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Saturday 16 March 2024

‘DUNE’ (NOT A PROPER REVIEW AT ALL)



That story about George Lucas writing ’Star Wars’ as a Vietnam analogy, everyone likes to repeat it. Except, come on, we know it’s not actually true. I suppose it’s possible he believed it himself, perhaps as a alibi against accusations he was selling out. There may even have been earlier version of the many redrafts which actually had some of that in them. But none of it’s up on the screen, is it?

Except it is there in ’Dune: Part Two’. The scenes where the monstrous black machines churn their way through the desert, to be defeated by tiny human figures literally rising up out of the ground, David slaying MechaGoliath, is very much Revenge of the Third World. The feeling is very much like the ’Hunger Games’ sequel where a character ups and says “remember who the real enemy is”, and everybody then does. It’s not exactly going to change anything. But highly welcome. If there currently seems no viable way of fighting back politically, we can at least do it culturally. Give us culture wars, we’ll fight culture wars.

Even now there are snobby film critics who disdain anything Science Fiction as ‘mere spectacle’. As if there’s some innate dividing line between spectacle and imagery. While the appeal of Science Fiction, at least good Science Fiction, is that it can let imagery run riot. Much of the meaning of this film is there in those scenes, stuck up on a big screen, captured in such an arresting way I think it’ll stick around in my head for some while.

Another example would be the distinction between the three worlds - Arrakis, Caladan and Geidi. There are those of us old enough to remember how SF was restarted in the cinema with ’Star Wars’ and ’Alien’. Films which came out two years apart but were chalk and cheese, one SF as Fairy Tale, the other as Gothic Horror. Then the surprise when we discovered they both sprang from the same source, Jodorowsky’s unfilmed (and entirely unfilmable) version of ’Dune’.

In particular he had wanted the sections devoted to the different Houses to have their own entirely different styles and aesthetics, even down to different soundtrack composers. They shouldn’t look like different stopping points in the same universe so much as different reality systems. Smartly, that’s what director Villeneuve takes up here. Which means the effect of ’Dune’ spread so far that eventually it even went to ’Dune’.

So in short this is a great, truly great, achievement. No-one was ever likely to actually make a better ’Dune’ adaptation than this.

However…

There’s two main plot themes. Paul, our protagonist, gets the gift of prescience. Except in time-honoured fashion the gift turns out to be a curse. Seeing Fate coming towards you, like a hurtling train, turns out to bestow on you no ability to step out the way. You know its going to hurt, and then it does. It’s not original, it’s somewhat reactionary in its assumption there’s no real agency in life. But that’s extrapolation. What you’re supposed to dwell on is the taste turning sour.

But there’s also the White Saviour narrative, foreigner as Messiah. Paul looks to be the One sent to rescue Arrakis, the prophet he is here and all that. Only for us to discover this isn’t indigenous notions but a cargo cult seeded by the Bene Gesserit (galactic Macbeth witches who are also the Secret Services). Paul’s mother immediately cashes in on this, while he rows with her and tries to dodge it.

Both of these are in themselves pretty good narrative arcs. But how do they fit together? They don’t at all. First it becomes Paul’s role to not fall into that role, not the natives to resist their programming. (Or at least the narrative weight falls heavily on Paul.) Paul is gap-yearing as the Messiah, and the fact he feels bad about this doesn’t undermine but underline the problem. It becomes reduced to a plot obstacle, the Campbellian Refusal of The Call.

The film rather schematically divides the natives in two, more savvy Northerners and “fundamentalist” Southerners, which allows them to act as objective-correlatives of Paul’s journey, maps of his mind. The South is the one place Paul cannot go without them all doing his bidding. (Even as he bids them not to do his bidding.) So of course he keeps saying “I must not go South”, shortly before going South.  

It’s not so much there’s no realistic prospect of his avoiding any of this. It’s that the audience is put in the position of not only expecting but wanting this to happen, so the Plot can take place. And this in the same film so keen to convey to us the Revenge of the Third World?

We are not obliged to take a film’s protagonist as the hero. And in fact this film’s heart lies in Chani, who constantly says the right things, and mostly goes out and doing them. So its strange to note that film ends with her walking off in disgust. (Okay, riding a giant sandworm off in disgust. This is Arrakis, same thing.)

Can any of this be brought together in the mooted third part? I read the books in my early teens, which is possibly a longer time gap than between the second and third novel. But the internet seems strangely agreed that author Frank Herbert was aghast to see so many siding with Paul, so turned the sequel into a corrective, underlining the fact he decidedly wasn’t. “Now here’s another clue for you all, the head of the messianic death cult was Paul”. Such a thing is depicted in this handy internet meme. Though the cynic in me suspects this was a flaw in the book itself, which the author then projected onto the audience.


Conceivably then, the film has run into the same problems the book faced, despite knowing them in advance. So it shares the fate of its lead. It sees it coming up and takes steps to prevent it happening, which prove useless.

So what next? My somewhat weak memories are of a second book much bleaker, much less action-adventure than its predecessor. So whether that could either resolve any of this or even be made into into a viable big-budget film… such a thing remains to be seen. To all of us except Paul, anyway.

A more sensible review of this film lies here.

Saturday 9 March 2024

‘BATTLEFIELD' (SYLVESTER McCOY'S DOCTOR WHO)

First broadcast: September 1989
Writer: Ben Aaronovitch 
What witchery is this? Plot spoilers reside below, beware unwary surfer!


“Any advanced form of technology many not necessarily make much sense."
- Arthur C Clarke
(or at least it was something like that)

”Infamy, infamy...”

Given the cod-heightened dialogue that crops up throughout this Arthurian storyline, it would be tempting to start with the celebrated quote “infamy, infamy, they've all got it in for me!” 'Battlefield' is infamous for being the 'Who' story with the worst-ever viewing figures, and credited by many as less another nail in the show's coffin than the lid slamming down. Tomb of the Anorak is not alone in dismissing it as “the worst Doctor Who story of all time”. Yet, all told, it induces not a negative so much as a polarising reaction. Few are they who would uncritically defend it. But other views are available. As Jack Graham puts it “as so often in this era, there are superb ideas under a surface mess”.

And haven't we been here before? It's almost like the show is going out the way it came in. As with, say, 'The Web Planet’ or any other from a number of Hartnell episodes you spend half the time wanting to like this a whole lot more than you really do. Or possibly wishing there was some way for you to ingest it, absorb its themes and concepts, which didn't involve the often-tedious business of having to sit through the bloody thing. While, and unlike 'Web Planet', you spend the other half wishing you didn't like it at all so you could in good conscience just switch it off.

A large part of the problem is the wearily leaden direction. It lacks… well, what it really lacks is direction, which is a bit of a problem where direction’s concerned. Take the scene where the villainous Morgaine (below), invading our reality, comes across a war memorial in a church. Realising humans are perhaps not entirely the base brutes she's imagined, she orders her knights to stand and pay their respects. Then, running into the Brigadier, she tells him the occasion is not a time for fight. (“I wish you know that I bear you no malice… but when next we meet I shall kill you.”) But it's filmed about as prosaically as his earlier visit to the Garden Centre.


Those yet to have the pleasure of this story might say we should be trained to look past this sort of thing by now, that we should focus on the wood being suggested rather than the trees actually stood in front of us. But the execution really is too terrible to ignore, at a time when you might think TV was improving at least a little. 'Back to the Hartnell era' is not much by way of a compliment. Some scenes would embarrass a fan reconstruction, let alone an actually broadcast story. And worse, like looking a painting through a crappy distorting lens, it distorts the underlying theme.

Which, not terribly surprisingly given the title, is war. By tradition, something 'Who' tends to be a little skeptical about. Yet, to quote Owen A Stinger, “if anything, the directing... belittles the act of war, showing it to be a fun game for arrogant swaggerers.”

Consequently the story often feels like the archeological dig it's partly set in, the trawling through mud can feel endless but reveals the occasional jewel. For example, there's the Knealish emphasis on history seeping through into the present via place names. The Gore Crow Hotel (below) is lingered over by the camera but never remarked upon by the characters, which just lets it marinade into the overall atmosphere. It's like the way an actual sleepy Sussex town can be called Battle. The garden of England is a graveyard to wars past, we drive our cruise-control cars over the bones of the dead.


The Doctor being equated to Merlin might sound merely hackneyed. But making Merlin a future Doctor, so the Doctor himself becomes a pawn in his own game... that's much more involving stuff. By essentially splitting the Doctor role it inoculates against the standard McCoy-era problem that the Doctor is too alien, too remote. Which he is, but at the very same time he's reduced to the role the rest of us usually take up – trying to figure out what the Doctor has been up to this time. (“I could have given myself more warning,” he grumbles.)

It also necessitates his tactic of throwing himself into situations by acting as much like the Doctor as possible – a task he takes to with relish. (“Go!” he cries at one point, “before I unleash a terrible something upon you!”) And they stick to the conceit that the Merlin Doctor (so to speak) remains an off-stage mystery, where narrative conventions might seem to insist on a last-minute showing.

And despite the near-total inability to endow the trans-dimensional nobles with any genuine gravitas, at points the story somehow still manages to creatively contrast them with the contemporary and everyday. This is used humorously, but applied som thickly that the initial juxtaposition eventually erodes. Perhaps the most obvious moment of this is when Ace rises from the lake clutching Excalibur, to unceremonially shove it into the mitts of the nearest noble. As he pontificates actorly on the significance of the moment, she cuts him short - “That's what I said, Shakespeare.”

In this way, and much like the Hartnell era, the story seems almost self-inoculated against its own cheapskateness. The nobles hail from a parallel dimension “sideways in time”, and we've already seen the significance of that term for the Hartnell era. In short they come from somewhere so distant that its unframeable, that there isn't much point in worrying about it. What matters about them is what they signify.

Blasted By the Past 

Yet, however ill-served by the production, the story itself is pretty cockeyed. Like something found in an archeological dig, it comes up bent and broken with bits missing. What, we feel entitled to ask, is supposed to be going on? Lots of stuff gets alluded to without ever really being picked up. Morgana's near-constant feuding with her son Mordred suggest the younger generation are about to break free from her insistence upon etiquette among tyrants, but this doesn't really go anywhere.

There's also the suggestion that the Doctor isn't just playing at being Merlin, that he won't at some future point stick on a false beard and start saying “thee” a lot, but is Merlin – he belongs with the other-worldly nobles, not with us. This does often look like the Doctor at his most manipulative, at one point hypnotising the locals into leaving. Which doesn't really get taken up.

But then neither does he convince as the humanitarian voice of peace. There's a nice scene where two swordsmen parry, and fling each other back, for the Doctor to stroll through the ensuing gap. But his declammatory “no battle here” rhetoric, delivered in the middle of a battle, ultimately allows us to have our cool lazer-gun swordfights and eat them. (Okay, they're not actually very cool-looking. The point still stands.)

Still, if you have to squint pretty squintily in order to make sense of things, you can sort of do it. One of the main things the Arthurian characters represent is the past. Their reawakening/reappearance (whichever its supposed to be) threatens us with being trapped in their world of cyclic time, in endless round of war and conflict – those battle-commemorating place names come to life, reasserting their spells, memorials becoming predictions.

Critics of the story say Morgana doesn't demonstrate much of a clearly defined masterplan. But that's because she doesn't have one. She just wants to renew her perpetual conflict with Arthur. Their lives are based around each other more than most couples. The near-future setting, as well as being an in-joke on fandom's UNIT dating controversy, suggests what we are fighting for is literally the right to a future – the establishment of linear time.

There's an association made between Excalibur, the demonic Destroyer and the nuclear warhead – even if the story slings them together so inelegantly. It's never quite explained why the warhead gets stuck. But let's imagine it gets held near Excalibur, the sword having some magic attraction over it the same way it works on the scabbard on the hotel wall. Which establishes some innate equivalence between the two weapons, totems of might in the two different worlds.


While, when we first meet the Destroyer (above), he's presented as a kept demon of Morgana, as if representing her most destructive impulses - her warrior instincts unchecked by her warrior's code. She fears him even as she holds him. The original concept was of a man in a business suit who grew more demonic as he grew more powerful, as events in the story went more his way. She threatens to others that she'll release him, even though she knows to do so would be to unleash total destruction. So she parades him, as a deterrent, ultimately as a bluff. And if you haven't yet seen where this is going, remember at the time of broadcast the Cold War was still a live concern.

But those pointy fingernails of hers become forced. Effectively, they're forced twice and she takes the opposite courses of action – releasing the Destroyer, then refusing to press the button. Which doesn't really make much sense. Well, maybe a little if 're still willing to squint. If we see the Destroyer as representing her unchecked ego, as part of her, and the warhead as the depersonalised results of this. A chain of logic which progressively removes the human element and with it ramps up the destructiveness.

And what accelerates that chain better than technology, than modernity? We've become better at killing and worse at everything else. The Doctor breaks the chain by pointing it out, causing even Morgana to be repelled by evoking the mass, indiscriminate slaughter the bomb will bring. As Rob Matthews says, her “almost romantic notion of war has no place in a world like ours, a world where death has indeed gone mad.” (Notably, a working title for the script was 'Nightfall'.)

But of course Morgana's just a construct, devised purely so this can be said to her. The Doctor's the protagonist of a TV show, he's really talking to us. So why do we need to be told this? Because we must transcend her cyclic world of recurrent warfare – its become a necessity. Like the Destroyer the missile's something too powerful to be held in check by any code. We can change our ways or we can die. Hence the character who would have been the most noble of all these nobles, Arthur, is dead before events even begin. His ethics, though genuine, are now untenable. (Though why he's also sending a distress signal is another loose plot thread to add to the tangle.)

Which sounds not just an oddly conservative moral, but (like so many such) one based on a nostalgic haze rather than solid ground. They're praising the past, when they said they came to bury it. Even after they told us the past and warfare were effectively interchangeable concepts. Were there past chiefs who refused to take up iron weapons, gunpowder, cannonballs and all the rest, because they looked a bit too nasty? We wouldn't know because they would have been crushed beneath the boots of history, but it seems unlikely and besides it doesn't matter much. It might have worked better if “sideways in time” had been the parallel dimension of myth, Morgana stepping from the Avalon of the 'medievalist romance' section of one of those bookshops with rainbows painted on the front – only to be confronted by base reality. But that's not what happens on the screen.

Besides, out of the hamfisted way the three symbols are squashed together, the worst is the way the warhead is dumped into the story. It equates so easily with the liberal anti-nuclear agenda of the era, images generated by pressure groups like the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament which showed missiles stuck incongruously onto the rustic English countryside. (Pete Kennard's post-Constable montage, below, was an at-least-witty take on the theme.)


Nuclear weapons were seen as an aberration grafted onto an otherwise civilised society, like a thorn somehow stuck in our collective paws, rather than the logical outcome of a whole set of political and military alliances. That way, we could reject the conclusion without having to change our working out. The Doctor makes the usual uniform-baiting comments about UNIT, but its never suggested the missile really comes from them. They just happen to be guarding it. They're all presented as headstrong but ultimately stout-hearted types.

(The multi-ethic 'rainbow coalition' nature of UNIT, most epitomised by new Brigadier, Bambera being black, suggests we should be looking respectfully upon them. The story may intend us to visualise a multi-ethnic future, which just happens to mostly present itself through UNIT. The whole presence of Shou Young seems designed around giving Ace a politically correct friendship, her only other role seems to be to own a car. But come out mostly through UNIT is what it does.)

And speaking of Brigadiers...

The Brig Is Back (Long Live the Brig)

The story is perhaps best remembered for the final appearance of the original Brigadier - Lethbridge-Stewart. And indeed the old chap is the main thing it handles right. He's often seen as merely a straight man to the Doctor, an echo of Colonel Breen's “slide-rule mind” in 'Quatermass' - something for the Doctor to take his creative tangents from. Yet here they don't even meet until the third episode. His return from retirement, if woefully stretched out, is essential to his story arc. Initially he's so busy among his begonias he won't even answer the Brig-phone - “I don't care if it's the King!” (Which it sort of is, of course.) He's even been replaced by Brigadier Bambera, who wastes no time pointing this out. It's as if Bilbo had again left the Shire for 'Lord of the Rings', rather than delegating to Frodo. His gun is the ring he elects to carry once more.

Arthur may be dead, but its the Brigadier who's the real Arthur, the old warrior reappearing to save the day. And he can do it, reappear from his own personal Camelot deep in the garden of England, precisely because he is real. He's not conjured from dry ice and glowing globes like some others you could mention, he just got a phone call and a lift. He's gone from professional soldier to volunteer reserve.

And he's not just Arthur. In his final confrontation with the Destroyer, he's asked scornfully “can this world do no better than you as their champion?”, and replies calmly “Probably. I just do the best I can.” People rightly commend this exchange, as one of the moments that get to the heart of the show. But perhaps what's significant is that its something the Doctor, the ultimate gentleman amateur could have said, but doesn't. The Doctor becomes too associated with the nobles here, doors opening obediently at the sound of his voice. Someone else has to take up his champion-of-the-little-people role.

So the Brigadier knocks him out, to take his place in taking down the Destroyer. In a story about the importance of change, the necessity of linear time, we see a recurring character in a new light. And in a story telling us we need to put the old ways behind us, that's exactly what he was doing. He was never a warrior at heart, it was a role he could hang up like his uniform. But when the phone rang he was equally willing to die if need be.

...which makes it all the more annoying that they rolled back from their original decision. His death is less foreshadowed than pre-announced. The whole scene is played as intended, then inexplicably at the end of it he lives. Marvel comics have never been crasser. And just think, if they had stuck to their intent, we'd have escaped all that Cyber-Brig business in 'Death in Heaven'.

There's a telling scene where Bessie (the vintage car loved by the Pertwee Doctor) is reintroduced. Ace laughs at its antiquity, only to find it's been revved up and can fly by at superspeed. The story ends with her excitedly taking a trip in it.

...which seems to sum up the way we're supposed to see this. It may look like the old show, it may have no better production values, but there's a whole lot more going on under the hood if you care to look. Unfortunately the argument's not much more effective than the special effects used to convey this. You need patience, diligence and a very forgiving temperament to get there - and not everyone's an archaeologist. The casual viewers who tried ten minutes of it then shook their heads and switched over, they can't really be blamed. There are superb ideas under this surface mess, even if they don’t really come in an assemblable order. 

But at the very heart of it all is a dead King, inside a spaceship that's going nowhere. The Brigadier doesn't die. But he should. And with the theme of breaking the cycle and moving on, at times it feels like the show is straining to put itself out of its own misery.

…which may be an apt time to say that this will the last of my *’Who’* reviews. Thanks to those who read them.

Saturday 2 March 2024

'VENGEANCE ON VAROS' (COLIN BAKER'S DOCTOR WHO)

First broadcast: Jan 1985
Written by Philip Martin


”MORAL: TV is bad for you. Oh. Wait a minute”
- Androzani 

Torture Porn Goes Teatime

This was a controversial story for a controversial era, criticised by foes and even some fans of the show for its supposed sadism - the point torture porn went teatime. IMDB gives it the keywords 'bare chested male', 'bare chested male bondage', 'torture', 'execution' and 'electric torture', not exactly what they said about 'Black Orchid'. 

This may well be a case of becoming the news you intended to comment on. For against a background of the ongoing Video Nasties moral panic, the scenario essentially recaps Nigel Kneale's classic dystopia 'Year of the Sex Olympics' with torture porn replacing the... er... porn-porn.

The Varosians are providing the universe's only supply of Maguffinite. (At least I think it was called that). Despite everybody else needing this for space and time travel, they are continually ripped off over its price and kept impoverished. (It may be worth noting the British miners’ strike was also much in the news at time of broadcast.) Their reliance on torture becomes a way of keeping the workers acquiescent, while providing a secondary export in selling the tapes to thrillseekers.

Yet there's an extra element which frames all this. We continually cut to Arak and Etta, two regular Varosians, watching events on their home TV as they are broadcast. The conceit is that TV on Varos is essentially CCTV - viewers will see rebels caught and punished, as this is intended to work as a deterrent. You survive this crushing life by transforming your daily masochism into your end-of-shift TV sadism. And it's this intra-story meta-commentary you focus on. (Though, bizarrely, it seems they were added only in the final rewrite.)


Neither Arak nor Etta analyses or critiques the action. In fact they just sit there and utter grumpy banalities. Which is the whole point of them. Which becomes the very point of the story. It's less a clever metafictional conceit and more a distorting mirror held up to the viewer, which makes the story feel almost like an agit-prop drama. At times it all seems uncannily prescient, satirising TV trends then still to come - 'Gogglebox' fused with 'Big Brother’, cross-booked with 'Saw'.

Admittedly, this happens partly by default. The supposed main story is, for the most part, so incidental and lacklustre you couldn't give it your attention if there was money on it. (Mostly it's a random series of encounters with cheap and unimaginative hazards, seemingly dreamt up by an accountant told to attract the BBFC guideline 'contains mild peril' as frequently as possible.) But the distinction between the two is best explained by looking at the ending. The actual ending, the story ending, is risible in extremis. It just sort of ends. Someone might as well have walked out and hung a sign up saying “and then everything was alright again”. In fact, it pretty much ends with that message read from a monitor screen.

But the cut-back to Arak and Etta verges on Beckett. Blinking in this new-found freedom they never asked for, they turn to one another:

“It's all changed. We're free.”
“Are we?”
“Yes.”
“What shall we do?”
“Dunno.”


You naturally assume at some point they'll become sucked into the main story, that the Doctor will burst into their little flat seeking shelter or something similar. The internal fourth wall seemed already established as such a filmsy partition, surely it'll get broken down. But it doesn't and it's so much better that it doesn't.

Part of the scenario is that Varos used to be a prison. But its clear, even if no-one ever says so out loud, that this is only so everybody can pretend its not a prison now. At one point we even see a set that remains a prison, but it looks pretty much like everywhere else. After all, what is wage labour but day release prison? You finish your shift, eat your ration, you watch TV and you watch your mouth. The descendants of the officers are now the political class, and the convicts the workers. Not a subtle allusion, but an effective one.

The prison setting also makes use of the limited indoor sets. Even their cheapness and basicness becomes kind of incorporated into the shabby aesthetic. Like the besieged bases of the Troughton era, production limitations are turned into an advantage – to evoke claustrophobia.

And speaking of politics... Here the chains of office are precisely that. Well-meaning politicians are constrained by a system, corralled by capitalists and chiefly there to get blamed by the workers when nothing changes. (Which it always does.) On Varos even they risk torture. Popular votes are made a binary choice, pressbuttons located handily beside the citizen's tellies. And whenever a politician loses a vote they get an electric shock, the degree proportional to the scale of their loss. 

William Burroughs once described the President as “the dumbass frontman who takes all the rap”, which is pretty much the Governor's job description. Even as he orders the arrest and execution of others he looks trapped himself, knowing he won't be getting out of this job alive. We see Arak salivating at the prospect of his demise, as he will have done with so many before.

A fitting dystopia for the era, with a metafictional conceit to bring the point home. So far, so good. However, if we look past the Governor to those corralling capitalists problems start to emerge…


There's Something Wrong With Sil

Andrew Hickey, noted 'Who' sage and fan of this story, comments “it’s not a matter of goodies and baddies, but of people being forced to fit into a corrupt, evil system, no matter what their nature.” And indeed the story’s at its strongest where this description holds.

Yet he also describes the adversary Sil as an “evil slug-like reptilian capitalist,” which seems pretty much like a baddie if ever there was. He is, it should be conceded, quite possibly right to call Sil “the last great comic grotesque of Doctor Who’s history”. Nabil Shaban gives a bravura performance, unashamedly and quite gloriously over-the-top without getting kitschy or knowing. Yet despite this there is something very wrong with Sil - and the gulf between those two quotes helps explain it.

Essentially Sil is the SF trope of the malevolent brain in the jar (here transposed into a grub in a tank), crossbred with the agit-prop standard of the wicked capitalist. And, on the surface, they fit together easily. But perhaps that's the problem, the character slips too easily into a genre in a story otherwise intent on disrupting things.

The problem with the wicked capitalist figure is that it assumes capitalists cause capitalism. Whereas in reality it is capitalism which causes capitalists. As Marx said ““the capitalist is only a function of capital, the labourer a function of labour power.” The problem with giving capitalism a face (even a malevolent face) is that it hasn't got one, it's an inhumane system because its inherently inhuman. I've argued before that the way to present those faceless corporations is as faceless corporations, issuing orders remotely and clinically – the way it was done in 'Alien'.

Or if we are to have a Sil we need several Sils, all vying to get their bid in while keeping the overall price down, all knowing they risk torture from their own corporations should they fail. Underperforming Sils could disappear and be replaced by other Sils. (Think for example of the succession of Number Twos in ’The Prisoner’.) Every player convinced the real decisions are being made elsewhere.

Worse, once you effectively remove capitalism as a motive for capitalists something else needs to be found. At which point the trap-door is thrown open to the basement of a lot of dodgy associations. There is, thankfully, no sign of anti-semitism in the portayal of Sil. But he is something of a blackamoor, a folk culture demon, a jumble of signifiers for foreign-ness. Instead of a foreigner, he's all that's foreign. While the Varosians are white he's quite literally painted black, and given two black henchmen to silently do his bidding. He talks very differently to the regular English everybody else manages. (Something diegitically blamed on a faulty translator circuit.)


Varos has hierarchies, it has wage labourers to extract goods and officials to then sell them as commodities. We see all this on the screen. But like the criminal in the mind of the tabloid columnist the capitalist is literally an alien to Varos, something from outside. Things can get better just from him going. Yet of course the longer we keep pretending capitalism lies somewhere else, intervening with but outside of our lives, the longer it will be able to stick around.

Moreover, to the foreign we need to add the missshapen. There's something creepy in learning Shanan was cast as part of an affirmative action programme for disabled actors, only to have his disability made into a visual metaphor for his villainy. Signifying villainy through disfigurement is nothing new of course, Shakespeare saddled Richard III with a hunchback. 'Who' itself has done this before now, for example with Davros. And, ultimately, is deliberately casting a disabled actor as a villain any different to deliberately casting an Asian actor as a villain?

And there's an added inducement to make capitalist villains disabled, confirming the separation between them and the supposed dignity of manual labour. For example, in the 1968 film 'Once Upon a Time in the West' the railroad magnate Morton is made a cripple. Both disability and capitalism can be seen as unnatural, deviations from the norm.

Plus, the need to make Sil the sole, or at least the primary, source of their predicament forces the story to play about as fast and loose with economics as the Tardis does with physics. If we were to get semantic about names, Sil is a word associated with a threshold (as in window sill), suggesting he's their sole link with the outside. Varos is the universe's sole supplier of the vital Maguffinite, but the whole planet seems unaware of this and the idea of sounding out another buyer seems only recently dreamed up by the current Governor. One half of the planet torturing the other half in order to flog recordings of it, that occurred to them first. At the story's end other supplies of Maguffinite are found – and the sale price promptly goes up

Let's give it a half mark, however. Perhaps this is in part a riposte to the commonly held view that poor countries suffer from being 'under-developed' due to a 'lack of resources'. While the conflicts that almost perpetually seem to beset, for example, the Congo are happening precisely because the country has abundant mineral deposits. The fighting occurs because there's something worth fighting over. If there wasn't, the vultures would fly elsewhere. And as the majority of the population seems unlikely to see the value of any sales, whoever might win, they'd essentially be better off if the minerals had never been discovered. And here, Maguffinite is precisely why Varos is being squeezed.

Okay, it could be claimed that criticising a 'Doctor Who' story for an underdevelped analysis of capitalist economics is kind of missing the point. The Tardis, after all, does play fast and loose with physics. Ordinarily, this objection would be right. There's not much point listing all the things a popular TV show didn't say, we're better off focusing on what it did. But by taking on these agit-prop attributes 'Varos' is something of a special case, almost setting itself up for such questions to be asked.


A Cocktail Of Poisons

It can be hard to escape the feeling the story is actually little more than one of the torture porn tapes it's supposedly satirising. It's cheap production and poor direction only add to this. The feeling doesn't come from the degree of violence, which (despite all the infamy) isn't actually high. It's more the unremitting nature of it all. The story's structured around an attempt to escape a dungeon that finds everywhere else is a dungeon too, torture and claustrophobia crossbred. You start to yearn for one single shaft of daylight to cross those dungeons. Video nasty? Well it's shot on video and can be pretty nasty.

And that’s partly due to the peculiar combination of torture and metafiction having a strangely lacing effect. Strange, but with a precursor. Darren at The M0vie Blog describes ”the set design [of the original Start Trek episode] ‘The Empath’’” as ”sofas without furniture sets, consoles without walls, chains without ceiling hooks. It is haunting and unsettling, feeling incomplete. The set design in ’The Empath’ looks wrong on an instinctive level. ’The Empath’ wanders into the realm of the uncanny, suggesting that there something fundamentally broken.”

And like ‘Vengeance On Varos’, it’s also notorious for torture scenes. (Which led to it being banned by the BBC until 1994.) Yet was that just the torture? Didn’t that uncanny set design and those visceral scenes combine to create a cocktail of poisons? Something too strange to accept, yet too harsh to dismiss as mere artifice. Different, opposing reactions are stirred in you at once. The sets on ‘Vengeance On Varos’ aren’t as blatantly Brechtian. But the metafictional aspects of the story, the ever-present reminders that everything you see was made to be filmed, creates a similar cocktail. And with both, there’s often the feeling that the creators aren’t really aware of of what they’ve created, how powerful it it and so can’t really control the dose.

Added to which the second-biggest problem after Sil... well, that's the Doctor. It's bizarre to consider the story was originally conceived for the nicer-than-nice Fifth Doctor. Because Baker is here at the height of his psychopath-dressed-as-clown persona. Before the adventure starts, he's presented as listless, sinking into a torpor. He seems to need the conflict as much as the Tardis needs Maguffinite.

And once on Varos he seems to take to life there. Virtually the first thing he does on landing is to point a laser gun at a guard. We also see him prepare a death trap using poisonous vines, and in the acid bath scene (the most infamous moment of this infamous story) not only do his actions lead to the gruesome deaths of two guards he even makes what James Chapman calls a “sub-James Bond quip”. With the protagonist himself taking such a relish in what you might expect him to oppose, it comes to feel as confining morally as those limited sets are physically.

However, the Doctor’s implication in this is less to do with any grand scheme to make him initially dislikeable, and more to do with good old-fashioned cock-ups. The guard was supposed to fall into the acid bath by accident, but poor direction left this unclear. And as scripted the other guards would have blundered into those vines. However, the real cock-up is something broader...

To quote Andrew Hickey again, he notes the story “feels a lot like '2000AD' of the period… biting political satire and ultraviolence For The Kids.” In fact the story was broadcast in place of an ultimately unfilmed script by '2000 AD's chief deviser, Pat Mills. And one of the chief ingredients of '2000AD' of the era was its irreverent black humour. However, much of this was taken out of Martin's script during editing. And when you extract the humour, what you're left with is the blackness. Where it remains seems largely confined to Arak and Etta. Elsewhere, the few lines that survive merely sink things deeper. The acid bath scene was intended to be played comedically, presumably some kind of 'black slapstick', after which the Doctor's sub-Bond quip would have been more in context.

However, we should remind ourselves that after the saccharine Davison a more rough-edged Doctor was required. If they pushed the dial too far in the other direction, it was at least the right direction. Acid bath deaths are tricky to overlook, true, but at the same time – this is kind of what he does. This could be the biggest time since ‘Power of the Daleks’ where the Doctor has behaved as such an anarchic, disruptive force – throwing everything up in the air and then abruptly leaving, figuring where and how it lands is someone else’s business. Sil's raging cry “why is everything no longer as it was?” is actually quite glorious, one of the show's signature lines.

There's little silver lining to be found with Peri, however. Particularly given the way the story insists on auto-critique, her role become self-parodic without anyone seeming to notice. She basically gets herself into rescue situations while wearing a tight-fitting top. Nicola Bryant might as well have given up on acting the part altogether and just struck model poses. As much as she's given any characterisation it's a general disgruntlement with the overall state of things, including her (non) relationship with the Doctor. 

While the only other intra-story female character, Areta, seems to have the role of a rebel's girlfriend. (Handily for her, Varos' prisons allow hairspray.) As with the wicked capitalists, this seems all the worse for a story so keen to be making some kind of a progressive political statement.


Torture to the Left, Torpor to the Right

And while we're focusing on the downside, Arak and Etta aren't entirely getting off the hook. It needs conceding that there's problems with the metafictional device itself. Those who celebrate this controversial story tend to see it as the one which “took on” Mary Whitehouse and the show's other censorial critics. But ironically it may be the one which gave them the most ground.

Certainly, if this is 'about' the video nasties moral panic the panic is less called out than used as a basis. Chiefly, this was the association of horror films with snuff movies, an accusation then widespread and about as baseless. (Mostly centred around the 1976 film 'Snuff' which, seeking publicity through notoriety, claimed to show a real murder. This stunt may have been sick but it was a blatant hoax, and was well known as such before the 'nasties' moral panic even began.)

Moreover, while 'Snuff' and some of the other films might have well deserved their 'nasty' tag home videos had become quite a working class pursuit, and much of the panic was underlain with a paternalist concern the proles were escaping the regulated world of broadcast TV. (Even commercial TV in those days operated under strict controls.) It was a moral panic in about every sense.

And, as is so often with agit prop, there's the same self-righteous middle class concern the masses aren't being educated in the way they should be, and so are complicit in their own torpor. (Think of the sanctimonious disdain so often found in Crass' 'You're Already Dead' rhetoric.) It fits all too easily with the common conservative myth that the poor are responsible for their own state of being. One just proposes regularly scheduled does of elevating costume drama, the other sub-Brechtian shock tactics.

Take Arak and Etta on their proletarian sofa. Ostensibly, they're watching 'Doctor Who'. They're watching the same scenes as us, after all, and we're watching 'Doctor Who'. But it's clear they're watching TV, 
just watching what happens to be on. They demonstrably don't even know the names of the characters. They're a 'Doctor Who' fan's somewhat condescending picture of the casual viewer. Had I watched it on transmission, I'd almost certainly have associated the couple with my parents, grumbling endlessly about repeats and politicians. Watching it now, 'Who' fans probably think of the gullible fools who'll watch reality TV over their readymeal dinners when they could be treating themselves to a DVD of 'The Space Pirates'. Whichever, fans of show and by association the show itself, are semi-inoculated from this auto-critique. We’re okay, the problem’s wall with you. 

In an era of interesting failures this may be the biggest of all, and you may notice I didn't qualify there which word I was referring to. If it doesn't really work, if it got confused over itself about what it was doing, there may not be any way it possibly could work. But you're not even sure if its actually trying to. It may have intended to fail, to be self-sabotaging, breaking itself on prime-time TV hoping the shrapnel it throws off breaks everything around it and chucks us Arak and Ettas off our collective sofas. A slap in the face of public taste, the Dadaist urinal of broadcasting.

Or, to misquote Arak and Etta:

“What was that all about?”
“Dunno”

Saturday 24 February 2024

‘THE FACE OF EVIL' (TOM BAKER'S DOCTOR WHO)

Written by Chris Boucher
First broadcast Jan 1977
Plot spoilers happen!



“At last we are here. I shall be free of us.”
- Xoanon

When Two Tribes Go To War

As we all now know, this is the one where future companion Leela is found. She’s not fitting in terribly well amid her tribe, the Sevateem. Who seem remarkably similar to the Tribe of Gum way back when, as if savagery hadn’t advanced much in the meantime. There's the same machiavellian power struggles, and so on. In fact the differences only occur when the plot compels them. Not only is their religion different, if equally plot-driven, this becomes more central to the story so they have a shaman to reiterate it. (Rather than just the power struggle over leadership.)

In fact it can feel like they've come back to savagery to complete the quota of colonialist tropes. They missed some last time, such as cargo cults and foreigner-as-divinity. It's useless complaining these aren't really common features of tribal societies. One only ever really happened during a narrow time period in the south Pacific (and some doubt even there that 'cargo cult' is an accurate term) and the other only happened to the Aztecs, who weren't a tribal society but an ancient civilisation.

But they allow us to indulge in infantalisation of primitive peoples. Cargo cults demonstrates them playing at things they don’t understand the way children do. Which is of course required thinking for colonialists, to see other people as our charges. And so people want to believe them, and so here they are.


As from it's early days science fiction aped and echoed colonialist fiction, it's scarcely a surprise that this stuff got absorbed along with everything else. 'Star Trek' did it on less than three times, with 'The Apple', 'Return of the Archons' and 'A Piece Of the Action'. About which Josh Marsfelder says this, and there's not much point me paraphrasing him.

But of course, here there’s a twist. Which, as we all now know equally well, is that the Sevateem and their arch-enemies the Tesh both turn out to be descendants of an original landing party, respectively the Survey team and the Techs. The fact that they've created a cargo cult around their own history is, true enough, a tasty paradox. My favourite moment is when they use a steel panel from the spaceship as a gong, which may well be because they're not mimicking its original purpose but finding their own.

Commentators often talk about this story in terms of its influences, which may be understandable. The Baker era has, up to now, done their take on Frankenstein, on Triffids, on Mummy stories and all the rest. In a way the show hadn’t since the decline of the historicals. But here it’s misplaced. This story may well have had influences, but its not taking a recognised trope out for another spin. Its basis is more the classic science fiction extrapolation of a high concept. Which, as we all know was, What If God Went Mad? (More on Gods going mad later.)

And this may be partly why the story’s so under-rated, normally ranked below Chris Boucher’s other two scripts, ’The Robots of Death’ and ’Image of The Fendahl’ - despite that introduction of fan fave Leela. People aren’t looking at it in quite the right way.

More strangely, those same commentators often overlook what must surely be its biggest influence. Mostly it channels ’Zardoz’, just with Leela taking up the Sean Connery role of the half-naked savage who crosses the threshold to civilisation. (Through a big stone head, even.) There's the same exotic science-fictiony names which turn out to be corruptions of more familiar ones. The evil overlords even have similar names, from the titular Zardoz to Xoanon.

Well, except... ’Zardoz’s theme was civilisation leading to decadence and ennui, and therefore needing the odd bit of prodding by some passing half-naked savage to liven life up a bit. While this goes back to that great SF staple of the division between mental and manual labour. (Seem most clearly in the influential ’Metropolis’.) While the Tesh are ascetically religious, as fixated upon the life of the mind as the Sevateem are on physical prowess. (Their mind control powers should really have extended to telekinetic abilities, allowing them to carry out their daily tasks without sullying their fingers.)



Though while they guard the inevitable sentient super-computer and see themselves as superior to the brute Sevateem, unlike the Eternals of ’Zardoz’ they're ultimately as clueless as to what's really going on. (There's a touch of ’Canticle For Liebowitz’ in their turning science into religious litany.)

An artificial barrier has been constructed by that super-computer to keep the two apart, and the story's largely predicated upon bringing this down. In short, despite the technophobia you might expect, it's not technical development which has placed people on either side of it, the early adaptors versus the stuck-in-the-mud Luddities with their hunting knives and dial-up connections. Xoanon represents a false consciousness which needs throwing off. Social stratification has a social cause.

And if the plot has Leela lead the way, the Sevateem eventually follow. They cross the same physical and psychological barrier as her, they just do it a bit later. Intra-story at least, they make the mental leap of their own accord. The shaman plays a crucial role in overcoming Xoanon, with the Doctor admitting he's underestimated him.

And the name ‘survey team’ suggests they weren't colonising invaders, so would most likely have been of the same scientific bent as those who stayed in the rocket, suggesting this difference wasn’t innate but developed over time. (Which may explain how they're able to carry crossbows, which seem well beyond their general level of development. Perhaps.) But that’s not really the point of the thing.

And this is accomplished by the same thing happening in microcosm – a team-up between the Doctor and Leela. When Leela first encounters the Doctor, she crawls up to his feet. But that turns out to be something of a throw, as they soon shape up into a team. If Leela’s from the Sevateem, the Doctor's not of the Tesh in the same way. It’s that in their cosmology he belongs that side of the barrier, and is more associated with brain work.

But for their team-up to be effective the differences between them need to be overcome. When the Doctor insists on imposing that division of labour, Leela guarding the door as he confronts Xoanon, it becomes cliffhanger time and she needs to rescue him. And just as he teaches her the rudiments of science, at one point he has to uncharacteristically resort to fisticuffs.

So all this could end up with any essentialist difference between the two tribes erased, the sides learning to just get along. That would after all take us back to how things were before this even began. But the story pointedly shows us neither before nor after, it ends with no-one knowing what to do and with everyone arguing. As do many ’Who’ stories, it’s true, such as ‘Power of the Daleks’. But that doesn’t change the basic fact – we don’t see any of this happen, it essentially ends on a freeze frame.

”I’m Not Feeling Myselves Today”

As things progress, we gradually discover Xoanon has some kind of split personality. He later states the split he's created in society is a duplicate of his own mental state, which most commentators take as gospel. But it isn’t at all. You could have written an evil computer who comes unplugged in the end without any of the tribal conflict, or have the two groups separated by some natural force, a gorge or raging river, or a force filed without any sentience behind it. The real split's in the story itself.

In almost a reprise of 'The Ark’, the Doctor caused all this on an earlier visit when he tried to fix the computer. That face of evil, it’s his! This is most obvious in the blatant ’Forbidden Planet’ borrow, where the invisible monster is revealed to have his face, as if it's his rampaging id. (Just his face. But still able to leave footprints.) There’s multiple mirror and fractured screen scenes.


The literal going inside of the Doctor’s head (if in carved form), the appearance of a couch, that most Freudian item of all furniture… these are two heavy hints among many that we should be seeing this as a psychological story. It’s probably unsurprising that the Black Archive book for this was written by a psychologist, Thomas Rodebaugh.

But rather than offer a talking cure the story seems as beset by confusion as Xoanon. The Sevateem believe Xoanon is held prisoner behind the barrier by the Evil One, who the Doctor looks like. Yet when Xoanon talks to the tribe on the cosmic walkie-talkie he has the Doctor's voice. And why, if its too insane and conflicted to even know itself, has it embarked on this human engineering programme in the first place?

Xoanon is really a whole bunch of cultural signifiers for a troubled mind pasted together. (Rodebaugh states politely “Boucher thinks psychologically [but] does not think psychoanalytically, which is a different matter entirely.”) Which shouldn’t be seen as altogether surprising. Professional scriptwriters are more likely to go with what they half-remember on a subject than decide to read the complete works of Freud and Jung before starting on scene one.

Look at ’Face Of Evil’ up close, and the sense of it dissipates. But its like looking at a painting up close, and getting surprised it goes abstract. Stand back, stupid! This isn’t something that’s intended to make sense. Its trying to be stimulating, not polemical. It throws a bunch of stuff at us, and gives us the job of sorting it.

Okay then, let’s get started on that.

So, the Doctor repairs the faulty computer, but in so doing he creates Xoanon, who is modelled on him. And Xoanon could be seen as an abandoned child, both modelling himself on his parent and wanting to establish his own self by breaking away from him. God went mad because of Daddy issues. As the child rebels against parental authority, that control seems not just bad but definitional of evil. To the child, after all, this is the point from where all authority seems to stem. And the solution can seem to be to rid yourself of the parent, allowing you to replace them.

It’s perhaps possible to see the two tribes as a child mind obsessing over sorting, over putting things in their place. Of course the Tesh and Sevateem cannot mix, any more than the land can meet the sky.

And in the one way you could say the story is psychoanalytical, its cool that the super-computer doesn’t just become a life form, its allowed to stay one. In a longstanding Who tradition it doesn't need defeating but curing. To overcome our reliance on our parents and become our own self, the paradox is that we need our parents to help with that. It gets harder when your Dad keeps shooting off. But works out alright in the end.

The rest of this review will be a semiotic analysis of Louse Jameson’s legs.

A Semiotic Analysis Of Louise Jameson’s Legs

Told you.


The Sevateem seem to have one other woman amongst them, whose role seems to be to stop anyone saying Leela's the only woman among them. (Nor do they have any children or old people.) Because of course she’s a blatant example of the nubile savage. The classic version of which is Raquel Welch as Loana in 'One Million Years BC' (1966). Not only does she illustrate that TV Tropes entry, the fur bikini she sports even has its own Wikipedia page. (Even the names are suspiciously similar,  Leela and Loana. But then primitive languages don't use consonants much. Or at least that’s what I was told by Looalla.)


The Nubile Savage’s ability to scour her environment for naturally occurring hair and beauty products is much-mocked. But if it’s effectively a form of fancy dress, the Doctor’s an example too. Closer to the point is the double standard rolled up in the popular term for the sexy companion figure, Something For The Dads. The Mums are presumably in the other room, making everyone’s tea, so let’s not worry. Arguably this is almost the norm with the companion figure. But with her skimpy leathers upping the sexiness, Leela brings it more out in the open. Though there’s more specific things to bring up…

First off, Google-image the term and see how many Nubile Savages are white girls hanging around in black parts of the world. One very common iteration is the Jungle Girl, the female Tarzan. Because after all we wouldn’t want that lechery getting inter-racial, now would we?

Moreover, and put bluntly, the supposition is that primitives will be unconstrained by our social norms and so make for better shags. But at the same time a recurrent feature of the Nubile Savage is her sexual innocence. Unsocialised, with the mind of a child in the body of a woman, she doesn’t know what her parading about in her skimpies does to the rest of us. The number of times she’s made some solitary figure, discovered by some expeditionary party, attest to this. Which of course is about making her unthreatening the same time as sexy.

How much of this applies to Leela? She’s white, and living in a jungle. And she’s isolated from her tribe after the first scene. While this is a family show, so subject to obvious constraints, no mention is made on-screen of her sex appeal despite that being blatantly what she’s there for.

I’ve peppered these reviews with personal recollections of first watching them. But this one’s not quite as charming as a wide-eyed boy having nightmares about Daleks. Leggy Leela’s arrival was for me just at… um, well, the right time. I’ve no idea what my Dad thought of her, but I got to be pretty keen.

What if we were to ask the young me what made him so besotted? There’s little point pretending I‘d have been the same had they made her an Inuit wrapped in furs, instead of what ’Futurama’ would call “a compelling short garment”. But maybe it wasn’t just that…

There was then something of a negative feedback loop between girl characters in popular dramas and boy audience response. There just to give the hero someone to rescue, they spent a lot of time screaming and simpering. A little young for terms such as ‘media construct’, my schoolmates and myself tended to conclude “girls spoil it”. Why not get straight to the fight scene, we reasoned, past that lovey-dovey stuff?

Whereas Leela didn’t simper much, which wasn’t always true of the type. Loana is simultaneously Nubile Savage and Damsel In Distress, her Fay Wray role in the film is to get captured by various kinds of dinosaur, who may well have been queuing up offscreen. Whereas Leela, strong-willed and resourceful, is Savage as much as Nubile. (Or, more accurately, cross-bred her with the Action Girl trope.)

Previous woman companions, such as Liz Shaw, had been given agency by beefing up their brains. Leela might seem to go in the other direction. Her role in terms of plot function is less Liz and more a throwback to Ian, Steven or (another primitive from a fightin’ background) Jamie, sometimes clashing with the Doctor over the use of force.

But while her educational record may have gaps, its also established from the get-go that she’s savvy. Jameson has said she played the character as “very intelligent but uneducated”, and part-based her on a child she knew.)


As said, she soon strikes up a rapport with the Doctor. The story opens with her decrying tribal customs like a one-woman Enlightenment, and getting exiled for her pains. She elects to travel with him. And her rejection of tribal leader status is a more stammering version of how he’s responded on other occasions. (Essentially “you are making a category error here.”) It's strange to read that two endings were deliberately written, to keep their options open with her. You can't imagine the other having worked half as well.

It’s true we have Jameson herself to thank for much of this. While Walsh figured her best response to being cast as Loana was to “strut my stuff”, she became more protective of her character. Frequently given scripts saying “girl companion screams” she’d simply state “Leela doesn’t scream”. From Susan on, the standard pattern for the girl companion was to establish someone as more interesting and then progressively wear them back down to cliche. Jameson didn’t make the feisty Leela up, but she took the character from this story and stuck with her.

I’d like to look back and believe this planted some early seed in my young mind about how different women characters could be depicted. Perhaps to some extent it did. But my reaction at the time was something else…

Jameson’s best-known comment is that what they gave Leela in proactivity, they took away from her in clothes. But what she saw as a trade-off my young mind took as a combination, it was legginess plus knife-wielding which made her sexy. (Leela replaced Sarah-Jane, who didn’t simper much either. But whenever she did anything pro-active I suspect my young mind went ‘honorary boy’.)

The Action Girl overlaps with what, in the terminology of the day, was called a Tomboy – a girl who takes to boy's stuff. You see the same trope at a similar time in Leia's anti-Dale Arden act in 'Star Wars' (1977). The figure’s appealing to young boys partly because it’s a girl coming into your world, doing your things, not asking you to move too much.

Which also exposes the limits. A girl who survives in a boy's world by doing boys' stuff, the Action Girl sidekick doesn't break the presumption that an audience is bad default a male audience. (Quite often she'll be just bad enough to be sexy, hence the hero keeping her in line.) it's also implicit that there's something unorthodox in hers heroics, and with it something kinky.

Rodebaugh states Philip Hinchcliffe, then the producer, thought the character might lead to more girls identifying with her. I’m not sure of this. Emma Peel from ’The Avengers’ had a lot of… well her name was devised as a homonym for ‘Man Appeal’. But I’ve also met not a small amount of women who took her as a kind of role model, even if that wasn’t the original plan. I’m not heard anyone say anything similar over Leela. She was made for the males. And if she did anything progressive, it was to the males.

Further reading: “You could argue that this is the personification of the core divide at the programme's soul at this time. Threatening to destroy the series is the untapped ego of Tom, with the self-reflexive query ‘Who, am I?’ an internal debate over whether or not he's bigger than the programme itself. Nah, not really - but food for thought, innit?”
- Tomb Of the Anorak

Coming soon! Further disruptions in the space-time continuum…

Saturday 17 February 2024

'SPEARHEAD FROM SPACE’ (JON PERTWEE'S DOCTOR WHO)

Written by Robert Holmes 
First broadcast: January 1970 
Plot spoilers: Medium-to-high


”The New Policy”

”No eyes, no hair, just stares...”
”What?”
”Men. Creatures! Made in the factory!”

Some ’Who’ stories, there’s no real doubting which one they are. Take this. It’s the one where the dummies break out the shop windows and run amok. It’s one of the show’s most memorable sequences. Though I’ve never specifically heard it said, I would bet my frilly cuffs that this kicked things off and the script was then written around it.

But then why should that be so iconic? Why should one and a half minutes stand out so much from twenty-six years? (Particularly if you watch it back and realise they could only break that plate glass by having it happen off-screen.)

Perhaps the child psychologist Piaget will know. He conceived of the young mind as animist, progressing from a generalised sense that “all things are conscious”, even the most inanimate objects, through “things that can move are conscious” to what he called the mature view. (“Not everything that moves is necessarily conscious, just look at Ian Levine.”)

Interestingly, he saw the source of this as anxiety, a reaction to what otherwise seemed inexplicable. “It is when some phenomenon appears doubtful, strange and above all frightening that the child credits with a purpose.” (‘A Child’s Conception of the World’, 1929) And the child progresses through these stages not mechanically, like passing exams, but unevenly, shifting back and forth. So the old beliefs linger, overwritten but never truly banished.

Crucially, then, this is less a child’s anxiety than an anxiety rooted in childhood. (Surrealist art, not known for being aimed at an infant audience, often played on it.) So even in the adult that child sense can be re-induced. Which is crucial for a ‘family viewing’ show such as this. How do you appeal to both child and adult at the same time? You allow adults to reconnect to their child fears.

And this animism is all the stronger in the case of things in the image of a human. ’Who’ has already featured animate toys and dolls in ‘The Celestial Toymaker'. (If poorly applied, alas.) And it would frequently return to the trope, for example with the Weeping Angels. Further, Piaget insisted that animism isn’t anthropomorphism; in other words, things are granted sentience, but they continue to merely fulfil their function just as things do. So here the Autons don’t just oppose the shoppers they shoot, they behave in a contrary way to them. They are life and unlife at the same time.

So in a sense this sequence is classic because it's timeless, reversing development, taking adults back to a child perspective. But at the same time there is something very timely about it. And to get there we need to compare it to some near neighbours. The ’Twilight Zone’ episode ’The After Hours’ (1960) essentially takes mannequins as a variant of toys, and tells a Pinocchio tale. While the 1967 'Avengers' episode 'Never, Never Say Die’ focuses on duplicate copies. 'The Avengers' and 'Who' in particular were always exchanging writers and story ideas, so similarities are not so surprising. But instead let’s look at the differences. The 'Avengers' story becomes that spy-fi staple, the bodyswapping farce. Whereas here the focus is on duplication itself – on production.

This is of course not just the first story to feature Jon Pertwee as the Doctor, but the first of the new Earth-based adventures. (The conceit being he’d been sent there by the Time Lords, and told to think about what he'd done.) And if these new direction stories were to become more indebted to the classic BBC series 'Quatermass', they waste little time about it. The alien takeover narrative of 'Quatermass II' is unceremoniously filched in almost its entirety.

And then, more shamelessly still, they borrow to an almost equal degree from the show's own earlier 'Quatermass' homage – 'The War Machines’. To steal not only from another show but your own prior stealing from it – now that's chutzpah.

But the difference lies in the differences. In 'Quatermass II' alien takeover is signified by the familiar trope of a mark, echoing folk tales and witch trials. Here it is a plastic sheen, like spray-tan. One of the first encountered 'humanised Autons' (as opposed to those shock troop shop-front dummies) is a Secretary. And she sports the bland perfection of the Seventies 'dolly bird', recalling the then-familiar phrase “putting my face on”. In fact the closest parallel might be nothing from the list above but ’The Stepford Wives’ (1975, from a 1972 novel), which while more feminist had the same focus on getting replaced by a more perfect version of yourself. (And when you look at the silicon sheen on today’s celebrities, I’m not sure the Autons didn’t win after all. Rylan Clark? Clearly an Auton.)

Simon Reynolds writes that “plastic as a pejorative dated as far back as the Twenties...but it was really in the Sixties that people started using the word to mean fake and superficial.” (’Shock and Awe’,Faber & Faber) Think for example of the 1967 Mothers of Invention track ‘Plastic People’: “She paints her face with plastic goo/ And wrecks her hair with some shampoo”.

Which you might expect. Though their history is longer, in the Seventies plastics were becoming increasingly ubiquitous - to the point where they seemed almost new technology. Notably, the 'Doomwatch' episode 'The Plastic Eaters' hit the screen only a month later. Though, unsurprisingly, 'Who' is less concerned with maintaining scientific caution than using the stuff as a poetic symbol. Just like the Cybermen weren't really about your Auntie getting a replacement hip, the malevolent Autons aren't really about plastic bags replacing paper ones.


So plastic comes to play an almost transmutive role in the story. It becomes the bridge in the once-firm division between man and machine, between metal and flesh. One of the key settings is the Auto Plastics factory, where designer Ransome returns after a business trip. To find everything changed. His presence is now no longer required by his former business partner Hibbert, who has a new and somewhat sinister compatriot in Channing. In general, everyone seems to be behaving very strangely. 'Edge of Destruction’ levels of strangely. They don't shake hands when they do business. He's fobbed off by being told all the changes are down to “the new policy”.

But perhaps the key sequence is the one preceding this, set on the factory floor. It has, as you might expect, similarities to the factory sequence from 'War Machines'. But, again, the differences... That was clearly being undertaken in secret, happened upon by a tramp. Here they are not surreptitiously making robots by night but doll parts by day. After the 'poetic realism' of 'War Machines', this is 'real realism'. It could be documentary footage of a doll factory merely inserted into the episode. It might even be taken for filler.

…except the whole significance of the story is there in that scene. One of Marx's famous dictums was “it is not the workman that employs the instruments of labour but the instruments of labour that employ the workman”. This scene is like that sentence turned into a feedback loop. The workers (all women here, despite Charlie's chosen phraseology) are making approximations of human parts with machines. While they themselves work robotically, to the machine's speed, just a replaceable set of parts themselves.

“We're turning over to automation,” explains Channing. “It means we can keep staff down to a minimum.” But of course the meaning of the phrase is not literal. Its not a story about mechanisation resulting in rising unemployment, something in its infancy at the time of transmission. It means a minimum of autonomy. In 'Quatermass II' the manual work still needed to be done by workers, who could scupper the invaders' plans simply by folding their arms. But times change...

It's like lifting up the lid and exposing the workings. You could look at that scene and wonder if, like the Secretary, the workers have been taken over yet. But when you do you come to realise it doesn't really matter. The Autons may win, or the Doctor may defeat them. But whichever way the workers are staying on that production line.

That shop-window-busting scene, where the immaculately attired dummies usurp the somewhat-shabbier-looking shoppers – yes it’s iconic, but it’s not altogether surprising. In a way it’s cachet lies in the fact it’s a moment whose time had come. As the counter culture came to be more subsumed into the mainstream, critiques of consumerism became a staple of the Seventies. But this story goes beyond that. It takes not just consumption but production into its lens. True it only does this incipiently, but its being there at all is noteworthy.

In this way the replacement of mind control (used in both 'Quatermass II' and 'War Machines') by... well... replacement is significant. Notably, Holmes' working title for the story was 'Facsimile'. In this new, plasticated world we all become replaceable. People aren't just done away with but vaporised, made to disappear. (Via the command “total destruction”.) Being surplus to production is analogous to non-existence.

In 'The War Machines', the plan's combination of takeover by mind control (represented by the sentient super-computer in the Post Office Tower) and by robot invasion (represented by the factory) never seemed very joined up. And here the Post Office Tower is essentially replaced by another handy London landmark, the waxwork museum Madame Tussauds. Which makes more sense...

...no really, it does! Well, that symbolic sort of sense anyway. Because it is used as their warehouse of Auton duplicates of the great and the good, the “government types” and military top brass. Because it matters who our betters are. While us proles, we’re essentially mere parts - faceless, interchangeable cogs. We can be replicated by the production line we're working on.

Yet it needs stressing that the critique of production is only incipient. Just as with 'Quatermass II', as with 'War Machines',  as with 'Tenth Planet' or countless other examples, the problem is framed less in terms of our losing our agency than a rather fetishistically individualised sense of the pure self. The Nestene Consciousness, who control the Autons, are bad because they are collective. Ransome becomes suspicious of Hibbert when “you keep saying we”. When Channing later intones “we have no individual identity” we are intended to be chilled.

There's a plethora of telephone scenes, despite the fact that unlike 'War Machines' they have no obvious narrative function. But they're most likely there to underline one early scene where Channing is in a phone booth. Someone impatiently barges in to ask how long he'll be, to discover the receiver is down. We separate beings communicate one-on-one, nodes in an exchange. While the Nestene, a hive mind, pool their thoughts universally by telepathy.

Except of course they possess only the supposed downsides of collectivity – and so they still have leadership! While their consciousness arrives on Earth via meteorites (giving the story it's title) which can then inhabit the Auton shells, its the 'swarm leader' which goes missing – putting their plans on hold until it can be found. “Swarm leader” seems a peculiarly oxymoronic phrase, reminiscent of Kenneth Williams insisting on being called “Citizen Sir” in 'The Black Fingernail'. 

When looking at 'Tenth Planet’, it became obvious that the notion of the Cybermen standing for communism can't really hold up to scrutiny. This story may be firewalled against misinterpretation, but from another direction. Ransome has been away on business, which is carefully specified as in America. Though by the Seventies this had become common, there may be a significance to it.

Particularly back then, America seemed the place where capitalism came from. “The latest thing from America” was a common phrase. Any mention of “the new policy” might stir up Stateside thoughts in people's minds, new business practises shaking up the trusted old ways. Ransome's trip throws us off this wrong scent. (Though my mind goes in another direction. The Nestene’s name always make me think of the notorious Swiss multinational Nestle.)

Because, just like the Cybermen, the Nestene come from neither west nor east, neither left nor right. Not even up, not really. Outer space is not being used as a blind to disguise their actual origins. In a cautionary story, they stand for the future. (The meteorite's calling signals sound almost uncannily prescient of mobile phone rings.) And space stands for the future just fine.

From A Clown To A Dandy

”I couldn't bear the thought of being tied to one planet and one time.” 


If not much has been said about the new Doctor so far, then the story doesn't do much more. He's kept out of the action for almost the first half, as he recovers from his (still unnamed) regeneration. (While Troughton’s first outing got an instalment to itself.) And when he does appear, as perhaps should be expected in a story so indebted to 'War Machines', he's clearly a successor to Hartnell.

Donning the aristocratic signifiers almost as soon a stepping from his sick bed, he 'borrows' his trademark cape and vintage car from... yes, really... a Doctor. Which he promptly drives to UNIT and speaks so imperiously to a sentry you can't help but be reminded of Andrew Mitchell's Plebgate affair. His commanding voice, we don't even need to be shown, gets the job done. In fact, it could be argued he doesn't <i>really</i> behave like the Pertwee Doctor until he's in his posh togs. In his sick bed he feigns derangement as a means to get what he wants, then pulls a face of mischievous-child triumph, a very Troughton trick to pull.

At points he acts less like a hero and more like an aristo who, after losing his heritage, has been thrust unwillingly into a day job. Suddenly he has responsibilities, even the need for a name. At first he tries to evade it by sneaking off, only to find the Tardis disabled.

And herein lies the paradox. For a story about the alienation induced by modern production methods (which in no small way this is), it is all the more bizarre to have a protagonist so steeped in privilege culture. But rather than searching for some intra-story way of getting to grips with this, we are better off seeing it as symptomatic of Seventies culture overall - perhaps even British culture in general. Andrew Hickey has often observed that there is much of George Orwell or Tony Benn in the Doctor, the toff who turned to the proles. This paradox will be turned over again and again by the show. It's the grit that makes the oyster.

The Autons and their replacement/takeover scenario may have been devised to match his regeneration. The Doctor conveniently manages to land not just at the same time as the Nestene's meteorites, but in the same wood. (In the Pertwee era, not only does the Earth reduce to the Home Counties, they can be spanned by stretching out your arms.) His line about his new face being “very flexible, you know” might seem to suggest at some kind of parity. Yet the Autons' replacements ultimately do the opposite of the Doctor, who is the same person only looking different.

However, for all that there's a newfound emphasis on his alien-ness. He's shown to have two hearts, something he's been previously quiet about. But of course this alienness is now required precisely because of the new format – because things are now Earth-bound. However copycat the scripts might get, the Doctor is not Bernard Quatermass the Earth scientist. He's from another world and has at root an inscrutably alien nature. The 'Radio Times' cover which introduced him was keen to show him as some kind of magician.


If this is not the first UNIT story, it's clear UNIT is now being set up to be regular feature. (We're almost explicitly told the Autons will be back for a rematch.) This story went out the same year as yet another Seventies SF show with an alien invasion premise, 'UFO'. While SHADO, UNIT's equivalent, hide behind the cover of a movie studio, their glam fashionista uniforms suggest the cover they've gone in for is quite deep. Nominally SF, 'UFO' overlapped considerably with pop-surreal spy-fi stories, such as 'The Avengers', 'The Man From UNCLE' and Marvel comics' 'Nick Fury Agent of SHIELD'. (Where SNAAC applies, Snappy Acronyms Are Always Compulsory.)

UNIT can't compete with this fashion parade, but they still look a good deal more dashing than that regular army clobber. Of course they have to act the straight man to the Doctor's dandy. But like the plastic they occupy a between-space, not as hidebound as the straight army, but neither as savvy to strangeness as the Doctor. Notably it's Captain Munro from the regulars who gets replaced.

And with UNIT of course the Brigadier is back. This significance of this may be hard to reconstruct from hindsight, as we tend to see his role as effectively beginning here. But while fans frequently complain the new policy of Earth-set stories constrained the show, the contemporary casual viewer – tuning in to a much faster-paced show, with more location shooting and now in glorious technicolour – would have seen it as opening up. 

All those revelations about the Time Lords to top off the last season, now they don't even get mentioned by name. This is built to be a jumping-on moment for new viewers. (Ratings had been falling through Troughton's tenure, and are known to have increased with this story.) Given all this, the Brig's reassuring face becomes one of the very few recurring features, the only person around who would have been able to recognise the old Doctor. (The Tardis is alternately guarded and ferried around like a totem, but we don't see inside it.)


Yet if the Brig is the familiar face, all the audience identification business falls to new companion Liz Shaw. When Hartnell became Troughton they made sure it happened mid-season, with Ben and Polly still around to provide a live commentary. This time it’s a season-opener. Here, as Andrew Hickey comments: “we’re introduced to these vaguely familiar elements as if they’re totally new, through the eyes of new companion Liz Shaw.”

Her introductory scene is all about her, and us, being brought up to speed. But it also tells us about both her importance and her character. Her initial skepticism has to be seen in this light. We're used to encountering the small-minded disbelief of the petty bureaucrat - obsessing over protocol and procedure oblivious to the fact that silver-suited extras are even now over-running High Wycombe. But from Liz, coming so early in the reboot, its a skepticism she expresses for us – and so in her we see it as a sign of intelligence. (Though she doesn't need to worry about those “little blue men”. Everyone she runs into will be green.)

She's clearly been head-hunted by UNIT on her own prowess, though just in case we haven't got it yet the Brigadier states firmly she's “not just a pretty face”. If the Doctor's still a magician, this time he's not handed another mini-skirted assistant. Liz is an actual scientist who does actual science stuff, almost a dummy run for Romana. To think that it was only four years ago when Polly first appeared, and we got almost excited over her being a secretary.

Though 'Quatermass' featured female scientists, despite so much else being sourced from there Liz has no real antecedent. She's more an acknowledgement of shifts in Seventies culture – what was then dubbed “Women's Lib” and we now tend to call second-wave feminism. A wave which had expanded from political and legal campaigning to a general critique of culture, which of course included popular culture. Gloria Steinem’s article <i>’After Black Power, Women’s Liberation’</i> was at this point barely a year old.

A popular TV show keen to expand its audience may have not wanted to seem behind the times, or to cut itself off from a potential female audience. Certainly, like the UNIT uniforms Liz's look seems pitched - tied-back hair but mascara round her eyes. Not too old-world, not too dauntingly modern.

Given all this, when Liz is shown taking to the Doctor straight away the man she's meeting is the man a whole chunk of the fresh audience may be meeting. A mysterious stranger, an alien. All we can be really sure about is that he's brilliant and here to help us. Actually, we can't even be entirely sure he's here to help us.

One of the more unfortunate similarities to 'War Machines' is that the ending is as much of a let-down. Things are essentially solved by the combination of a technomaguffin and overacting. (Androzani calls it “a disappointing ending which fizzles out in a sea of woeful tentacles”, and indeed its a sequence about as infamous as the Autons coming to life is famous.) Seemingly you're only supposed to twig that Channing was an Auton himself right at the end. A natural reaction to which would be “if I'd have known I wasn't supposed to guess that, I'd have tried harder not to”.

Yet overall, while Holmes' previous two efforts ('The Krotons’ and 'The Space Pirates') are not what you would call well-remembered, this has gone on to be a favourite among fandom. Yes, the same fandom which normally so takes against the Pertwee era! Which is perhaps odd, as it very much establishes the new policy rather than provides an exception to its rule. Maybe sometimes its the first time that can be the charm.

Coming soon! Those anomalies in the tempo-spatial sphere persist…