many things you could call Ryan Sinclair’s departure from the TARDIS, but “unforeshadowed” is not one of them. At the very least, one scene in Series 12’s Can You Hear Me? – the episode which took a crack at giving all three members of the Fam a bit more interiority (albeit about a dozen episodes too late) – reveals that what’s weighing on his mind isn’t the wonder of outer space, but the grim future for his home planet Earth posed by earlier adventure Orphan 55. A trip into Ryan’s nightmares depicts an infernal landscape, er, well, an infernal darkened room, containing an aged-up version of his friend Tibo and a cameo from one of Orphan‘s mutated future humanoids.

Like most interesting things in this era of Doctor Who, the concept of a time traveller existentially terrified by climate apocalypse is raised briefly and then re-lowered, but it’s enough to telegraph that he’ll have a motive to quit the gang soon. The part that really interests me is later on, in Ryan’s final episode itself, when for one glimmering moment a story not only threatens to come together but to cohere this entire era of the programme.

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.

CHIBSHOW: 10. Ritual of the Stenza

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

Nine Separate Distress Calls From The Same Planet

1. It Croaked On Sight
2. God in the Monument
3. Demons of Desolation
4. SniperBots United
5. A Mind In Labour
6. Plop.
7. sub poena
8. The Man Who Fell From Grace
9. Apathy in the Delay

CHIBSHOW: 09. It Croaks At Night

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

1. CATEGORY: Visual Big Finish
2. CATEGORY: Writers’ Room
3. CATEGORY: Atavism
4. CATEGORY: Performance
5. CATEGORY: Morality
6. The End