THIS WAY UP

(Part Two of 'Everybody's Happy Nowadays', Part One here.)

”History has just begun”
- The Ex

“Let's change the future from here”
- Atari Teenage Riot

”Nobody will give you freedom, you have to take it”
- Meret Oppenheim

(The story so far: Back when our side fought the class war more acutely, we had near-universal benefits, pensions and healthcare, and better protection in the workplace. Now we're fighting less, and by a remarkable coincidence all of that's being eroded. But how did we come to be losing like this? And even then wasn’t it that we didn’t have it good, just less bad? How come we ever put up with this situation in the first place?) 

It’s notable how in practice people slip back and forth between saying “we live freely in a democracy” and “but you can’t ever touch the rich, why bother trying?”, despite them being so clearly contradictory. But the puzzle’s soon solved. It’s a matter of starting off with the obvious-sounding conclusion then going back to the working-out. Both assert nothing is to be done, so we might as well stay sitting where we are. Which takes us to the real question. Why the need for such ‘rationalisations’?

While the thing they’re busily not saying is “capitalism’, the thing they are busy saying is “human nature”. This is known as the naturalistic fallacy, the notion that if something is that’s proof in itself it out to be. To want to change things is to go against some fundamental order, like defying gravity.

In a classic example, in the film ‘Dr. Zhivago’ the revolutionary Pacha (played by Tom Courtney) curtly insists “people will be different after the revolution”. And if we’re presented at all in the mainstream media it’s usually as some form of this - equal parts fanatical and unworldly.

Yet there’s abundant evidence of mutual aid being practiced. What, for example, about food banks? Their spread is often taken as an inevitable consequence of hunger. Yet people must set them up, others must donate to them and still others volunteer in them. You could look at these examples and assume the truth’s the very opposite. We are not greedy, its just the greedy telling us we are. So our nature must not be bad but good.

But ultimately that just makes the same mistake the other way up. Yes, history shows there were those who risked their own lives to hide those in danger from Nazis. But it shows others grassing them up, even - in no small numbers - murdering them themselves, in order to take their property. It’s not enough to find a few surface examples, and then try to apply some universal rule.

When faced with such reductive simplicities we shouldn’t reverse but transcend them. We need to reject altogether the confining notion we are limited to some kind of “nature”. Nature is here being used as a synonym for essence, or set of inherent qualities, as if we’ve been made in a mould. In this sense it can only be applied to objects. Geologists classify rocks according to their structure, and the job’s done. Whereas even other animals have a culture, in that they can adapt or innovate, choose to do one thing or another.

But to go back to the Pacha quote, the thing is – he’s right. People would be different. After so seismic an event as a revolution, how could they not? ‘Human nature’ isn’t natural at all. It’s human, by definition. It is, and always has been, a social construct. We make our nature, by creating its conditions.

Our bodies are quite literally composed of what we consumed through our lives. An archaeologist can come across human remains and, by analysis of its bone and teeth, deduce where and how that person lived. Should our minds be any different? Isn’t our upbringing, the people we’ve met and our experiences of life, the best guide to understanding what makes us ourselves? Doesn’t that sound more credible than us being like sticks of seaside rock, with the same few words written right through us? And why should this not also apply collectively? History books talk freely of how, for example, life became different after the Second World War.

Zoologists how now effectively given up studying animals in captivity, as it’s so unconnected to their behaviour in the wild. Yet Sociology has done nothing but study humans in captivity since its inception. As Marx said “the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations.”

Besides, isn’t there a bizarre twist to this? While it’s supposedly a foolish fancy to imagine we can “change human nature”, the existence of Capitalism itself proves the opposite. Capitalism replaced Feudalism, a quite different system of social organisation which required people to adopt a quite different “nature”. For the main argument it uses against us to be true, it couldn’t be here to make it in the first place.

So wage labourers under capitalism act and think as wage labourers, just as peasants think and act as peasants and tribespeople as tribespeople. Limited historical perspective can hide this truth from us, but once pointed out it becomes obvious. They call us hopeless idealists, when we’re the real materialists! 

So this mean a communist society would reshape us until we we’re all neat nuggets of altruism, slaving selflessly for the pubic good, scrubbed clean of any traces of individual identity? No of course it doesn’t! But then such a parodic notion was never anything to do with communism in the first place.

We need to ask, all this supposed individualism, but what’s in it for us? We want communism precisely because we are the ones who will benefit from it, because we will gain control of our lives not lose it. It’s your boss at work who tells you “there’s no I in team”, when he wants you to work harder for no more reward. It’s us who tell you there is an I in communism.

The legendary Pop Group liked to sing “only you can be your liberator”. And the way we live now, putting yourself at the centre of your life is in itself virtually a radical act. But you can’t carry out that act alone, you need to work in accord with others or you’ll be easily beaten down. It may sound a paradox. But it’s because we’ve always been told an inherent division exists, between ‘the individual’ and ‘society’, a chasm which we must leave to wise heads as something only they can manage. Might there be times conflicts can arise? Of course. Is it inherent? Effectively, the opposite. ‘The individual’ needs ‘society’, and vice versa.

Marx and Engels always insisted “the free development of each becomes the condition of the free development of all.” Bakunin was more eloquent still: “no tree ever brings forth two leaves that are exactly identical. How much more will this be true of men, men being much more complicated creatures than leaves. But such diversity, far from constituting an affliction is… one of the assets of mankind. Thanks to it, the human race is a collective whole wherein each human being complements the rest and has need of them; so that this infinite variation in human beings is the very cause and chief basis of their solidarity.”

And there’s a second way their argument is self-defeating. It may be true that none of us are selfless saints. But then what does that say about the wisdom of handing vast reserves of power and wealth over to a few individuals, in the hope they then use some of that back for the betterment of the rest of us? Or making some order-givers on the assumption they’ll legislate for the greater good?

The most infamous example of this is the orange goon Trump. Remember how every “sensible” political pontificator was telling us that first securing the nomination, then assuming the Presidency would lead him to become “more Presidential”, the burden of office straightening him out. Of course it was the opposite. Being born into such a position of power was the very thing which had made him such a grasping psychopath. So, strangely enough, granting him more power didn’t prove much of a cure. Its like saying the cure for alcoholism is more booze.

But as ever he’s just a more egregious example of a general rule. Power corrupts, we see the evidence all around us. It’s true to say that it couldn’t do so unless we were corruptible. But the sensible answer to that is - let’s minimise the chances of corruptibility!

Okay, you reply, but whose going to do the work?

The answer in brief is – who do you see doing it now?

You hear all the time people complaining against (real or, more commonly, imagined) “scroungers” and “shirkers”. They say they want to see these “idlers” getting a job, contributing to society, doing something useful. Yet if you ask the self-same people whether they feel they are contributing or doing something useful in their own jobs, you’re either met with a stupefied look or a diatribe over how much they hate the whole valueless experience. And that disconnection is the very point. Work is so awful for me, why should others get to escape it?

Almost everybody knows the Marxist phrase that we’re “alienated from the means of production”. And of course it’s very true. The factory worker who tightens widgets all day, or the call centre operative who ceaselessly repeats their script, both feel disassociated from what they do. This remains the case even if they’re in one of the few remaining jobs which have an actual social value. We’re doing things not of our choosing, under conditions not of our making, simply so we can survive. How is that likely to make us feel?

But Marx didn’t stop there, where everybody thinks he did. He went on to describe how the situation also left the worker alienated from him or her self, was unable to interact with the world in a way they chose, was therefore unable to fulfil themself. We don’t just live in a world where the things we create and enable don’t belong to us. We live in a world where, in a material sense, we don’t belong to us either.

There’s a thing you have which you must sell, if you’re to get by in the world. And that thing you must sell is you. Ever seen a thing you used to own, disconnected from you, for sale in a shop window? Now imagine that thing is you. Estranged from even your own self, of course you come to feel estranged from others.

The paradox is almost unparalleled. We are the engine of it all, every day we are the fuel which obligingly pours itself in - and only then can the machine run. But we appear to ourselves as the passengers. It’s the backbreaking business of labour, combined with the passive feeling of being strapped in your seat.

As Malatesta commented: “Someone whose legs had been bound from birth but had managed nevertheless to walk as best he could, might attribute his ability to move to those very bonds which in fact serve only to weaken and paralyse the muscular energy of his legs…. Just imagine if the doctor were to expound… a theory, cleverly illustrated with a thousand invented cases to prove that if his legs were freed he would be unable to walk and would not live, then that man would ferociously defend his bonds and consider as his enemy anyone who tried to remove them.” That’s where we are.

Exploitation and alienation are the two fists that maintain the abusive relationship we endure with capital. Yet alienation has a particular twist. Alienation is simultaneously a form of psychological damage and the justification for that damage, the gaslighting voice that tells us this abusive relationship is all we have so we should cling to it.

Yet, as that great philosopher Homer Simpson said, “it’s a crummy system, but what you gonna do?”

The first step to overcome this alienation is to act for ourselves. A Reclaim The Streets flyer for an action in support of the (then striking) London Tube workers craftily modelled itself on the Tube map handouts. Under the header ‘Mind The Gap (Between What is Possible and What Capitalism Allows)’ they said:

“If we want another world we’ve got to stop maintaining this one through our action and inaction. The power of our rulers is based on the fact that they have separated us from each other, and we act as alienated individual workers and as passive consumers. By endlessly repeating the same patterns – paying our fares and bills, going to work, watching the world unfold on TV – we recreate the world every day. Today we attempt for a brief period to upset the normal pattern, to feel the power that we have when we act together… Workers can bring this world to a halt.” 

It’s a good first step. Yet life is more complicated and, unfortunately but inevitably, to talk about what communism is necessity compels us to start with what it isn’t. This goes beyond the inevitable distortions of black propagandists. The sad truth is that very few people alive today claim to be communists and very few people even know what communism is. And sometimes this seems particularly true among those who claim to be communists.

Mention the word and expect the Soviet Union to be thrown in your face. Even today, thirty-five years after its passing. There are those able to see the obvious truth that it wasn’t at all communist, some even able to grasp the more important point that it was capitalist. But mostly they still cling to the notion that ‘central planning’ becomes at some point antithetical to capitalism. Then, when you ask them where Marx says such a thing, they’ll hurriedly change the subject. This fixation with central control is what Bordiga called “the mistaken thesis”: 

“Constructing industrialism and mechanising things is supposedly the same as building socialism whenever central and ‘national’ plans are made… The difference between the employment of mechanical forces in a capitalist society and in a socialist one is not quantitative, it does not lie in the fact that technical and economic management passes from restricted circles to a complete circle. It is qualitative and consists in the total overthrow of the capitalist characteristics of the use of machines by human society, something much more thoroughgoing and which consists in a ‘relationship between men’ in opposition to the cursed ‘factory system’ and the social division of labour.”

And Marx himself said the very opposite to the words so often stuffed in his mouth: “To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter. But, for man, the root is man himself.” (Okay, “man” should be “human”, he was writing a while ago.) His conception of Communism was “a free association of producers under their own conscious and purposive control.”

The revolutionary subject is not the plan but ourselves. Inasmuch as there is such a thing as revolutionary plans, its because we make them. We make them ourselves and make them for ourselves. We are not ancillary or subservient to them. They are subservient to us.

But what would this free association of producers actually look like? How do these high-sounding ideas fare against reality?

Most people seem to assume there’s an intrinsic link between authority and organisation. Fascist societies might have been repressive, but you can’t deny they got things done. Whereas anyone who’s actually studied actual fascist societies knows they were effectively the opposite - fractious, chaotic and corrupt. The famous formulation that Mussolini made the trains run on time was a baseless propaganda line, still repeated now all these decades later. Whereas during the Spanish revolution, anarchist workers collectivised the Barcelona trams - and they did run on time.

This is George Orwell's description of the workers' militias he encountered during that time, as recounted in 'Homage To Catalonia':

“The essential point of the system was social equality between officers and men. Everyone from general to private drew the same pay, ate the same food, wore the same clothes, and mingled on terms of complete equality. If you wanted to slap the general commanding the division on the back and ask him for a cigarette, you could do so, and no one thought it curious…. each militia was a democracy and not a hierarchy. 

”…there was no military rank in the ordinary sense; no titles, no badges, no heel-clicking and saluting. They had attempted to produce within the militias a sort of temporary working model of the classless society....”

”Cynical people with no experience of handling men will say instantly that this would never 'work', but as a matter of fact it does 'work' in the long run… 'Revolutionary' discipline depends on political consciousness - on an understanding of why orders must be obeyed; it takes time to diffuse this, but it also takes time to drill a man into an automaton on the barrack-square.” 

”The journalists who sneered at the militia-system seldom remembered that the militias had to hold the line while the Popular Army was training in the rear. And it is a tribute to the strength of 'revolutionary' discipline that the militias stayed in the field at all. For... there was nothing to keep them there, except class loyalty. Individual deserters could be shot - were shot, occasionally - but if a thousand men had decided to walk out of the line together there was no force to stop them. A conscript army in the same circumstances - with its battle-police removed—would have melted away.”

A more nuts-and-bolts explanation of the working mechanisms of workers’ collectives in Spain states... 

“...the individual collective was based on a mass assembly of those who worked there. This assembly nominated administrative staff who were mandated to implement the decisions of the assembly and who had to report back to, and were accountable to, that assembly... So, in general, the industrial collectives were organised from the bottom-up, with policy in the hands of workers’ assemblies… [which] were widely attended and regularly held... if an administrator did something which the general assembly had not authorised, he was likely to be deposed at the next meeting.”

I’ve picked the Spanish revolution because it’s the best known example. But there’s frequent examples of such things throughout history, Wikipedia gives a brief list here. 

Let’s spell out clearly something which shouldn’t really need saying - this is not some magic cure-all which, as soon as unleashed, dispenses with all ills. The problems, issues and debates which came up in Spain and elsewhere have been widely discussed, should anyone want to read about them.

Nevertheless, the examples above give widespread practical examples of something we’re always being told is an impossibility. It is, it might be argued, somewhat in the interests of those currently controlling our lives to tell us that we couldn’t do the job better ourselves. When, most of the time, we’d be harder pressed to do it worse.

But of course we no longer live in 1936. Historical accounts of this period may make for compelling narratives, but as guides for action today do they hold any real relevance? Accounts of the more recent anti-austerity movement in Spain inevitably focus on their negatives, or on their likely effect on electoral politics. Yet popular assemblies not only reappeared, arranged along broadly the same lines, but in the same neighbourhoods – for example at Madrid’s Puerta del Sol.

The CNT, a revolutionary union still in existence, said of these:

”The organizational formulas developed in these mobilizations prove the viability of direct participation through assemblies for taking decisions that channel our aspirations and demands and make us overcome individualism. We become protagonists, rather than spectators of a system based in representation and delegating authority, which erases our individuality. Assemblies, a rotating microphone, working groups, responsibility, capacity, organization, self-responsibility, coordination, involvement and visibility are the collective teeth that move our gears, capable of challenging the institutions… We continue to build at the same time as we disobey. The protest continues!”

Next time! Tune in for our final thrilling instalment...

HOW TO MAKE HISTORY (THE ORIGINAL 'STAR TREK’)

“Even historians fail to learn from history.”
- Professor Gill, 'Pattern of Force'

History has Its Gravity (Future Classicism)

The Romulan commander in 'Balance of Terror' is never actually given a name. But he's still one of the classic 'Star Trek' characters, much better-drawn than there seems any functional requirement for him to be. Compare him to Kor, the first Klingon adversary in 'Errand of Mercy'. Kor is, it’s true, more than a mere pano villain. By his own culture's codes, he is honest and even valiant. But, in a complete inversion of the two, Kor is named though he's there just to be a Klingon - to represent to us what Klingon culture is.

While the Romulan drives the plot one way while all the time wishing there was another. In a story clearly based on World War Two submarine films he’s a recognisable type - the good German general. Battle-weary and worldly wise, he can see straight through the cult of war, and recognises Kirk as not just stuck in the same slot as him but as cut from the same cloth. Yet he’s too embedded in his culture to extract himself now, and the way things are going he’ll be dead soon. His last words are: “We are creatures of duty, Captain. I have lived my life by it. Just one more duty to perform...”

So if the Klingons are the Reds the Romulans must be Fascists. Simples, right? Not really. Much like the Daleks and the Cybermen, things aren’t that reductive. Yes, Fascism was forever keen to borrow the iconography of Classicism, from its Italian birthplace. But the Romulans are frequently portrayed as more Classical than anything appropriated by Mussolini. Take the uniforms, or the bird of prey motif. Events takes place between the planets Romulus and Remus, just in case the name Romulan alone wasn't enough of a tip-off for us. (Something set to repeat. The later episode ’Elaan of Troyus’ is blatantly Helen of Troy playing the telephone game.)

And 'Mirror Mirror' ostensibly set in a parallel universe where the Federation are imperious and backstabbing, is as full of classical references. The Starfleet insignia, an upward-pointing arrowhead is transmogrified into an unsheathed sword running through a planet. It's almost akin to one of those alternate histories where Rome never fell, so elements of our world get mixed up disconcertingly with theirs.

Partly this is a grab for gravitas. Previously, much televised SF in America had been juvenile and Gene Roddenberry was keen to establish some counter-credentials. Proper SF authors were recruited as scriptwriters. When, disliking being rewritten, Harlan Ellison wanted his script credit to revert to the generic Cordwainer Bird he was refused by Roddenberry. Much of his script went, his name remained. It was of more value than the words he wrote.

And speaking of namedropping, there’s the penchant for classical or literary quotes to be employed as episode titles. ’Plato’s Stepchildren’ even begins with the helpful explanation “Plato, Platonius, see?” (Oh yes, right!) Shakespeare is cited in 'Conscience of the King'. At the outset, ex-dictator Kodos is wanted for war crimes and hiding out. The particular hiding spot he chooses being a travelling theatre troupe, appearing before different audiences each night across the galaxy. So much for the believer in eugenics being a superior life form. Except of course it's not happening that way round. It seems a safe enough bet that the Shakespearian players in space, with the lead actor himself in disguise, was the impetus. This was to be a 'phasers on impress' episode.

So it logically follows they're performing 'Hamlet', despite there being no-one in the troupe who could really play the Dane. 'Forbidden Planet' borrowed the plot and theme of a Shakespeare play, 'The Tempest', without mentioning it explicitly. 'Star Trek' does precisely the opposite. The title comes from the line “the play's the thing/Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King”, referring to 'Hamlet's' play-within-a-play structure. Yet there's no mirroring of that in the plot. They merely use the play title most people will have heard of (and not, say, ’Pericles Prince of Tyre’), in the same way they used the best-known playwright. And naturally the name is taken as permission to justify some truly scenery-chewing acting.

...While Time Has Weight

But another means, by which SF might more genuinely emulate the historical sweep of Classicism, is time travel. Which allows for future history, surely a branch of historical fiction. As any fan knows, Asimov’s Foundation series came from his reading Gibbons’ ’Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’. Kim Stanley Robinson even went so far as to define SF as "an historical literature... In every SF narrative, there is an explicit or implicit fictional history that connects the period depicted to our present moment, or to some moment in our past.”

Which couldn’t help but raise an intriguing question? Mostly we consider history subjectively, the way we do evolution - it was all about us, a timeline designed to get to here, at which point it handily stops. By extending the timeline further, into dates not yet on calendars, does SF open our minds beyond that narrow notion? Or by ostensibly setting dates in the future where the same shit happens (people commute by jet-pack, but of course there’s still wage labour) does it actually reinforce it?

Time travel was one means by which science fiction conveyed these connections, or general historical sweep. Which means it's probably significant that the original series had more episodes with the word “time” in the title than it did actual time travel episodes. (Seriously, where did 'Amok Time' ever get its handle from?) Just like ‘Shakespeare’, ‘Time’ is a word with connotations.

But let's look at the two actual time-travel stories...

‘City On the Edge of Forever’ has something of a metafictional undercurrent. This was when TV’s primacy had become embedded in our culture. TV now gave you your history, alongside your news and your entertainment and telling you when to go to bed. So history became a movie you already knew the ending to. The crew see history through the lens of a black-and-white screen (showing actual film footage), which they then find the magical power to enter. For a screen entices more than the pages of a book.

This heightens a prevalent question. What if you could jump through that border, and punch out the bad guys before anyone contemporary to them got wise? But like a cursed magic object from a folk tale, the portal only offers the appearance of that power. All you can do is watch from close up as the course of history happens. (More on that sort of thing here.)

'Tomorrow is Yesterday', whose 'Friends' title would be 'The One Where The Enterprise Ends Up Back On Earth In The Present Day, Sparking The UFO Craze', makes an element implicit in 'City' into a definite rule. Most of history, you see, is just busywork. You and me are like the extras in the ships' corridor scenes, walking up and down, ostensibly doing stuff but really just making up the numbers. Only a few important individuals have an actual historical impact. Providing the Enterprise gets involved only with us historically insignificant types, it can head back to the future with no harm done. It's like offing red shirts. There’s no consequence, everyone just forgets they were there.

So when they beam up pilot John Christopher and he first seems insignificant, all looks fine for the future. But the twist is that he's carrying historical importance like a recessive gene, as a descendent will have a major role in developing space travel. To underline this point a second character gets beamed aboard, a base guard. Clearly not an alpha type but a B lister, he spends his whole time on the Enterprise in stupefied awe. Luckily, they're able to fix everything by putting time back where it was when they found it.

And this dividing people up into the historically significant and insignificant, doesn't it sound rather close to Kodos self-aggrandising doctrines about superior beings, despite his being the ostensible villain of 'Conscience of the King'? When there's insufficient food to stave off starvation on the planet he ruled, he worked out a programme where only the important will be permitted to survive. As so often ’Star Trek’ liberalises this, expects more benevolence from its Alphas, but doesn’t question the division.

All of which sounds a good deal like the 'great man' theory of history. In 1840, Thomas Carlyle helpfully explained:

“The history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones: the modellers, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realisation and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwell in the Great Men sent into the world.”

Alphas make history, not just in the sense of getting their names on the statues and portraits but in the sense of creating it. And the Great Man theory makes history into an adventure story, where we’re enlisted troops permanently in the throes of battle and the great perpetually triumph over adversity.

Leaving The Past Behind

But there’s also an insistence on the linearity of history. It aligns with the conceit of the Federation having a Richter Scale of Cultures, against which anyone they run into can not only be mapped but assigned a number from a progress chart. (Cultures might progress through this at different speeds, but it’s specified the points are fixed.) More primitive societies are presented as being like children, needing our guidance. And just as history is assumed to be linear, lack of progress is associated with arrested development, like time's on freeze frame. (The classic example here would be 'The Apple', but there's no shortage to choose from.)

Let's look at an apparent exception. 'Errand of Mercy' feigns to be another episode where a primitive culture (the Orgonians) requires an appropriate adult to beam down to them and give them a big of a leg-up. The story spends much time contrasting the free West against the Evil Empire of the East... sorry, the Federation against the Klingons, then spanners its own works by throwing in a perspective which makes that distinction merely trivial.

We find we're the ones who need the appropriate adults, and Kirk and his Klingon adversary are effectively told “if you children can't play nicely together we shall have to take your toys away”. This time the 'Friends' title would be 'The One Where the Vietnam War Was Won By Buddhism', and in Buddhist terms the Organians are off the wheel – beings of pure light, opposed to any form of physical violence… in fact anything physical.

But crucially, the standard perspective is reversed not undone. In many ways it's reinforced. The story ends with Spock speculating that they took millions of years to evolve as far as they have, and so in time might we. Their revealing their true form looks similar to the transporting effect, as if they were one day ‘energised’ and saw no reason to revert. And his assertion is given weight by the Orgonians asserting that in the future the Federation and Klingons will become friends.

It’s teleological and techno-utopian at once. Are there strange new worlds, new life and new civilisations out there? They say yes but they mean no. The future can just be predicted through extending the curve of a graph. But at the same time, the Orgonians are effectively angels, just from a heaven which has been displaced from above us to ahead of us. And heaven has always been where you could leave your imperfect physical existence behind.

Most of this story takes place within an illusion created by the Orgoniains, which the viewer shares. Shouldn't that make them similar to the Talosians of 'The Cage'?  Yet one is coded as destructive and the other as positive. Something achieved by emphasising how the Talosians are the remnant of an ancient civilisation which became degenerate. The Organians are beings of pure energy who only take on human form to make other people feel better. The Talosians have a misshapen version of the human form, most notably with enlarged craniums. While outside events impact upon the Organians, disturbing their serenity until they feel they're left with no choice but to step in and resolve them, the Talosians need to lure and trap humans for their survival.

In other words, the Organians are the - possibly our - future while the Talosians are stuck in the past. They spend their time doing nothing but bathing in memories, made tactile by the power of illusion. It's vitality, “primitive emotions”, with which the tough young Pike is still in touch, which have the power to defeat them.

Similarly, in the ’Outer Limits’ episode ’The Sixth Finger’ (1963) a character evolves on speed dial, to the point he first decides to wipe out us primitive creatures, then later to the point where he decides not to any more because now he’s above being above things, that had just been a phase he was going through. Which is again associated with leaving behind bodily form. Evolution will take us to a point “when the mind will cast off the hamperings of the flesh and become all thought and no matter – a vortex of pure intelligence in space.” Physical existence in inherently tainted. But don’t worry, we will evolve out of it.

And in case we didn’t get the point the first time we go through it all again with ’The Empath’, except this time it's Kirk raging against a dying alien race of bigheads. “You don’t understand what it is to live. Love and compassion are dead in you. You’re nothing but intellect.”

Getting Out the Garden, Staying on the Road

So history is teleological, leading to some kind of utopia. But beware of utopias you meet along the road lest they stall your progress. This is made clear enough by titling an episode 'This Side of Paradise'. “Our philosophy is a simple one” say the planet's rustic commune-dwellers, ”that men should return to a less complicated life. We have few mechanical things here. No vehicles, no weapons. We have harmony here. Complete peace.” They’re even vegetarians, an indication of subversion if ever there was.

In fact they’ve hit upon such a state of indolence that they don’t have to tend their dope plants or roll their own joints. Instead the plants obligingly wander up to them and blow spores in their faces. Cool, man. Not entirely unsurprisingly, the Enterprise’s crew has soon tuned in and dropped out too, leaving the Captain alone on the Bridge.

Despite the presence of these handy plants, the commune-dwellers aren’t an indolent lot, picking at the low-hanging fruit. It’s specified they’re farming, a form of labour. But, and this is underlined, they’re merely producing enough for their own subsistence. As they don’t have anyone to trade with, or even give stuff away to, this doesn’t seem all that daft. But surpluses here have become some sort of moral imperative, proof that the Protestant work ethic is present. (Similarly in ‘Plato’s Stepchildren’ Platonius acknowledges “we have become bizarre and unproductive,” like the two are synonymous.)

The target's about as clear-cut as the Klingons. The back to the land movement, undergoing a revival in this era, saw modernity as a mis-step, and the urban landscape as inherently dehumanising, somewhere to escape from. The downside of this is the obvious one. A wage labourer, dreaming of an alternative to the daily grind, might romantically imagine himself lolling in an idyllic farmyard. But show up at one and it soon becomes clear it’s another workplace.

Yet not everyone gave up at that point of discovery. The Whole Earth Catalogue, first issued about eighteen months after this episode aired, is usually seen as the Bible of this movement, with its various editions the chronometer. And it's purely practical in nature, based around getting hold of and using tools (ie mechanical things). Including, in point of fact, early computers. Their supplements used the by-line “difficult but possible”, and never hid the fact there’s no clocking off at five.

True, back to the land overlapped with hippy subculture. And hippies, not necessarily the world’s biggest realists, were wont to blissfully imagine somehow returning to Eden. (Think of Joni Mitchell trilling “we’ve got to get ourselves back to the Garden”.) But rather than undermine this romanticised ideology the episode inflates it, the better to counter with an ideology of its own. “We must live in a state of nature” versus “we must continually progress, at whatever cost”. Each exists only as an antonym for the other. “Maybe we weren’t meant for paradise,” Kirk rages. ”Maybe we were meant to fight our way through... Maybe we can’t stroll to the music of the lute. We must march to the sound of drums.” Shame they never made more than two musical instruments.

Which, for an American TV show made in the Sixties, seems strangely close to the Whig view of history, which took history as “teleological (or goal-directed), hero-based, and transhistorical narrative[s]… histories that present the past as the inexorable march of progress towards enlightenment… putting its faith in the power of human reason to reshape society for the better, regardless of past history and tradition. It proposes the inevitable progress of mankind.”

There’s a presumed association of political with technological development, and both with prosperity, in a kind of positive feedback loop. Arguably the whole doctrine relies upon a cod-materialism induced by the Industrial Revolution, where bigger and better machines equates to bigger and better people. (Hence the joke in ‘1066 and All That’ about history having only two memorable dates to it. In this history dates are no longer events, merely milestones set along the way of an already-mapped path.)

But don’t these two contradict, history as the long arc of progress and as something hammered out by the sinews of Great Men? In theory it would seem so, but putting them together has a… you know… a history to it. The popular phrase “cometh the hour, cometh the man” was most likely coined to paper over these problems. iA succession of Great Men ‘proves’ British superiority was something innate, our Empire inevitable and all the rest of it.Note the use of “hero-based” in the quote above. While Wikipedia boils Whig history down to five bullet pointed assumptions, one of which is: “Presenting political figures of the past as heroes, who advanced the cause of this political progress, or villains, who sought to hinder its inevitable triumph.”

In History, as an academic discipline, this theory was scuppered some time ago by pesky interfering evidence. Though of course it lurches on undead in popular histories, and as a general rule the more populist they are the greater the degree to which it appears. (Sometimes reaching a risible terminus.)

”The Old Doth Fall”

Yet there's also an important difference. The Whigs saw, for example, ancient Rome as a prototype for their more advances civilisation. Yes there were problems with it, but only because it wasn't as far advanced as we are. Besides, it's since obligingly vanished off the map, so there's not much point focusing on those flaws now. Whereas in 'Star Trek' effective Romans plague our heroes no less than three times.

Despite Claudius’ speech mocking the Prime Directive (a favourite of clip shows), 'Bread and Circuses' is the one episode where the Directive holds. (Well, just about.) Kirk is clearly not just willing to die for it, but sacrifice Spock and McCoy into the bargain, and even earns Claudius’ respect for sticking to it. At the end they essentially escape rather than cure things. And this is possible because we’re on a parallel Earth. The rise of Christianity and its notions of ‘brotherhood’ is seen as proof the Roman empire will fall anyway, just as it did on Earth. (Actual students of the era please look away now.)

All the Shakespeare quotes the show bandies about, and one it noticeably doesn't use is Edmund's from 'King Lear' - “the younger rises when the old doth fall”. To Shakespeare this was the voice of villainy, when even the prospect of power passing down generations felt precarious, risked breaking the natural order. Whereas to 'Star Trek', this is the voice of inevitability.

Though 'Man Trap' had not been intended as the opening episode, in one way it's fitting. Its ruins turn out to be Gothic ruins, not as dead as they seem. And its adversary is an ancient vampire, a creature which by natural law should have died, which perpetuates its existence by snatching life from those which should be its heirs.

As Darren of The M0vie Blog comments: “Star Trek returns – time and time and time again – to the image of dying ancient societies…. Their decay and collapse (and even their withdrawal from the universe) is contrasted with humanity’s energy and enthusiasm as the Federation begins to truly claim their place among the stars. There’s a sense that the old world is passing, and a new world is dawning.” In short the series is riddled with, and obsessed by, decadence.

This is at it's dullest when the new world is simply a like-for-like replacement of the old. In 'The Paradise Syndrome' the Preservers have been remotely watching over a planet of Space Noble Savages, placing an obelisk to keep marauding asteroids at bay. The Federation first show up to deflect the asteroid themselves, then repair the obelisk. Kirk is... wait for it... mistaken for a God. Except 'mistaken' isn't really the word. Not only is the God's name strangely similar to his (Kirok to Kirk, what are the odds?) his “Kirk to Enterprise” line triggers the obelisk into action. They're so much the New Preservers they can comfortably step straight in the old shoes like worn-in slippers.

This isn’t even a a story about that, which we’re expected to take for granted. Instead its about Kirk, about his shaking off the white man's burden to live in some fictitious primitive paradise, shacking up with a nubile savage in a fetchingly short poncho. It could really be called 'The Last Temptation of Kirk'. Which just makes it worse. We're so secure in the knowledge we're preservers, the tale’s focus naturally falls on us. We're the next crop of parents, and they're our children. Children you get to shag, who can even bear children of their own. But children nonetheless.

Things can get more interesting, however, when the Old Ones don't disappear obligingly offstage but rub up against us. 'Star Trek' is full of dimming suns, ancient ruins with strange and powerful alien technology left lying about for us to stumble on. Underground chambers and tunnels abound, SF’s version of crypts and catacombs. “When they moved from light to darkness”, we're told of one lot, “they replaced freedom with a mechanistic culture.” (It's from 'What Are Little Girls Made Of?' but could be applied to many other episodes.)

The series has avowedly Gothic episodes, such as ’Catspaw’, or 'Little Girls', which even starred Ted Sasidy from 'The Addams Family’. But these can act as a kind of decoy, suggesting Gothic was an extra - something the show sometimes went in for. Whereas in fact it’s there in the DNA. Like in the Gothic novel, those chambers and catacombs are ever-present and always work as metaphors for decadence and degeneracy.

And in the post-war world who were the old ones? Of course they’re us, the old-world Europeans, those imperial Romans as hubristic as Ozymandias. We may have given them their conception of history, but now it belongs to them. Yet here we are hanging about obstinately rather than getting offstage while we should. The Platonians in ’Plato’s Stepchildren’ are Ancient Greeks, so naturally they speak with English accents. American dramas in general love an English villain, but its science fiction allows the trope to reunite with its source.

“You’re half dead,” Kirk rages, effectively at us. “You’ve been dead for centuries! We may disappear tomorrow. But at least we’re living now.” The ancient European God Apollo concludes in 'Who Mourns For Adonias?' “The time has passed. There is no room for gods.” Except that's a lesson that needs re-learning week by week, the coffin lid re-nailed down on the old vampire, history inevitable yet continually pressed into service.

(Noticeably in ’Earth vs. Flying Saucers’ (1956), ostensibly a red menace film, the invaders come from a dying solar system, so physically frail they need space-suits-of-armour to stand up and who assume an American-led Earth will submit to their demonstrations of superior power. To be told: “When an armed and threatening power lands uninvited in our capitol, we don't meet him with tea and cookies!”)

And we’re frequently represented by incongruity, something which really has no place in this world and yet appears anyway. This is perhaps most effectively conveyed by 'Who Mourns For Adonias?', in the surreal moment where a giant hand reaches out in space to grab the Enterprise. (Which of course also represents stalled development.)

Note in the quote above Kirk emphasises “we may be gone tomorrow”. It’s the brevity of life which makes you seize it. ’The Mark of Gideon’ perhaps goes furthest in associating sex and virility not just with life but also with death. Gideon is a planet of un-life, populated by shuffling shades lacking both life and death. After perhaps the most elaborate blind date arrangement in galactic history, building Kirk the habitat of a full-scale replica of the Enterprise, they get him to mate with a daughter of Gideon. But rather than conception what they hope for is a disease, not new life but death, which will helpfully decimate their population.

Diegetically, this bizarre switch goes largely unexplained. Third season episodes often lose their way, like someone’s forgotten why they’re telling you this and is hoping to stumble back on their purpose. No wonder Spock finds the whole thing so exasperating.

But if we see the thing symbolically, as Kirk injecting a shot of adrenaline into their culture, it works better. By jolting them back into life he also reintroduces death. It’s similar to ’Zardoz’ (1974) where a savage appears in a sterile utopia, simultaneously stimulant and infection.

Historically, monotheism did not originate even in Europe but goes back to the early civilisations of the Middle East. Honest, its on Wikipedia and everything. Yet 'Star Trek' seems particularly keen to label it “new” and appropriate it as American, thereby associating the polytheistic Old Gods with the Old World. Old Gods to be treated literally the way they have been culturally, we must tell them to their faces we are breaking up with them.

'Return to Tomorrow' features… you’ll never guess... ancient all-powerful aliens. This time they’ve been reduced to disembodied energy fields hanging out in glowing globes, and keen to borrow our bodies. The theme of the old unnaturally usurping the place of the young was recurrent throughout the Sixties, such as the 1967 film 'The Sorcerers'. But this episode adds a religious element to it. It's suggested the aliens are effectively our Gods, having seeded life throughout the universe. In a reverse of ’The Paradise Syndrome’ they refer to us as “our children”. 

Darren at the M0vie Blog claims this "draws rather heavily from The Book of Genesis [with] some biblical name-dropping.” And certainly Kirk speaks of Sargon in terms of experiencing God-like benevolence - “for an instant we were one. I know him now. I know what he is and what he wants, and I don't fear him.”

Yet while lead alien Sargon intends to keep to the bargain of borrowing short-loan, he is deceived by Henoch. Who could be associated with the betraying Lucifer, justifying Darren's description of him as “Satanic”. Yet in all the millennia up to now he appears to have been trusted by the others. The show's keenness to portray him more as a trickster than an 'evil one' would make him part of an older tradition, the antagonist who is also family member, something more like Loki in Norse mythology. (There's a brief, unexplained reference to him being from “the other side”.)

Perhaps the point is that in the past the Gods could be embodied, but must now be beings of spirit. They should leave this material realm to us. “We now know we cannot permit ourselves to exist in your world, my children.” (There isn't an automatic link between monotheism and an immaterial God, but the association is strong.)

The plot of ’Deadly Years’, accelerated ageing until everyone gets better again, is somewhat hackneyed. And as characters keep walking off and back on again with more grey slapped on, it’s hard not to find the whole thing comical. But the competency panel scene, where it becomes increasingly clear to everyone but Kirk he’s no longer who he was, and they respond by merely falling silent, is both awkward and tragic. Just like when it happens with real friends and relatives.

True, you need a double-think. Old age’s trick is to creep up on you by stealth, leaving you oblivious. Shrink that process down to a few days and you’d find it hard not to notice. You need to pretend at points that this is a future episode, that Kirk has reached this age the long way round, and then at others that it’s been induced and so can be cleared.

But it reads quite differently if seen in the overall context of the show. In a nice but easy to miss touch, they originally speculate this to be a weapon of the Romulans. But it turns out the cause of old age is… well, old age. The death trap there’s no leaping clear of. The show’s near-obsession with debilitating disease is the inevitable phobia of its philia with youth and virility. And here seems the point where they just come out and say it.

No escaping mortality? As things turn out, there is.

Chekov’s grumble, that they solve the problem by scraping bits off him, proves prophetic. What gave him immunity was adrenaline, which they then feed to the others. Somewhat tautologically, the cure for old age is a shot of youth. This makes scant story sense. Even if that warded the virus off him initially, why should giving it to the others later reverse the ageing process?

But, as we may have grown used to, it has a certain symbolism. The sheer ancientness of the universe is in itself enough to destroy you, by subjecting you to its scale. But whatever we are as individuals, our race is young and vibrant. The cure is found literally within ourselves. The Enterprise survives boldly going out there precisely because it boldly goes.

We saw last time how the show’s view of the Cold War was conflicted, and considered how that may have been inherent to a multi-writer show. Yet when it comes to history it’s remarkably consistent. Where there’s paradoxes in the show’s view of history, they tend to exist overall rather than be created in the friction between different episodes. While storylines are often based around moral dilemmas, so much of what’s outlined here is simply assumed - American exceptionalism, technology bringing development, history as the march of progress and so on. This happened inside an era when America seemed the dominant global force.

At the same time the Cold War was at its height, and had dragged the country into a war which would ultimately prove unwinnable. Yet rather than competing, culturally speaking the two things allied, insisted on the nation’s manifest destiny all the more strongly. When questioned, double down on your doctrines with greater fervour.

‘HOKUSAI: THE GREAT PICTURE BOOK OF EVERYTHING’

British Museum, London

“Hokusai has produced everything from Daoist immortals, Buddhist Gods, scholar-officials and women, to birds, beasts, plants and trees. Nothing is lacking. He captures deities with a wave of his brush.”
- From the preface to ‘Hokusai’s Sketches’, 1814

So the British Museum is back with the great Japanese print artist Hokusai, just three years after dedicating a large show to him. Which, in exhibition time, is no time at all. All due to a trove of original art, which recently turned up. And that’s more remarkable than it sounds…

From my days in comics fandom, folk were ever-keen to see original art. It could offer valuable insights into a creator’s intentions and working methods. This is a rare chance to do the same for Hokusai. In fact, exceedingly rare. The working method for prints back then was for the engraver to trace over the artist’s linework when carving into the block - creating an accurate reproduction but destroying the original. ’The Great Picture Book of Everything,’ thought to have been created between the 1820s and 40s, only survived because it was never published. We get to see this stuff precisely because his contemporaries didn’t.

You inevitably miss his use of colour, so bold and expressive. And it is a surprise to discover the size of his originals, or rather the lack of it - they’re smaller than your hand. It’s a little like imagining you’re going to see a film in cinemascopic technicolour, only to find it’s showing on an old black-and-white TV. A few are blown up onto banners, and the show even makes a point of telling us “the composition would retain its integrity on almost any scale”, but there really should be more.

As the name might suggest, this seems to have been somewhere between an encyclopedia and a Boy’s Own annual. Charmingly, it seems to make no distinction between scientific observation and myth, but bounces readily between them.

Unusually for Hokusai, but presumably because of the brief, the drawings are of figures rather than environments. Some you can even picture in an encyclopedia, ’Various Minerals and Shells’ for example is diagrammatically functional, with each individual element carefully labelled. While many are pairings so bizarre you’d think you’d wandered into some Surrealist show - ’Donkey and Seahorses’, ‘Phoenix and Peacock’, ‘Rhinoceros and Merperson’ (below), and so on.

Foreign travel was then banned in Japan, and it’s thought Hokusai never even visited its outlying islands. So when he draws things he knew to be real but wouldn’t have seen next to the entirely mythical, it’s hard to know how to respond. We’re told, for example, camels had been brought to Edo (Tokyo’s historic name). But when he depicts a rhinoceros with a shell on its back? Popular misconception, perhaps based on the notion they were related to dinosaurs? Personal artistic metaphor? Pure guesswork? Most likely, we’ll never know.

Some drawings seem executed almost like cave art, seeking more to convey the essence of its subject than place it anywhere. While others are more captured moments, such as ’Wild Boar Hunted And Shot in the Snow’ (below).

The show makes much of Hokusai’s ability to portray motion, pointing out ’A Bolt Of Lightning Strikes Virudhaka Dead’ (below) “prefigures modern manga by about a century”. Motion lines probably arose in Western comic art independently. But here they were normally used more sparingly - as flourishes, embellishments to an otherwise integral piece of artwork, like accents can only exist around letters. Whereas in Manga, they can - and do - dominate the artwork. Here, we see the radiating blast lines almost before the figure. We’re also told Hokusai distinguished between three speeds of brush stroke - formal, informal and rapid. (With ‘formal’ meaning something like ‘deliberative’.)

But there’s a twist to this. First he displays poise as well as he does movement. For example ’Two Cats By Hibiscus’ (below) accurately captures an arch-backed feline stand-off. Action scenes normally scrimp on detailing incidental objects, fearing they might distract, pushing them to the periphery of attention or eliminating them entirely. Whereas here the leaves of the bush are given as much detail as the two protagonists, as if Hokusai has no hierarchy of interests, his scrutinising eye being all-expansive.

And at times Hokusai isn’t just comic art but out-and-out comical. In ’Zheng Zhilong Threatens A Sea Monster With A Gun’ (below) our hero struggles with the weight of an impossibly massive blunderbuss, which straddles most of the frame and leaves no room for the sea monster he’s theoretically threatening.

Given the brief, the show potentially tells us as much about the culture of the time as the brushwork. Though how much that culture we’re getting raw and how much is being filtered through Hokusai’s sensibilities is anybody’s guess.

And so what’s absent can as interesting as what’s present. And what’s most obviously absent? That would be us. Japan was by this point trading with the West, but holding it at arm’s length. Instead China and India appear aplenty.

Now the smartarse kids of my schooldays were keen to tell you that the popular Japanese shows ’The Water Margin’ and ’Monkey’ were actually based on Chinese legends. Which, given the subject matter here, seems pretty typical.

It’s an arguable point that civilisation effectively spread from China to Japan. (Tea and rice, for example now seem staples of Japan but originated in China.) Just as is spread to Britain from the continent. And Britain has been permeated by Greek myths and culture, in a way it hasn’t by, say, Egypt. The British Museum building itself is evidence of this, with its iconic columns and all. 

Yet Japan seems much more preoccupied by China, as if it were the home of mythic time. An English-language Boy’s Own book would doubtless retell Greek myths, between gung-ho accounts of Trafalgar, taxidermies of birds and so on. But it would be understood those myths were not literal truth. This book of everything does seem much more a book of everything.

Why might this be? I’d honestly tell you if I knew! Perhaps some clue is the strong association of China with Daoism. Perhaps ancient wisdom always has to come from somewhere else, not the workaday world we inhabit.

And the India drawings have if anything a still-heavier emphasis on religion, this time Buddhism. (It’s thought both religions reached Japan before the development of Shintoism, despite the latter being native. We know Hokusai had his own Buddhist shrine.) And in the West Buddhism is associated with peaceful meditation, with looking inward not worldly change. It’s sometimes even used as an interchangeable term with pacifist.

Whereas these drawings are often of warriors! ’Buddhist Guards With Buddhist Sayings’ displays the sayings with some weapon-toting guards. Whereas Avalokiteśvara is shown in the eyes-closed meditation pose so familiar to us, but seated above a flying dragon (below).

The small number of finished prints prevents this from being a good introduction to Hokusai. Apologies to those hearing this now, but that was really the earlier show. But for those of us who saw that, this is a worthy sequel which does expand your knowledge of a great artist important not just to Japanese, not just to Eastern but to world art history. 

There’s a companion mini-exhibition of, I kid not, Hokusai NFTs. I tried to not let that dampen my mood too much…

‘THE HIGHLANDERS’ (PATRICK TROUGHTON’S DOCTOR WHO)

Written by Elwyn Jones & Gerry Davis
First broadcast Dec 1966/ Jan 1967

”How do I look?"
- The Doctor

The Wild West Goes North

As we saw with ‘The Tenth Planet’, the Troughton era essentially started before the main man was aboard. But then, because nothing makes sense in this show’s history, his second outing was the show’s last historical. (Though in fact, because nothing in this show makes sense, there was then a late entry, appearing in 1982.)

And it happened in a characteristically cockeyed way. Production team Innes Lloyd and Gerry Davis had considered the historical to be retired, but Elwyn Jones then pitched a Jacobite story. He having connections at the Beeb, they found themselves reluctantly demurring. Jones then announced he didn’t have the time to write the thing after all, lumbering Davis with it.

The scenario, and numerous plot elements, are unashamedly similar to ‘Reign of Terror’. A breed of inherently noble types have been overrun, by invaders placing vengeance above any kind of natural justice.

As we saw with ’Reign’, adventure stories set in post-revolutionary France have a mother. While Highland Romances have both a grandfather and a father. Walter Scott’s career-founding ’Waverley’ was published in 1814 while Robert Louis Stevenson’s ’Kidnapped’ followed in 1886. The tone of both is best summed up by Stevenson’s dedication:

“This is no furniture for the scholar’s library, but a book for the winter-evening schoolroom when the tasks are over and the hour for bed draws near… to steal some young gentleman’s attention from his Ovid, carry him awhile into the Highlands and the last century, and pack him to bed with some engaging images to mingle with his dreams.”

Indeed, both are populated by characters drawn so broadly you’d need the open Highlands just to frame them. Yet at the same time ’Kidnapped’ doesn’t just find plot-related reasons to traverse the Highland landscape, it puts great emphasis on real place names - at one point even suggesting the reader consult a map.

Two things square this paradox. Both books made their protagonist a stranger to the region; Scott’s titular hero is English, and Stevenson’s Scottish but a southerner - venturing from his home town for the first time and speaking no Gaelic.

And note Stevenson’s reference to the last century. In fact despite the seventy-year gap between them both were set in the same period, the Jacobite rebellion. Something both foregrounded, with ’Waverley’ even subtitled ’Tis Sixty Years Since’. To us these novels cannot but seem historical in themselves, but even in their day they were presenting a Highlands already gone. 

In his introduction to ’Waverley’, Andrew Hook comments that Scott’s method was “to present the modern world with a series of images from the past that were at once actual, in that they had a historical basis, and simultaneously by contrast… marvellously romantic.” In short, they handily lie at our margins in both time and space.

They’re effectively geographically relocated Westerns, an untamed North to match the Wild West, the post-rebellion Highland clearances playing the same board-clearing role as the American Indian wars. Scott explicitly compares Highlanders to “African Negroes and Esquimax Indians”, and calls them “gentleman savages”. In what is sometimes called imperialist nostalgia it’s the currently cowed nature of the savages which permits their former wildness to be framed as thrilling, and perhaps even worthy of respect. Like the cavaliers of ’1066 And All That’ the rebel Jacobins are romantic but wrong.

For that reason their inner nobility is often presented as something of a twist. Scott writes: “Yet the physiognomy of the people, when more closely examined, was far from exhibiting the indifference of stupidity: their features were rough, but remarkably intelligent; grave, but the very reverse of stupid; and from among the young women, an artist might have chosen more than one model…. It seemed on the whole as if poverty were combining to depress the natural genius… of a hardy, intelligent and reflecting peasantry.” Someone else might have missed these inner features. Not you or me, of course.

But for all the similarities between the books there’s an important difference. Hook concedes that ’Waverley’ “may not be the best novel of the nineteenth century; but it may well be the most significant… The historical novel properly speaking did not exist before [it]. After, it quickly became one of the most common and popular modes of the novel.” And this is because it found a way to convey the fixations of Romanticism in a narrative format.

But if it paved the way, it did so for others to ride over it. Truth be told it is little read today. It took ’Kidnapped’ to put the Highland Romance into mass production, unlike its ponderous predecessor a short punchy work. (Anyone thinking of attempting ’Waverley’ should be warned there’s a hundred-plus page slog before anything actually happens.) While ’Waverley’ has seen more train stations named after it than had adaptations Wikipedia lists no less than nine film and TV versions of ‘Kidnapped’. In this era alone a film in 1960 was followed by another in ’71. And inevitably it’s ’Kidnapped’ which has its plot elements repeatedly and shamelessly filched here.

”Between Highlanders and Redcoats”

Yet every adaptation inevitably reinterprets. And, at increasing distance from the source events, they felt freer to amend them. ’The Highlanders’ is typical of this. Both books semi-acknowledged Jacobism came from a schism between royal families. (Scott assuming the reader to be familiar with the overall events.) But this became crudely reduced to a nationalist opposition between Scotland and England, which is if anything more romanticised than these great Romantic novels. The Scottish are on the Scottish side because they are Scottish, just as the English are on the English. A telling subtitle in the Loose Cannon reconstruction is “between Highlanders and Redcoats.”

But interestingly, this is combined with a growing cynicism. Bonnie Prince Charlie is presented in ’Waverley’ as the very epitome of the regal. (The title character effectively converts to his cause after being swayed by his radiant presence.) Here we’re told sourly by Jamie “he was the first to leave the field” of Cullodden. Which makes him a microcosm of a whole era run by bribery and corruption, by bullying and domination, where superior officers are ineffectual fops called things like Algernon-Ffinch and their subordinates petty and grasping.

Which leaves the Highlanders as the exception which proves the rule. The Doctor has very soon told us “a Highlander’s word is his bond,” and not much later that an English solider would “sell his Grandmother for tuppence halfpenny”.

The plot contrivance of them having to be tricked into signing themselves away for slavery seems designed to convey this combination of noble-hearted with simple-minded. Certainly it makes no intra-story sense. They’re already prisoners aboard the boat that will take them, so in little position to argue, and it’s not a nicety that slavers normally bothered with. It’s another borrow from ’Kidnapped’, but David is enlisted via a more traditional knock on the head and waking up to a receding shoreline.

Peter Watkin’s award-winning drama documentary ’Culloden’, appearing four years earlier, is perhaps the last word in this cynicism. Generally, this is a comparison people make too much of. Yes it’s cultural impact was huge, to the degree I was first shown it at school. Yet the facts it was award-winning and I was shown it at school tells us it sailed in higher waters than an early evening adventure show. An overlap is not necessarily an influence. Both are riffing on similar cultural currents, not one lending to the other.

Doctor In Disguise

 

We’ve already seen how, despite being based on the Scarlet Pimpernel’s adventures, ’Reign’ is a dour story with little of it’s derring-do spirit. And aspects of ‘The Highlanders’ are equally bleak, not least a a bound man being thrown in the sea as a lesson to the other prisoners. (Framed as a cliffhanger, despite his clear inability to escape.) They’re soon locked in jail and threatened with hanging.

In the early historicals the past was nothing more than a constraint which you needed to escape from, like the animal trap Polly falls into. And this is heightened here, where to Ben’s befuddlement the arrival of English troops means not rescue but imprisonment. In ’Reign’ you needed to flee from France, this time the Highlanders are escaping to it.

At which point the Doctor cheerfully proclaims “I’m just beginning to enjoy myself”. Such levity is a world away from ’Kidnapped’. But it’s a big step towards the Pimpernel, who Troughton resembles so much more than Hartnell. The Pimpernel’s chief weapon is his mastery of disguise, which allows him not just to outwit his foes but make them appear fools. He’s hero less as adventurer than trickster. A trick Troughton repeats… well, repeatedly.

Hartnell dons just one disguise in ’Reign’, and carries on behaving much like himself. Troughton manages three in four episodes, including one in drag. And this is because he impersonates, gleefully taking on his roles. And, a cat in a world of wolves, in his games he cheerily plays friend and foe alike. When for example he acts as a German doctor, he delights in making mugs of his captors, convincing one he must close his eyes to rest them as he handily escapes. And his serving wench is straight out of Terry Jones. Even in ‘The Romans’, where Hartnell’s at his most mercurial, there’s nothing like this.

In short it’s a bleak story set in a callous world, except for when the Doctor shows up. Troughton is already proving so different a Doctor that he’s warping the stories he appears in to fit around him, like the sun distorting gravity waves. And this approach seems infectious. Polly’s soon picked up on it, delighting in playing the Lieutenant who she mockingly dubs ‘Algie’.

And that becomes the motor. Proceedings start to resemble a bleak historical all over again, only for the Doctor to reappears and re-establish the comedy. And, particularly when you consider this was rush-written by someone who never wanted to write it to begin with, it works fairly well. It is more fun to see authoritarian bullies wrongfooted and humiliated than defeated in a sword-fight, their power not stayed but dispelled.

But there’s two problems. Other characters, given their brief screen time, inevitably come to be cut from whole cloth. So they’re scarcely any less stereotyped than the Doctor’s impersonations. Trask, for example, clearly comes from Sea Captain’s Finishing School and is often to be found saying “you scurvy swarb” or “arr.” Which is perhaps why he’s given so few scenes with the Doctor.

And if only the Doctor’s presence can right this wrong world, inevitably he’s going to take off. So how can there be any kind of satisfactory ending? The solution is to give Algie a last-minute volte-face so he can do the right thing to some wrong ‘uns and a modicum of order can be restored. But it’s unseeded and unconvincing.

The New Boy

For the longest time, this story seemed to have just one claim to fame - it marked the introduction of Jamie. This being another wiped episode, all we now have is the soundtrack and a few stills. The most reproduced of which came to be the one up top, where the new boy holds the Doctor at dagger-point.

Yet if the four stills we have of this scene are representative, that’s the only one in which he’s prominent. He has no dialogue and two of the other stills don’t even feature him. (See example below.) It might seem a strange start for someone who’d go on to become the longest-serving companion.

Moreover, in the opening scene it’s not Jamie but his clan compatriot Alexander who gets rid of a troublesome redcoat. His only real task in the story is offing Trask, an event that’s presented as a twist. (It’s another character who's after the usurper for stealing his boat, but Jamie has to step in.) The return to the Tardis could be easily rewritten without him.

One thing everyone now knows about ‘The Highlanders’ is that everyone used to know Jamie’s inclusion was a last-minute decision, then found out that wasn’t true. Nevertheless, you can see how such an urban myth gained credence.

All this may partly be explained by Ben getting the escapology stunt in episode three. There’s essentially now two contenders for the ‘doing’ male role, an overstaffing issue which won’t be resolved until Ben packs his kit bag two stories hence.

But there is… or at least will be, a crucial difference between Jamie and the previous holders of his role. As his actor Frazer Hines once told Troughton: 

“Patrick, you’re paid a fortune as the Doctor to do all that speaking. I'm paid to get the girls from going out to the disco. And Padders [Wendy Padbury, who’ll show up soon enough] is paid to get the dads in from the garden.”

The sexy girl companion, which now seems such a show staple, only really came in about now. (Polly is probably its start.) As Hines alludes to, this was often tellingly described as “something for the Dads”. They were sometimes even referred to as “assistants”, like the girl hired to point at the magician while sporting stockings. He was a rare offering for the Mums. Of course this scarcely compensates for decades of imbalance (even if we factor in his length of tenure), but it’s still interesting the first eye candy for girls arrived so soon.

(Let’s recall… William Russell’s Ian was more the leading man, in his early days seen as the heroic protagonist to the Doctor’s Grand Wizard, with his relationship to Barbara an unspoken understanding. Jamie’s the eye candy companion who just happens to be a boy.)

So prevalent is this theme, TV Tropes even has a Man in a Kilt section. The thinking is partly just “how can we get a male character to show some leg… oh wait!” But there’s more. Unlike Africans or Native Americans, Highlanders were just foreign enough for this purpose, rugged and exotic without the risk of fantasies straying to the inter-racial. For example, the ‘white-man-gets-to-hang-out-with-noble-savages’ exploits of ‘Dances With Wolves’ had to concoct a safe all-white squaw for Kevin Costner to get with, even at the absurdly late date of 1990.

Coming soon! ‘The Underwater Menace’ looks somewhat soggy underfoot, so instead let’s shoot for the moon…