THE RISE OF SPOCK (THE ORIGINAL 'STAR TREK')

“Nowhere am I so desperately needed as among a shipload of illogical humans.”
- Spock, ‘I, Mudd’

Logic Thinking And Its Discontents

It’s time to boldly go into a multi-part look at the original ’Star Trek’. The crux of which is of course the Kirk/Spock/McCoy triangle. Formally this is yet another of its inheritances from the film 'Forbidden Planet', with the Commander, Lieutenant and Doctor. But if both are interested in psychology the film's paradox is to be unconcerned with characterisation. As a one-shot of course it has less running time to build characters, but even so it seems content to paint in broad types. They're cast in the film in pretty much the way they carry out their duties, according to rank, and certainly don't spend much time debating philosophy.

Whereas, a show of limited sets gives a conference room over entirely to the three's debating. (Though for a Doctor, McCoy sure seems to hang around on the Bridge a whole lot.) 'Star Trek' has a reputation as a pedagogical message-of-the-week show, a mouthpiece for Kennedy-era interventionism – showing up somewhere and doing the right thing in the allocated fifty minutes. But Spock and McCoy will squabble about that right thing on almost a weekly basis. There’s a sense that they can't just serve up instant answers, that they need to be teased out.

Yet Kirk is at the apex of this triangle. He's able to draw on both of them, knowing when to listen to logic or draw from intuition. As a leader needs advisors, Kirk needs Spock and McCoy, but also needs to make the final decision himself. They're brain, heart and head. It's a model which professes to achieve diversity of thought and unity at the same time.

And okay, drama dramatises things, which often involves personifying them.But this model seems fixed on the notion that heart and head can’t exist in the same body, and can only be combined via the workings of an external force. Perhaps relatedly, our society has a tendency to associate intellectual brilliance with emotional coldness, a ‘rule’ proven through being regularly applied to fictional characters. Such as Sherlock Holmes, or… oh, you guessed.

The third season episode ’The Tholian Web’ gives us a Kirkless situation, where Spock and McCoy have to manage without him. It rather shamelessly supposes this to be something new whereas by this point we’ve lost count of the times. But it plays the concept for all it’s worth, by focusing solely on Spock and McCoy, with no counter Kirk subplot. In fact even the ghost images of him don’t appear until late on.

Instead it has the tape he leaves them. Spock is advised “temper your judgment with intuitive insight. I believe you have those qualities, but if you can't find them in yourself, seek out McCoy. Ask his advice”, and McCoy told to follow the new Captain. In other words, even when Kirk is missing presumed dead the necessary interlocutor between their opposite poles is still Kirk.

For the first Kirkless situation we need to jump back to the early 'Galileo Seven’. Its designed around demonstrates the limits of logical thinking. Abandoned on a hostile planet against primitive locals (essentially id-creatures, impervious to if not the opposite of his logic, never properly seen on-screen) Spock makes mistakes and lives are lost. And yet he never falls prey to panic, keeps his head when all about him are losing theirs - and gets the majority of the crew home. As it's an unusually hard science story for 'Star Trek', quite deficient in omnipotent alien beings, we can more-or-less follow the rationalism of his decisions.

Yet instead of McCoy having to admit that Spock’s decisions proved right in the end, them being alive and all, it turns out Spock was in the wrong. He's gleefully told by McCoy and Kirk he acted illogically, an accusation which is... well, quite illogical, Captain. He jettisons their remaining fuel, causing a signal flare the Enterprise sees and responds to. Its a gamble. But had he not taken this chance their lives would have been prolonged by only a few hours. Calculation was his thought process. They then go through exactly the whole debate again, in the later episode 'Gamesters of Triskellion', and still McCoy hasn't learnt to have any confidence in him.

While in 'Corbomite Manouvere', Kirk corrects Spock's chess analogy to poker – which allows him to go save the day. And poker is more McCoy's game. Why load the deck so? Because at some point, logical thinking and ideology are going to clash. Intuition and ideology aren’t the same thing but they can seem the same, the things we’ve always assumed will “feel right” to us. But in the modern world a degree of logical thinking is necessary. So it needs to be invoked, but in such a way its forever subordinate to feeling. The brain can’t be done without, but must be constantly mistrusted. Thinking is like a powerful but potent drug, only to be messed with when the antidote of feeling is close to hand.

Though, like any rule, exceptions apply. 'Devil in the Dark', unusually is a horror story. Which makes it much closer to 'Doctor Who',even to the point where the horror is inverted and the 'monster' found not to be a monster at all. And it's Spock who plays the Doctor role, not only guessing the truth but managing to communicate with the monster. McCoy scoffs and Kirk plays the skeptical role of the Brigadier, but they come round.

‘Spectre of The Gun’ has a plot resolution which literally relies on Spock making the others see the world as he does. Cross aliens transport them into a Wild West set to re-fight the battle of the OK Corral as the losing side. And it is demonstrably a Wild West set, the Hollywood tradition of building streets out of theatre flats is given a Brechtian foregrounding. Their adversaries, the Earps, are about as robotically remorseless as Yul Brunner in ‘Westworld’. Though slightly absurdly, no-one among the crew seems to notice this and they carry on insisting they’re in the 1880s.

Then, at the very end, Spock realises the solution is to transcend. Ostensibly he persuades the others via the Vulcan mind meld. But it works like no other occasion. It’s more like a Zen master preparing his novices for a ritual involving treating the ‘real world’ as samsara. (“Unreal. Appearances only. They are shadows. Illusions. Nothing but ghosts of reality.” Strictly the bullets are unreal whereas samara is more akin to ‘merely real’. But the comparison is there.) After which the Earp’s bullets can no longer harm them. In contrasts to Kirk, whose lineage we’re told stems from the Wild West. As Spock points out, they’re enveloped in “the violence of your own heritage”, the very thing they need to rise above. After which they are permitted to meet the bodiless aliens, the Melkotians.

But there's not really any corresponding points where McCoy's heart fails him. In ‘Man Trap’ Kirk snaps at him: “You could learn something from Mr. Spock, Doctor. Stop thinking with your glands.” But it’s incidental to the story. In 'City on the Edge of Forever' he causes all the trouble by getting so hyper-emotional, but only via going mad. There was no particular reason why it should be him. (And in fact in Harlan Ellison's original script it wasn't.) And it's noticeable that when Spock turns out to be right it’s often when he’s not pitted against McCoy, for example in 'Arena' where he questions Kirk's aggressiveness towards hostile aliens.

In short, in the ceaseless tug-of-war between Spock and McCoy the game is rigged, the deck loaded. It's simply assumed that his logical approach is deficient (even as we rely on it). Then, with the plot conceit of his being half-human, it’s equally assume he's kidding himself about being non-emotional anyway. Hence the dodge that, if he does something that worked out, it couldn’t have been logical in the first place.

There isn't a single other Vulcan character in the whole first season, and when we do finally see them, in 'Amok Time', it's a traditionalist, ritualised society, not a logic-based technocracy at all. His father shows up now and then. But a full-on Vulcan, a completely logical being, is not something the show takes any interest in.

At times, the show uses the motif of the computer talking metallically. But at others ‘readings’ are relayed by Spock, as he peers into what I can only think to call a peeroscope. Spock may be the tech guy on the team who spends the Xmas party telling you the merits of various operating system. The interlocutor with the computer is something of a computer himself.

Certainly computerised systems are treated with mistrust, in episodes such as ’The Ultimate Computer’ where the running of he Enterprise is mechanised. As we literally see the lights go out across the ship, we realise this will leave the Federation like all those dead worlds its crew has encountered, with only programmes pointlessly left running. It’s a different threat to the commonly encountered mad computer, the menace doesn’t come from machine hubris but logic pursued to its limit. We should also remember Spock’s effective replacement in ’Next Generation’ was “synthetic life form” Data.

But if Spock was intended to prove on a weekly basis the limits of all that thinking business, there was a twist to the tale…

Spockmania Strikes

The Captain’s Log conceit is mostly there to allow for a post-advert catch-up. But it does at times stray into Kirk’s ‘thought voice’, the pared-down equivalent of a theatrical monologue. Whereas Spock just holds his impassive poker face.

Analysing Frank Millers’ comics in ’The Importance of Being Frank’ (in 'The Daredevils' 1) Alan Moore noted “Miller’s creation Elektra has never utilised thought balloons to expand upon her motivations. Thus, much of her characterisation is in the reader’s mind.” Spock does have one moment, in ‘Cloud Minders’, where we get to hear his thoughts. And it’s strangely jarring.

Much like a sitcom, ‘Star Trek’ comes alive in the casting. Shatner's idiosyncratic, histrionic, scene-stealing performance is infamously over-the-top. But in many ways it has to be for the thing to work. Kirk has to push himself into the foreground, by sheer act of will, or he'd merely be the referee between Spock and McCoy. Had they stuck with Jeffrey Hunter as Pike, as in the pilot, it's unlikely we'd be talking about 'Star Trek' now. The fun to be had with Shatner and Kelly comes through performance. There’s never a moment where they lose themselves in their character, but that doesn’t matter when you can enjoy them being themselves.

So its their overplaying which enables and highlights Nimoy's underplaying, achieving considerable expressiveness just by raising an eyebrow. He’s not just the best but in the precise sense the only actor. So when he comes to do the heavy emoting which is so commonly associated with acting, it has greater effect. He’s like the best player in the band who knows it, so deliberately rations his solos. It becomes something you wait for.

And those ‘solos’… initially at least they came from Nimoy himself. Worried about the part’s effect on his reputation, he was insistent Spock couldn’t just be “a walking computer who gives scientific data” and required repeated assurances from Roddenberry.

But there was something further which cemented Spock’s popularity. Hilariously, even as the scripts stipulated Kirk getting the girl on a weekly basis, it was Spock who proved to have the girl appeal. And that’s not a small thing in the history of this show.

As the M0vieblog has pointed out: ”Although the importance of female fandom has been somewhat downplayed in favour of stereotypes about male nerds, female fans were hugely active and important from the very beginning of Star Trek.” These female fans weren’t necessarily tuning in for their Spock fix alone. But Nimoy’s fan mail soon surpassed Shatner’s and the term ‘Spockmania’ was coined, leading the production to play into this.

But what was the basis of this appeal? Particularly when it was Shatner getting his shirt off on a near-weekly basis. Gene Roddenberry “believed that female viewers would find a slightly dangerous and taboo character more attractive. This was supported by female visitors to the set who seemed to be immediately drawn to Nimoy.”

Not uncharacteristically, he may well be claiming lucky break as masterplan. But there is insight in his comments. There’s a strange accord between Spock and both Peter Cook’s stand-offish pop star Drimble Wedge in ‘Bedazzled’ (1967) and Gary Numan’s career-launching ‘Top of the Pops’ debut in 1979. The two aren’t identical. Numan, seemingly separated even from his own band, plays someone convinced he’s emotionless while you can see he’s actually vulnerable. (“And just for a second I thought I remembered you.”) Whereas Cook just plays the facade, culminating in the pay-off line “I’m not available”. But it’s the same equation, unavailability creates appeal.

We should remember that in this era it was still uncommon for women to have careers. Domesticity was presumed to be your realm. And if your life reduced to your husband, then a steady, loving, reliable husband becomes the equivalent of a McJob – rote and dull. Aged nineteen, Sylvia Plath, wrote in her journal “I must pour my energies through the direction of my mate. My only free act is choosing or refusing that mate”. In which case, why not use that one free act to at least give yourself something of a challenge? A confident alpha male with good prospects, Kirk might have been what women were expected to look for in a man. But the female audience voted with their pens, and they went for Spock.

We can take a stab at plotting the development of Spock past the walking computer with the logic chip. He’s not at all like himself in the pilot, where the remorselessly efficient second-in-command role went to Number One. You can see fore-tremors even here, even if they’re pegged to another character. The mindreading aliens state to Pike: “Although she seems to lack emotion, this is largely a pretence. She has often has fantasies involving you.” Though her on-screen behaviour never openly confirms this, she does manage a logically-deduced but waspish put-down to Vina. (Who those aliens are grooming as her rival for Pike.)

It may start with Uhura’s song about him in ‘Charlie X’. (Which not only relies on the explanatory song trope, but comes in the second episode broadcast - where we might expect character elements to be described diegeticially. The original script had her mimicking others.) Bizarrely, this both references an old, abandoned idea that he would have a full-on Devil look (“devil ears and devil eyes”) and looks forward to his babe magnet future. Here his allure’s presented as intentional (“at first his look could hypnotise… his alien love could victimise/ And rip your heart from you”), a warning to space-faring gals. And Spock smiles as he (literally) plays along. It’s hard to work this out from here. Is it that the cold exterior character is not yet developed? Or is it already being melted down?

Then, in the fourth episode ‘Naked Time’, a space virus causes everyone to lose their inhibitions. But here Nurse Chapel confesses her love to him while he’s unable to respond. He breaks down, but precisely because he couldn’t tell his mother he loved her. (Nimoy has since said little was scripted for this scene, and most of his dialogue was extemporised.)

It was ‘This Side of Paradise’ that first had Spock fall in love. A role originally been slated for Sulu, but switched to him. And if we were to guess when those fan letters first took effect…

As time went on Spock’s breakdowns became about as much a ‘Star Trek’ cliché as Kirk getting the space girl, with predictably diminishing returns. (“Spock, your feelings are showing again.”) Seeing him throw teenage tantrums on ’Amok Time’ was risible stuff. (Nimoy himself grew disappointed by the treatment of the character, leading to strained relations with Roddenberry.) But there were other ideas too, which better grasped the concept…

The Vulcan Mind Meld, introduced in ’Devil in the Dark’, parallels telepathy – often used to portray a deeper form of contact than mere speech, underlining the notion of Spock possessing uncharted depths. While in ‘Return to Tomorrow’ they meet a benevolent alien race who have over time lost their bodies. So, as a temporary solution, they ask to borrow the crew’s. Kirk hosts their benevolent leader Sargon, like going to like. But Spock is assigned Henoch, who proves to be a scheming Loki figure. Watching Nimoy dressed as Spock but playing the malevolently smirking, insouciant Henoch is easily the most memorable element of the story. If this wasn’t the original motivation tfor the script it should have been.

As so often, it may be a unique combination of chance circumstances that gave us the Spock we have. The imposed post-pilot rethink. Nimoy’s insistence on a more substantial role. Letters from the female fanbase. And without the Spock we have, there’d be no ’Star Trek’ as we have it. That’s only logical, Captain.

Coming soon! More boldy going...

MISTAKEN BELIEFS CORRECTED (ANOTHER SPOTIFY PLAYLIST)

With our latest Spotify playlist things take off with the Blue Aeroplanes, in tribute to guitarist Angelo Bruschini who recently died. And continue with the Waterboys’ (alas-still-timely) rumination on colonialism. Richard and Linda Thompson fuse folk with soul in a James Carr cover, Coil try to find our place in an indifferent cosmos, Kate Bush paints a landscape of Arctic ice, Michael Gira of Swans receives (or possibly sends) a somewhat psychotic fan letter, the Shaolin Afronauts bring us Afrobeat from Adelaide, the Fall sport uncharacteristically smart legwear, and the Psychedelic Furs proffer flowers in the way knives are normally drawn.

(The illo is William Blake’s Urizen, at his imperious work.)

The Blue Aeroplanes: Huh!
The Waterboys: Bury My Heart
Richard & Linda Thompson: Dark End Of The Street (live)
COIL: Where Are You?
Nina Nastasia: I Say That I Will Go
Kate Bush: Under Ice
Michael Gira: Fan Letter
John Cale: The Philosopher
The Shaolin Afronauts: Shaolin Theme
Hole: Softer, Softest
The Fall: Chino
Hey Colossus: Hey, Dead Eyes, Up!
The Psychedelic Furs: Flowers

“Are you still looking for things which no-one else can see?”

‘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.

‘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.

'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”