tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-99875132024-03-19T04:02:29.616+00:00The Life And Opinions of Andrew RilstoneUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger1635125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-19252337700527366412024-03-17T20:12:00.001+00:002024-03-17T20:12:23.103+00:00<p>It is a True Fact that whenever I write about politics I lose Patreon followers.</p><p>This makes me think my Fan Base has had quite enough of me talking about politics. </p><p><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/100552772">Just saying.</a></p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgS5bY9OLz2UWUh97N6LEgVUX5gtM9u5wX9qnXwbwIr4UbvirahkZf011vtVNYPT_uQf1bfEZqlq9ShGC48VGo7zyxyzNTxONGfzzk6QCeLnKczICftYkU1GEfKHDPNOJdZUr4cZiTGqqiS4kQosHyHbT9WR9prQW6qqlYoXQJzML3zHryhYVi8/s4500/PATREON_SYMBOL_1_BLACK_RGB.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4500" data-original-width="4110" height="233" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgS5bY9OLz2UWUh97N6LEgVUX5gtM9u5wX9qnXwbwIr4UbvirahkZf011vtVNYPT_uQf1bfEZqlq9ShGC48VGo7zyxyzNTxONGfzzk6QCeLnKczICftYkU1GEfKHDPNOJdZUr4cZiTGqqiS4kQosHyHbT9WR9prQW6qqlYoXQJzML3zHryhYVi8/w213-h233/PATREON_SYMBOL_1_BLACK_RGB.jpg" width="213" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-67788619642634383522024-03-15T15:17:00.000+00:002024-03-15T15:17:42.968+00:00Patreon Supporters Get....<p><br /></p><h2 style="text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigj2c2lhk28vCWwnALB9N-CBwXkYrVuQrisdHBpACcY_LF5GIPggv3U3-TWDukljmR-ZdiQW6efhd2TysBKPw1r0CMjbceKW4OEhmtnv4pA5C-6dw6CddMgITP2jdtSPD6nPZQVrCNhFP_WOy8zvjuJynj64Heeq0UguphV5LDfWNzDzoOxW91/s4500/PATREON_SYMBOL_1_BLACK_RGB.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4500" data-original-width="4110" height="133" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigj2c2lhk28vCWwnALB9N-CBwXkYrVuQrisdHBpACcY_LF5GIPggv3U3-TWDukljmR-ZdiQW6efhd2TysBKPw1r0CMjbceKW4OEhmtnv4pA5C-6dw6CddMgITP2jdtSPD6nPZQVrCNhFP_WOy8zvjuJynj64Heeq0UguphV5LDfWNzDzoOxW91/w121-h133/PATREON_SYMBOL_1_BLACK_RGB.jpg" width="121" /></a></div><br />Advance Access to My Doctor Who Essays</h2><p><a href="https://www.patreon.com/collection/412948">https://www.patreon.com/collection/412948</a></p><h2 style="text-align: left;">Exclusive Doctor Who Essays</h2><p><a href="https://www.patreon.com/collection/395495">https://www.patreon.com/collection/395495</a></p><h2 style="text-align: left;">PDF versions of nine of my books</h2><p><a href="https://www.patreon.com/collection/417229">https://www.patreon.com/collection/417229</a></p><h2 style="text-align: left;">Pilot Edition Of My Video Podcast</h2><p><a href="https://www.patreon.com/collection/410759?">https://www.patreon.com/collection/410759</a></p><p><br /></p><p>Patreon is a wonderful way of supporting "creators" whose work you like. Just head over to my page and pledge £1 (or more) each time I write an article. (That's usually £4 a months: you can set a limit for those months where I put out 5 or 6 pieces.) <a href="https://www.patreon.com/Rilstone">It's really the best way of supporting your blogger. </a></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-39850047102150186942024-03-15T14:04:00.005+00:002024-03-17T12:03:07.875+00:00Why Andrew Is Still Writing About Why Andrew Is Still Not Writing About Politics<div style="text-align: justify;"><b><i><span style="font-size: x-large;">"Don't be mean with the beans, Mum. Beanz meanz Heinz."</span></i></b></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">1: Oh, adult human female who has procreated or adopted! Be more generous when distributing the edible seeds of climbing plants! Unrelatedly, "Edible seed of climbing plant" is synonymous with a German name meaning "Ruler of the House"!</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">2: Mother: Give us generous portions of cooked haricot beans in tomato sauce, because the words "cooked haricot beans in tomato sauce" mean the same as the words "Heinz canning company."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">3: Although many varieties of canned baked bean are available, if you mention canned baked beans, people automatically assume you mean the variety manufactured by Heinz, because the quality is so high. So if you have children, you ought to give them large portions.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">4: If you buy Heinz baked beans rather than any other kind, your children will be pleased.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">5: The kinds of people who like Heinz baked beans are the kinds of people who would notice that the name of the product and the name of the manufacturer assonate. That's because they are a fun, informal product to be enjoyed on fun, informal occasions</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">6: Buy our product.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><i><span style="font-size: x-large;">What does woke mean?</span></i></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><i><br /></i></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;">What, indeed, does anything mean? Even the most innocent expressions are fraught with ambiguity. We learned this last year when trying to translate some of the more gnomic Thoughts of Chairman Musk. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><i><br /></i></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;">For some time now, my working hypothesis has been that the word <i>woke </i>is synonymous with ethnic (and minority representation): it is used primarily by people who believe that ethnic representation is an unreservedly bad thing or (to translate that into plain English) racists. </div><div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"Doctor Who is woke" (on this theory) translates as "Black characters appear in Doctor Who, and this is bad", or alternatively "Only white characters ought to appear in Doctor Who."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I decided to unscientifically test this hypothesis.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">This afternoon, I looked up the twenty most recent pejorative usages of the W-word on the right wing hate site formerly known as Twitter. I ignored non-English messages, messages from people who include "Woke" in their user names but not in the tweet and messages which only contained links.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I don't think the results were especially surprising. Obviously one would need a larger sample to prove the hypothesis. But I think they are worth recording.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><i><br /></i></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><i><br /></i></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><i><span style="font-size: x-large;">The Experiment</span></i></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">About fourteen of the posts related primarily or secondarily to race, religion or immigration. The tweets that I saw did not contain hateful tropes or slurs about black people or Jewish people: but they <i>did</i> complain obsessively (in both England and the UK) about "immigration" and (less frequently) "Islam".</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Five or six of the posts used "woke" generically to refer to liberal or left wing viewpoints; 5% used the slogan "go woke, go broke". Racial, religious and political definitions were frequently conflated. Two or three used "woke" unintelligibly to refer to "bad thing" or "thing I dislike". Two or three used the word primarily to mean "Islamic" or "pro-Islamic". I saw only a couple of specific references to gender. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I spotted no positive or neutral uses of the word -- no posts where black people or liberals exhorted each other to be more "woke". There were some ironic usages ("I suppose people will say that such-and-such is too woke...") and some critical usages ("Someone silly has implausibly claimed that such-and-such a thing is woke.") One hopeful sign is that "anti-woke" may be passing into the lingo as a synonym for "silly right wing person."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In the 80s and 90s, when the "PC gone mad" panic was at its height, "political correctness" was still occasionally used in a neutral or descriptive way. ("The Spastics Society is now called Scope because this is felt to be more politically correct"). No equivalent usage of the w-word shows up on my radar.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I didn't see much sign of a consistent conspiracy theory; but the posts seemed to take for granted the existence of a malevolent third party pulling the strings. The US Army is run by "brainwashed socialists"; and the UK immigration system is "overseen by the woke". </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">There is a strong implication of weakness, hypocrisy and insincerity in accusations of wokeness. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">On the basis of this very small sample, it seems clear that "woke" does not refer to any one group or belief-system; nor does it precisely scapegoat any particular minority, although it is overwhelmingly hostile to what it calls "immigrants". But it pretty consistently speaks to an inchoate ambience:</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">1: Everything is terrible</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">2: Someone is to blame for everything being terrible.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">3: The people who are to blame for everything being terrible are a malevolent third party who insincerely advance the interests of black people, immigrants, trans people and Muslims for unspecified nefarious purposes.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">4: In so far as this group has any specific characteristics, it can be said to be weak and hypocritical.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><i><br /></i></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><i><br /></i></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><i><br /></i></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><i><br /></i></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><i><br /></i></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><i><span style="font-size: x-large;">Summary</span></i></b></div><div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgwh61mnpTsOZntmESHm1MscRhX7BT7jdz74Hv4QMTUoB-YZiz3eDrpb6m6XNMzLfhVn82s7nrYCVBrmzQPmPZhZ2EyE_D2Xi8JKy64uC1_d8qaYcBSH3desruTT2w3-cBdvRRXOLSuhtqLZgZEK9Q46tX-TgBSi9o2ck6M15vf-Qkmp-YWN0K7" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="589" data-original-width="560" height="506" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgwh61mnpTsOZntmESHm1MscRhX7BT7jdz74Hv4QMTUoB-YZiz3eDrpb6m6XNMzLfhVn82s7nrYCVBrmzQPmPZhZ2EyE_D2Xi8JKy64uC1_d8qaYcBSH3desruTT2w3-cBdvRRXOLSuhtqLZgZEK9Q46tX-TgBSi9o2ck6M15vf-Qkmp-YWN0K7=w482-h506" width="482" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Who is woke?</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div></td></tr></tbody></table><b><i><span style="font-size: x-large;">Show Your Working</span></i></b><br /><br /></div><div><span style="font-family: courier;"><b>Text of Tweet</b></span></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>Proposed Definition of Woke</i></div><div><br /></div><div>Blogger Commentary</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: courier;"><b>We granted citizenship to 202,000 people in 2023. The success rate for citizenship applications for the UK is 99%. One of the highest rates in the world. Our citizenship tests are weak and overseen by the woke. Then need to be fixed by @reformparty_uk</b></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Woke: [1] Insufficiently Hostile to Immigrants</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The Citizenship test has always been a formality in which people who have <i>already</i> been given the right to remain answer questions about where they would find Big Ben and which poems William Wordsworth wrote: you would expect the pass rate to be close to 100%. But the poster imagines it to be a system for preventing undesirable foreigners remaining in the UK, which is not being applied with sufficient rigour. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b style="font-family: courier;"><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b style="font-family: courier;"><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b style="font-family: courier;"><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b style="font-family: courier;">Cuban says winning arguments with young adults on Instagram and TikTok is so much easier than X. Mark Cuban was handed his head by @TheRabbitHole84 and @elonmusk repeatedly when he said stupid woke S$#% while virtue signalling.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Woke: [1] Liberal views, insincere </i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>[2]Insufficiently right wing. </i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>[3] Insufficiently supportive of Elon Musk.</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Obscure: so far as I can tell this refers to Mark Cuban, generally thought to be an objectivist/libertarian. "Virtue signalling" almost always refers to insincerely held <i>liberal</i> values, so I take it that he is being blamed for being insufficiently right wing. (One of my former Labour friends regards the Green Party as virtue signallers by definition.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b style="font-family: courier;"><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b style="font-family: courier;"><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b style="font-family: courier;"><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b style="font-family: courier;">It’s the woke white folk who feel they have to stand up for the appressed [sic] and be the voice to make them feel like they are the true humanitarian.. Horse Stuff! [Poo Emoji]</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Woke: [1] Insufficiently hostile to racial minorities </i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>[2] Disapproval of derogatory imagery, insincere. </i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">This Tweet refers to campaigns to remove stereotypical imagery of Native Americans from football logos. The specific issue may be nuanced, if as one contributor says, the logos were often originally created by or in consultation with native Americans. "It's only white people complaining, the black people don't really mind" is a common trope used to close down <i>any</i> criticism of racial content whatsoever. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><span style="font-family: courier;">The only thing you're sorry about is that you have been exposed by the Angiolini Inquiry</span></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><span style="font-family: courier;">Sarah and many others would be alive today if you people had done your jobs</span></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><span style="font-family: courier;">Suella Braverman was right</span></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><span style="font-family: courier;">The Met surrendered to woke and Sarah Everard died because of it</span></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Woke: [1] Bad Thing </i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>[2] ??Insufficiently racist </i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Very Obscure. The tweet refers to a report into the shocking murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer who haad a history of committing sexual offences. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The Metropolitan police have often been accused of systemic racism and misogyny; it is alleged that in this case they ignored "red flags" about the officer because they didn't take sexism seriously enough. The implication that they didn't identify the murderer in their ranks because they were <i>too</i> liberal or left wing is rather hard to make sense of; but it is very hard to suppose that the Tweeter understands "surrendering to the woke" to mean "being sexist and misogynic."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">When I first wrote about Political Correctness, I noticed that some of the main vectors of the conspiracy theory used the McPherson Report as their primary example of political-correctness-gone-mad. So the thought here may be:</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><ul><li>MrPherson told the police to be less racist</li><li>Being less racist is <i>woke</i></li><li>Twenty seven years after being told to be less racist (=more woke) a police officer commits a terrible murder</li><li>Therefore, the murder was caused by wokeness</li></ul></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><span style="font-family: courier;"><br /></span></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><span style="font-family: courier;"><br /></span></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><span style="font-family: courier;">Ahh you got your words mixed up: damn sure it should say woke cun.... !</span></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Woke: [1] Disapproval of bad taste jokes, insincere<br />[2] Insufficiently hostile to Palestinians <br />[3] Insufficiently hostile to Muslims <br />[3] Bad Thing </i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The context here is that one Tweeter had made an offensively bad-taste joke about the protestor who set fire to himself outside the Israeli embassy, and implied that the people who attended his vigil had bad or insincere motives. There followed the kind of witty, Socratic debate for which Twitter is justly famous. Well, hardly anyone would come if they held a vigil for you / At least they would be sane rather than indoctrinated into a vile religion or woke cult / Better a woke cult than a bigoted cunt/Damn sure it should say woke cunt.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b style="font-family: courier;"><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b style="font-family: courier;"><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b style="font-family: courier;"><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b style="font-family: courier;">"It was a prostitute on the altar the first time around; today it’s a funeral for a male prostitute, laid out just feet from the Tabernacle and hailed as the “Mother of All Whores”. ~Michael J. Matt, "Woke Catholicism and the New Reign of Terror"</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Woke: [1] Insufficiently hostile to transexual people</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>[2] Dogmatism </i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>[3] Bad thing </i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">A barking mad hyper-catholic who doesn't accept the papacy of Pope Francis maintains that because the funeral of a trans man took place in a Catholic cathedral, the Church is now in thrall to a new French Revolutionary Terror, a new Whore of Babylon, and a new Abomination of Desolation. Note, again, that the ostensible target is not trans people themselves, but a conspiratorial "woke catholicism" which supports them and forces other people to support them. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><span style="font-family: courier;">Sign the petition to stop the censorship so you are not charged for “ having feelings” that don’t align with woke ideology! New federal bill attempts to censor your feelings! What the hell.</span></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Woke: [1] Insufficiently hostile to minorities </i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>[2] Not a free speech absolutist</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">This refers to Canadian legislation that might give financial compensation to victims of hate speech. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I think it is quite unlikely that the <i>feelings</i> themselves (as opposed to the public expression or publication of such feelings) are to be criminalised, but I am neither a Canadian nor a lawyer. The feelings in question are presumably feelings of hatred towards Muslims, black people or gay people. Note that although the specific complaint is about the state limiting free speech, "<i>woke ideology"</i> appears to refer to the belief that racist and homophobic ideas are bad in themselves.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><span style="font-family: courier;">…and it will be half full.</span></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><span style="font-family: courier;">When it is , without fanfare, this will be dropped. Not because of any outcry but because it doesn’t make money.</span></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><span style="font-family: courier;">Go woke, go broke.</span></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Woke: [1] Insufficiently hostile to black people. </i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>[2] Belief in white privilege, insincere. </i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>[3] Belief in affirmative action, insincere. </i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">This is slightly nuanced. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">A new London play about slaves, imaginatively called Slave Play, has advertised "black only" evenings -- for the benefit of people of colour who would not feel comfortable watching a racially charged play alongside white people. I reserve judgement on whether or not this is a good idea, and whether it would even be legal in the UK. If your reaction is but-what-would-you-say-about-a-WHITE-only-performance then you haven't understood the question. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The strong implication of the Tweet is that no-one will attend the production (people of colour don't really want this) and that the theatre's motivation is insincere (they don't really care about the racial issue and will drop it if it fails to make them money).</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><span style="font-family: courier;"><br /></span></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><span style="font-family: courier;"><br /></span></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><span style="font-family: courier;">No more irresponsible than you stirring up the idea any criticism of Islam is phobic you woke grifting low life</span></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Woke [1] Insufficiently hostile to Islam </i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>[2] Contemptible person, bad thing.</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Unable to rebut a previous poster's allegation (that claims about the Mayor of London being operated by a shadowy cabal of Islamists is inflammatory) the Tweet resorts to the rhetorical technique known as <i> whataboutery</i>. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It may be true that some people unfairly claim that any criticism of the Muslim faith is Islamophobic (and, similarly, that any criticism of the modern Israeli state is anti-semitic). On the other hand "not all legitimate criticism of Islam is necessarily Islamophobic" very often means "all Islamophobic remarks are to be regarded as legitimate criticism of Islam." </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Perhaps this writer is making a legitimate distinction between nuanced religious and cultural criticism and racist abuse; and limits the term "woke grifting lowlife" to those who mistake the former for the latter. Or perhaps he isn't. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><span style="font-family: courier;">The #USA is fn screwed!!</span></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><span style="font-family: courier;">I'm afraid the military is to woke, undisciplined (CLEARLY), brainwashed socialists, n fn drag queens! Ha!</span></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><i><br /></i></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Woke: [1] Bad thing </i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>[2] Liberal </i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>[3] Insufficiently hostile to trans (or gender non-conforming) people. </i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Obscure. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The reference point is a film of service-men engaging in what appears to be an activity part way between a raucous play-fight and a riot. Which I would have thought would be exactly the sort of thing that you would expect "single men in uniform" to engage in.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Is the speaker seriously arguing that "a belief in higher taxation and improved public services" (=socialism) and "a taste for gender-non-conforming clothes" (=drag) necessarily causes macho horse-play to get out of hand? And does he seriously think that most US soldiers, or their officers, hold left-wing political views and wear frocks? It is pretty clear that "socialist" and "drag queen" (like "woke') are here simply synonyms for "naughty".</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><i><br /></i></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><i><span style="font-family: courier;"><br /></span></i></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><i><span style="font-family: courier;"><br /></span></i></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><i><span style="font-family: courier;">Go woke go broke … fuck em</span></i></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Woke: [1] Ethical consumption </i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>[2] Liberal</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The Body Shop cosmetic chain is going into receivership. The writer hates the chain because they believe in ethical consumerism and the humane treatment of animals. He believes they only acquired those characteristics recently; and as a result have got into financial difficulties. The fact that the Body Shop failed after only forty seven years proves that running a business on liberal or ethical principles will invariably lead to commercial failure.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: courier;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: courier;"><b>Okay, and I am surprisingly tired of this kind of criticism. Which is not to say there is a bunch of a**holes that will label anything that breathes as woke, but it's pretty obvious when "inclusion" is written as a selling point rather than a tridimensional character.</b></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Woke: [1] Inclusivity </i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>[2] Insufficiently hostile to minorities. </i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Another nuanced Tweet: the writer even admits that the term "woke" is overused. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">However she puts scare quotes around the word "inclusion", so she apparently thinks that at least <i>some</i> "inclusivity" is "woke". This really only makes sense if you think that non-white (or non straight, or female, or minority religion) characters are deviations from the norm and that the existence of black people has to be justified as a special case.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It would be interesting to hear which black characters she regards as "three dimensional" and which as "selling points". My guess would be "none" and "all" but I would be perfectly happy to be proven wrong.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><span style="font-family: courier;">Keep in mind this girl was extremely woke, and went to a woke university. Her professors are literally defending the killer and saying it’s racist to blame her death on illegal immigration. Low sympathy for people like Lwken. She’s just another Molly Tibbs.</span></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Woke: [1] Insufficiently hostile to immigrants. </i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"Molly Tibbs" refers to Mollie Tibbets, a twenty year old student who was murdered in 2018. "Lwken" refers to Laken Riley, a twenty-two year old student murdered earlier this month. In both cases the apparent murderer was a person of foreign origin, in the USA illegally. The argument has been made, in both cases, that their deaths were therefore caused by lax immigration policies. This Tweet engages in particularly despicable victim-blaming: the young woman (to some extent) deserved to be murdered by an immigrant, because she had been supportive of immigrants in the past; and because her college was supportive of immigrants. <br /> </div><div style="text-align: justify;">"This person was murdered by an immigrant; therefore, we ought not to allow immigration" and "This murderer was an immigrant, therefore, all immigrants are murderers" are both unambiguously racist statements. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: courier;"><b>Really? That’s not what they say about guns. When it comes to guns it’s not “that person isn’t dead bc of a gun but because that person ran into a violent person” woke people are seriously dangerous.</b></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Woke: [1] Insufficiently hostile to immigrants </i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>[2]Insufficiently supportive of gun ownership </i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>[3]Liberal</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Another nasty tweet about the same tragic case. The twisted argument here is that it is hypocritical to blame a gun-murder on the availability of guns while not blaming a murder committed by an immigrant on the presence of immigrants. Note the othering of "woke people", incidentally. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div><span style="font-family: courier;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: courier;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: courier;"><b>So between democrats, woke local governments and sheriffs, victims of the heinous crimes by these illegals - they simply don’t care?!</b></span></div><div><br /></div><div><b style="font-family: courier;">Seriously, when is someone going be held accountable?</b></div><div><br /></div><div><i>Woke: [1]Insufficiently Hostile to Immigrants </i></div><div><i>[2] Liberal</i></div><div><br /></div><div>Yet another racist tweet about the Laken Riley case. As I understand it, US immigration authorities can ask (but not require) police forces to detain suspected illegal immigrants for up to 48 hours; and the current sheriff of the county where the murder happened had stated in his election campaign that he would not necessarily cooperate with such requests. This is a rather arcane point of American law. I would only note that "If we had locked all the illegal immigrants up, we would have locked up this illegal immigrant; therefore the policy of not locking up illegal immigrants is the direct cause of this murder; therefore we should lock up all illegal immigrants" is, at best, logically flawed, and at worst, an argument for internment and collective punishment. </div><div><br /></div><div>For our purposes, the interesting point is that the writer believes in an indistinct group "woke local governments" who are deliberately or callously allowing bad things to happen. </div></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: courier;"><b>If Mason Greenwood returns the media and woke brigade will destroy him. He’s better off abroad</b></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Woke </i><i>[1] ??Judgemental, self-righteous </i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>[2] ??Insufficiently tolerant of sexual violence. </i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Very obscure. Mason Greenwood is a footballer who was accused, prosecuted, <i>and acquitted</i> of serious sexual offences. The implication is that "the woke brigade" will continue to believe that someone is guilty of a crime <i>even though they have been found innocent in a court of law. </i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">This seems to be using "woke" to refer to an actual phenomenon: the possibility that someone will be treated as guilty in the court of public opinion despite having been found innocent in a court of law. It is unclear if this is a particularly recent phenomenon; although the internet and social media undoubtedly increase exponentially the speed with which rumours and false accusations can be spread. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It is interesting that the "media" and the "woke" are here conflated, as if, say, the Daily Mail was well known for its bleeding heart liberalism. (Are the "woke" who tolerated the police officer with the criminal record the same as the "woke" who are going to hound the man who was falsely accused?) </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I wonder if, lying behind this tweet, is a buried assumption that liberals will not accept that someone has been exonerated because they take sexual offences too seriously?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><span style="font-family: courier;"><br /></span></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><span style="font-family: courier;"><br /></span></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><span style="font-family: courier;">Our military is weak.Anyone who would have entered the past 5 yrs hasn't because of the woke bullshit being pushed into it. They're all at home. Where they need to be. Because shits gonna hit the fan with the illegal immigrants and crazies this summer. Hope not. But seems like it</span></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Woke [1] ?Liberal </i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>[2] Insufficiently hostile to immigrants </i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>[3] Bad thing.</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Very confused indeed. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">a: No-one has joined the US army since 2019. (Untrue, although there has been a shortfall of recruits.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">b: This is because no-one between the ages 19 and 25 (the famously conservative Generation Z) will join up.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">c: This is in turn because, since 2019, the army has acquired an unspecified quality called Woke Bullshit.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />d: This isn't necessarily a bad thing, because it means that the quarter million people who did not sign up (assuming a target of 50,000 new recruits each year) are available and prepared to participate in a civil war against immigrants in the run-up to the November election. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">This seems </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">a: Very unlikely to be true and </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">b: Very scary indeed</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><span style="font-family: courier;">Homeowners clash with ‘woke’ city that refuses to remove street squatters causing 'disgusting' hazard</span></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Woke: [1] Insufficiently hostile to poor people </i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>[2] Liberal </i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Fairly self-explanatory. Note use of "street squatter" for "homeless person."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><span style="font-family: courier;"><br /></span></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><span style="font-family: courier;"><br /></span></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><span style="font-family: courier;"><br /></span></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><span style="font-family: courier;"><br /></span></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><span style="font-family: courier;">London…what a cesspit of nutters. Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion, Free Palestine….left wing, woke, Islamic capital of the World.</span></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Woke [1] Insufficiently hostile to Muslims. </i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>[2] Liberal </i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>[3] Bad things</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The speaker disapproves of the tactics of environmental protestors. He regards Extinction Rebellion and Free Palestine as essentially the same thing, and conflates "left wing" and "muslim" into a single thing he calls "woke". </div></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div><div><b><span style="font-family: courier;">I forgot you can’t just tweet anymore. Everything is so woke omg</span></b></div><div><b><span style="font-family: courier;"><br /></span></b></div><div><span style="font-family: courier;"><i>Woke: Everything.</i></span></div><div><span style="font-family: courier;"><i><br /></i></span></div>No comment necessary.<div><span style="font-family: courier;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: courier;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: courier;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: courier;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: courier;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: courier;"><a href="https://www.lulu.com/shop/andrew-rilstone/why-andrew-is-still-not-writing-about-politics/paperback/product-654kk5k.html?page=1&pageSize=4">Why Andrew is Still Not Writing About Politics -- The Book</a></span></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://www.lulu.com/shop/andrew-rilstone/andrew-rilstone-and-the-terrible-horrible-no-good-bad-footnote/paperback/product-zvkwzy.html?page=1&pageSize=4">Why Andrew Stopped Writing About Politics In the First Place -- The Other Book </a></div><div><span style="font-family: courier;"><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNgANO0NQxLtatEM_Hb9j4xVf-b-p8a1mCE_l3_ycBTRaNCmDzQCQLg-osTI18mYThX10ifrueuQnQ2qBjpC1VP0H_hbJutPyI_KcbZ61WcLgAQnm45MWX_-yR-SOUDOYIsY2yfuZGBkQwLikeXMDf1wsrqLK2vVdWz7QSJZlthYDJnYCNxG5I/s897/new%20version%20of%20cover%201.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="666" data-original-width="897" height="238" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNgANO0NQxLtatEM_Hb9j4xVf-b-p8a1mCE_l3_ycBTRaNCmDzQCQLg-osTI18mYThX10ifrueuQnQ2qBjpC1VP0H_hbJutPyI_KcbZ61WcLgAQnm45MWX_-yR-SOUDOYIsY2yfuZGBkQwLikeXMDf1wsrqLK2vVdWz7QSJZlthYDJnYCNxG5I/s320/new%20version%20of%20cover%201.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: courier;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: courier;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: courier;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: courier;"><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, FreeSerif, serif; font-size: inherit; line-height: 1.5; margin: 10px 0px; text-align: left; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/pirate-planet-2-98244260" style="color: blue; text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="font-size: inherit;">Read: The Pirate Planet Parts 1-4</span> </a></p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, FreeSerif, serif; font-size: inherit; line-height: 1.5; margin: 10px 0px; text-align: left; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><a href="https://www.patreon.com/collection/395495/edit" style="color: blue; text-decoration-line: none;">Read: Andrew's opinions on Doctor Who's Sixtieth</a>
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<a href="https://www.patreon.com/Rilstone" style="color: blue; text-decoration-line: none;">Join Andrew's Patreon and get beautiful shiny PDF booklets for free. </a></p></span></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-60841283287606316102024-03-09T11:42:00.003+00:002024-03-17T20:24:09.475+00:00Dune Part Two<div style="text-align: justify;">Dune 2 just works. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">It's immersive in the way that the book is immersive; but it's a piece of cinematography, not a crib-sheet for the book or a gallop through the major plot points. We engage with Stilgar and Irulan and the Emperor as characters in this movie; not as more or less successful translations of literary figures. Huge machines lumber across a desert landscape without making us wonder about models or see gee eye. We flash away from the main action to breathtaking vistas of alien otherness but there is never any sense that we are being shown spectacle for the sake of spectacle. I couldn't say if Timothée Chalamet embodies the Paul Atriedes of the book; because the Paul Atriedes of the book is either a held-at-arms-length construct; or else a printed-in-italics stream of consciousness. <i>No-one in the movie thinks in italics.</i> Kyle MacLachlan was absurd, and I have already forgotten Alec Newman. Chalamet is older than I recall the character in the novel being; but he has an androgynous youthfulness, so that even in the final scenes he feels like a child thrust into a role he is terrifyingly good at but at the same time far too small for. When the spice runs out, perhaps he could go into the confectionary business, though ideally not in Glasgow.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">We are very definitely watching Dune Part Two; not Dune II or Dune - the Sequel. Like Les Trois Mousquetaires it's a long adaptation of a very long book split into two more or less manageable chunks. (Cinema Buddy said she could follow it perfectly well having so far avoided part one.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Denis Villeneuve has taken five hours to adapt a 500 page novel; where Peter Jackson spent about nine on a book which runs to around 1300. <strike>Put another way, Jackson spent two and a half minutes on each of Tolkien's pages, where Villeneuve spent a minute and a half on each of Herbert's.</strike> But Jackson's ring trilogy always felt rushed, breathless, frenetic. Villeneuves Dune feels leisurely, even slow. Granted, more happens on any one of Tolkien's pages than on any three of Herbert's. Dune, is, in the end, a contemporary novel with a contemporary novel's pacing, where the Lord of the Rings is (the Professor always insisted) a "prose romance". But there is more to it than that. Villeneuve omits; Jackson condenses. Tolkien himself in his lifetime said that omission was the way to go. Jackson looks at a crowded house and feverishly tries to stuff everything into the van, along with some new things that he thinks might come in useful later on. Villeneuve steps back and tries to see which pieces of furniture to keep and which to discard: retaining only what is essential to allow the room to continue to look like itself. Jackson tried to translate the Lord of the Rings into the language of a Hollywood blockbuster, which was always going to be a poor fit for his source. Legolas became a swashbuckler and Aragorn became a romantic lead because movies require swashbuckling heroes and romantic leads. But that meant that Jackson had to create completely new material which isn't in the book to provide a pretext for swashbuckling and heroism, which meant in turn that he had to rush through the stuff which is in the book even faster.</div></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Dune is no a Hollywood blockbuster. It is quite clear from the opening seconds that it is the kind of historical epic that they don't make any more. It has more in common with Spartacus or the Greatest Story Ever Told than with Indiana Jones and the Temple Of Doom. Since Dune was always a pseudo-historical novel, the translation to cinema far less painful. It may not be a coincidence that Dune Part Two hits the cinemas in the same month that the gore-soaked Shogun remake finds its way onto Disney Plus. The two books occupy not entirely dissimilar ballparks. James Clavell spent the 1970s on the same spinner racks as Frank Herbert.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">People returning to Dune after a long absence -- and people coming to the film without prior knowledge of the book -- are likely to look at the deserts and the great big machines and think "Gee, this is awfully like Star Wars." And in one way, it is. It's hard not to look at desert dwelling nomads and not think of Tusken Raiders; it's hard not to wonder if Uncle Owen's moisture 'vaporator is preserving the precious water of the tribe; and it's hard not to suspect that the spice that Han was smuggling for Jabba the Hutt had something to do with the psychotropic <i>melange</i> that the galactic empire depends on. Tatooine isn't Arrakis -- it clearly owes a very great deal to the desert kingdom of Mongo -- but Dune was clearly one of the many streams which fed George Lucas's imagination. </div></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">In the first film, Luke mentions in passing that he hunts local fauna from his T16 spaceship; and examples of the creature were spliced into the "special" edition of the movie. They look quite a lot like the kangaroo mice that Muad'dib takes his name from. Maybe there are only so many way you can CGI a desert dwelling rodent. If Luke Skywalker had needed a "battle name", Womp Rat would have done the job very well. In World War 2, the Seventh Armoured Division called themselves the Desert Rats. The Gerbils wouldn't have sounded nearly so macho.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">But Villeneuve never plays up to any of this. Where Peter Jackson seemed to quote Star Wars excessively, one never feels that Villeneuve is particularly pointing outside the film or asking you to smile with recognition or even borrowing shots from older movies. There are big ships; there is an emperor; there is a princess; and (for good and adequate reasons) the heroes of both franchises use blades; but the visual vocabulary never bleeds from one movie to the other.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">If there is such a bleed, or inadvertent retrospective quotation, then the film which interposes itself between Dune and the viewer is Life of Brian. It's more or less impossible to look at middle-eastern religious mobs in a desert landscape and not find yourself wondering whether, perhaps, Paul is after all not the<i> mahad</i> but merely a very naughty boy. When Stilgar literally and in so many words says that Paul must be the messiah because he denies that he is, a certain frisson of recognition goes through the audience. (It overshadows a very good plot point. In the previous movie, Paul's father said the same thing: the best leaders are the ones who don't desire it.) I never believed that Cleese and Palin ever had et al had a conscious political motivation, but their film has created a sort of psycho-historical ripple that makes religion, or at any rate cinematic religion, almost impossible to approach with a straight face. I don't recall Herbert himself describing the Fremen of the South as "fundamentalists", but desert dwellers in robes obsessively chanting <i>Muad Dib! Muad Dib!</i> have unfortunate contemporary real world resonances. One or two people online have already described it as irreducibly That Culture Appropriation Movie.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">There are small plot changes: it may be that proper serious Dune Geeks are as annoyed by the movie as proper serious Tolkien Geeks were by Lord of the Rings. It seemed to me that on the whole, details were being polished, clarified, and spelled out; and that the less cinematic ideas were gently pushed into the background. We are told that Alia becomes sentient <i>in utero</i>, and that she communicates with Jessica and Paul telepathically; but Villeneuve very sensibly spares us a talking baby. The novel is framed with endless commentaries by Princess Irulan about the life and teaching of Muad'dib, but the princess herself barely registers as a character in the actual narrative. Chani is a similarly passive figure, the book ending with Jessica's assurance that although Paul is going to make a dynastic marriage to the Princess, posterity will regard Chani as a wife, not a concubine. The film (like the old sci-fi channel TV show) gives both women considerably more agency: indeed, the final shot of the movie is a disgruntled Chani turning her back on Muad'dib's jihad and riding back to the desert on one of the sandworms.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The film makes some sensible choices about which plot points to underline: what the story loses in ambiguity it gains in clarity. We are told directly and early on that the prophecies of the <i>mahdi</i> were planted on Arrakis by the Bene Gesserit; and that Paul himself does not believe in them. (David Lynch, weirdly, ended his movie with Paul supernaturally bringing rain to the desert world.) The film presents the Bene Gesserit as directly running the whole show from behind the scenes, where the books leave one thinking that they are merely one powerful faction among many. Herbert as a slight tendency to murmur about Reverend Mothers and the Water of Life and leave the reader to infer what the heck he is going on about. Villeneuve sensibly lets us overhear characters explaining details to one another. We are shown a Fremen drowning a baby spice worm and harvesting the Holy Poison from it, answering the question "Water of excuse-me-what-did-you-say?" without giving us the feel that we are being info dumped. In Part One, Paul says directly that he is going to make a play for the Emperor's job; at the end of film 2, we positively see the old emperor kneel and kiss his hand. The film ends with the Fremen going off to war against the Great Houses and Jessica saying "Begun these Clone Wars have" (or words to that effect). That's pretty much what happens in the book; but there it's presented just that little bit more elliptically.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Are books factual accounts of What Happened, or verbal constructs built in particular ways by particular authors for particular effects? (This question recently became slightly controversial in Another Place.) Frank Herbert completed six volumes of the Mighty Dune Trilogy and due to the sterling work of his literary executors, the Trilogy now runs to a concise twenty two volumes, which possibly makes it a icosikaidology.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">Opinion is sharply divided about the merits of the various humous and posthumous volumes. I am one of a minority who thought Children of Dune was a bit all over the place, but really liked God Emperor. It seems to me that if Frank decided to end Dune on the eve of the Big War and begin the sequel when the Big War had long since finished, that was probably because he thought that leaving the big war off stage was the right way to tell the story he wanted to tell. Son Kevin evidently knows better, and has Andersonned no less than three books to plug the "gap" in the original saga. I have not read them. People who have done so say they are by no means the most hateful of the sequels and prequels. I assume that if no-one was reading them, no-one would be publishing them.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Villeneuve is pretty clear that there is going to be a third film, but probably none after that. This makes a good deal of sense. Frank Herbert's own sequel, Dune Messiah, could be read as an extension of the original novel, where Children of Dune and the latter volumes introduce a lot of new, and increasingly whacky, ideas. If Villeneuve was reluctant to show us a talking baby, he would certainly baulk at Paul's son covering himself with leeches and turning into a Sandworm/Human chimera. And the (spoiler alert) death of Paul is as good a place as any to end the trilogy. (Spoiler alert: he gets better.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But Kevin Herbert's name appears on the credits as an executive producer, and Kevin J Anderson crops up in the "special thanks" section.</div></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Please Reverend Mother, tell me that Dune Part 3 will be an adaptation of Dune Messiah as opposed to Paul of Dune, Winds of Dune, Princess of Dune or Tasteful Yellow Lampshades of Dune. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><p style="font-size: inherit; line-height: 1.5; margin: 10px 0px; text-align: left; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/pirate-planet-2-98244260"><span style="font-size: inherit;"><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" />Read: The Pirate Planet Parts 1-4</span> </a></p><p style="font-size: inherit; line-height: 1.5; margin: 10px 0px; text-align: left; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><br /></p><p style="font-size: inherit; line-height: 1.5; margin: 10px 0px; text-align: left; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><a href="https://www.patreon.com/collection/395495/edit">Read: Andrew's opinions on Doctor Who's Sixtieth</a>
<a href="https://ko-fi.com/andrewrilstone/shop">Buy Beautiful Shiny PDF booklets of Andrew's reviews of Tom Baker's first four seasons.</a></p><p style="font-size: inherit; line-height: 1.5; margin: 10px 0px; text-align: left; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><a href="https://ko-fi.com/andrewrilstone/shop">
Buy Beautiful Shiny PDF booklets of Andrew's reviews of Doctor Who's sixtieth</a>
<a href="https://www.patreon.com/Rilstone">Join Andrew's Patreon and get beautiful shiny PDF booklets for free. </a></p></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-43735290396633291602024-03-08T13:58:00.001+00:002024-03-08T13:58:51.367+00:00Arts Diary: Peter Clifford's Magical Mythologies<a href="https://andrews-bristol-diary.blogspot.com/2024/03/peter-cliffords-magical-mythologies.html?spref=bl">Arts Diary: Peter Clifford's Magical Mythologies</a>: Wardrobe Theatre, BristolUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-59983952613315732302024-03-07T13:53:00.001+00:002024-03-07T13:53:46.819+00:00Arts Diary: Wicked Little Letters<a href="https://andrews-bristol-diary.blogspot.com/2024/03/wicked-little-letters.html?spref=bl">Arts Diary: Wicked Little Letters</a>: Everyman, BristolUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-50221766842303353972024-03-01T13:06:00.002+00:002024-03-01T13:06:51.639+00:00Book Are One of A Number of Quite Good Things That There Are In the World <h1 style="text-align: left;">Book-Enjoyers Bingo</h1>Have you done any of these slightly amusing things in the context of a book? <div><br /></div><div>If you can answer “maybe” to at least several or more of them, then you may be a book-liker! </div><div><br /></div><div>But on the other hand you may not be. </div><div><br /></div><div>Or maybe you can tick off some different things which aren’t on this list. </div><div><br /></div><div>Really, it’s fine. </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvx_z6lbl5PIT4fL2usDdvIPiOjW5X1qO1gmhMYW7AT6H8Gi4HvHWsrsQZipRouwgPBbSzXhOJ8PBOlR7RT4PKW7lxNdujs6SSn48tgwCaLV7mtj3seN_Z0G2xu_Bhp_NZcRJfD4G-TfLR943bwdMbkNlbG7-DppUlAXjOoyuC-jh96j47u1_S/s537/book%20meme%203.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="537" data-original-width="533" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvx_z6lbl5PIT4fL2usDdvIPiOjW5X1qO1gmhMYW7AT6H8Gi4HvHWsrsQZipRouwgPBbSzXhOJ8PBOlR7RT4PKW7lxNdujs6SSn48tgwCaLV7mtj3seN_Z0G2xu_Bhp_NZcRJfD4G-TfLR943bwdMbkNlbG7-DppUlAXjOoyuC-jh96j47u1_S/s16000/book%20meme%203.jpeg" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><div><br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-84167190725258768212024-02-23T15:40:00.003+00:002024-02-23T15:59:49.795+00:00The Ribos Operation (2)<div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXoWbNYnoIhX0f12n-uhoc0Dam_N14UnYfoDwuU-lqOES5VOAn0edMG3r8BgFm49KLeq39CVdW2gJflU39TogBP0VPxwme87A_SmwO1_nF5jmSeNF1SE_Vm1qdb9rx2OnAfRWS_RfESoCKQUPr7o-kB28_ol_LCRgmROO7mjHK0qp_8AdcFn7E/s380/Untitled-2.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="349" data-original-width="380" height="156" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXoWbNYnoIhX0f12n-uhoc0Dam_N14UnYfoDwuU-lqOES5VOAn0edMG3r8BgFm49KLeq39CVdW2gJflU39TogBP0VPxwme87A_SmwO1_nF5jmSeNF1SE_Vm1qdb9rx2OnAfRWS_RfESoCKQUPr7o-kB28_ol_LCRgmROO7mjHK0qp_8AdcFn7E/w170-h156/Untitled-2.jpeg" width="170" /></a></div><br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The Ribos Operation is not about the Graf. It is barely even about the Doctor. It's about two con-men, Garron and Unstoff. It begins with them bantering wittily as they break into the royal treasure house. It ends with them bantering wittily about how well or badly their heist has worked out. It's their story.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Garron is played by Iain Cuthbertson, the nasty squire from Children of the Stones. He was originally going to be Australian, but his accent shifts between stereotype cockney and stereotype cockney trying to sound posh. Although he's a galactic rogue only two degrees removed from Han Solo, he's also clearly a cockney barrow boy. The home he wants to return to isn't Coroscant or Trantor, but Hackney Wick.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Unstoff is played by Nigel Plaskitt. In 1978 it would have been impossible to see him without muttering "course-you-can-Malcolm" under your breath. He'd been in a very irritating series of adverts for patent cold remedies. The BBC was pernickety about product placement; but it is a heck of a coincidence that Ribos is stuck in it's winter season and Unstoff spends the opening scenes complaining about the weather. Plaskitt also voiced and operated Hartley Hare on Pipkins (and I believe subsequently worked with Jim Henson) so presumably he felt right at home sharing the stage with the shrivenzale.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Plaskitt plays the part absolutely straight while Cuthbertson teeters permanently on the brink of pantomime. Robert Holmes is far too clever too hammer the point home, but the relationship between the know-it-all youngster and the seen-it-all-before veteran closely mirrors that of the Doctor and Romana. One assumes that Big Finish made two hundred CDs about the pairs further adventures? They are far more original and funny then Jago and Litefoot ever were.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Garron's scheme is pretty clever and great fun. He started his career doing the venerable old trick of selling bridges he doesn't own to unwary tourists; but has moved up in the world and now sells planets. Unstoff breaks into the castle strong room and instead of stealing the crown jewels, plants a lump of precious metal in the vault. Garron "accidentally" gives his victim papers to show that the planet has vast unexploited mineral wealth; so his mark will be prepared to buy the valueless planet at an inflated price.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Who are they trying to swindle? Obviously, the Graf Vindar-K.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It's a weirdly brilliant set-up. A classic con-trick being perpetrated on a classic space-opera bad guy by a couple of classic con-men in a classic fantasy medieval setting. It's as if Grand Moff Tarkin arrived on the set of Hamlet and Del Boy tried to sell him Westminster Bridge. (This was before Del Boy, but after Moff Tarkin.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The Plot Device leads the Doctor and Romana into the epicentre of the scam: the strong room where Unstoff has planted the precious jethric. But this in itself doesn't particularly embroil them in the story. They spend the bulk of the first two episodes pressed to the edge of the narrative; watching the scheme unfold and unravel. Romana directly says that the main action of the story is "none of their business" and that they should ignore Garron -- clearly the protagonist of the episode -- and concentrate on getting the first segment out of the strong room.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The Doctor briefly proposes one reason to become involved. He does not say that it is their moral duty to prevent the Graf being swindled; or, indeed, to prevent him from getting his hands on the valuable jethric. But he does suspect that Garron is "after the same thing" as he and Romana are. This would have been in line with Graham Williams' original concept: the Doctor and the agents of the Black Guardian in a race to find each precious Segment. But the story -- and very possibly Robert Holmes -- resists this resolution. Garron is not an agent of the Dark Side, even unwittingly. And he is not, in fact "after the same thing". In fact, he already possesses the segment, and has placed it in the reliquary, unaware of its value.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">At the time of Ribos Operation, many of us were for the first time discovering Dungeons & Dragons. Heroes went into labyrinths (which did not exist for any reason) and faced perils (which did not exist for any reason) and obtained treasures (which did not exist for any reason). The Dungeon was, in effect, a physical embodiment of the Plot. There was no need for a plausible narrative to explain how the heroes came to be negotiating a pit full of spikes; or trying to avoid a dragon's fiery breath: they were doing it because that was what there was at the end of the corridor.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">At the end of Episode Three, Unstoff stumbles into what is unmistakably a Dungeon. Surprised by the Ribos guards while trying to retrieve the jethric, he escapes into a series of caves and tunnels which just happen to run under the city and to be accessible from the strong room. They are completely impossible to navigate without supernatural or technological aid (meaning that he can stay lost for as long as the Plot requires.) They are home to a colony of fully grown shrivenzale (and can therefore provide peril and cliffhangers when called to do so). They are a hiding place for fugitives and outcasts (and can therefore introduce new characters into the story without any further explanation). Once Unstoff is lost in the Plot (the caves) with the MacGuffin (the jethric) the Doctor is obliged to go in after him.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In case we are in any doubt about what is going on, the Ribos guards enlist a lady witch doctor. It is agreed by all parties that there is no way of finding Unstoff in the caves without her aid. She's an odd fit to the overall story: a figure in a mask who keeps doing strange dance moves, a little like the Sisterhood in Brain of Morbius. She provides the Plot with a completely arbitrary end-point, "prophesying" that only one person will emerge from the Dungeon in one piece. She has exactly the same narrative function as the Tracer, and is in fact referred to only as the Seeker.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The Doctor does manage to claw back some of his status as the show's hero from Romana. But it is worth, once again, looking at what does <i>not</i> happen. It does not turn out that his poor exam results were the consequence of him being too cool for school; or that he was thrown out of college for tampering with knowledge that man was not meant to know; or that he is far more than a Time Lord and has a history that Romana can only guess at. But it does turn out that he has been round the galactic block a few times. He spots things that Romana misses. When Garron puts on a silly Mummerset accent, the Doctor notices that it is an earth accent, not a Ribos one. Romana is taken in by Unstoff's cock-and-bull story about an abandoned mine "because he has such an honest face": the Doctor points out (pityingly) that you can't be a successful crook with a <i>dishonest</i> face. (If all smugglers looked like smugglers, sir, my job would be a lot easier.) Romana assumes that the Crown must be the First Segment, because it is the most valuable thing in the strong room. The Doctor realises that it must in fact be the jethic. The audience have got there already: it has to be the jethric because the jethric is the main driver of the Plot. But the Doctor spots that the segment was moving between locations when the Tracer detected it; and Garron brought the jethric to Ribos from another star system (whereas the crown jewels are hardly ever moved). Romana thinks that this very obvious deduction is "brilliant".</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">And while this clearly restores the Doctor to the role of central character, it still represents a fundamental shift in the Doctor / companion dynamic. The Doctor is the street savvy one, the voice of common sense and intuition and occasionally local knowledge. Romana remains the clever, scientific one; and she still looks down on him.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But this can only go so far. The Doctor may no longer be wandering; he may be trying his hardest not to get involved; and he may have an assistant who is reluctant to assist. But he has one thing on his side: the format of Doctor Who. Episodes have to end with cliffhangers; and cliffhangers require the Doctor to be the Doctor. Romana, to her credit, does not scream when she is (inevitably) threatened by the shrivenzal. But she does call out "Doctor, I'm over here" and actually hug him when he frees her. "Are there many such dangerous creatures in the universe?" she asks, and the Doctor relishes the moment. "Millions! Millions! You shouldn't have volunteered if you are scared of a little thing like that."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">No Doctor Who story would be complete without a little light capital punishment. At the end of Episode Two the Graf orders that the Doctor, Romana and Garron be executed by firing squad. But the Doctor entirely refuses to take the cliffhanger seriously. In the next episode he says, in effect "Please stop" and they stop, whereupon he and the Graf get involved in a mutual face-slapping routine straight out of the Marx Brothers. They are all held prisoner (while Unstoff gets lost in the Plot Dungeon) and the Doctor spends a fair chunk of the episode chatting with Garron about the heist.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"Doctor, there are men out there planning to kill us, and you're just sitting here chattering" complains Romana.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"When you've faced death as often as I have, this is much more fun" he replies.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">More fun. It isn't merely that the Doctor is braver and less afraid of dying than Romana. It's that he doesn't take the universe entirely seriously. Which makes sense once you've realised that his meeting with the Guardian is essentially a con flab with the Author. He knows that he is the hero of the story, and that he can't be killed off. He probably even knows that the story is closer to being a comedy than a tragedy.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">There is one last element to consider.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">When Unstoff sets off into the impenetrable story-cave, he encounters Biro The Heretic. Biro fits into the story precisely nowhere, and is therefore, almost by definition, the best thing in it.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">He's a stock character. I suppose his ultimate source is Benn Gunn, the castaway in Treasure Island. He reminds us of characters who Blackadder and Robin of Loxely encounter in prison cells; and the poor chained up fellow who has to push the pram a lot. (This was before Blackadder and Robin of Sherwood.) Old, beardy, raspy, dressed in rags, apt to talk to rats and not entirely sane: I suppose the purest version of the archetype was Geoffrey Bayldon's time shifted wizard in Catweazle. But this pathetic figure is Ribos's Galileo or its Darwin: pronounced a heretic for declaring the truth about the universe for the first time.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It's another strange structural moment. The crazy mad scientist is a little bit like the Doctor; and the fresh faced guy with the bunged up nose is a little bit like Ian or Harry or any number of straight men. But Unstoff is to Biro as the Doctor has been to so many mortals: the one who tells him that, yes, the world is round; yes, the lights in the skies are other star systems and yes, travel between the worlds will one day be possible. (No-one seems to care very much about the Prime Directive: at any rate, honest-looking con-men don't.) Reviews at the time, in fanzines, pinpointed the Unstoff/Biro scenes as being good examples of the Magic which Doctor Who didn't have any more. They are certainly good drama and good writing played straight by two good actors.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Tom Baker's Doctor is sometimes said to be a little callous: not psychotic like Colin's version but looking at humans from a slightly elevated perspective. But the ending of Ribos Operation is surprisingly cruel. The Seeker has predicted that only one person will survive the caves. After Sholakh dies, the Graf consciously tries to bring the Plot to its foreordained ending. He hands his remaining guard a bomb, and walks away: the guard gets an honourable death, and he himself gets to leave the catacombs in one piece.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">He is ranting movingly about past battles, and talking about Sholakh as if he is still alive. One half expects him to say that he has nothing left but his panache. But the guard is the Doctor in disguise (of course); and the Doctor has switched the bomb for the jethric (of course). The Graf blows himself up and the Doctor gets the segment. We shouldn't mourn too much for Vinder-K: he was a bad man who had it coming; but it's a cold thing for the good guy to do. But then, Ribos is a very cold planet. Perhaps the Doctor could do with some Vicks Sinex.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But our focus is not on ridding the universe of nasty but impotent bad guys: it's on the Doctor getting his hands on the Plot Coupon. We head straight for a comedy climax. Garron switches the jethric for some worthless stone, but the Doctor switches it back again. Garron is cross, but only a bit cross; you imagine he starts planning his next hustle right away. The final lines; as the Doctor secures the First Segment in the TARDIS safe, slightly undercuts the adventure. "Simple wasn't it. Only five more to go."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">A chap at a Doctor Who convention at the time told me that "the magic of Doctor Who" comes down to "how Doctor Who makes you feel". That's probably about right. Our joy in the show is subjective rather than objective: it's a romantic, rather than a classical engagement.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">What is Doctor Who? Chases down corridors; old fashioned theatrical actors; chases down corridors; special effects departments doing the best they can; chases down corridors. Ribos Operation has them: Pirate Planet will have more of them; Power of Kroll will have very little else. The question is never what Doctor Who irreducibly is; but what the Doctor has at a given moment become. The disruptive figure, arriving on a planet and shaking everything up? The saviour, arriving at the moment of crisis? Or merely the curious, benevolent wanderer?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Professional fans at the time of Deadly Assassin complained that there was too much hyperbole. The Doctor no longer rescued individuals or cities or even planets: He only ever saved The Universe. Which may be one of the problems the Key to Time sets out to solve. The action is tiny: a small lump of precious rock; a swindler; a posturing noble. But the stakes are as ultimate as they can possibly be.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">If we wind back to when Anthony Coburn created Doctor Who, single-handedly, by himself, without input from anyone else [is this right? -ed] the show was about two things.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It was about the idea of Space: the idea that this earth, containing everything we have ever known, is really a tiny part of the universe, and a wardrobe in a junk yard could contain everything. Ribos puts us on a planet which doesn't even know that space exists and shows us the Copernican moment when the ice crystals turn into stars and the universe turns out be bigger on the outside than the inside.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">And it was about a sense of place: about spending long enough on Skaro or the Stone Age or Ancient Mexico that we started to feel at home there -- as at home as we did in the foggy London streets or the London secondary school. Robert Holmes, cleverly, wittily and economically draws us into the Ribosness of Ribos. This is not a story that could have been set anywhere else.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">And perhaps that is another function of the Anti-Plot Device. For this season at least, the Doctor's function is to arrive, grab, and leave, and try not to get involved. Perhaps that enables us to see Ribos as Ribos would have been even if the Doctor had never shown up.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Don Quixote; Tristan Shandy; Hamlet -- even Watchmen. There is a longish lineage of work which set out to undermine a genre and end up becoming the perfect example of it. The Key To Time is the product of Graham Williams' disillusionment with the the whole idea of Doctor Who (and Holmes irritation with the idea of an Umbrella Setting.) But it's not only the best story of the season; it is, in anyone's book, one of the finest entries in the entire Canon.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Coming soon: The Pirate Planet.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><p style="font-size: inherit; line-height: 1.5; margin: 10px 0px; text-align: left; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><br /></p><p style="font-size: inherit; line-height: 1.5; margin: 10px 0px; text-align: left; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/pirate-planet-2-98244260"><span style="font-size: inherit;">Read: The Pirate Planet Parts 1-4</span> </a></p><p style="font-size: inherit; line-height: 1.5; margin: 10px 0px; text-align: left; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><a href="https://www.patreon.com/collection/395495/edit">Read: Andrew's opinions on Doctor Who's Sixtieth</a>
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Buy Beautiful Shiny PDF booklets of Andrew's reviews of Doctor Who's sixtieth</a>
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Invasion of Time debunked the TARDIS: the once miraculous machine is literally a facade, and if you take one step out of the gleaming white control room what you will find is not even-more wondrous technology, but brick lined tunnels and obsolete office equipment.<p></p><p style="line-height: 1.5; margin: 10px 0px;"><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">The Ribos Operation goes one step further. It debunks the Doctor. And then it debunks the whole idea of Doctor Who. And then it puts them back together again.</span></p><p style="font-size: inherit; line-height: 1.5; margin: 10px 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">The Guardian of Time has stepped into the space vacated by the Time Lords. He summonses the Doctor and tells him he has chosen him to perform an important mission. The Doctor chafes and complains and sulks but takes on the quest. He can't very well not. The Guardian is a plot device: the voice of the authorial <em>fiat.</em> If the main character in the story doesn't do what the Author tells him to do, then it is literally true that nothing will happen to him: ever again.</p><p style="font-size: inherit; line-height: 1.5; margin: 10px 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">The living embodiment of the Plot looks like an ex-pat from the Raj. You can rationalise this kind of thing if rationalising things is your bag: maybe Guardians change their appearances to fit in with their surroundings, like the TARDIS; or maybe everyone perceives them differently, like Galactus and Santa Claus. But I think we just happen to be in the kind of Universe where the higher power is an old duffer in a white suit. The universe may be threatened with eternal chaos; the cosmic cube may have been split into six easily managed monthly instalments: but the TARDIS is still a phone box and God is quite definitely an Englishman.</p><p style="font-size: inherit; line-height: 1.5; margin: 10px 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">The Doctor is reduced to a self-conscious school-boy; calling the Guardian "Sir" with a distinct trace of sarcasm. It's the sort of thing that Tom does so well: acting, darling. His relationship with God is very much like his relationship with his old college tutor. The Doctor is very much still the Doctor.</p><p style="font-size: inherit; line-height: 1.5; margin: 10px 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">But when Romana appears, it all gets a bit uncomfortable.</p><p style="font-size: inherit; line-height: 1.5; margin: 10px 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">Fans talk about "companions"; journalists talk about "assistants". When the Guardian tells the Doctor that he is going to have a new "assistant" he is speaking from outside the story; talking about the format rather than the universe. The audience knows that Louise Jameson has quit and that the first story has to introduce the "new girl"; so having the voice of the author simply impose one on the Doctor is a nice post-modern penetration of the fourth wall. When the Doctor responds that "in my experience, assistants mean trouble; I have to protect them and show them and teach them..." he's pretty much calling into question the entire premise of Doctor Who. And he is surely speaking for the lead actor -- and some of the fans -- when he says "I'd rather work alone". Later he tells Romana "to stay out of my way and keep out of trouble" and to "stick close to me and do as you're told". If companions always did that, there wouldn't be many stories. (James Goss's novelisation of the Pirate Planet pushes the metafictional element much harder: the Doctor requires a companion who "likes country walks through quarries" and has "sturdy ankles.")</p><p style="font-size: inherit; line-height: 1.5; margin: 10px 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">Romana doesn't accept the companion role. It's not that she complains that the Doctor is sexist and patronising. Jo Grant occasionally did that. (Sarah was more self-confident and therefore more subtle about it.) But Romana tells the Doctor directly that he is not as clever as he pretends to be; and she is repeatedly proved right. She -- it turns out -- has a first class degree in Time Lording from the University of Time Lord, where the Doctor barely scraped a pass-mark on the second attempt.</p><p style="font-size: inherit; line-height: 1.5; margin: 10px 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">Information about the Doctor's past has always been rationed: William Hartnell was a pioneer among his own people; Jon Pertwee had a mysterious mentor; Patrick Troughton has a family who he sometimes thinks about. But Tom, it seems, was a bad, second rate student. It undermines the Doctorness of the Doctor for the sake of a cheap gag.</p><p style="font-size: inherit; line-height: 1.5; margin: 10px 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">In earlier drafts, Romana was going to be an undergraduate Time Lord: one who was still learning and therefore knew <em>less</em> than the Doctor; although possibly more inclined to stick to the rules. This would have been much less of an attack on the show's format: and therefore much less fun.</p><p style="font-size: inherit; line-height: 1.5; margin: 10px 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">There would be nothing very surprising about the pairing of a veteran hero with an academically brilliant young turk. Knowledge versus experience is a perfectly good narrative set-up. The young Captain can bring the old Admiral up to speed about recent developments in antimatter imbalance without necessarily undermining the Kirkness of Kirk.</p><p style="font-size: inherit; line-height: 1.5; margin: 10px 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">But in her initial interaction with the Doctor, Romana consistently maintains the upper hand; and the Doctor ends up looking ridiculous. She rightly points out that he is childishly sulking. He petulantly makes fun of her name, and she doesn't take the bait. She cleverly catches him out with reverse psychology. (The Doctor forbids her from returning to Gallifrey, even though he really wants her to leave.) She accurately claims that he has "massive compensation syndrome" -- he wants to appear competent to make up for his relatively poor academic record. And when he histrionically warns her to watch where she is going and expect the unexpected he literally walks into a bear trap.</p><p style="font-size: inherit; line-height: 1.5; margin: 10px 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">It's funny enough, in a Crackerjack kind of way. But if the Doctor is a bit of a fraud then he has always been a bit of a fraud. Ian and Barbara and Jamie and Sarah and six million viewers were taken in: but this new lady can see right through him.</p><p style="font-size: inherit; line-height: 1.5; margin: 10px 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">The Doctor was introduced to us as a kind of Flying Dutchmen figure -- a stranger with a Ship he couldn't steer making landfall in mysterious places with no particular purpose or motivation. The uncontrolled TARDIS is one part of the story-generating engine. The Doctor's innate curiosity and moral compass provides the other half. Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke explained the set-up very clearly to me when I was eight:</p><p style="font-size: inherit; line-height: 1.5; margin: 10px 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><em>"Having thought of all that, Newman and Wilson had to consider an important question of logic: why should the Doctor travel about through Time and Space? You will remember what was said about television series to do with detectives, policemen, and doctors. In their jobs, they are called to where something is happening. There could be no logical reason for the Doctor to be called, say, to the Planet Skaro to help the Thals against the Daleks, nor why he should be called back into Earth's history to the time of Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. So there had to be another reason for the Doctor's travels. The answer was that something had gone wrong with the steering of the TARDIS. It was decided that on each journey the Doctor would try to make the TARDIS go where he wanted, but always the TARDIS would be out of control. However, this would not greatly displease the Doctor. Built into his character was a scientific curiosity about everything and everywhere."</em></p><p style="font-size: inherit; line-height: 1.5; margin: 10px 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">But the Tracer/Core changes the dynamic. The voice of authorial fiat has given the Doctor a literal plot device: a device that points him towards the plot. The Doctor will now be <em>directed</em> to a specific planet; and on that planet he will <em>look for a particular thing; </em> and when he finds that thing he will move on. Where the Doctor's whole personality inclines him to get involved; the Guardian's mission actively requires him <em>not to.</em></p><p style="font-size: inherit; line-height: 1.5; margin: 10px 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">If the Key to Time saga is about anything, it is this. The central conflict is not between black and white or between order and chaos. It is between plot and anti-plot.</p><p style="font-size: inherit; line-height: 1.5; margin: 10px 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">Everything about the Ribos Operation seems to be off-kilter. It looks like a costume drama; but it keeps insisting that it's a space-opera. Every character is a broad, comedic caricature: but the story keeps demanding that we should feel empathy for them. The character who is structurally in a heroic role -- the usurped prince on a quest to restore his throne -- is a psychopath and all our sympathies lie with a pair of crooks who should logically be bad guys. The Doctor and Romana are pushed to the edge of the narrative, and the con-men act as if it is their show. It is perpetually trying to become a Doctor Who story, but the Key to Time actively prevents it from doing so.</p><p style="font-size: inherit; line-height: 1.5; margin: 10px 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><br /></p><p style="font-size: inherit; line-height: 1.5; margin: 10px 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">Imagine a Ruritanian romance set in space. A King goes off to war and returns home to find that his half-brother has usurped his throne. (Perhaps their names are Richard and John.) In exile with a loyal general and a handful of guards, the rightful King plans to establish a new base of operations, raise an army and reclaim his throne. He says things like "Do you think that I can rest for one moment until I've won back the Levithian Crown which is mine by right?"<em> </em>In such a scenario you'd expect the Doctor to side with the exiles against the usurper.</p><p style="font-size: inherit; line-height: 1.5; margin: 10px 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">But the expected set up is reversed. Graf Vynda-K, the rightful king, is a thug and a tyrant; the throne-stealing half-brother, by all accounts, a jolly good fellow. We are on the edge of a massive space opera: we hear about star cruisers and space marines and a galaxy-wide empire, but it's all kept entirely off-stage. The action takes place in the environs of a single medieval castle.</p><p style="font-size: inherit; line-height: 1.5; margin: 10px 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">The Graf seems unsure what kind of a character he is meant to be. He speaks fluent technobabble mixed with fluent villain; but he keeps lapsing into old fashioned ("why think you of those caves?") He can't pronounce the name of his henchman Sholakh without lingering on the K: and he keeps doing that Laurence Olivier thing of unexpectedly. Pausing half way through a line. At first he is merely a very arrogant nobleman: two of the three cliffhangers end with him talking about himself in the third person. "No one makes a fool of the Graff Vynda-K and lives";"No one will ever know how you tried to trick the Graff Vynda-K" By episode three, he's adopted the language of colonialism ("I flatter myself I know how to get the best out of natives") and is shooting prisoners as if they were grouse. But in episode four, he modulates back into being a space-marine action figure and there is something slightly heroic about him. You can't completely hate someone who reminisces about "So many battles, Skarrn, the Freytus labyrinth, Crestus Min..." He actually kisses Sholakh when the latter is killed. Perhaps, like Corialanus, he was a good soldier who was forced to become a bad politician.</p><p style="font-size: inherit; line-height: 1.5; margin: 10px 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><br /></p><p style="font-size: inherit; line-height: 1.5; margin: 10px 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">There is a very old joke, possibly made by Robert Holmes himself, that if the BBC remade Michael Caine's Zulu, the thousands of extras would be replaced by one man in a pith-helmet sticking his head out of a tent and crying "there are thousands of them out there!" Certainly, Doctor Who always relied on showing it small and telling it big: taking viewers to the periphery or the aftermath of some large scale conflict and coming up with good reasons why universe-shaking events are played out in a quarry, a space ship or an Edwardian country house.</p><p style="font-size: inherit; line-height: 1.5; margin: 10px 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">This is perhaps a harder stunt to pull of in 1978 than it would have been a decade earlier; you can't carry on claiming that the pictures are better on the radio when Industrial Light and Magic is blowing up planets twice a night on Screen 2 of the Barnet Odeon. But Robert Holmes remains the master of the poetry of allusion; of giving characters jargon laden gibberish which seems to have eons and continents of meaning behind them.</p><p style="font-size: inherit; line-height: 1.5; margin: 10px 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">Ribos is a primitive planet "three light centuries from the magellanic clouds" with seventeenth century technology but no knowledge of the wider universe. The inhabitants believe that their world is flat and that the stars are ice-crystals suspended in the sky. The planet experiences four-year long winters followed by equally long summers. If there is a parallel between the people's superstitious belief in an endless war between the sun gods and the ice gods and the endless cosmic war between the Guardians, Holmes doesn't point it out.</p><p style="font-size: inherit; line-height: 1.5; margin: 10px 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">It looks like any number of historical dramas: we could almost be over on BBC2 watching the Television Shakespeare season. As a matter of fact, the sets and the costumes were liberated from a dramatisation of Anna Karenina. In Episode 3, we see fur-clad actors, lost in BBC caverns, having mannered, theatrical conversations in extreme close up. If you switched off the colour and squinted, you might almost think that it was 1964, William Hartnell was in the TARDIS, and all was right with the world.</p><p style="font-size: inherit; line-height: 1.5; margin: 10px 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">The action takes place in a castle: the castle has a strong room; and the crown jewels are on display in a glass case. They are guarded by a monster, the shrivenzale, part frog and part dragon; which rather reinforces the sense that we are looking at something that quacks like science fiction but is really fantasy under the bonnet. The shrivenzale is obviously a puppet, but it's a pretty impressive one. It's never very frightening but it's never actively ludicrous.</p><p style="font-size: inherit; line-height: 1.5; margin: 10px 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">Ribos is an anagram of Boris. Shrivenzale is probably an anagram of something very rude indeed.</p><p style="font-size: inherit; line-height: 1.5; margin: 10px 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">The Graf's backstory never completely settles down: he is trying to regain the "Levithian crown"; he participated in something called "the Frontier war"; the planet Ribos falls within the "Greater Cyrrhenic Empire"; and something called "the Alliance" has the power to adjudicate the succession. We don't know what "Pontonese ships" or "Shalankie mercenaries" are: but don't they sound terrific? He could have said that only the Magellanic Mining <em>Company</em> has the authority to buy and sell planets, but he chose to go with <em>Conglomerate</em> instead. I don't think Douglas Adams was actively involved, but it all sounds terribly Hitchhikery.</p><p style="font-size: inherit; line-height: 1.5; margin: 10px 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">I am sure that it is possible to bind these phonemes together into some coherent campaign-setting: I am sure Big Finish or Cubicle 7 have done so. But it is better left unexplained and unexplored: the jumble of non-specific imagery underlines the important point that Space is Big. The Graf and his remnant represent the tip of a narrative iceberg protruding into this one tiny story; a single space marine on a board we will never see.</p><p style="font-size: inherit; line-height: 1.5; margin: 10px 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">And he isn't even the person the story is about.</p><p style="font-size: inherit; line-height: 1.5; margin: 10px 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><br /></p><p style="font-size: inherit; line-height: 1.5; margin: 10px 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/ribos-operations-96289842">Read: The Ribos Operation Part 2</a></p><p style="font-size: inherit; line-height: 1.5; margin: 10px 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/pirate-planet-2-98244260"><span style="font-size: inherit;">Read: The Pirate Planet Parts 1 and 2</span> </a></p><p style="font-size: inherit; line-height: 1.5; margin: 10px 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><a href="https://www.patreon.com/collection/395495/edit">Read: Andrew's opinions on Doctor Who's Sixtieth</a>
<a href="https://ko-fi.com/andrewrilstone/shop">Buy Beautiful Shiny PDF booklets of Andrew's reviews of Tom Baker's first four seasons.</a></p><p style="font-size: inherit; line-height: 1.5; margin: 10px 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><a href="https://ko-fi.com/andrewrilstone/shop">
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color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6); font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, "system-ui", "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: 700; letter-spacing: -0.14px;"><div class="sc-czsgh-1 iYRuWu" style="-webkit-box-align: center; align-items: center; display: flex;"></div></div></div></button></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-78279401498387209062024-02-10T19:15:00.001+00:002024-02-12T11:59:42.750+00:00The Key To Time<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8KyVaT-AJJXsua3trhECVeHxM5Nkt8ITXH5Rq0P79Um_AsNkWAJxS7nC23tqaFB3E0Kt9F2iTvCjR_FLG3r_xELzcxfF7ah1PU-Re4SvFXKk17KYSC1hXJPDcuzeMaqzy7Lm8bppdZ3c6kK9XKymQ_iojpGWgah4ppjLLsbyw_JAXbXV3fYFv/s595/Untitled-1.jpeg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="241" data-original-width="595" height="130" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8KyVaT-AJJXsua3trhECVeHxM5Nkt8ITXH5Rq0P79Um_AsNkWAJxS7nC23tqaFB3E0Kt9F2iTvCjR_FLG3r_xELzcxfF7ah1PU-Re4SvFXKk17KYSC1hXJPDcuzeMaqzy7Lm8bppdZ3c6kK9XKymQ_iojpGWgah4ppjLLsbyw_JAXbXV3fYFv/s320/Untitled-1.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><br /> <p></p><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">He that is not busy being born is busy dying.</p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><br /></p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">Doctor Who has always been in a death spiral; undermining it's own credibility and trampling it's own legacy. But equally it has always been struggling to come into being; edging toward the moment when it has finally become Doctor Who.</p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><br /></p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">But what <em>is </em>Doctor Who? </p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><br /></p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">We think we know. Pseudo-science, corridors, second rate Equity members over-acting in the general direction of extras in rubber suits. And no one can say that that version of Doctor Who never existed. But the crock of gold at the end of the corridor is always receding. We think we've arrived at the definitive Doctor-Who-as-it-always-was: and we find that what we're watching is a clever costume drama on left-over sets from Anna Karenina.</p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><br /></p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">The Doctor has to retrieve a powerful object referred to as the Key to Time. It has been split into Six Segments and scattered across the Universe. Since there are six stories in a season of Doctor Who, the artificiality of the device pretty much screams at you from the first synopsis.</p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><br /></p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">The term "story arc" was not quite current in 1978: the production team were inclined to talk about "the umbrella theme" or "the blanket story line". But we could all see that the Key to Time was a McGuffin hunt: a trek across time and space searching for what Nick Lowe memorably called "plot coupons".</p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><br /></p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">There are two extant documents which explore the idea behind the saga. One is written by incumbent producer Graham Williams; the other by incoming script editor Douglas Adams. Two writers, thinking on paper, trying to sort out in their heads what the Key to Time saga could possibly be about.</p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><br /></p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">Williams is interested in cosmology and lore. He's interested in what kind of universe the Doctor inhabits. I have said in the past that most Doctor Who backstory amounts to "lore-babble": stuff that sounds good but which has no real "sub-creation" behind it. However, the Williams memo does seem to envisage a self-consistent Whoniverse: even if he is ad libbing it in the very act of typing the words.</p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><br /></p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">There are writers who can't write the big sex scene unless they know what kind of handles there are on the bedroom door and the colour of the wallpaper. And there are writers who don't give the hero a name unless and until it becomes relevant to the plot. Douglas Adams seems to have been in the second camp. When someone asked him if Arthur Dent used an Apple Mac, Adams said it was a silly question because Arthur Dent didn't exist, and there had never been a scene in which we saw him typing. Graham Williams is more like the actor who can't say "My lord, your carriage awaits" unless he knows what the footman had for breakfast. The Guardians have to have a purpose and the Key to Time has to have an origin even if he has no intention of sharing them with the audience.</p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><br /></p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">Tolkien worked out elvish rates of fertility to a hundred decimal places as a kind of displacement activity before writing some of the most beautiful mythic prose any human being has ever composed. Williams is similarly doodling on the page, trying to get a head of steam up before working on his story. But his ideas barely impact on the actual TV show.</p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><br /></p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">The memo keeps dissolving into gibberish. Elisabeth Sandifer memorably called it the most spectacularly incoherent thing she had ever read. There are three forces in physics, right? Gravity, electromagnetism, nuclear? And some theories require there to be a fourth force, which might be space-time? And humans can control gravity and electromagnetism? So maybe the Time Lords control the fourth force? </p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">Come on. It was 1978. Of course it was going to involve the Force.</p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><br /></p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">But the Time Lords are corrupt, right? So mustn't there necessarily be a power that is as far above the Time Lords as the Time Lords are above us humans? But the higher force can't be purely good; because then the universe would be good, which it obviously isn't. So there must be <em>two</em> higher forces; a good one and an evil one.</p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><br /></p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">Voila: the Black and White Guardian Show.</p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><br /></p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><em>"Eternity and Infinity, as concepts, do not by their very nature, allow for an absolute Authority -- the Pyramidical Hierarchy stretches through time and space and can have no apex... But the next step is logical. The balance must be kept by someone..."</em></p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><em><br /></em></p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">If "must" is a moral imperative ("you must be home by tea-time") then this doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Who or what made the rule that there "must" be a balance? But if it's an inductive "must" ("he must have been home by tea-time because the kitchen light was on") I think we can see what Williams is driving at. If Time and Space are infinite there can't be any supreme being. A pyramid with infinitely long sides never comes to a point. If the Time Lords are above the humans and the Guardians are above the Time Lords, there must be Something Else above the Guardians, and Something Else above the Something Else. It's turtles all the way down. (Williams literally quotes Jonathan Swift's poem about fleas.) But if the next in line above the Time Lords were good then we'd expect goodness to be running the whole show: which obviously it isn't. So it follows that there "must" be both a good and an evil force, in some kind of balance.</p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><br /></p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">It's the old, old question. If the supreme being is good, then how do you account for the existence of haemorrhoids and Sir Kier Starmer?</p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><br /></p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">There is some pretty weird moral philosophy in the memo:</p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><br /></p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><em>"Must responsibility and objectivity lie solely in the hands of the good influence? Demonstrably not so. Of our recent history there is no account nor any evidence that Hitler believed his principles less sincerely than Churchill believed in his. Where were Nuremburg, had Hitler won."</em></p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><em><br /></em></p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">This is monstrously confused -- we're looking over Williams' shoulder as he vomits ideas into a notebook. But I think we can see the thought he is trying to have. He's contrasting a monotheist universe in which good is good and all alone and ever more shall be so with a dualist world where good and evil are two equal and opposed forces.</p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><br /></p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">In a strictly dualist universe there is no particular reason why you <em>ought</em> to choose to be good rather than evil. They are just two teams, like the Arsenal and the Spurs. Dungeons & Dragons conceptualises "good" and "evil" as antagonistic clubs you choose to join, not meaningful descriptions of codes of conduct or ways of life."You <em>ought</em> to follow the light rather than the dark" implies that there is a third force, over and above the light side and the dark side that approves the Jedi and deprecates the Sith. That's why orthodox Christians have always been very clear that Satan is <em>not</em> an evil god; he's merely a very naughty angel. I believe that even so-called dualistic systems like Zorastrianism and Manicheism say, under their breath and off mic, that the good force came first and will beat the bad one in the end. You <em>ought</em> to back the winner.</p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><br /></p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">What Williams appears to be blurting out is that Hitler <em>believed</em> himself to be good and the allies to be evil and that there is no absolute perspective from which one can say that he is wrong. Cosmically speaking, murdering six million Jews and <em>not</em> murdering six million Jews are equally neutral acts. It's a fortunate quirk of history that we happen to have been educated on the non-genocidal side of the line.</p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><br /></p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">But "Hitler thought that doing evil was good, so maybe doing good is evil" is not meaningful or helpful, even as a thought experiment. The relevant insight would have to be something like "Suppose you honestly thought that monstrous aliens dedicated to the destruction of humanity were dispersed through your population: might genocide be one of the solutions which would occur even to a good person?" We stopped executing witches, not because we changed our mind about executions, but because we stopped believing in witchcraft.</p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><br /></p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">But that's exactly the kind of thinking which the Doctor rejects. There would be a contradiction in wiping out the whole Dalek species because the Daleks are genocidal monsters. The Daleks are bad and if the Doctor acts as they do he would be as bad as them.</p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><br /></p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">The second half of the Williams memo attempts to connect all this back to Doctor Who. It proposes that the President of the Time Lords is told about the higher authority when he assumes office. (The Doctor must therefore have learned about them in Invasion of Time -- or would have done if he had not had his memory erased at the end of the story.) The two Guardians are representatives of the Higher Power within the Cluster -- the section of the universe the Time Lords are in charge of. The Key to Time is a neutral source of power for both the White and the Black Guardians. In Williams' original conception, the Black Guardian has <em>already stolen</em> the Key and scattered it through Time and Space; the Universe is <em>already</em> descending into chaos. He seems to entertain the thought that the Doctor has <em>always been</em> resisting the chaos and his enemies have <em>always been</em> agents of the Black Guardian. He wonders if perhaps Time Lords are periodically promoted to being Guardians, and that the Doctor might be rewarded for completing the quest by being offered the chance to level up.</p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><br /></p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">But none of this makes its way into the actual episodes. Neither does the attractive idea of a magic candle which burns dimmer and dimmer as the Black Guardian's power waxes. And Williams philosophical doodle entirely fails to answer the big question. How will a season of Doctor Who in which the Doctor is searching for the six segments of the Key to Time be distinguishable from a season in which he isn't?</p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><br /></p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">In this respect, Douglas Adams' notes are a lot more interesting; albeit only as a counterfactual -- a brief premonition of a more interesting Key to Time which might have existed, but never did. Adams isn't interested in higher powers, moral relativism, or infinitely large pyramids. He's truthfully not that interested in Doctor Who. He's interested in scripts. The producer has determined that the Doctor is going to spend Season 16 collecting party favours for a cosmic scavenger hunt: so how can a writer use that idea to generate some interesting TV?</p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><br /></p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">Adams zeroes in on one crucial fact. Each of the segments is disguised as a random object. So in each story, one object must be of exceptional significance. The important thing is to think of interesting and surprising objects and to think of interesting and surprising reasons why some character might want to stop the Doctor getting his hands on them.</p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><br /></p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><em>"The problem in each case is that the object plays some significant role in the life of the planet on which it is located, either for good or evil, and the Doctor has to consider how its removal will affect life on [that planet]."</em></p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><em><br /></em></p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">Being Douglas Adams, he tries to think of far-fetched and ridiculous things for the segments to be disguised as. The Moon and the Sun. Stonehenge. A person: Romana, maybe, or even the Doctor himself. Imagine a story in which the Doctor arrived in a future London and was required to ask the King (recognisably descended from Prince Charles) if he could please remove Buckingham Palace because he needed it to save the universe.</p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><br /></p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">Adams was finishing up the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy at the same time he was working on what became the Pirate Planet and there is a certain familial wackiness between the two stories. What if the second segment turned out to be, er, Africa? What if the Doctor already knew this, and had the original continent in storage in his infinitely large TARDIS?</p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><br /></p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">Adams' essay is not always very easy to follow. His mind worked very quickly but didn't stay in one place for long. But it is the idea of disguise which seems to fascinate him. He envisages characters being mistaken, or directly lying, about which object will turn out to be that episode's plot coupon. Maybe the Doctor <em>pretends</em> that he has found the segment to impress Romana? Maybe he lies about what the segment is to give him a pretext to take away some alien object he wants to possess for some unfathomable reason of his own? Maybe the segment is a weapon and the Doctor has to make a morally ambiguous pact with a supervillain to get his hands on it?</p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><br /></p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">Williams' introduction of the tracer/core in Episode One pretty much closes off most of these interesting avenues: the Doctor has an infallible wand that flashes "this way to the plot" at the beginning of each episode. (Several times, the Doctor loses the tracer, but that simply turns the McGuffin detector into a temporary McGuffin.)</p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><br /></p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">The memo may contain the germ of what became the Armageddon Factor. But very few of Adams' ideas ever see the light of day. It is hard to avoid the feeling that in many of the Key to Time stories, the quest was being retrofitted into stories which would have worked perfectly well without it.</p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><br /></p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">Four seasons ago, the Doctor was sent on a quest: not by the Guardians but by the Time Lords. The TARDIS could, I suppose, have randomly dumped him on Skaro at the precise moment when Davros was about to activate his new range of outer space robot people. And the Doctor might have decided that this provided him with an opportunity to abort his enemy at the moment of their conception. And he might even have had moral qualms at the last minute. But that would have all been a bit of a stretch even by Doctor Who standards. The prologue to Genesis of the Daleks justifies the contrivance; and sets up the moral dilemma in the final episode. The Doctor questions whether he ought (that word again) to destroy the Daleks <em>even though the Time Lords have told him to</em>.</p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><br /></p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">And that's the question that neither Williams nor Adams successfully answers. What narrative effect will the Guardian's sending the Doctor on a cosmic treasure hunt have on the six stories that make up Season 16?</p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><br /></p><p style="background-color: white; font-family: "ABC Oracle Plus Variable", -apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><br /></p></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/doctor-who-16-96044151">Read: The Ribos Operation (1)</a></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/pirate-planet-1-98239326">Read: The Pirate Planet (1)</a></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/one-with-scarf-98318106">The complete Tom Baker Essays (to date): free to Patreon Supporters.</a></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://ko-fi.com/andrewrilstone/shop">The complete Tom Baker Essays (to date): available for pay-what-you-like purchasers. </a></div><div></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-76586830477825306212024-01-14T23:26:00.002+00:002024-01-14T23:26:53.345+00:00Norwegian Blue<p></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Gill Sans"; font-size: x-large;"><b>The Wolves of Eternity by</b></span></div><span style="font-family: Gill Sans; font-size: x-large;"><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Karl-Ove Knausgaard</b></div></span><p></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Gill Sans";"><i>People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff. - </i>Trad.</span></p><span style="font-family: Gill Sans; font-size: x-large;"><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>1</b></div></span><div><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><div style="text-align: justify;">Some years ago, there was a TV series called Heroes. The first episodes followed the apparently unrelated life-stories of several super-powered characters. Gradually, over slightly too many episodes, we started to see how their lives were connected; until by the final instalment, they all turned out to have been part of a single story. Someone certainly had to save the cheerleader. Because it was about a network of overlapping relationships it was called the first popular drama of the Facebook era. By me, if by no-one else.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Social media makes a difference. Past Lives, a film which somehow didn't excite me quite as much as it excited everyone else depends on Facebook for its central premise. It would have been quite impossible, prior to 2005, for two people on two different continents who were sweethearts at the age of twelve to reestablish contact at the age of twenty four. Not without private detectives, or a gigantic coincidence involving handbags and strawberry marks. You may remember how Rustum (a father who long ago lost contact with his son) and Sorhab (a son who was raised entirely in ignorance of his father's identity) inadvertently killed each other in single combat. That sort of thing used to happen all the time in the days before Twitter.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div></span><div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Gill Sans";">Alan Moore's Watchmen, which came out as early as 1986, is another story in which multiple narratives about disparate characters gradually converge, until we perceive that, from a certain point of view, everything is connected to everything else. Moore's Ozymandias sits in front of a huge bank of television screens, randomly changing channels, in the belief that this will somehow enable him to perceive the Big Picture. Nowadays he would spend all day on Twitter. Come to think of it, he would probably own Twitter.</span></div><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Conspiracy theory thrives online; and conspiracy theory, almost by definition, involves drawing lines between things which are not connected. Until 2022, the titular head of the United Kingdom was called the Queen. One of the Queen's children is alleged to have links to Jeffrey Epstein. Jeffrey Epstein was accused of sexual offences. Men who wear extravagangtly feminine clothes as part of a theatrical performance are sometimes referred to as Drag <i>Queens</i>. This proves...</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But Alan Moore came to believe that ritual magic and creative writing were both equally about creating new connections between unconnected things. All stories are true.</div></span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Gill Sans";"><br /></span></div><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><div style="text-align: justify;">I wonder if the Marvel Cinematic Universe -- and the various franchises which have so far entirely failed to emulate its success -- are knock-on results of the ubiquity of Twitter? We're disinclined to see stories as lines and more inclined to see them as webs.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><span style="font-size: x-large;"><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>2</b></div></span><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In 2012, someone called Helge listens to a record that they used to like when they were eleven.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div></span><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><i>"The cover alone sent a tingle down my spine. The image of the world, shining in the darkest firmament, the band name in electric lettering and the album title underneath in computer script–wow! But it didn’t really knock me out until I pressed play and started listening. I remembered all the songs, it was as if the melodies and riffs hidden in my subconscious came welling up to reconnect with their origins, their parents, those old Status Quo songs to which they belonged. But it wasn’t only that. With them came shoals of memories, a teeming swathe of tastes, smells, visions, occurrences, moods, atmospheres, whatever. My emotions couldn’t handle so much information all at once, the only thing I could do was sit there trembling for three-quarters of an hour as the album played.”</i></span><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Well, quite. Frenchmen often have that kind of experience when they dip little cakes in their tea. One thought leads to another and suddenly Helge remembers something very odd that happened to him in 1977. It's all over and done with in six pages and I don't think we hear another peep out of him for the rest of the very long book. </div></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><br /></span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Gill Sans";">The second section, amounting to a longish novel in its own right, is about a second character, named Syvert. It's 1987 and Syvert has just come home from his national service (which is, or was then, a thing in Norway). He was a cook in the Navy and is rather good at it, although he doesn't want to go into the restaurant trade as a career. He doesn't know what he does want. Gradually, some facts about his life unfold. He lost his father a decade ago; his mother is seriously ill (he finds blood in the washbasin and then a bloody tissue in the bin). He has a younger brother who has been having vivid dreams about Dad. Almost without us noticing, a plot starts to happen. Syvert finds some of his father's old papers, which include letters written in Russian. He didn't know his Dad spoke Russian. He becomes curious, and gets them translated. Meanwhile and in passing he visits the local Vicar. It seems that everyone is automatically confirmed in the Church of Norway by default, and has to pay tax to the church: they need a signature from a clergyman if they want to opt out. The Vicar is very nice about it, but half-seriously asks Syvert to return the favour by reading Crime and Punishment. Dostoyevsky is the most Christian of writers, he says, more Christian than Jesus. Syvert is not only an atheist, but quite right-wing, although this only manifests as occasionally having unkind thoughts about people he assumes to be leftists. When he finds the only Russian speaker in the village to translate his dad's letters, they recommend Dostoyevsky to him as well. He rejoins a football team, develops a crush on a girl he has never met, unwisely gives an interview to a local newspaper and finds a temporary job -- as an undertaker's assistant.</span></div><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">After four hundred pages of this, we switch to Russia, where a lorry driver named Yeygeny Pavlovich is robbed by thugs and then wrongly arrested by the police. And then a new, long section about Alevitina, a Russian academic. She's lecturing in biology and becomes quite irritated by a student who tries to quote Intelligent Design texts at her. </div></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; text-align: start;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><i>"The kind of reductionist materialism you all stand for can only point to physical and chemical laws, but there’s nothing in those laws that can explain how life arose out of non-life. Is that science? And as for the theory of evolution, is it able to explain how the genetic code emerged, not to mention how it’s actually read? The theory has to be able to do that in order to be valid. Only it can’t. Is that science? Or is it orthodox faith?"</i></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;">There is a very long flashback to when she was an graduate student; she was briefly interested in "biosemiotics"; the idea that if trees can at some level pass information to other trees, and if there are extensive networks (networks!) of fungi beneath the earth, forests could be complex enough to possess something analogous to consciousness. This led her into thinking about shamanism, and a brief experiment with magic mushrooms. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><br /></span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Gill Sans";">And thence to a whole chapter of a work in progress by her friend Vasilisa. It deals with similar themes and is, of course, entitled The Wolves of Eternity. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Gill Sans";"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1f1f1f; font-variant-ligatures: no-contextual; text-align: start;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><i>The starting point of Fyodorov’s philosophy is that death belongs to nature and life belongs to humans. Nature is a destructive force we permit to control us. Death is a result of our passivity towards nature: we allow nature to kill us. But this is by no means a necessary outcome. Whereas the forces of nature that tear everything asunder are blind processes taking place according to laws and systems of which nature itself is unknowing, we human beings possess consciousness, will and emotions.</i></span></span></div><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><span style="font-size: x-large;"><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>3</b></div></span></span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Gill Sans";"><br /></span></div><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><div style="text-align: justify;">How does Karl-Ove Knausgaard do it?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">This is the sort of eight hundred page novel which you devour in hundred page chunks. It's the sort of book which leaves you breathlessly on the edge of your seat, waiting to find out if Syvert and his kid brother Joar will have a nice time at the swimming pool; or if Syvert is going to extricate himself from talking to a couple of over-chatty tourists without undue embarrassment. It's the kind of book you find yourself reading, if not quite from behind a sofa, then at any rate with mounting nervousness, almost afraid to get to the end of the chapter. If Syvert goes on the date with the girl he's been obsessing about for the past hundred pages, and leaves Joar home alone, will something terrible happen? Will his mother look at him in a judgemental way? Will he say exactly the wrong thing and ruin the date?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In fact, the answer to these kinds of questions is almost always "no". A really, really bad thing did indeed happen in Syvert's family before the book started; and if the book has a single theme, it's Syvert's gradual realisation of what that bad thing was. But the bad thing happened a very long time ago, and the repercussions are not especially dramatic. But we keep reading. Karl-Ove's books grip us like nothing else. We apply words like "compelling" and "addictive" to them. One reviewer said correctly "even when he is boring, he is interesting." </div></span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Gill Sans";"><br /></span></div><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><div style="text-align: justify;">How does Karl-Ove Knausgaard do it? </div></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><br /></span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Gill Sans";">Some people might say that the question is really: how does Karl-Ove Knausgaard get away with it?</span></div><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><span style="font-size: x-large;"><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>4</b></div></span></span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Gill Sans";"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Gill Sans";">Knausgaard's fame chiefly rests on having written a four thousand page fictionalised autobiography, from the point of view of a writer whose chief claim to fame is having written a four thousand page autobiography. Naturally, it was entitled My Struggle. The book is quite aware of its own cheek, or provocation: a book about the trivia of daily life comparing itself with the most infamous and egotistical autobiography of the twentieth century. If I'd been doing it, I'd have probably gone with The Greatest Story Ever Told, which wouldn't have been nearly so clever. There is a three hundred page digression about Hitler in the final volume, which, treated as a sub-book in its own right, is genuinely interesting and informative.</span></div><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">My Struggle ended with Knausgaard declaring that he was no longer a writer; but in fact he followed his huge autobiography with a huge work of fiction. The Morning Star was a montage of first person narratives connected by the fact that a new star has inexplicably appeared in the sky; and that dead people are equally inexplicably coming back to life. When you have written four thousand pages about the minutiae of your own life, I suppose there is nothing much to do but write about the minutiae of other people's. </div></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><br /></span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Gill Sans";">The Wolves of Eternity is a sequel to the Morning Star, although even saying that amounts to a kind of spoiler. Two more connected volumes have already been published in Norwegian: the title of the third book in the series, </span><i style="font-family: "Gill Sans";">Det Tredje Riket</i><span style="font-family: "Gill Sans";"> arguably translates as The Third Reich.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><span><span style="font-family: "Gill Sans"; font-size: x-large;"><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>5</b></div></span><div style="font-family: "Gill Sans"; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: "Gill Sans"; text-align: justify;">It would be misleading to say that the Wolves of Eternity reads like a soap-opera; but the Wolves of Eternity does read a little like a soap-opera. It would also be unfair to say that it reads like a writers' workshop exercise or an RPG scenario; but it does somewhat resemble both of those things. Here are two major characters and three minor ones: can you think up reasons, thematic or narrative, that their lives are connected? </div><div style="font-family: "Gill Sans"; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: "Gill Sans"; text-align: justify;">In a sense, it would be better to go into the book not knowing that it is a sequel to the Morning Star -- or perhaps we should say, that it is part of the Morning Star Extended Universe. The ideal reader would be following the ins and outs of Syvert's and Alevitina's lives and be surprised on page 700 (or thereabouts) when the grown-up Joar, now an astrophysicist, appears on TV trying to explain the sudden appearance of the new star. "Aha, they would say: not only are the five characters in the Wolves of Eternity obliquely connected; but they are obliquely connected to the seven or eight we met in the previous volume."</div><div style="font-family: "Gill Sans"; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: "Gill Sans"; text-align: justify;">I am, though, trying to avoid spoilers. The book doesn't contain a particular Astonishing and Surprising twist. But I would say that when I spotted the connection between Syvert and Alevitina -- and the reader works it out slightly before the characters do -- I said "Aha!" Syvert and Alevitina's meeting also reveals how Helge of the first chapter is linked to Syvert, albeit in an indirect way that neither of them are likely to ever discover. That also made me go "Aha!" "Aha!" is probably the correct reaction to the works of Karl-Ove Knausgaard.</div><div style="font-family: "Gill Sans"; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: "Gill Sans"; text-align: justify;">But the book isn't <i>about</i> the characters or their interconnections. Beneath all the trivia, Knausgaard is really interested in huge philosophical questions. He gets through the entire book without saying "quotidian" once.</div><div style="font-family: "Gill Sans"; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: "Gill Sans"; text-align: justify;">It's breathtakingly erudite, although there are some signs of authorial contrivance. The central four hundred pages we spend with Syvert only cover a few days of his life: but when we rejoin him thirty-five years later, we find that all the important things in his life depended on those four days. He married the girl he had the crush on, stayed with the undertaking firm (and now runs a chain of four funeral homes) and is still concerned about the context of Dad's letters. </div><div style="font-family: "Gill Sans"; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: "Gill Sans"; text-align: justify;">The Wolves of Eternity, like all Karl-Ove's books, is about Death. (I think of the interviewer who asked William Golding why all his books were about the Fall of Man. "That's a bit like saying all my books are about people.") Both volumes carry epigrams from the book of Revelation. The Russian lorry driver, who doesn't otherwise intersect with the story, is sent to a remote location to pick up what appear to be very large fuel tanks. When he delivers them, he learns that they actually contain...cryogenically frozen heads and bodies. At the end of his chapter, he mysteriously hears banging -- from inside the tanks! Towards the end of Syvert's second narrative chunk, he is getting confused messages from the staff of his funeral parlours saying that, so far as they can tell, no-one has died in Norway for the past three days. </div><div style="font-family: "Gill Sans"; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: "Gill Sans"; text-align: justify;">While Alevitina was researching the consciousness of forests, she became interested in a (real) Russian philosopher, Fyodorov, who believed that it was possible, and indeed imperative, to resurrect dead people. He believed that Science! ought to be able to reassemble the actual atoms that the deceased were originally made up of and reconnect them with their souls, which must logically still exist somewhere. He also believed in aliens. Big Name Russians like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky took him seriously. Fyodorov's "cosmism" naturally makes one think of contemporary theories about transhumanism and the singularity which flourish because social media has made it so easy for crackpots to link up with other crackpots.</div><div style="font-family: "Gill Sans"; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: "Gill Sans"; text-align: justify;">So perhaps, while praising the book for its erudition and fractal complexity, we need to lightly chastise it for its slightly clunky artifice. Syvert gets a job in the death industry while finding out about his dead father and confronting the mortality of his mother; meanwhile other characters discourse on the philosophical nature of death and the plot arc carried over from the previous volume suggests that death may literally be coming to an end. Or perhaps we are merely gob-smacked that the poet laureate of prawn sandwiches is telling something with the general shape of a <i>story</i>?</div><div style="font-family: "Gill Sans"; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: "Gill Sans"; text-align: justify;"><b style="font-size: xx-large;">6</b></div><div style="font-family: "Gill Sans"; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: "Gill Sans"; text-align: justify;">There's no doubt that the writing style is odd: even Knausgaard's advocates smile at the endless cups of coffee and showers. A reviewer in, I think, the Washington Post prefaced his positive remarks with "if Knausgaard is your thing..."</div><div style="font-family: "Gill Sans"; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: "Gill Sans"; text-align: justify;">The characters all speak in the same register: it always sounds to me, slightly, as if a patient primary school teacher is addressing a bright but obstinate child. </div><div style="font-family: "Gill Sans"; text-align: justify;"><br /></div></span><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><i>‘Have you got any music?’</i></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><i>‘My record player’s in my room. I don’t think you’ll like my records much, though.’ <br />‘Don’t underestimate me, thank you very much. What do you listen to?’ <br />‘Heavy metal.’<br />'Is that all'<br />'Yes'<br />'You don't look the type if you ask me.'</i><br /><br />Or<br /><br /><i>‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry for being so presumptuous. I’m a bit drunk, you see. Well, more than a bit, actually. I’m very drunk.’ <br />‘Some people get happy when they’re drunk,’ I said. <br />‘I know. I do sometimes as well. Only not tonight, it seems.’ <br />‘That’s OK. I accept you as you are,’ I said. She laughed. I laughed too. </i></span><span><div style="text-align: start;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: "Gill Sans"; text-align: justify;">There is a sometimes self-conscious frankness; characters are a little too inclined to say things like <i>"I put the beers and cokes in the fridge, the crisps in the cupboard, then went to the toilet for a shit, only there was someone in there".</i> It isn't entirely clear who these detailed first person narratives are spoken to: perhaps everyone in Norway now writes incredibly detailed auto-fiction. Christos Tsiolkas also has a tendency to follow his characters into the bathroom: it may be the price we pay for living inside their heads. And, of course, we're reading a translation; it may be that Norwegian has a formality that doesn't quite have an English equivalent. When Syvert (Norwegian) and Alevitina (Russian) finally meet, it isn't immediately clear that they are conversing in English. A couple of times, I wondered what Norwegian quirk the English was representing: for example, when Syvert's girl-friend is surprised by his use of the word "flabbergasted". Everyone uses "loo" for "toilet".</div><div style="font-family: "Gill Sans"; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: "Gill Sans"; text-align: justify;"><b style="font-size: xx-large;">7</b></div><div style="font-family: "Gill Sans"; text-align: justify;">Knausgaard's second book, A Time For Everything, included a huge long section about a relatively normal family doing relatively normal Knausgaardian things, but as the section rolls on, we realise that they are contemporaries of Noah, and the point of the section is to imagine what a literal global flood would be like, and how it might have been perceived by its victims. (Which, come to think of it, recalls Jesus' words about people carrying on living normal lives right up to the moment when Noah went into the Ark.) My guess is that the Morning Star quartet is going to turn out to be Knausgaard's take on a literal, Biblical apocalypse -- Lucifer and the resurrection of the dead and all -- from the point of view of ordinary people on the edge of it. A secularised Left Behind, if you will.</div><div style="font-family: "Gill Sans"; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: "Gill Sans"; text-align: justify;">One could imagine Ray Bradbury, say, dispensing with the rising of Lucifer and the resurrection of the dead in three florid pages. Someone like Salman Rushdie would have taken six hundred pages in three languages, implied that the whole thing is a metaphor and offended two major religions in the process. Knausgaard just tells it, takes it for granted; as if it's not even the most important thing that happened. (I often imagine how the news media would cope if there ever was contact with aliens or a major nuclear exchange. "But now, in other news...") It's not magical realism, but it's not really science fiction, either. It's happening in a world where you have to change babies' nappies and check with the hospital morgue about the paperwork and decide what you're having for dinner. A world where a cancer diagnosis is necessarily followed by a discussion of whether it's better to take the train or the coach to the hospital. Syvert realises that he has promised to visit his maybe terminally ill mother on the same day that the girl he has developed the obsessive crush on has asked him for a date. Which is very much how life is. The big stuff is enmeshed in the small stuff; the small stuff is what we see the big stuff through.</div><div style="font-family: "Gill Sans"; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: "Gill Sans"; text-align: justify;">It's compelling and gripping and several of the characters feel real in a way that fictional characters hardly ever do. It's eight hundred pages long and I wish I read Norwegian so I could plunge straight into volume three.</div><div style="font-family: "Gill Sans"; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: "Gill Sans"; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmMm8yozvDgtPdI88SOUKDvssk_fKkf3qlO4U2H038lCjtEqsCvgiGyiyXds88_saX1igdvQi-EU-zstprr0dYVDXJn38L_fgNdK9Lx7jMm9u9yqV-wspJ5Q311gM-s3bEBhnUU-Aehdc04sf_SGQcjr8pJmYkxXVLgsW2aof9JiroX1TAPhCK/s320/image.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="180" data-original-width="320" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmMm8yozvDgtPdI88SOUKDvssk_fKkf3qlO4U2H038lCjtEqsCvgiGyiyXds88_saX1igdvQi-EU-zstprr0dYVDXJn38L_fgNdK9Lx7jMm9u9yqV-wspJ5Q311gM-s3bEBhnUU-Aehdc04sf_SGQcjr8pJmYkxXVLgsW2aof9JiroX1TAPhCK/s1600/image.png" width="320" /></a></div><div style="font-family: "Gill Sans"; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: "Gill Sans"; text-align: justify;"><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Times; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;">Patreon is way of supporting web writers who you like. You promise to pay me a small amount, typically a $1/£1 each time I write an article. You can set a maximum, so if I am unexpectedly prolific one month you won't get stung by a bigger than expected bill.<br /><br />It's my <a href="http://www.patreon.com/rilstone">Patreon</a> supporters who enable me to spend some days each week writing. </span><div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/doctor-who-16-to-95737851">It would be very cool if you joined them. </a></b></span></div></div><div><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div></div></div></span></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-53692491626030434122024-01-11T13:44:00.002+00:002024-01-11T13:44:15.393+00:00Nothing At The End of Lane [complete]<p><a href="http://www.andrewrilstone.com/2024/01/nothing-at-end-of-lane-1.html"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans; font-size: x-large;">Part One</span></a></p><p><a href="http://www.andrewrilstone.com/2024/01/nothing-at-end-of-lane-2.html"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans; font-size: x-large;">Part Two</span></a></p><p><a href="http://www.andrewrilstone.com/2024/01/nothing-at-end-of-lane-3.html"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans; font-size: x-large;">Part Three</span></a></p><p><a href="http://www.andrewrilstone.com/2024/01/nothing-at-end-of-lane-appendix.html"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans; font-size: x-large;">Notes</span></a></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-61752820257337999292024-01-11T13:40:00.001+00:002024-01-11T13:40:38.826+00:00Doctor Who Sixtieth Anniversary....<p>I do understand that some people think that what I am doing is worthwhile but can't commit to a monthly Patreon Payment... so I've put all the recent Doctor Who essays (the ones about the Sixtieth Anniversary, and the extended piece on An Unearthly Child) into a little PDF book. It's available on the Ko Fi page. <br /><br />Patreon would have paid around £6 for these pieces, but I've set it to "pay what you like".</p><p><br /></p><p>Much thanks for your ongoing interest. (The Tom Baker retrospective will go into a different book, at some stage.)</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvr5dfu3qgg2QSLrWrf9fEcTgAiylFmY17ybkcqBzFoC4T6fOGIWX2lrcTa4xc0JSFycKQlkBD-s3VvNC8IRoGdAoWApKHlwYY5b48tbQ31kvhpYTAGg8_OuBCQDFEHEkwX1y86Jz1Zqo3qQI_rBNEpJmli_2-fxvkionYgjFP9uqLKy3rD0v1/s648/60.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="648" data-original-width="432" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvr5dfu3qgg2QSLrWrf9fEcTgAiylFmY17ybkcqBzFoC4T6fOGIWX2lrcTa4xc0JSFycKQlkBD-s3VvNC8IRoGdAoWApKHlwYY5b48tbQ31kvhpYTAGg8_OuBCQDFEHEkwX1y86Jz1Zqo3qQI_rBNEpJmli_2-fxvkionYgjFP9uqLKy3rD0v1/s320/60.jpg" width="213" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://ko-fi.com/s/94cfefd9fb">Andrew's Ko-Fi Shop</a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-53806621112704813652024-01-11T13:40:00.000+00:002024-01-11T13:40:21.227+00:00Nothing At The End of the Lane (Appendix)<div><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>NOTES<br /><br /></b></span></span></div><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>ACRONYM</b></span><br />While Sidney Newman and Verity Lambert may have come up with the word TARDIS; it appears that the writer of Unearthly Child came up with the idea of it standing for Time And Relative Dimension In Space. It is not referenced again until the Time Meddler, by which time the word Dimension has been pluralised.<br /><br />Susan says she coined the name: which would make a great deal more sense if we assume that "TARDIS" is the personal name of this particular vessel -- along the lines of "Enterprise" or "Liberator" or "Shippy McShipface".<br /><br /><span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>COAL HILL SCHOOL</b></span><br />For many years, Coal Hill School would have been a pub quiz answer for obsessives. Then Sylvester McCoy went back there for an anniversary story. More recently, wonderful Clara became a teacher there; and there was a pointless spin off about the place. An easter egg implies that Ian Chesterton is one of the governors.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: Gill Sans; font-size: x-large;"><b>FOG</b></span><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><br />In the pitch documents, fog was a significant plot device: Ian and Barbara walk Susan home because it is foggy; or else find her and her grandfather lost in the fog. It is still foggy at the beginning of the pilot episode; but the fog clears. In the transmitted episode it has been downgraded to potential fog.<br /><br /><u>Pilot episode</u><br /><br />SUSAN: I rather like walking in the English fog. It's sort of mysterious.<br /><br />BARBARA: You say that as if...<br /><br />IAN: Then we won't deprive you of that romantic pleasure.<br /><br />BARBARA: Well, hurry home, Susan. And be careful, the fog's getting thicker.<br /><br />*<br /><br />IAN: The fog's cleared. We're lucky.<br /><br /><b><u>Transmitted Episode</u></b><br /><br />SUSAN: I like walking through the dark. It's mysterious.<br /><br />BARBARA: Be careful, Susan, there'll probably be fog again tonight.<br /><br />*<br /><br />IAN: We're lucky there was no fog. I'd never have found this.<br /><br />It may be that we are supposed to infer that the fog we see in the opening sequence (when the policeman is checking out the junkyard) is <i>unnatura</i>l fog; fog produced by the Ship in order to disguise itself. By 1963 the clean air act would have meant that the thick London smogs you could get lost in were receding into folk memory.<br /><br /><b><span style="font-size: x-large;">LESSONS</span></b><br />Ian is usually said to be a chemistry teacher: so why is he setting a Fifth Form / Year 11 class elementary geometry? (The pitch says that "Cliff" taught applied science at a Secondary Modern.) Similarly, if Barbara is a history teacher, why has the subject of English currency come in one of her lessons?<br /><br />In the pilot episode, the blackboard very clearly has a note on it that says:<br /><br /><i><b>America 100 c = 1 $<br /><br />England 20 /- = 1 £</b></i><br /><br />Which suggests that she must have reacted to Susan's error by writing the true state of affairs on the board; which wasn't a particularly kind thing to do.<br /><b><span style="font-size: x-large;"><br />POLICEMAN</span></b><br />The story opens with a policeman checking the gates of the junk yard. In the pilot episode; Barbara notices that there is a policeman standing outside Totters Lane, suggesting that their arrival follows straight on from the pre-cred and that the school scene is a slight flashback.<br /><br />When the Doctor realises that Ian and Barbara are teachers, he says "not the police then..." as if he was concerned that the officer in the pre-cred was coming to ask him questions. Shortly after they enter the junk yard, Barbara says she is going to fetch a policeman; then Ian tells the Doctor that he is going to find one; and then the Doctor dares him, twice, to do so. But no policeman appears after the opening scene. <br /><br />Note that they are referred to as "policemen" throughout as opposed to "the police", "coppers" or "cops."<br /><br /><span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>POLICE BOX</b></span><br />In Episode 2, the Doctor and Susan express surprise that the TARDIS has not changed. This is not remarked on in Dead Planet or Marco Polo.<br /><br />The image of the displaced Police Box at the end of Episode One brilliantly conveys the premise of the show: an ordinary thing ending up somewhere extraordinary.<br /><br />It is sometimes said that the TARDIS being fixed in a single form was a late addition to the mythos, when it was realised that creating a new prop in each story would be too expensive; but this makes very little sense. But surely it would have been easier to say that some haystack or a postbox that would have been part of the setting in any case was this month's TARDIS? <br /><br />The idea that the ship was some mundane object seems to have been part of the premise at quite an early stage: it is more likely that the "stuck camouflage device" was an after-the-fact rationalisation. <br /><br />The TARDIS was police-box shaped in pitches and synopses prior to An Unearthly Child. It is sometimes said that Sydney Newman proposed that it should be night watchman's tent; but in fact, he gave that as an example of one of thing it definitely <i>shouldn't be</i>. But there is a persistent oral tradition that the author of the first story was the person who proposed the Police Box shape.<br /><br /><span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>SMOKING</b></span><br />When Ian loses his torch, he says that he doesn't have any matches, which suggests that, unusually for the time, he is a non-smoker. ("I haven't got any" rather than "I just used my last".) The Doctor, smokes a big pipe, which may be why he keeps coughing.</span><div><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;">Ian's lack of matches may be intended to foreshadow the storyline about the cave people who have forgotten how to make fire. <br /><br /><span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>76 TOTTERS LANE</b></span><br />The word "totter" can mean to stumble or collapse: however Totter is also an old English word for a trader; we still talk about "totting up" the days takings. There is an area of Bristol called Totterdown.<br /><br />'76 was the year of the American revolution; Barbara of course gives Susan a book about the French Revolution of '89.<br /><br />There is a real Totters Lane near Guildford and Basingstoke in Surrey.<br /><br />If the Doctor wants to keep his existence secret, why has he allowed the school secretary to know the real address of the place he has hidden the TARDIS? </span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-73665671797748473412024-01-11T13:39:00.001+00:002024-01-11T13:39:16.275+00:00Nothing At The End of the Lane (3)<div class="sc-eldieg ktdTil" style="background-color: white; margin-bottom: -10px; margin-top: 10px;"><div class="sc-1sp3zau-0 fYCOwC sc-d4f3hw-0 iATlLz" style="font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5;"><div class="sc-1ye87qi-0 irEdXD"><p style="font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-bold);"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans; font-size: x-large;"></span></span></p><div><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><br />This is the first part of an essay on An Unearthly Child which has already appeared on my </span><a href="http://Patreon." style="font-family: courier; font-size: small;">Patreon.</a><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;">Patreon: A way of supporting web writers who you like. You promise to pay me a small amount, typically a $1/£1 each time I write an article. You can set a maximum, so if I am unexpectedly prolific one month you won't get stung by a bigger than expected bill.<br /><br />It's my <a href="http://www.patreon.com/rilstone">Patreon</a> supporters who enable me to spend some days each week writing. </span><div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/doctor-who-16-to-95737851">It would be very cool if you joined them. </a></b></span></div></div></div></div><div><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><p style="font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-bold);"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></p><p style="font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-bold);"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans; font-size: x-large;">2024</span></span></p><p style="font-size: inherit; font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-size: inherit; font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;">And so, for many years, we fetishised An Unearthly Child. When John Nathan Turner took up the reigns of Doctor Who, he gave the Doctor <em>three</em> companions, instead of a single assistant. He made them bicker among themselves. He even made the Fifth Doctor a subordinate character in his own story. This was widely praised at the time because it was returning Doctor Who to its roots; which meant making it more like An Unearthly Child. It was almost as if the years between 1963 and 1982 had been one dreadful wrong turning.</span></p><p style="font-size: inherit; font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-size: inherit; font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;">I was delighted by an interview with Douglas Adams on the Wogan programme, in which he said that he and Graham Williams had taken the first four episodes out of the archive, intending to watch them in a spirit of ironic mockery. They were embarrassed to discover that 1960s Doctor Who was very much better than the 1970s version of the show. He added, not unintelligently, that it was the addition of colour had spoiled it. It is much easier to believe that jobbing actors in front of a painted backdrop are primeval cavemen when you are watching them in monochrome on a very small screen.</span></p><p style="font-size: inherit; font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-size: inherit; font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;">I was full of DWAS Story-Information Folders and CMS loose leaf essays and Radio Times specials. I knew all <em>about</em> the black and white era. But from Panopticon 2 until (I suppose) the National Film Theatre Doctor Who weekend, in or around 1987, Unearthly Child was the only black-and-white Doctor Who story I had actually seen. [*]</span></p><p style="font-size: inherit; font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-size: inherit; font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;">So the feeling developed: the Magic of Doctor Who was that quality which An Unearthly Child / Tribe of Gum possessed, but Deadly Assassin didn't. An </span><span style="font-family: "Gill Sans"; font-size: inherit;">Unearthly Child took itself seriously. Deadly Assassin did not. And the thing that Deadly Assassin was not taking seriously, the mythos -- Doctor Who's very identity -- was the very thing which An Unearthly Child worked so hard to establish. An Unearthly Child spoke the language of BBC naturalistic drama, and dropped cave men and time machines into the middle of it. An Unearthly Child was set in a gothic studio where everyone wore silly hats. An Unearthly Child was about the clash of fantasy and reality. Deadly Assassin was pure fantasy.</span></p><p style="font-size: inherit; font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-family: "Gill Sans"; font-size: inherit;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-size: inherit; font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;">There is a fine irony in the fact that An Unearthly Child was transmitted less than a day after CS Lewis sadly died. It is, after all, the story of an adolescent girl named Susan, who is nearly old enough to be interested in boys. The marvellous device which takes her between the worlds is a wooden box; a wooden box which messes with time. Doctor Who is dressed up as Science Fiction, but it functions according to Narnian logic -- in fact to Looking Glass Logic. There's a magic kingdom in the bedroom closet, and a stone aged tribe in the phone box, and a set of homicidal playing cards at the bottom of the rabbit hole. </span></p><p style="font-size: inherit; font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-size: inherit; font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;">Sydney Newman initially visualised the TARDIS as a kind of magic door between worlds. Magic doorways are a staple of children's fiction. An Unearthly Child is exceptionally successful because the outer world -- the fog and the bobbie and the notice board -- and the inner world -- the fire and the skulls -- are both treated with equal conviction. But before long there would only be a single world: the world of Doctor Who.</span></p><p style="font-size: inherit; font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-size: inherit; font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;">Ian refuses to believe in the stone age, just as Peter and Susan refuse to believe in Narnia. Lewis's Professor appeals to <em>logic</em>: you don't definitely know that cupboards can't contain magical kingdoms; but you <em>do</em> definitely know that your sister is not a liar. The Doctor accepts that the TARDIS defies logical analysis and doesn't try to prove it. It comes down to faith.</span></p><p style="font-size: inherit; font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-size: inherit; font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;">"I can't help it, I just believe them, that's all" says Barbara. But Ian, not unreasonably, demands proof.</span></p><p style="font-size: inherit; font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-size: inherit; font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;">"If you could touch the alien sand and hear the cries of strange birds and watch them wheel in another sky, would that satisfy you?" asks the Doctor. Ian concedes that it would.</span></p><p style="font-size: inherit; font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-size: inherit; font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;">Direct personal experience is not, in fact, sufficient grounds to believe the impossible. In the novel, Ian briefly considers that he is hypnotised, or drugged, or dreaming: which would, in fact be a more rational position. But maintaining that rational belief would really drive him mad. </span></p><p style="font-size: inherit; font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-size: inherit; font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;">Blessed are they that have not seen, but have believed. <em>Credo quia absurdum.</em></span></p><p style="font-size: inherit; font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-size: inherit; font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;">An Unearthly Child does what it does so very well that we are tempted to think that "what An Unearthly Child does" is what Doctor Who was always intended to do; and that everything since has represented a falling away from that platonic idea.</span></p><p style="font-size: inherit; font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-size: inherit; font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;">Fans were amused when a review from December 1963 came to light complaining that Cave of Skulls was not as good as An Unearthly Child: ho-ho, they said, people have been saying that Doctor Who is not as good as it used to be from before the beginning! But (assuming that the cutting is real) the journalist was in no way making a silly comment. You sold me on a mysterious story about a brilliant school girl and an alien hiding in modern London; and what you followed it with was a kids TV adventure involving cave men and spooky skulls. You offered me a well-drawn English science master and in twenty five minutes you turned him into Richard Hannay.</span></p><p style="font-size: inherit; font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-size: inherit; font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;">The scenes in the TARDIS follow directly on from Unearthly Child; the scenes in the cave are part of a completely different conceptual world. And it does seem very much as if An Unearthly Child and Tribe of Gum were conceived as separate entities. The exact process isn't known or knowable; but it certainly seems that CW Weber's lost script -- the one in which the heroes were going to be miniaturised -- began with Susan (or Sue, or Biddy) introducing Ian (or Cliff) and Barbara (or Miss McGovern) to her mysterious Grandfather. That script was rejected, not because it failed to capture the magical essence of Doctor Who, but because the BBC budget wasn't sure if it could run to Incredible Shrinking Man special effects. If we were living on another time-line, I might very well be saying that a Land of the Giants chase across Mr Chesterton's science desk was the exact and perfect way to begin Doctor Who. The familiar seen from a new angle: the ordinary made strange.</span></p><p style="font-size: inherit; font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-size: inherit; font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;">What is certain is that the writer of An Unearthly Child incorporated <em>some</em> elements of the CE Weber script, which were themselves based on Sydney Newman's pitch; into that un-transmitted pilot episode; and that that pilot was partially rewritten, probably by script editor David Whitaker. Changing "I was born in the fifty fourth century" to "I was born in another world, another time" would be a very Whitaker thing to do.</span></p><p style="font-size: inherit; font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-size: inherit; font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;">The impact of Unearthly Child is so great that we are tempted to pretend that, as a matter of fact, Doctor Who <em>was</em> always like this, right up until the moment when it wasn't. </span></p><p style="font-size: inherit; font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-size: inherit; font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;">And maybe that was even sometimes a little bit true. When I first saw the Aztecs (at the BFI) I could certainly convince myself that the proper grown up characters from the first episode were now enmeshed in a proper grown up historical drama. Dalek Invasion of Earth has quite a lot of silliness in it; but what we remember is its Orwellian, dystopian vibe: the two London school teachers carried sideways into a world where outer-space Hitler won the war. But the idea that An Unearthly Child was a tonal template could only be maintained when the black and white era was substantially lost or mislaid. It can't survive an encounter with the Sensorites or the Web Planet or the Keys of Marinus. Good stories; good Doctor Who stories; good Saturday evening telly: but much closer to Flash Gordon than Play For Today. (Not that there is anything wrong with Flash Gordon.)</span></p><p style="font-size: inherit; font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-size: inherit; font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;">Unearthly Child wrote cheques that the series itself was unable to cash. It sets up a question: who is Susan? who is the Doctor? -- to which the series never properly returns. Ian asks "who is he -- Doctor who?" but immediately loses interest in finding out the answer. The words "doctor who" became taboo; not spoken on screen for many, many years. No serious clues as to the Doctor's identity were laid down. A mutter about him having been a pioneer at the end of the Daleks, some boilerplate about alien planets in the Sensorites, and the arrival of a second time traveller in the Time Meddler, which is played for laughs. That's about all the follow up we get.</span></p><p style="font-size: inherit; font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;">CE Weber's early treatments say that the Doctor stole his time machine (okay) and that he is being pursued by the police from his own time (makes sense) but nothing ever comes of that. You might have expected the Monk to be a central plank of the show, rather than light relief: in fact the idea of "the Doctor, but evil" doesn't occur to anyone until the second season of the colour era. The Time Lords are finally unmasked in the War Games but by then Unearthly Child is long forgotten. No-one mentions the Monk, or Susan, or the Doctor's kids, or Mrs Who. For the majority of the first ten stories, Susan is simply a kid, whose function is to scream and say things like "what is this, grandfather?" (She never calls him Granddad or Grandpa or Gramps.) The ending of Dalek Invasion of Earth -- where the Doctor kicks her out of the TARDIS to marry a mortal -- is problematic in many ways. But the big disappointment is that the two genuinely unsettling aliens have in one year turned into a generic teenager and her embarrassing Dad.</span></span></p><p style="font-size: inherit; font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-size: inherit; font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;">What would the time line have looked like if Charlotte Bronte had died on the eve of World War I, her early forays into romantic fiction eclipsed by a half century of mighty novels? But it is of course equally possible that a Charlotte who survived consumption would have become a dull Victorian moralist whose evangelical temperance tracts caused her promising juvenilia to be forgotten. No one is ever told what <i>would</i> have happened. An Unearthly Child might have been followed by a serious, cerebral piece of science fiction with heavy religious overtones, and thence into Marco Polo. And on that timeline we might be celebrating sixty years of challenging Wellsian science fiction. And if Luxormania had replaced Dalekmania perhaps the idea that science fiction is mostly about silly spaceships and silly monsters would never have taken root, and we would live in a more humane, literate world. But equally, if Sydney Newman had been less flexible about his original vision, Doctor Who might be an interesting science-and-history show that ran for 52 weeks from 1963 to 1964 and is now remembered only by TV historians.</span></p><p style="font-size: inherit; font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-size: inherit; font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;">An Unearthly Child could even be seen as getting the series off on the wrong foot. Some of the characterisation from the first story is carried over into the Dead Planet; but Edge of Destruction largely reboots the set-up. All the hostility melts away and everyone agrees to be friends. Marco Polo, probably the only story which ever got within striking distance of Newman's original concept has been inconveniently erased, and the record resumes with everyone being sent on a "collect the set" treasure hunt by a malevolent computer.</span></p><p style="font-size: inherit; font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-size: inherit; font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;">Four friends going on adventures in time and space. There is really no need for an origin. Even at the beginning we are in the middle: the TARDIS has been a sedan chair and a Greek pillar and they nearly lost it four or five journeys ago. The loss of An Unearthly Child episode is not a disaster. The Dead Planet is as good a jumping on point as any other.</span></p><p style="font-size: inherit; font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans; font-size: x-small;">[*] Full disclosure. They reshowed Unearthly Child at Panopticon 3, followed by all three Cavemen episodes: some Americans tried to take flash photography of the screen. There was a very short BFI film clip from Dalek Invasion Earth which I assume copyright applied differently to. The BBC showed Unearthly Child and Krotons as part of a retrospective, directly before Peter Davison's first appearance. Excerpts used to appear from time to time on Blue Peter; and there was a TV documentary called Whose Doctor Who? which included a few clips.</span></p><p style="font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><b>if you enjoy this kind of thing, there is more of it here </b></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/spoilers-follow-93159159">Children in Need Special<br /></a><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/tales-from-92382466">Tales From the TARDIS</a><br /><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/star-beast-94421711">The Star Beast</a><br /><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/terrible-thing-94505231">Giggle<br /></a><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/honest-to-doctor-94711516">Honest To Doctor Who</a></b></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/doctor-who-16-to-95737851"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><b>The Key To Time</b></span></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/doctor-who-16-96044151">Ribos Operation (1</a>)</b></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/ribos-operations-96289842" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"><b>Ribos Operation (2)</b></a></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><p style="font-variation-settings: var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWidth-regular),var(--global-fontVariationSettings-fontWeight-regular); line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-align: justify; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans; font-size: x-small;"></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj13_pe27w_6tJwd1S0hyF0O0uUoSnVUZADDydKNBElPAQjzFxL_chXAnAdBs8tp523Fi-5UahoBpmgz96v4d7NAxbzlWi-zCeL8udxyALz2buveZr2dgZpmVFB-NyV65oZTXw3gCOWiv26VvHI8z4QSjTzIBrVXRgqs9fgKtSaohRHzx7FozmK" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="180" data-original-width="320" height="113" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj13_pe27w_6tJwd1S0hyF0O0uUoSnVUZADDydKNBElPAQjzFxL_chXAnAdBs8tp523Fi-5UahoBpmgz96v4d7NAxbzlWi-zCeL8udxyALz2buveZr2dgZpmVFB-NyV65oZTXw3gCOWiv26VvHI8z4QSjTzIBrVXRgqs9fgKtSaohRHzx7FozmK=w200-h113" width="200" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://ko-fi.com/s/94cfefd9fb">Or you can buy a little PDF of all the 60th anniversary stuff here...</a></div></div></div></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-43903950272794751782024-01-11T13:39:00.000+00:002024-01-11T13:39:01.551+00:00Nothing At The End of the Lane (2)<div><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><br />This is the first part of an essay on An Unearthly Child which has already appeared on my </span><a href="http://Patreon." style="font-family: courier; font-size: small;">Patreon.</a><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;">Patreon: A way of supporting web writers who you like. You promise to pay me a small amount, typically a $1/£1 each time I write an article. You can set a maximum, so if I am unexpectedly prolific one month you won't get stung by a bigger than expected bill.<br /><br />It's my <a href="http://www.patreon.com/rilstone">Patreon</a> supporters who enable me to spend some days each week writing. </span><div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/doctor-who-16-to-95737851">It would be very cool if you joined them. </a></b></span></div></div></div></div><div><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Gill Sans; font-size: x-large;"><div style="font-family: Times; font-size: medium;"><div><div><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/doctor-who-16-to-95737851" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1920" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKFBDLx39hy3gUVBpwvWqbtVXwLnntCPqgF5goTro-7udOCXdd0mrSifz-wNBQ96i4U3hDyhFUiiu_gsUgAg3B8oaHJSpGOzcdpYXoSl4Rfe_TXdZhwhXLp0Wnu6HaGgls7XqAiYZ6ZZib19MArvV-U1wzb41DZsPz9KTlzzytkI-uC9fQw1XY/s320/fhd_Patreon_Wordmark_fb38c295a1.png" width="320" /></a></div></span></div></div></div></span></div><span style="font-family: Gill Sans; font-size: x-large;"><b><div><span style="font-family: Gill Sans; font-size: x-large;"><b><br /></b></span></div>1963</b></span><div><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><b><br />0.0 - 0.28</b></span><br />The wavy line; like a rocket trail or an oscilloscope.<br /><br />What is surprising is how consistent the title sequence remained for so long. The words “Doctor Who” forming as if from the ripples in a space-pond. The diamond shaped waves; the lava-lamp shapes; the coffee cup-swirl: these were part and parcel of the show until the big blue space tunnel came along in Jon Pertwee’s last-but-one season. That was also when the coloured triangular logo came in, replacing the words Doctor and Who in plain white-on-black type-face. A show that had long since lost its high seriousness.<br /><br />It’s the boom dubba bom/boom dubba bom over the vapour trail that gives us notice that this is not a normal theme tune and this is not a normal TV show. Each subsequent version made the tune grander and louder and less unearthly. Some versions want it to be a march. They give undue prominence to the “bom-diddy/bom diddy-bom” that plays over the closing credits—the one part which sounds like normal, human, hum-able music. That is not the sound which defines the show.<br /><br /><b><span style="font-size: x-large;">0.28-2.00</span></b><br />The music continues to play over the first scene: intrusively, surprisingly. In the seventies, there was a clear demarcation between the opening credits and the story itself. Doctor Who. Death To The Daleks. By Terry Nation. Part One. The boundary was marked by a whoosh or a howl or a budda-budda-budda. But in the ancient black and white universe the title of the episode and the name of the writer appear over the action in plain, ordinary, white on black writing. Like any episode of Crossroads or Blue Peter. As if Doctor Who doesn’t yet know it is Doctor Who.<br /><br />It was supposed to be transmitted at 5.15pm. It was followed by the Goons and Juke Box Jury and then, at about 6.30, by Dixon of Dock Green. “The story of a London policeman on his beat.” The very first person to appear in Doctor Who, as everyone knows, is Reg Cranfield. Unnamed and uncredited. A London policeman. On his beat.<br /><br />A coincidence, probably. But as a matter of fact, ownership of Saturday night was about to move on. Jack Warner must decrease while William Hartnell must increase.<br /><br />We move from the abstract title sequences to a point of view shot. Someone is looking at the policeman, and we are looking through their eyes. That someone opens the gates, and walks through the junk yard to the police box. It’s a standard horror trope; one that Doctor Who will use many, many times. Show us what the monster or the murderer sees without showing us the monster or the murderer.<br /><br />But it means we open with a question. Who has just waited for the policeman to leave and entered the dark junk yard? <br /><br />The unearthly music has stopped. The title card appears on the screen. An Unearthly Child by....some writer whose name escapes me.<br /><br />A child? What child? We haven’t seen a child?<br /><br />The viewpoint character advances to the door: looks at it.<br /><br />Is presumably about to go through it.<br /><br />And dissolve to:<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>2.00 - 4.36</b></span><br />A noticeboard: Coal Hill School; very much the kind of place where you would expect to find children, unearthly or otherwise. It’s a modern school. There is a bell and a blackboard and a house system, but the children aren’t wearing uniforms, although the boys seem to have jackets and ties.<br /><br />The first audible words identify the eponymous character: “You can wait in there, Susan” says an older woman, obviously a teacher. But in fact, if we strain, the first words may actually be “Goodnight, Miss Wright.”<br /><br />Television is artifice; but it has ways of conveying “realism”. Terry Nation’s Survivors (for example) doesn’t depict a plague attacking modern England so much as a plague attacking the world of BBC situation comedies. Safe, suburban, C&A blouses and Peter Bowles. The opening moments of Doctor Who don’t feel like Doctor Who because there is no Doctor Who for them to feel like. But they don’t feel like children’s TV. No-one is talking down to anyone else. Almost, slightly, they feel like a documentary. It’s not a school-story, but an actual school. Reality as mediated by BBC drama. It’s not Saint Trinians or Tom Browns Schooldays or Whacko. It’s certainly not Grange Hill. I would say it felt like Play For Today if I had ever seen an episode of Play For Today.<br /><br />Sydney Newman understood television. His first series for ITV laid out the new medium’s credentials very succinctly: Armchair Theatre. Unearthly Child is best thought of as a stage-piece: very deftly and skilfully constructed. We meet the characters in reverse order of importance. First, we meet Barbara; Barbara goes to see Ian. Ian and Barbara talk about Susan and then they talk about the Doctor. And then they have a scene with Susan; and then they have a scene with the Doctor; and then the four principles come together for the big final scene.<br /><br />I am not knocking it. It is very well done. The classic rep theatre mystery begins with the Butler standing upstage and telling the Housekeeper that he supposes it all started with the reading of the late master’s will. Doctor Who begins with two teachers. The male teacher is worried because a student seems cleverer than he is. The female teacher is worried because the same student’s guardian won’t allow her to have extra tuition at home; and because the home address seems not to exist. We, watching from our armchairs, were given the solution on our way in: the child will turn out to be unearthly. It’s a set up, an info dump, bringing us up to speed about the basic situation. But it very skilfully and delightfully sets up the characters of the teachers. I wonder if any two characters have ever been more economically introduced than in those first lines of Doctor Who.<br /><br />MAN: Not left yet?<br /><br />WOMAN: Obviously not!<br /><br />MAN: Ask a silly question...<br /><br />WOMAN: I’m sorry.<br /><br />MAN: That’s all right. I’ll forgive you this time.<br /><br />The woman talks in a severe “teacher voice” all the time: if anything, she is more informal with her pupil than with her colleague. The man is light-hearted and ironic; but relapses into schoolmaster mode when in the presence of the girl. The woman is Miss Wright first and only subsequently Barbara; the man is introduced as Ian but then called Mr Chesterton. Ian washes his hands carefully at the end of the day (he teaches chemistry); Barbara tells him to pay attention; he indicates that he has been.<br /><br />Who are the two girls in the school corridor? What is the paper they are looking at? Who is the boy? Why does he tease them? What impact does their acquaintance with Susan have on the rest of their lives? Spin-offs have been built on flimsier questions.<br /><span style="font-size: x-large;"><b><br />4:36 - 6.20</b></span><br />Why is Susan so clever? Why won’t her grandfather allow her history teacher to give her extra home tuition? Why does her address not exist?<br /><br />In the second scene we meet the mysterious girl. And she doesn’t seem very mysterious at all, which is the most mysterious thing about her. She has a posh accent and likes pop music. She prefers to walk home than take a lift with her teachers. And she spots a mistake in her teacher’s history book. <br /><br />She is listening to the music on her own. She is not pretending to be normal for Ian and Barbara’s benefit. Maybe the hand-jive is meant to seem a little bit alien; I think it is just meant to look “with-it”. I have heard it said that she looks elfin; that she looks like a younger Audrey Hepburn. But most people would surely look at her hair and think of John, Paul, Ringo and George.<br /><br />With the Beatles, with the monochrome Hamburg portraits on the cover came out the day before An Unearthly Child, November 22nd 1963. The date was overshadowed by another event. A month before, in October, Bob Dylan had told the straights that their sons and their daughters were beyond their command. <br /><br />Susan is an alien teenager; but all teenagers are alien. It is 1963 and children are by definition unearthly.<br /><br /><span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>6:20 - 9:38</b></span><br />Scene 3: Ian and Barbara have followed Susan to her mysterious home, and they continue to talk about her. The three flashbacks don’t take us very far. Ian is astonished by her advanced knowledge of chemistry; Barbara is astonished that she doesn’t understand the English currency system; Ian manages to confuse her with a very simple geometry question. “You can’t solve the problem using only three of the dimensions!” sums up the tone of the show about as well as anything could.<br /><br />Barbara snaps “don’t be silly”. Ian ironically breaths “with time being the fourth, I suppose?” The past is a foreign country. Sarcasm in the classroom will not be stopped for a few years yet.<br /><br />“I feel frightened” says Barbara “As though we were interfering with something that is best left alone”. Not, perhaps, the subtlest lines ever written. And suddenly, we get a glimpse of Susan; already in the junk yard. She pops something into her mouth. (A gobstopper? A jelly baby? An alien food tablet?) And we catch a glimpse of a manikin; possibly a shop window dummy. It’s head is smashed in, and it is hanging by what can only be described as a noose. And we flash back to Ian and Barbara. “Lets get it over with” says Ian, as if he were about to ingest some unpleasant medicine, or maybe punish one of his pupils.<br /><br /><br />9:38-11.38Scene 4. Ian and Barbara walk around the junkyard. We see the hanged manikin again. We see the police box. It is humming: buzzing. It has never hummed or buzzed since. The humming and the buzzing clues us in that it is perhaps an unearthly police box. And (this is a little clunky) it provides a pretext for Ian to walk around it.<br /><span style="font-size: x-large;"><b><br />11:39-12:07</b></span><br />“A little more than kin, and less than kind.” <br /><br />“I perceive that you have been in Afghanistan.” <br /><br />“Gosh, uncle Ben, you're worse than a room full of alarm clocks.”<br /><br />A world historical moment. An old man appears. He is coughing. We don’t know his name, and we never will.<br /><br />“What are you doing here...What do you want?”<br /><br />He has come on to the stage, and will never vacate it.<br /><br /><span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>12:07-14:30</b></span><br />When George Lucas first shows us Yoda, he is an annoying sprite who knocks things over. If we were one of the very few people who saw Empire Strikes Back without spoilers, there would be a fairy tale unmasking. The smurf who won’t tell Luke where Yoda is turns out Yoda himself to be.<br /><br />Ian and Barbara have followed Susan home. They encounter an annoying, patronising, condescending old man. He is Susan’s grandfather; and Susan’s grandfather is the Doctor Who of the title. But Ian and Barbara somehow do not make this connection; they somehow imagine that the old man has locked the young girl in the police box—slightly kinky for Saturday night, but not remotely meeting the facts as they know them. Susan comes to school every day, well dressed and well fed, so she can hardly be spending the evenings locked in a cell.<br /><br />If there wasn’t sixty years of Doctor Who lore weighing us down; we might think that the junk yard was part of the mystery: that the old man collected junk and the police box emerged from his collection of hanged manikins and dusty picture frames. At any moment Prof Yaffle might step down from his bookend and we will put the police box in the shop window in case whoever lost it should happen to pass by. <br /><br />It is a scene rich with potential. It is the last time we don’t know.<br /><br />The mystery narrows. “Who is Susan?” has contracted to “what is the police box?” The old man is the answer to both questions, but his very name is a riddle. A riddle that will never be answered.<br /><span style="font-size: x-large;"><b><br />14:30</b></span><br />And suddenly, the universe changed.<br /><br />This is the scene I remember from Panopticon. This is I suppose the scene which made me get up out of my seat and go to the front and kneel down and give my life to Doctor Who.<br /><br />You can’t fit a skyscraper in a sitting room; but you can fit a TV into a sitting room and you can show a skyscraper on a TV screen. So you can fit a skyscraper in a sitting room after all. <br /><br />How does this help? Those sheep are small; but those sheep are far away.<br /><br />What does the Doctor suppose he is saying? Is the idea that when you step through the doors of the police box what you perceive is merely an image of the interior, transmitted from somewhere else, like the image of Dallas, Texas watched on a screen in Barnet, Hertfordshire? The early pitch documents speak of a ship which projects the characters into other modes of being. <br /><br />Or is he saying that when you watch TV, you don’t perceive William Hartnell to be a Lilliputian figure barely six inches tall: your imagination turns him into a full sized man. So perhaps the TARDIS interior is very small, and Ian and Barbara’s imagination is making it seem enormous.<br /><br />There is a TV in the TARDIS. We see London; and then we see the Stone Age. On the TV on the TV. And then the doors of the TARDIS open, and we see the image and the screen through the doors. And Ian and Barbara step through the doors, into the image.<br /><br />We are watching Doctor Who, on TV. From the armchair, or maybe even from behind the armchair, in one of our smaller sitting rooms. TV can take us anywhere. The TARDIS is a metaphor.<br /><br />By 1978 it was an in-joke. Bigger on the inside than the outside. Why is a mouse when it spins? What colour is the square root of Wednesday? <br /><br />Why is it bigger on the inside? <br /><br /><br />Because it is dimensionally transcendental. <br /><br />What does dimensionally transcendental mean? <br /><br /><br />It means it’s bigger on the inside. <br /><br />It has become a proverb. Used by people who had never even seen Doctor Who. The oppositions motion is like the TARDIS. My granny’s cupboards were like the TARDIS.<br /><br /><br />Barbara walks through the police box door. The camera is behind her. We see her walking away from us.<br /><br />Barbara walks through the TARDIS doors. The camera is in front of her. We see her walking towards us.<br /><br />A reaction shot: a close up of her face.<br /><br />Ian stumbles in after her: looking confused.<br /><br />A quick pan around the TARDIS interior.<br /><br />And pull back to see the four characters assembled in the large control room.<br /><br />In my head, I was convinced that I had gone through the doors and seen them expand, and experienced knowledge-by-acquaintance of the TARDIS interior dimensions. I now see that the magic was achieved with a very quick cut. But the scene grew in my mind. It defined the magic of Doctor Who. It was bigger in the inside of my head than it was outside on the big screen. <br /><br />But that was 1978, not 1963. I was not, in fact, surprised that the TARDIS was b.o.t.i.t.t.o. <br /><br />But I was surprised that it was surprising. I was surprised that it had once been surprising. And I believed, for many years, that that surprising-ness was a thing that could have remained; that should have remained; that the TARDIS ceased to be surprising because later writers did not respect The Magic and that The Magic could, in theory, be brought back.<br /><br /><span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>14:44 - 20:26</b></span><br />Scene 5. The cast is assembled. And there is nothing, in fact, left to happen.<br /><br />The premise of the show is that Biddy and Cliff and Miss McGovern and Dr Who should travel through time and space and have adventures. Sidney Newman described a first episode in which two teachers walk their student home through the fog; are surprised to find that home is a police box, and are invited inside by a confused, lost, possibly quote senile unquote old man. Another early internal pitch says that once the teachers are inside the Doctor’s ship, someone accidentally presses a button and causes the ship to “slip its moorings”. This is very much what happens in the Peter Cushing Dalek movie, in fact.<br /><br />But Unearthly Child, as we have it, offers a much more interesting set up. It generates actual hostility between the principles. Not only between Ian and Barbara and the Doctor, but between the Doctor and Susan.<br /><br />Ian and Barbara are convinced that the TARDIS is an illusion. “A game you and your grandfather are playing, if you like”, says Barbara. The Doctor says the box can travel in space and time; Ian has a moment of wonder but rejects it as ludicrous. The Doctor retains some of the attributes of the old man in the junkyard: he fusses over a broken clock in the same way he fussed over an ornate picture frame. But he is largely in control: dominant, a wizard in his magic domain. Ian and Barbara decide to leave; but the Doctor won’t let then. He says that if they leave, the TARDIS will have to leave as well. Susan says that if the Doctor leaves earth, she will stay there. There is a brief fractional moment which should have defined her character for ever afterwards, when she is torn between her grandfather and her teachers. The Doctor over-rides her choice. He pretends to open the door, but in fact he sends the TARDIS travelling in Time. Susan is at that moment as unwilling a traveller as the two humans; although that will soon be forgotten.<br /><br />In the untransmitted pilot version of the story, there is a science fictional motivation. The Doctor thinks that mere knowledge of the TARDIS will change history or violate the timelines. Barbara in particular is dangerous because she seems to believe. “My dear child, you know very well we cannot let them possess even one idea that such a ship as the TARDIS might be possible” he says to Susan. “I can’t let you go” he says to Ian. “You and your companion would be footprints in a time where you were not supposed to have walked.” <br /><br />After such knowledge, what forgiveness?<br /><br />But this idea more or less drops out of the transmitted version. The Doctor is simply worried about being made into “a public spectacle”. The dialogue about giving humans anachronistic knowledge (which makes the Doctor and Susan one smidgeon more alien) is replaced by Susan asserting her love of 20th century England. A canny move: a theoretical argument has been replaced by a very human piece of drama.<br /><br /><span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>20:26 -23.00</b></span><br />We see an image on the TARDIS monitor—on the TV within the TV. A London scene: but it is clearly not a view of Totters Lane. Could it be—could it possibly be—the BBC television centre? <br /><br />It shrinks and recedes and is replaced by the wibbly wobbly wavy lines we saw in the opening seconds. The whirling line, the ripples; super-imposed over each characters face in turn. It takes more than a minute. For a second, there is jaunty electronic music, giving the unfortunate effect that the characters are dancing; but rapidly an extended dematerialisation sound effect kicks in. The same sound effect would be in use sixty years later. That and the police box and the word TARDIS are the only things which survive.<br /><br />Ian and Barbara are unconscious. The Doctor looks uncertain. We see a sandy desert through the TV within a TV; and then we go outside. The viewpoint has changed: we are seeing what the characters cannot yet see. The police box is in the middle of a desert; and a shadow of something unpleasant falls across it.<br /><br />In 1978, Time Travel was entirely ordinary: the Doctor lounged in his ship playing chess or chatting about going on holiday and then typed coordinates into the console. In this first story, Time Traveller is scary and awesome and surreal. A bit of a wrench. I read this back into the future of the series. Every TARDIS trip should have been like the first TARDIS trip and someone had somehow allowed the Magic to lapse.<br /><br />And yet it was clearly the mundanity and silliness of Tom Baker that had won my heart.<br /><br /><b><span style="font-size: x-large;"><br />Next Episode: The Cave of Skulls</span></b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;">Some people find the cavemen dull; some people even advise newbies to skip episodes 2-4 and rush on to the Daleks. But I think that the cavemen are an intrinsic component of the emerging myth. No-one planned them as such. But I don’t think you can experience the full joy of the scary alien robots if you haven’t followed Ian and Barbara through the primordial desert.<br /><br />The end of Unearthly Child changes the viewpoint; we are outside the TARDIS, looking at a shadow falling across it. The Cave of Skulls continues this counter intuitive narrative strategy. We don’t go back to our heroes in the strange chrome room. We go first to a cave, where a modern stone age family talk articulately about losing the secret of fire and choosing a new leader before we return to the action of the first instalment. It ratchets up the dramatic irony in the next scene. Ian obstinately refuses to believe that they have travelled in time, but we, in our armchairs, in our smaller sitting rooms, know that they have.<br /><br />The Doctor says that year-o-meter is broken: not calculating properly—because it says that they have gone back to Year Zero.<br /><br />But Year Zero is exactly where they have gone. Before the decade was out, another science fiction epic would be opening with the Dawn of Man.</span><br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><div style="font-family: Times; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><b>if you enjoy this kind of thing, there is more of it here </b></span></div><div style="font-family: Times; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div style="font-family: Times; font-size: medium;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Times; font-size: medium;"><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/nothing-at-end-3-92270633"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><b>Nothing at the End of the Lane (3)</b></span></a></div><div style="font-family: Times; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/nothing-at-end-4-92320931">Nothing at the End of the Lane (4)</a><br /><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/spoilers-follow-93159159">Children in Need Special<br /></a><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/tales-from-92382466">Tales From the TARDIS</a><br /><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/star-beast-94421711">The Star Beast</a><br /><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/terrible-thing-94505231">Giggle<br /></a><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/honest-to-doctor-94711516">Honest To Doctor Who</a></b></span></div><div style="font-family: Times; font-size: medium;"><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/doctor-who-16-to-95737851"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><b>The Key To Time</b></span></a></div><div style="font-family: Times; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/doctor-who-16-96044151"><b>Ribos Operation (1)</b></a></span></div><div style="font-family: Times; font-size: medium;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Times; font-size: medium;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj13_pe27w_6tJwd1S0hyF0O0uUoSnVUZADDydKNBElPAQjzFxL_chXAnAdBs8tp523Fi-5UahoBpmgz96v4d7NAxbzlWi-zCeL8udxyALz2buveZr2dgZpmVFB-NyV65oZTXw3gCOWiv26VvHI8z4QSjTzIBrVXRgqs9fgKtSaohRHzx7FozmK" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="180" data-original-width="320" height="113" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj13_pe27w_6tJwd1S0hyF0O0uUoSnVUZADDydKNBElPAQjzFxL_chXAnAdBs8tp523Fi-5UahoBpmgz96v4d7NAxbzlWi-zCeL8udxyALz2buveZr2dgZpmVFB-NyV65oZTXw3gCOWiv26VvHI8z4QSjTzIBrVXRgqs9fgKtSaohRHzx7FozmK=w200-h113" width="200" /></a></div></div></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-64945971349539543762024-01-11T13:38:00.001+00:002024-01-11T13:38:47.316+00:00Nothing At The End of the Lane (1)<span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><br />This is the first part of an essay on An Unearthly Child which has already appeared on my </span><a href="http://Patreon." style="font-family: courier; font-size: small;">Patreon.</a><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;">Patreon: A way of supporting web writers who you like. You promise to pay me a small amount, typically a $1/£1 each time I write an article. You can set a maximum, so if I am unexpectedly prolific one month you won't get stung by a bigger than expected bill.<br /><br />It's my <a href="http://www.patreon.com/rilstone">Patreon</a> supporters who enable me to spend some days each week writing. </span><div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/doctor-who-16-to-95737851">It would be very cool if you joined them. </a></b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/doctor-who-16-to-95737851" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1920" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKFBDLx39hy3gUVBpwvWqbtVXwLnntCPqgF5goTro-7udOCXdd0mrSifz-wNBQ96i4U3hDyhFUiiu_gsUgAg3B8oaHJSpGOzcdpYXoSl4Rfe_TXdZhwhXLp0Wnu6HaGgls7XqAiYZ6ZZib19MArvV-U1wzb41DZsPz9KTlzzytkI-uC9fQw1XY/s320/fhd_Patreon_Wordmark_fb38c295a1.png" width="320" /></a></div></span></div><h1 style="text-align: justify;">1978</h1><div style="text-align: justify;">Time worked differently in those days. The world had only recently changed to colour and pictures from the previous decade came from a different dimension. They still called it the generation gap. Teenagers grew up in a different world from their parents. I don't know if the Beatles were literally bigger than Jesus, but history was certainly divided into Before Beatles and After Beatles.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I measured out my life in annuals. I could wind back through 1977, 1976, 1975 by looking at increasingly dog-eared Blue Peter presenters. Time stopped in 1968, Book 5. Peter Purves topless and Valarie Singleton wrapped up like an eskimo. Before that there was only Magic Roundabout and Pippin Fort.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">So, in August 1978, it seemed like a very big deal. Panopticon Two, the second ever Doctor Who convention. The centrepiece: the very first episode of Doctor Who. Unseen since 1963. Fifteen whole years.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The very first episode of Doctor Who. I came on board at the same time Jon Pertwee left. The Sugar Puffs Doctor turned into the One With the Scarf. Oh, it is such a cliche to talk about "my Doctor". I think Colin Baker started it. Tom Baker was <i>the</i> Doctor, the only Doctor I properly knew. Jon Pertwee was a huge foundational myth from the primeval junior school era. The First and Second Doctors were as remote and mysterious as the Garden of Eden and Uncle Mac.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It was 1978 and Doctor Who wasn't as good as it used to be. The special magic had departed and even the president of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society didn't know what had happened to it.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Facebook insists I look at forums about old television programmes. There is a widespread agreement that television ceased to be funny when It Ain't Half Hot Mum and Robin's Nest came to an end. There is no excuse to ever watch anything apart from reruns of Fawlty Towers. We have moved from an age of gold into an age of brass. When King Arthur comes again, Wagon Wheels will return to their proper size and comedians will appear on television in black make up. Women will smoke during pregnancy. There will be lots of beatings.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Everyone's age is a golden age; but it is factually true that the middle 1970s produced a lot of very funny TV shows. Older comedians who had learned their trade in the last days of variety and rep were still working; but the alternative circuit hadn't yet made comedy the new rock and roll. No, we can't have Carry On back because Carry On came out of a particular moment in time and time doesn't go round and round in circles but just moves on.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I was lucky enough to have been twelve when Star Wars happened. I don't know if I'd swap that for being a generation younger and living through Beatlemania and the second folk revival.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The very first episode of Doctor Who. The BBC didn't do repeats. Not what they called "out of Doctor" repeats, anyway: when Baker assumed the throne they were reluctant to show old Pertwee episodes and certainly nothing earlier.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">When this newfangled idea of showing pictures on the radio first came in, actors and writers were worried. If we're not careful, they said, the BBC will build up a library of plays and comedians and jugglers and never need to employ another one ever again. What chance for a young actor who wants to essay the Dane if the BBC already has a definitive version of Hamlet in their magic box? So agreements were made with trades unions and Actors Equity. The BBC had to go on making new TV; and very, very little old TV could be shown each year; and then not without the original actors' and writers' permission.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The Beeb was surprisingly sportsmanlike about this. They took it for granted that they had to check with Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln each time the Brigadier appeared on screen, because the Brigadier first appeared in a story wot they wrote. I suppose the DWAS had to get clearance from Equity and the Beeb. Or maybe a few hundred people at a con counted as a private showing.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">An episode of Doctor Who, on the big screen. A black and white episode: the very first.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Some people can't separate Doctor Who from the night John Kennedy died. Some people can't separate it from that unseasonably cold winter. I believe my Mum and Dad were already living in the family home, two years before I materialised. They owned a black and white TV. I was the Doctor Who fan but they had actually watched Doctor Who on their TV when the world was black and white and cold and foggy.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But to me the alpha version of An Unearthly Child -- and therefore the primary experience of Doctor Who -- is the great hall at Imperial College looking at a life sized TARDIS and a life sized Dalek with a packed lunch and a tube ticket clasped to my breast. Your mileage may vary.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I don't know how many times I have watched it in the intervening decades. I saw it the following year, at Panopticon 3. I saw it in the Five Faces Of Doctor Who season on BBC 2 during the Baker-Davison interregnum. I saw it on my own TV when VHS tapes first became affordable. I saw it a few years back when I tried to watch right through the whole canon. I watched the first dozen episodes on Britbox with Sofa-Buddy during lockdown.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I know it as well as I know anything.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Someone from Sons of the Desert once said that he'd seen all the Laurel and Hardy films so many times that he no longer laughed at them: but he still watched them because he wanted to spend time with Stan and Olly. What is left of the first two seasons of Doctor Who aren't as scary as they used to be; they very probably never were. But they have that quality that CS Lewis probably did not call Donegality. The sense of time-and-place.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The ship. The stone age. The radiation needle turning to critical. A vanishing EnglandLondonBritain that had flown forgotten as a dream before I drew my first breath. An umbilical chord back to my thirteenth year; when testcard, ad-break and Radio Time were still apparelled in celestial light. Just barely.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I knew that Frankenstein was the name of the creator, not the monster. I knew that Doctor Who was the name of the series, not the character. Having seen Unearthly Child gave me one more thing to be a purist about.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Nineteen sixty three. Fifteen years ago. As far removed from me then as Blink and Last of the Time Lords is from me today.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Nineteen seventy eight. Forty seven years ago. As far removed from me now as Charlie Chaplain was from me then.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">What has happened to the magic of Doctor Who?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It came true. You're looking at it.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><b>if you enjoy this kind of thing, there is more of it here </b></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/nothing-at-end-3-92270633"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><b>Nothing at the End of the Lane (3)</b></span></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/nothing-at-end-4-92320931">Nothing at the End of the Lane (4)</a><br /><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/spoilers-follow-93159159">Children in Need Special<br /></a><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/tales-from-92382466">Tales From the TARDIS</a><br /><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/star-beast-94421711">The Star Beast</a><br /><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/terrible-thing-94505231">Giggle<br /></a><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/honest-to-doctor-94711516">Honest To Doctor Who</a></b></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/doctor-who-16-to-95737851"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><b>The Key To Time</b></span></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/doctor-who-16-96044151"><b>Ribos Operation (1)</b></a></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj13_pe27w_6tJwd1S0hyF0O0uUoSnVUZADDydKNBElPAQjzFxL_chXAnAdBs8tp523Fi-5UahoBpmgz96v4d7NAxbzlWi-zCeL8udxyALz2buveZr2dgZpmVFB-NyV65oZTXw3gCOWiv26VvHI8z4QSjTzIBrVXRgqs9fgKtSaohRHzx7FozmK" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="180" data-original-width="320" height="113" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj13_pe27w_6tJwd1S0hyF0O0uUoSnVUZADDydKNBElPAQjzFxL_chXAnAdBs8tp523Fi-5UahoBpmgz96v4d7NAxbzlWi-zCeL8udxyALz2buveZr2dgZpmVFB-NyV65oZTXw3gCOWiv26VvHI8z4QSjTzIBrVXRgqs9fgKtSaohRHzx7FozmK=w200-h113" width="200" /></a></div><br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-37599134709930372022024-01-11T13:38:00.000+00:002024-01-11T13:38:20.964+00:00The Ribos Operation (Cont)<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIg4_1xAM0VUhzUNlqC8dQlXHUxaUgXEMqtqgpAYNWvvTLOmhqCNOHcW01w00fj_5LZaSO94rQWDCtmKilmRrF-dLeqGF2KGU9Sy_h0psKrfSbW17jyI6MMR62eo06Dw6PaQe2od-eKYAY_VPAH7O73ufdzIswf12vo1_1d9TLsiYSVufl2Y-s/s1055/Screenshot%202024-01-11%20at%2012.12.14.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="929" data-original-width="1055" height="564" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIg4_1xAM0VUhzUNlqC8dQlXHUxaUgXEMqtqgpAYNWvvTLOmhqCNOHcW01w00fj_5LZaSO94rQWDCtmKilmRrF-dLeqGF2KGU9Sy_h0psKrfSbW17jyI6MMR62eo06Dw6PaQe2od-eKYAY_VPAH7O73ufdzIswf12vo1_1d9TLsiYSVufl2Y-s/w640-h564/Screenshot%202024-01-11%20at%2012.12.14.png" width="640" /></a></div><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/ribos-operations-96289842" target="_blank"><br /><span style="font-size: x-large;">Read more</span></a><p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-56634284693305374842024-01-11T13:37:00.001+00:002024-01-11T13:37:55.509+00:00Doctor Who Season 16: The Ribos Operation<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGOorkI_gDVFTVkOPaErFhvJ4TilamtiTTkEZA7vJfVVSL6yaBF3OnVLTlvWypa0ZcW-_OLunKQ5rUJzRYduf7rjYV_JlL9hfUYnqMbdUjQMwaptrC25TeswWSom_Fb2vzWEjZE_jjMudg-DvINQfkrA36MlOTNSsnVmPcSTrQcI1Y5ttIrQFh/s916/Image%2007-01-2024%20at%2017.48.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="821" data-original-width="916" height="574" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGOorkI_gDVFTVkOPaErFhvJ4TilamtiTTkEZA7vJfVVSL6yaBF3OnVLTlvWypa0ZcW-_OLunKQ5rUJzRYduf7rjYV_JlL9hfUYnqMbdUjQMwaptrC25TeswWSom_Fb2vzWEjZE_jjMudg-DvINQfkrA36MlOTNSsnVmPcSTrQcI1Y5ttIrQFh/w640-h574/Image%2007-01-2024%20at%2017.48.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div> <p></p><p><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/doctor-who-16-to-95737851"><span style="font-size: x-large;">read more</span></a></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-75281252349716723782024-01-11T13:37:00.000+00:002024-01-11T13:37:23.644+00:00Doctor Who Season 16: The Key To Time<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/doctor-who-16-to-95737851" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="821" data-original-width="900" height="584" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0TZqSOmfvWAEhVy3AIKCfdtiu9r_G1BlZyyNZcWlc07okD84QCs6ghH1aR-Ry56lj74bCh7DmmLjpZs6Ia4FLPR8Q7G2xMUTSnU3CdYnWl-lNMgXLqdDFRDxwNR9qIucYm5VoX_KpkHHKdNb5m4kPaCS2MYFm2xWc_chbMYdoKfrdEmO_SaZ3/w640-h584/Image%2007-01-2024%20at%2017.51.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><span style="font-size: x-large;"><b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/doctor-who-16-to-95737851">read more...</a></b></span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-65940376069948089412024-01-04T11:54:00.005+00:002024-01-04T11:54:58.787+00:00Obligatory Church on Ruby Road Review<p><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/obligatory-on-95847693">Obligatory Church on Ruby Road Review</a><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-22367127028743433032023-12-15T13:20:00.001+00:002023-12-15T13:20:27.710+00:00Honest To Doctor Who<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9-OHPpi_Di0pW9Myh7IWb_H0OW5li3f8LEe3U5FJcq4_p2THruRgZ__S-e8pRyNdQZdKB3vmQEhcI8QKMUGykiMODmvdCK26dqC3rugL1VjYSFE7qGysnHlif96MjKeIPU6lDrLrAn9DaIKgS73DdZFKGLAYVzVyunzcZg91xDQcADEjN5pLJ/s1247/Screenshot%202023-12-15%20at%2013.16.44.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="817" data-original-width="1247" height="381" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9-OHPpi_Di0pW9Myh7IWb_H0OW5li3f8LEe3U5FJcq4_p2THruRgZ__S-e8pRyNdQZdKB3vmQEhcI8QKMUGykiMODmvdCK26dqC3rugL1VjYSFE7qGysnHlif96MjKeIPU6lDrLrAn9DaIKgS73DdZFKGLAYVzVyunzcZg91xDQcADEjN5pLJ/w581-h381/Screenshot%202023-12-15%20at%2013.16.44.png" width="581" /></a></div><p><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/honest-to-doctor-94711516">Honest To Doctor Who</a></p><p><br /></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span><span><b style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;">Subscribers to my Patreon have already read this essay, along with other Sixtieth Anniversary related essays. <br /><br /></span></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span><span><b style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;">I am a semi-professional writer, and Elon Musk is making it increasingly difficult to promote myself. If you would like to know what I think about Doctor Who, the nicest thing you could possibly do is to pledge to pay $1 every time I write an article. (You pledge more if you like, and you can set limits as to how much you'll be charged in a single month.) </span></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span><span><b style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.patreon.com/rilstone" rel="nofollow" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1920" height="96" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaU5EYdBjbuVs48H9_WEZqxyHb3fsfVLIRopGgI9_wAsrYJ-7HT-LPuTPnudCnf5lx7hrxugPjmRd5dtWCWtF9pE8sSm1M88bL3fL2Ue-lC4BFWZARxZ6x5JxdWwqrpwYR-MVaulVaLhmV2klzCdLqJFmUgs2tEgQ3psNRHYaETJ7nAwOEgg5j/w169-h96/fhd_Patreon_Wordmark_fb38c295a1.png" width="169" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><a href="http://patreon.com/rilstone">Join My Patreon</a></span></b></div></span></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span><span><b style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><br /></span></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span><span><b style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><br /></span></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span><span><b style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;">If you really can't afford to do that, then dropping a tip in my Ko-Fi would also put a medium sized smile on my big silly face. </span><span style="font-family: courier;"> </span></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span><span><b style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: courier;"><br /></span></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span><span><b style="background-color: white;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwl_T4Eqs2PbcJRx9kHcbzPrh4WuCsvZaoPzBhBvNcmF6RQkPQadOWuaVFsEH6ve79TNrdPVpL4RtqYig6NyPP2IXleCyZOCWVbYZrC6I9EdGq3zQPwWGdt62Vfeej1N2j-W74npglqaivdgzKyt-SZzAxInUjWnhOPdSCRxmrPd8TKulrMvTL/s500/image.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="163" data-original-width="500" height="65" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwl_T4Eqs2PbcJRx9kHcbzPrh4WuCsvZaoPzBhBvNcmF6RQkPQadOWuaVFsEH6ve79TNrdPVpL4RtqYig6NyPP2IXleCyZOCWVbYZrC6I9EdGq3zQPwWGdt62Vfeej1N2j-W74npglqaivdgzKyt-SZzAxInUjWnhOPdSCRxmrPd8TKulrMvTL/w200-h65/image.png" width="200" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://ko-fi.com/andrewrilstone/">Support me on Ko-Fi</a></div></b></span></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-74405181629472753842023-12-12T00:42:00.005+00:002023-12-15T13:23:02.246+00:00Doctor Who: The Terrible Thing Which Happened On Saturday<p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQtvAsigrrsVdaPKHqkJUhj1DAPadukt9bn5WdZdyiZiXrUap66tNP7mLaIBf_tL3aAB2EOHIHtthQTBrMM48q5sk95AxyaJ6yJ7lnchgk1t0mX764wSXQvXDplMJIVkPmdajbPEkIkJtK0fe6h3bRyM48TIHIxUgM_dWg9VRaYmL6vTIWjSpT/s1247/Screenshot%202023-12-15%20at%2013.21.10.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="817" data-original-width="1247" height="415" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQtvAsigrrsVdaPKHqkJUhj1DAPadukt9bn5WdZdyiZiXrUap66tNP7mLaIBf_tL3aAB2EOHIHtthQTBrMM48q5sk95AxyaJ6yJ7lnchgk1t0mX764wSXQvXDplMJIVkPmdajbPEkIkJtK0fe6h3bRyM48TIHIxUgM_dWg9VRaYmL6vTIWjSpT/w631-h415/Screenshot%202023-12-15%20at%2013.21.10.png" width="631" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/terrible-thing-94505231">The Terrible Thing Which Happened On Saturday</a></p><p><br /></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span><span><b style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;">Subscribers to my Patreon have already read this essay, along with other Sixtieth Anniversary related essays. <br /><br /></span></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span><span><b style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;">I am a semi-professional writer, and Elon Musk is making it increasingly difficult to promote myself. If you would like to know what I think about Doctor Who, the nicest thing you could possibly do is to pledge to pay $1 every time I write an article. (You pledge more if you like, and you can set limits as to how much you'll be charged in a single month.) </span></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span><span><b style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.patreon.com/rilstone" rel="nofollow" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1920" height="96" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaU5EYdBjbuVs48H9_WEZqxyHb3fsfVLIRopGgI9_wAsrYJ-7HT-LPuTPnudCnf5lx7hrxugPjmRd5dtWCWtF9pE8sSm1M88bL3fL2Ue-lC4BFWZARxZ6x5JxdWwqrpwYR-MVaulVaLhmV2klzCdLqJFmUgs2tEgQ3psNRHYaETJ7nAwOEgg5j/w169-h96/fhd_Patreon_Wordmark_fb38c295a1.png" width="169" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><a href="http://patreon.com/rilstone">Join My Patreon</a></span></b></div></span></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span><span><b style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><br /></span></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span><span><b style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><br /></span></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span><span><b style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;">If you really can't afford to do that, then dropping a tip in my Ko-Fi would also put a medium sized smile on my big silly face. </span><span style="font-family: courier;"> </span></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span><span><b style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: courier;"><br /></span></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span><span><b style="background-color: white;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwl_T4Eqs2PbcJRx9kHcbzPrh4WuCsvZaoPzBhBvNcmF6RQkPQadOWuaVFsEH6ve79TNrdPVpL4RtqYig6NyPP2IXleCyZOCWVbYZrC6I9EdGq3zQPwWGdt62Vfeej1N2j-W74npglqaivdgzKyt-SZzAxInUjWnhOPdSCRxmrPd8TKulrMvTL/s500/image.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="163" data-original-width="500" height="65" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwl_T4Eqs2PbcJRx9kHcbzPrh4WuCsvZaoPzBhBvNcmF6RQkPQadOWuaVFsEH6ve79TNrdPVpL4RtqYig6NyPP2IXleCyZOCWVbYZrC6I9EdGq3zQPwWGdt62Vfeej1N2j-W74npglqaivdgzKyt-SZzAxInUjWnhOPdSCRxmrPd8TKulrMvTL/w200-h65/image.png" width="200" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://ko-fi.com/andrewrilstone/">Support me on Ko-Fi</a></div></b></span></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-12360912530037334752023-12-10T18:02:00.003+00:002023-12-15T13:26:07.317+00:00Doctor Who: The Star Beast<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaQglvkoEZP2yL_C9W4hJOifWMeajaNEMQLJCJPeOpb4eNuKQUVTXzfRd2IDyFd1qf6nwKqhflN9oqNkYtHXOCZzKJqKiPzJ9nSuyMqWRxPlNJuuMYrH-8zeoVOKfErAhl7oevNjk10cp0L5fs_mmZsQsOfDjnQy0C7krjNgho9JMYlVGaDy_D/s1118/Screenshot%202023-12-15%20at%2013.25.04.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="814" data-original-width="1118" height="448" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaQglvkoEZP2yL_C9W4hJOifWMeajaNEMQLJCJPeOpb4eNuKQUVTXzfRd2IDyFd1qf6nwKqhflN9oqNkYtHXOCZzKJqKiPzJ9nSuyMqWRxPlNJuuMYrH-8zeoVOKfErAhl7oevNjk10cp0L5fs_mmZsQsOfDjnQy0C7krjNgho9JMYlVGaDy_D/w617-h448/Screenshot%202023-12-15%20at%2013.25.04.png" width="617" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/star-beast-94421711">Review: The Star Beast</a></p><p><br /></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span><span><b style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;">Subscribers to my Patreon have already read this essay, along with other Sixtieth Anniversary related essays. <br /><br /></span></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span><span><b style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;">I am a semi-professional writer, and Elon Musk is making it increasingly difficult to promote myself. If you would like to know what I think about Doctor Who, the nicest thing you could possibly do is to pledge to pay $1 every time I write an article. (You pledge more if you like, and you can set limits as to how much you'll be charged in a single month.) </span></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span><span><b style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.patreon.com/rilstone" rel="nofollow" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1920" height="96" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaU5EYdBjbuVs48H9_WEZqxyHb3fsfVLIRopGgI9_wAsrYJ-7HT-LPuTPnudCnf5lx7hrxugPjmRd5dtWCWtF9pE8sSm1M88bL3fL2Ue-lC4BFWZARxZ6x5JxdWwqrpwYR-MVaulVaLhmV2klzCdLqJFmUgs2tEgQ3psNRHYaETJ7nAwOEgg5j/w169-h96/fhd_Patreon_Wordmark_fb38c295a1.png" width="169" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><a href="http://patreon.com/rilstone">Join My Patreon</a></span></b></div></span></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span><span><b style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><br /></span></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span><span><b style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><br /></span></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span><span><b style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;">If you really can't afford to do that, then dropping a tip in my Ko-Fi would also put a medium sized smile on my big silly face. </span><span style="font-family: courier;"> </span></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span><span><b style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: courier;"><br /></span></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span><span><b style="background-color: white;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwl_T4Eqs2PbcJRx9kHcbzPrh4WuCsvZaoPzBhBvNcmF6RQkPQadOWuaVFsEH6ve79TNrdPVpL4RtqYig6NyPP2IXleCyZOCWVbYZrC6I9EdGq3zQPwWGdt62Vfeej1N2j-W74npglqaivdgzKyt-SZzAxInUjWnhOPdSCRxmrPd8TKulrMvTL/s500/image.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="163" data-original-width="500" height="65" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwl_T4Eqs2PbcJRx9kHcbzPrh4WuCsvZaoPzBhBvNcmF6RQkPQadOWuaVFsEH6ve79TNrdPVpL4RtqYig6NyPP2IXleCyZOCWVbYZrC6I9EdGq3zQPwWGdt62Vfeej1N2j-W74npglqaivdgzKyt-SZzAxInUjWnhOPdSCRxmrPd8TKulrMvTL/w200-h65/image.png" width="200" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://ko-fi.com/andrewrilstone/">Support me on Ko-Fi</a></div></b></span></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-72607592619593608952023-12-08T15:58:00.003+00:002023-12-08T15:58:36.967+00:00The Matrix Revisited<p></p><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Everybody knows that this reality's not real</i></div><i><div style="text-align: left;"><i>So raise a glass to all things past</i></div></i><i><div style="text-align: left;"><i>And celebrate how good it feels</i></div></i><span style="font-style: italic;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><i> </i><b> Fishermen's Friends</b></div></span><p></p><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b>Just seen the Matrix on the big screen. For the first time in very probably twenty four years. I was rather astonished. It's actually a darn good film.</b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b><br /></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b>I think it had been overwritten in my mind, first, by the very bad sequel and second by the very, very bad third instalment; and, thirdly, by a certain irritating Matrix-chic that infested geek circles in the opening years of the third millennium. I had a friend who literally wore a long black leather coat and mirror shades in the streets. Even in Tescos. He swore he was doing it before the Matrix came out; but even so.</b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b><br /></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b>It's like Star Wars. You can't recover a sense of the film as a film; because its originality and tropes have been part of the language of cult cinema for twenty years. I don't think it necessarily invented "bullet time" but it certainly made it popular. At one level, it's plugged into a very specific pre-millennial moment; but at another it defined how we think about computers so definitively that it doesn't feel particularly dated.</b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b><br /></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b>Flash Gordon and Star Trek still dominate our thinking about space travel: space ships are still pointy missiles with fins and Beam Me Up Scottie is still code for the last word in futurism or impenetrable geekery. Space fiction conceptually froze at a moment when space travel didn't quite exist but felt as if it should. The Matrix freezes computers on the cusp of their ubiquity: when Usenet was still a thing and the Web had not quite been mainstreamed; when cellphones were cool but it was no longer irredeemably pretentious to own one.</b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b><br /></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b>The world has moved on. Computers no longer have green screens and strange >: symbols. Coders no longer exist in stylishly unkempt bedsits. Computer discs are no longer traded like hard drugs. Legendary individuals don't have mysterious handles. Computers live on kitchen tables and commuters pockets and are used to play angry birds and order groceries. Artificial intelligence is a predictive text system which kids use to cheat on their homework. But the Matrix still dominates our sense of what a computer is, in the same way that Big Ben dominates conceptual London. We quote it without knowing that we're quoting it. Red Pill. Blue Pill. Rabbit Hole. Glitch.</b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b><br /></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b>The Matrix feels like it has always existed. I very nearly found myself talking about its 80s vibe. I could swear it was part of the lingua franca of the role playing club at college. As a matter of historical fact it only came out in 1999, the same year as Phantom Menace. Neil Gaiman's Sandman (which still feels quite contemporary) had finished its initial run in '96. "Morpheus" is referenced in the same way that the Prisoner, the Wizard of Oz and above all Alice in Wonderland are referenced: as cultural touch-stones that Everybody Knows. Was it cool to have read Sandman in 1999, or was it already a bit passe, grandad?</b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b><br /></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b>I had stored the Matrix in my brain as a syle-over-substance movie which packaged the cool bits of Descartes for people who had never read Phillip K Dick. Or possibly vice versa. But I was only remembering two sequences. There's the conspiracy stuff in the beginning, when Neo gets weird messages about white rabbits, meets strangers who know things they couldn't possibly know, and has liaisons with improbably cool people under improbably rainy bridges. And there's the Bruce Lee stuff at the end, where Neo takes on Agent Smith in an American tube station and establishes that he is the Chosen One. Enlightenment through extreme violence.</b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b><br /></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b>It was real funny when it turned out that Elrond was being played by the guy in the black suit who says Miss TAH AND Er SUN. Fellowship of the Ring was only a couple of years after the Matrix.</b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b><br /></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b>But I'd pretty much forgotten everything that comes in between. The excellent characterisation of Morpheus's team. It's pretty unusual for characters who exist mainly to be killed off to be so individualised and likeable and funny. (How much easier Aliens would have been to take if all the space marine action figures had had personalities.) The quite sophisticated explication of the mind body duality and John Stewart Mills contented porcine, particularly around the subplot of Cypher's treachery. I did remember that there was No Spoon; but I'd forgotten how cleverly the oracle-in-a-kitchen uses the ideas of fate and prophecy to set up some genuine moral jeopardy.</b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b><br /></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b>It's astonishingly clever that the mysticism, the action and the idea of virtual reality are unified into a single concept. We kind of get that Morpheus can run up walls and karate chop bullets because he's a character in a film: the rules of the real world don't apply because up there on the big screen everything is a special effect. And we definitely get that he can bend spoons because he's in a computer programme and the spoon isn't real. But we also get the idea that we could bend spoons and run up walls in the real world if we believed we could. The oracle and Neo are doing the kinds of things that Jesus and Buddha and Uri Geller could literally do. So "realising that the world is a computer game that you could manipulate" (in a story where the world literally is a computer game that you could manipulate) stands as a metaphor for "the kinds of things you could do in the real world if you believed you could."</b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b><br /></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b>It's bothersome that the Matrix has been appropriated by actual fascists. But everything gets appropriated by actual fascists. I don't know how far it's the movies fault. There is a school of thought that says that Wagner's Nordic fantasies are in and of themselves perfectly innocent: they only become evil when a lunatic with a silly moustache starts to pretend they are literally true, or could possibly be made so. And there is another school of thought that says that blonde-haired blue-eyed kids beheading hook-nosed avaricious midgets was as Nazi as fuck even before Nazism even existed. I might go down the "syntactical potential" root: the Nazi appropriation of Wagner occurred because Wagner contained material that was capable of being appropriated. Aeschylus didn't write a story about a scientist collecting body parts in a graveyard; and he certainly didn't write a story about Romantic poets rebelling against the constraints of Victorian literature. But his Prometheus was definitely a rebel rebelling against the kinds of things that rebels always rebel against. </b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b><br /></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b>The Matrix doesn't say that we literally live, or might live, in a computer simulation. It doesn't even say that your boss or the policeman is, or might be, an Agent of the System and that everyone else probably isn't an actual human being at all. But it certainly has the potential for actual fascists to read it that way.</b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b><br /></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b>I don't think it is about conspiracy theories. It isn't even about computers. It's certainly not about Kung Fu, except in so far as Kung Fu is a spiritual practice which attunes your mind to Higher Things. It's a rare example of someone having read Joseph Campbell and then done something interesting with him. George Lucas read Hero With a Thousand faces after completing Star Wars and retrofitted his B movie to the scam monomyth: a catastrophic error of judgement the repercussions of which we are still living with today. I think it is quite likely that the Wachowskis had got as far as the opening chapters of Masks of God.</b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b><br /></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b>The first layer of the movie certainly uses conspiratorial tropes: everything you think you know is a lie; the lie is being perpetuated by an all-powerful group that secretly controls everything; but a tiny group know what is really going on; and you (that is to say, me) by virtue of being really good with computers, are THE CHOSEN ONE who is going to free the drones from the Illuminati or the Woke Mob the Jews or whoever it is this week. Neo's final speech, after he has achieved Enlightenment, is couched in political language and could have emanated from anyone on the far left or the far right at any time in the last quarter century. I'll show the people what YOU don't want them to see. I'm going to show them a world without YOU. A world without rules or controls. A world without borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible.</b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b><br /></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b>But the world without rules or control isn't about free love and tearing up your draft card and not having to go to school. Nor is it about abolishing political correctness and wokery and calling a spade a spade as opposed to an earth turning utensil and being once more proud to be white. What Neo experiences is a Gnostic revelation: this reality is not real and there is a higher, realer, truer world he can reach. The computers and the politics are a metaphor for the spiritual, not the other way round.</b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b><br /></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b>The mechanics are purely scientific: Neo and everyone else exists in what we'd now call Virtual Reality. The implications are philosophical: if our sense of taste is only happening in our head, the result of brain cells firing, then there is no difference between a virtual steak in the matrix and an actual steak. Particularly when the real world you awaken into doesn't contain steak, but only tasteless nutritious porridge. How can a tree continue to be when there's no-one about in the quad?</b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b><br /></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b>The visualisation of the "brain in a box" conundrum -- millions upon millions of womb-like tanks containing frozen humans in their virtual dream-state -- is genuinely arresting. Inside the Matrix is a world of obsolete cutting-edge cellphones and wires and oscilloscopes only one level up from the paraphernalia of Victor Frankenstein and computer screens that were looking dated even in 1999. Outside the Matrix -- in the "real" world -- George Lucas's shabby future has been taken to an extreme, with a touch of Ridley Scott in the mix, as if the Millennium Falcon had been occupied by undergraduate squatters for a decade. The mirror shades and shiny guns and black leather are part of the illusion: in the real world everyone wears badly knitted grey sweaters. Anyone who adopts Matrix chic as a fashion statement has seriously missed the point.</b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b><br /></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b>But that's what conspiracy theory does. Flips reality on it's head: tells us that the archaeologists who have studied the pyramids for decades are, just for that exact reason, unreliable, and the real truth about Egyptology is to be found in a shabby paperback or a mimeographed fanzine. There are increasing numbers of people who believe, or affect to believe, that the world is flat, not because they are ignorant about geography and gravity, but because their politics requires them reject all form of authority. I love Jesus more than you do, because I believe there were Tyrannosaurus at the court of Elizabeth I but you won't find that taught in mainstream schools.</b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b><br /></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b>The choice of the red pill over the blue pill, of grey jumpers over black leather jackets, is couched politically. But there is no implicit critique of the social order. Neo is the Chosen One because he has faith: faith in the fact that he is the Chosen One. He learns martial arts -- outside the Matrix, but inside a VR -- but is repeatedly told that he can't beat his dream-mentor because he doesn't believe he can. Neo's journey (like that of the nine hundred and ninety eight other heroes) is the same as that of Luke Skywalker. You don't win martial arts bouts by learning the moves. You don't become a guitarist by practising the chord shapes. You don't destroy armoured battle stations by going through a meticulous aeronautics course. You have to believe that you can do it; switch off your conscious self; sell your soul to Satan at the crossroads. The perfect marksman is the one who shuts his eyes and doesn't bother to aim.</b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b><br /></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b>Which, is admittedly and in itself, a right-wing trope. I think we've all heard quite enough from experts. Donald Trump will save us, not because he is a skilful and experienced politician, but because he quite definitely isn't.</b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b><br /></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b>Unless I have this wrong. Unless the movie does not intend to use politics as a metaphor for enlightenment but wants us to use enlightenment as a metaphor for politics. You can't really take on six men with guns in bullet time and then leap into the sky like Superman. But you can stick it to the man and make America great again, and that is what living without limits means.</b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b><br /></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b>Richard Bach's not-much-better followup to Jonathan Livingstone Seagull admitted that the little sea-bird who could was not Jesus. On the contrary, everyone is Jesus, or at any rate, Jesus is a metaphor for that which everyone is. Which may be very bad theology; but is really the only way to approach Chosen One myths. Luke Skywalker is the last Jedi and so are you; Harry Potter is the boy who lived and so am I. We are all Neo if we believe in ourselves; we can all bend the spoon once we realise it isn't there.</b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b><br /></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b>If we literally believe that there is a conspiracy and that "we" can reject "you" and live without limits, the Matrix is toxic. But not if what we take away from it is that we are all potential Siegfrieds who can go to the mountain top and slay our dragon.</b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b><br /></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b>So. There was clearly more to this film than I ever gave it credit for. That's mildly disconcerting. What would be severely disconcerting if I were to now see The Matrix Reloaded and realise that that's a perfectly decent film as well. Heck, if this goes on, it might turn out that there are redeeming features in Highlander 2.</b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: courier;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b>Or perhaps that's just what they want me to think?</b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b><br /></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b><br /></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier; font-size: x-large;"><b>>:Hey.</b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-family: courier;"><b><br /></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span><span><b style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;">Subscribers to my Patreon have already read this essay, along with a bunch of essays around the sixtieth anniversary of That TV Show. </span></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span><span><b style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;"><br /></span></b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span><span><b style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Gill Sans;">I am a semi-professional writer, and Elon Musk is making it increasingly difficult to promote myself. 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