Answers To Readers' Questions [5]

 Aristide Twain

One of many problems with the concept of a Doctor Who reboot is that it can't sustain. The temptation to have the New Doctor fall through a space-warp and meet an aging David Tennant in Dimension B is just too strong. Witness what happened to the Star Trek films! One of the post-Leekley, pre-McGann pitches for the 1990s reboot had already begun to plan a season finale where Sylvester McCoy would appear to explain how he had used the Key to Time to reboot the universe before the script for the pilot had even been greenlit. And all of this was before ‘No Way Home’ and the Spider-Verse films broke the bank. (I'm positively surprised that Mara Jade has yet to meet Rey and Poe.) I tell you, any attempt to simplify Dr Who's continuity by starting over would only complicate it further in the long run by simply leaving viewers with two connected timelines to keep track of. It's a foregone conclusion.

People tell new stories about old characters all the time. We all get that Ivanhoe, Robin of Sherwood, and Robin Hood Prince of Thieves are three different stories about the same character. 

I think that “reboot” usefully describes a meta-story: when there is an in-universe narrative reason that James Bond used to be gruff and Scottish and has suddenly become English and posh. 

(Old Doctor Who was curiously worried about providing in-universe explanations for trivial changes: Leela gets zapped in the eye by a laser when Louise Jameson wants to stop wearing contact lenses; the Doctor constructs K9 Mark 2 when the BBC wants a less unwieldy prop, and the robot gets laryngitis when John Leeson is unavailable to do the voice. You could say that the whole idea of regeneration is an in-universe explanation for changes to the production. There could have been a world where the seventeenth elderly, crotchety actor had been recast as the Doctor, and the twenty third actress had taken over the role of “Susan”.)

I think that there have been two fruitful uses of meta-narrative in other media. In both cases, the in-universe explanation was provided after the fact by writers who were not responsible for creating the revamped character. 

The first, obviously, was Flash of Two Worlds. The 1956 version of the Flash was simply a reimagining and updating of the 1940 version: but the 1961 comic established that there were two separate characters, living on, respectively, Earth One and Earth Two. I don’t think that many kids in the 1950s were lying awake at night thinking “But that means that those comics my Dad used to read weren’t really, really true.” But for the next couple of decades, writers had a lot of fun with the two universes: particularly as the existence of Earth Two gave them some leeway to age and kill-off major players without harming the central canon.

It was, however, incredibly confusing and off-putting for the casual reader. “The Huntress, she looks fun….Daughter of… I didn’t know that….WHAT YOU MEAN HE’S DEAD!!!!!”

The second one, equally obviously, was the hardly less convoluted history of Captain America. Stan Lee was under no obligation to say that the Cap of the 1960s was the same fella as the Cap of the 1940s: the natural thing would have been to just start again from scratch; but he chose to imagine the defunct character had been frozen in ice after the end of World War II. I don’t think anyone watching the Captain America: First Avenger movie would have been aware that this was originally a clever splicing of two different characters together: “a World War II hero out of his time” is a very interesting and valid premise. Stan Lee’s revamp failed to take into account, of wilfully ignore, a dozen appearances of Captain America Commie Smasher published between 1946 and 1950; and we could have carried on ignoring them, but in 1972, Steve Englehart established that the 50s character was a: an imposter b: mad and c: still alive. This was clever, because it allowed the different comics to be treated as “true”; but narratively fruitful because it allowed the liberal America of the 1970s to allegorically confront the conservative 1950s America. And because the imposter, William Burnside, grew in the ensuing decades into a sympathetic, tragic villain. 

But as you know, I groaned slightly when someone decided it would be a Good Thing if it turned out that Toby Maguire, Andrew Garfield and Tom Holland were not different actors playing different directors' different fictional takes on the same fictional character, but literally existing Spiders-Man from different timelines. It wasn’t interesting. Nothing followed from it: it was simply an opportunity to say “gee, the different versions of the character are different in some ways and not so different in others.” 

I felt the same way about the decision to say that the Ultimate Comics were part of an in-universe parallel world, as opposed to a creative take on what the classic Marvel Universe might have looked like if it had been created in the 2000s rather than the 1960s. Yes, Alan Moore very wittily said “this-is-an-imaginary-story-aren’t-they-all”, but my brain goes more easily to  “an alternate world where Uncle Ben survived but Aunt May died” or even “an alternate world where Captain Kirk is a fascist and everyone wears eyepatches” that it does to “a parallel world where everyone is much more realistically drawn.” 

Some people are just really uncomfortable with the idea of “fiction”. We understand that someone is making up the stories but we are not prepared to treat the stories as something which someone has made up. I can kind of see why: once you permit yourself to say “Let’s play a fun game in which we pretend that the Christmas presents are left by an old man in a red suit — you pretend to write to him and I’ll pretend to reply” then you are too old to hang up your stocking. 

How does this relate to the toxicity we have had to deal with recently? If it is an object of faith that fictional works really happened or must be treated as if they really happened then it is very hard to accept a new fictional work based on an existing one. “But Helen of Troy didn’t speak English with a US accent — she just didn’t — and if you think she did you have no right to called you film the Orestia."

I wonder if this relates to an underlying Christian fundamentalism in the culture: a sense that if Moses, as a matter of historical fact, didn't lead two million people though the Red Sea, then the story is entirely worthless. 

And shall I tell you what is really weird? Stan Lee had already introduced a metafictional element into his Marvel Universe: but that meta-fiction involved the Marvel Bullpen, the writers and artists who created the stories. His comics were presented, not as quasi-historical events, but as things that someone had made.

Doctor Who never did that: although it might be argued that when you saw monsters made of bubble wrap and neutron bombs counting down with flap-down digital clocks you couldn't avoid thinking “this is a story being acted out with improvise plots”. But it is very true that almost as soon as Doctor Who became popular, fans wanted to see the man behind the curtain. There were features on Blue Peter and the Radio Times about “how the special effects were done” and, boringly “amusing incidents on the set”. 

And yet: canon. 

It seems to me that if you were re-starting Doctor Who, you would begin with a mysterious figure trekking through space and time, who has always been trekking through space and time, and who has been everywhere once and lots of places twice. And since he is bound to talk about his previous adventures, there is no reason not to say that the previous two TV series’ represent the characters “past”. (If he says “I once met the devil” your would expect some viewers to say “ooo ooo he means the one with the ood / no no he means the one in the village with the white witch”.) It would be a bad move to make that a very important part of the new programme. Doubtless, at some point, he’ll say “Aha, my old foe, the Master, he travels in time and space but unlike me his does harm rather than good.” You would not necessarily say “Aha, the Master, he used to have a female identity called Missy and then revealed that I was the Timeless Child.” 

But I just. Don’t. See. Why any of this needs to be a Plot Point. Someone on the internet proposed that the new Doctor should have amnesia — that he should only find out about previous adventures from, say, a TARDIS diary. I am not saying that an amnesiac Doctor couldn’t be the basis for some good stories. Anything could be the basis for some good stories. But I don’t get why there needs to be an in-universe explanation about why the backstory is on the backburner.

When Doctor Who was a going concern, your Robert Holmes and Terrence Dicks were against multi-Doctor stores, because there was no good way of writing a script with four or five egos all competing for attention. As long as the revival actors are still alive, I suppose there is no way we can avoid a Christopher Eccleston / David Tennant / Whoever The New Person Is crossover. And if you do it, you should do it, with the egos clashing as loudly as you can. 

It is interesting that Star Wars was happy to do one of the most thorough-going reboots without providing the merest whisper of an in-universe explanation: dumping something like three hundred novels and a fairly well developed time line. And I am deeply grateful that there has never been the slightest temptation to say that there are two galaxies both equally long ago and far away; and in one Luke married a lady called Mara and had a son, and in one he stayed celibate and went to live in a monastery. When Dave Filoni wanted to incorporate Admiral Thrawn, the bad guy from the decanonized novels, into Star Wars: Rebels, he didn't make someone run at the speed of light to open a gateway between the universes: he just introduced him as a character. I like that approach. Some would say that Filoni was offering fan service to the kinds of people who felt that their life was ruined when the Expanded Universe was de-canonised. My impressions is that he wanted a big villain and though he would borrow one who already existed.

Dear Person I overheard in Forbidden Planet just after Force Awakens came out:

You said that the reboot means that all the time you spent reading the Expanded Universe was wasted: but if someone said “Hubble bubble hocus pocus make the Expanded Universe take place on an Alternate Time Line” would you get your time back?

Love ARR

But but but: suppose it turned out that New New Who was taking part in a parallel universe, and it turned out that the Very Big and Very Bad villain was actually the Doctor from a different universe, one in which the Doctor had finally, as has so often been predicted, gone bad; wouldn’t the moment where we tear Zagreus' mask off and reveal Ncuti Gatwa underneath be worth the complexity?

It might be. Anything might. Several different fans have at several times proposed a story where Moriarty rather than Holmes survived Reichenbach.

But it would, in a way, be an unearned twist: a twist that was interesting only at a meta-level. If you can make up a story without cannibalising history, maybe you should 

Answers To Readers' Questions [4]

 “But I rather think that ‘I am special because I met the Doctor’ is generally code for ‘We are special because we are Doctor Who fans’: and there are fewer and fewer ‘boomers’ for whom watching Doctor Who was a formative experience.”

Aristide Twain

” There are fewer and fewer for whom Tom Baker was a formative experience, but the people for whom David Tennant or Matt Smith were formative are just about getting old enough to make their own nostalgic television, and won't that be interesting? Christopher Eccleston has explicitly said at conventions that the only circumstance in which he'd consider returning to Doctor Who for a multi-Doctor special would if the new showrunner were someone who'd been a starry-eyed little girl in 2005-6.

The wider one’s range of experience, whether of media or life, the less significance each individual sensation appears to have: because you have so many others to compare it with. 

Doctor Who and Star Wars were very significant in the 1970s because that was all there was. 

Television had a status and importance for the children of the 1960s that it can’t ever have for the 2000 or 2010 cohort. 

I assume. Do people in their 30s talk about In The Night Garden and Octonauts in the way we grown-ups wax lyrical about Bagpuss and Trumpton? Maybe they do. 

Does the wider range of media mean that each individual bubble is less important?

Was children’s TV simply better in the 1970s. 

Or am I just speaking with the voice of nostalgia? 

“The summers seem so much brighter when I was a kid than they do today.”

“That’s not nostalgia. That’s cataracts.”

It does not follow that it would be a good thing if home cooking were bland and unadventurous and preferably rationed, and if the only restaurants in the average town were Beefeater and Wimpy, even if that is the only way of recapturing the transcendent joy we felt on first tasting garlic.

If you first watched Doctor Who when you were 12, and if David Tennant was your first crush then, totally, you would turn on a new series, especially if David Tennant was coming back for a cameo.

There was some talk of remaking Buffy without Sarah Michelle Gellar or indeed Josh Whedon. I am in no doubt that people who were teenagers between 1997 and 2003 would be quite excited about the idea. But I query how many people there are whose adult identity is “person who grew up watching Buffy.” 

Yes, indeed, Harry Potter. 

The Doctor Who of Russel T Davies and Stephen Moffat seemed very much to be a debate with itself about what Doctor Who meant and the significance of Doctor Who and what it was like to be Doctor Who fan. As we’ve argued, this goes back to Moffat’s silly Curse of Fatal Death, which directly made Doctor Who the character a metaphor for Doctor Who the programme. I don’t think a new series would want to do that. 

But maybe it would. The Marvel Universe, both in the movies and in the actual comics continues to regard the years from 1962-1972 as utterly foundational. Spider-Man: Brand New Day is teasing visual homages to classic comic-book covers: and they are all comic book covers which fans of my vintage would recognise. Fantastic Four: First Steps was an absolute love letter to the Fantastic Four as it was in 1968: as if John Byrne and Mark Waid had never happened. 

Or maybe classics are classic. We say that Star Trek reboots are pandering to people in their sixties but we don’t on the whole, say that Pride and Prejudice adaptations are pandering to bicentenarians.

Answers To Readers's Questions [3]

 Aristide Twain

“There has been one (1) successful Doctor Who spin-off, namely, the Sarah-Jane Adventures,” Well, on television. In prose and audio and comics, there have been very good Paradise Towers comics, Faction Paradox short story anthologies, Sontaran audio plays, and so on for many decades. (And naturally a lot of very bad Gallifrey audio plays, Lethbridge-Stewart short story anthologies, etc. etc.) I do not particularly yearn for a world in which such premises were executed as TV shows on Disney+ like the Marvel and Star Wars catalogues, but it is a very easy thing to imagine.

Yes: that is a perfectly valid point. I was thinking of TV Spinoffs — K9 and Company, Australian K9, Sarah-Jane, the Dreadful Torchwood, the recent sea devils thing. But if you include an infinite range of stage plays, novels, comics, audio-stories, RPGs, and computer games, then Doctor Who has had more spin-offs than pretty much anything else. 

In 2005, the holders of the copyright to Zorro commissioned Isabel Allende to write a serious historical novel about the character, largely on the grounds that it was bout the only thing that had never been done. I look forward to Doctor Who - The Opera in due course. 

So: whoever inherits the Doctor Who logo may very well decide to create a franchise of adventurous, slightly retro sci-fi stories, linked together by a nomad who wanders through time and space. One element might be set on a planet that the Nomad once visited; one on a planet which he is going to visit at some point in the future; and one on a planet that he is never going to visit, but which he has once mentioned in passing.

It’s a not unfeasible format: Sandman does it to some extent. 

Has anyone associated John Finnemore’s name with the revamped franchise? (He collaborated with He Who Still Probably Cannot Be Named on the Good Omens sequels, so must have worked with David Tennant.) Several of his comedy shows involve interesting structural hijinks. In one of his radio sketch shows the final item involved a time machine, which proceeded to travel backwards through the previous sketches in the episode, providing the explanation for lines which otherwise made no sense. One could imagine a new version of Who doing that kind of thing.

If your target audience know and care then prequels and sequels are a perfectly valid thing to do. “How did the Kangs get on after the Doctor left Paradise Towers” is as good a jumping off point for a story as any other. And if the story is good enough, it doesn’t matter if the audience know and care. I was a big fan of a US comedy show about a psychiatrist: I later learned that he had previously appeared in a different series set in a bar.

James Blish said that if you had a good idea for a science fiction story, it was better to create your own characters than to present it as Star Trek fan-fic. But I think it is possible to have a good idea for a Star Trek story that won’t go into any other format. 

My only real beef is with the idea that a stand alone series about a group of specialists solving mysteries and space becomes magically interesting when you say “And the computer expert is Zoe!” Although even that could be fun if it were an easter egg and not a premise. 

Answers to Readers's Questions [2]

 Scurra

It will be called Doctor Who and it will be Doctor Who. Just like the 1963 version, the 1996 version and the 2005 version are all Doctor Who. I similarly think that the Target novels, the Virgin novels, the BBC novels, the Titan comics, the Big Finish audios etc etc are all Doctor Who on the same basis. Indeed, if I was going to be fair, I'd also contend that unofficial videos and fanfiction are also all Doctor Who because either there is a line (in which case, it's really hard to draw) or there isn't.

People assume that Doctor Who is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a non-linear, not subjective viewpoint its more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... Cannon-y-wammony stuff.

I think it was Aristotle who said the reason elephants were large, grey and wrinkled was that if they were small, white and smooth, they would be aspirins. 

Or put another way: if you saw a small elephant, would you say “that is not an elephant” or “that is apparently a dwarf elephant.” Or if you saw a small elephant with small ears “Obviously the Indian dwarf elephant.” A small white elephant with small ears? “Obviously, an albino of the species”. How many attributes can you remove until the elephant stops being an elephant?

I suppose that we, unlike Aristotle, can say, “It is still an elephant as long as it has got elephant DNA.” 

I broadly agree with your point: the original black and white TV version of the Daleks; Russel T Davies’ absurd colourisation of the Daleks, the Doctor Who and the Daleks movie and the Doctor Who In An Exciting Adventure With The Daleks novel all come under the Doctor Who umbrella. And so, therefore, does the TV Century 21 Dalek comic strip and the Daleks Give-a-Show projector. 

Steve Moore wrote a back-up strip for the then Doctor Who weekly called Abslam Daak Dalek Killer. Which I rather liked at the time because it had, you know, Daleks, in it. But even at the time, I could see that this was a 2000AD strip, not a Doctor Who strip, and that you could have substituted the Daleks for pretty much any other alien without it making much difference. (The British Planet of the Apes comic infamously filled some blank pages by, er, taking some issues of Kilraven and drawing apes over the Martians.)

Presumably, the lost 1963 Crackerjack skit about Doctor What and his flying post-box; and even the Private Eye cartoon about Doctor Owen who never knew which party he was going to materialise in next have something to do with Doctor Who, although they are not very good examples of the thing that Doctor Who is.

You could say that Dalek Slayer is part of Doctor Who because you can construct a flow chart that connects it to the wider Doctor Who continuity. The Virgin New Adventures arguably happened to the same man who got shot outside his police box in San Francisco on New Year’s Eve, and that man unquestionably met Absalam Dakk, so it follows…

Interestingly, it would be harder to connect the infamous 1960s comic strip to the grand narrative in quite the same way. There isn’t a point in the fictional life-story of the First Doctor where he could have been living in a junk yard with grandchildren other than Susan. But it is very easy to see what kind of thing those comic strips are trying to be — a story which is a bit like the TV show Doctor Who. Invoke parallel universes if you insist: I think that children in the 1960s had no difficulty at all with the idea that you could tell the same story in several different ways. At the age of very young indeed I could understand that Walt Disney Winnie-the-Pooh was different from book Winnie the Pooh, but that it didn’t matter very much.

Answers To Readers Questions [1]

 This week I am writing intelligent replies to the comments my Fans made about my last Doctor Who article.

"Seven years later Paul McGann appeared in an American thing that had no discernible similarity to Doctor Who. Then there was radio silence until 2005."

METALLICMASK: I can't agree with that. For all the TV movie's flaws, it has a clear similarity to both Spearhead from Space and The Deadly Assassin. It's recognizably a Doctor Who story in a way that the Leakley draft wouldn't have been.

A Catholic would say that what makes the Pope Catholic is the Apostolic Succession. The True Church is the True Church because it stands in an historical relationship to the historical Jesus: it is the inheritor of the sacred flame. The Pope can’t not be Catholic: Catholicism is whatever the successors of Peter say it is. 

A Protestant would say that what makes an Archbishop truly Protestant is his subscribing to the correct set of doctrines. The True Church is the True Church because it believes in the things the historical Jesus taught. A Church stops being truly Protestant, or, indeed truly Christian, when it stops having right beliefs. 

On one view, the Paul McGann film is Doctor Who because of the appearance of Sly McCoy, the Master, the Eye of Harmony, the Daleks, the TARDIS, jelly babies, and because it said “Based on the BBC TV series Doctor Who” in the opening credits. 

On the other, it is not Doctor Who because the Master, the Eye of Harmony and the Daleks departed so radically from established orthodoxy. 

My nuanced view, thirty years later, was that the film contained some Quite Interesting treatments of established Whovian tropes. But it felt as if it had been written by someone who had had the concept of “regeneration” explained to him, but had never seen an actual episode of the Doctor Who. McGann himself, an obviously fine actor, seemed similarly to be dressed in a consensus impression of what a Doctor Who costume ought to look like. Kind of a mad scientist and kind of a superhero but with an incongruous Edwardian aesthetic. 

Think of the jelly babies. I don’t think Americans know what jelly babies are: they have sometimes been translated as “jelly beans” or  “gummy bears”. The writer got the memo that the Doctor liked a particular kind of candy, but he didn’t get the joke that he had a big bag of sweets in his pocket like a schoolboy. So he showed him eating them from a rather ornate dish, with a silver teapot, as if they were a rare delicacy.

And no, canonically, the Doctor eating jelly babies while drinking tea and listening to an old fashioned gramophone doesn’t categorically contradict any establish lore. 

Some of the decisions in the story — that it should be told from the point of view of the companion who should have their own back story and supporting cast, and that kissy-kissy  stuff was no longer off limits — were obviously good ideas and were taken over by the Welsh Series. “I’m half human on my mother’s side” seems to have been a fossilised hangover from a rejected treatment and need never be thought of again. 

This Chinese-whispers impression of what Doctor Who is probably like fell into a bog-standard 1990s action-ish thriller, not un-entertainingly. 

I can see elements of the BBC mythos in this American revamp: but I truthfully can see that the episode or the storyline had much overlap with any episode of Doctor Who — except, I suppose, in so far as Doctor Who has embraced so many kinds of story that almost any kind of story would inevitably resemble some aspect of Doctor Who.

Of course you never play your edgiest card in your pilot episode; and the McGann characterisation was strong enough that I would like to have seen more of it. 

It’s kinda sorta like my relationship with Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings. It’s certainly not Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, but I'd quite liked to have seen Movie Merry, Movie Pippin and Movie Frodo in the sections of the story Jackson cut out. 

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Liar Pieces

Patreon exclusives, which may eventually club together and form a book....

Liar Piece

I have started doing morning pages again.

Anyone who has ever tried to write will know about the theory of “free writing” or “morning pages”, where, instead of getting down to actual work, you procrastinate by typing whatever drivel comes into your head and never looking at it again. 

There are a number of theories about why this helps. I just read a book by Steven Pressfield, who is best known for writing a very macho novel about golf. I assume it is a macho book: I can’t imagine that he would write a writers' guide in the persona of a shouty PE teacher and then write a novel in which the way to knock little balls into little holes is through self care, soft furnishing and accepting who your are. 

It is called The War of Art which I am not going to deny is a very clever title.....

Souvenir Piece

I am so very, very sorry.

In the last month, I have twice promised that I will write a particular article “when I get a Round Tuit.” 

Which is a really smug, unfunny joke, derived from a piece of seaside souvenir shop tat, and I hate myself for having referenced it. 

Do seaside souvenir shops even still exist? I am not thinking of the places which sell plastic buckets and spades for kids; and water bottles and sun-cream and deckchairs for grown-ups, along with inflatable toys that would be incredibly dangerous to use anywhere near the sea....

Coffee Piece

I am in Cafe Kino which used to be my regular hang out when I lived on Stokes Croft. 

The Boston Tea Party, which was at the bottom of St Andrews Road has closed, and still looks decrepit and boarded. Ironically, they have another branch just a few minutes walk from my new flat. There is a bakery that sells artisan cakes and coffee literally outside my window.

When I first arrived in Bristol there was only one single Boston, on Park Street, which stayed open until 10pm, and sold sandwiches at half price from about 9pm. 

There was a kind of writers group there on a Thursday, and it was a kind of hang out the rest of the week. Unbelievably they must have decided that staying open til 10 for the benefit of writers who only bought one cup of coffee and didn’t pay full price for the sandwiches wasn’t a viable business model. They now have branches everywhere: I suppose they are a chain, although they slightly retain the old bohemian feel. 

It only costs $5 a month to join my Patreon, and new followers

a: Make me feel good about my life

b: Give me pocket money to save against my frail old age.

Come over and have a look.

Oh, What a Serkis

 If there has always been a photograph of the King on the wall of a particular school, then only a very strong republican would want us to take it down. If there has never been a photograph of the King on the wall of a particular school, then only a very strong monarchist would suggest putting one up. It’s not about the picture. 

When I came to Bristol I didn’t know who Edward Colston was. When I found out, I was quite neutral towards his statue: “That’s quite interesting” I said “That someone who would definitely be regarded as a monster in one era was regarded as a hero in another one. We might as well leave it where it is.” However, as time went by, it turned out that not everyone did think that Colston was a monster. Some of them paraded about town carrying giant golliwogs, some of them wrote to the papers saying slavery wasn’t so bad and that most of the slaves had a cushy time, and some said that Bristol was a white town and we should celebrate our white history. So of course the statue had to go. When it was still there, I am sure that there were sensible moderate leftists and sensible moderate conservatives who would have been okay with it staying on display, maybe with an explanatory plaque,  but now it’s gone, only full on nutters would remotely think of putting it back.

Things that Tolkien “would have” objected to in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings:

—the change to Frodo’s age

—the juvenile characterisation of Merry and Pippin

—the comedification of Gimli

—dwarf-tossing

—Elf skateboarding

—the removal of Theoden and replacing of him with an entirely different character

—the removal of Faramir and replacing of him with an entirely different character

—the visualisation of the Balrog….

What Tolkien “would have” said about Rings of Power: 

“It has nothing to do with the history of Middle-earth, so why are you even asking me about it?”

What Tolkien “would have” said about the War of the Rohirrim: 

“Well, it’s not my middle-earth, but I respect the fact that “other hands” have taken my footnotes and appendices seriously enough to imagine them for themselves.”

Things that Tolkien probably wouldn't have cared about one way or the other.

Dark skinned Hobbits.

Yes, as a matter of fact, I can imagine a production of Romeo and Juliet in which the main characters are not played by Italians and a production of Hamlet in which the main character is not portrayed by a Dane. In fact the first time I ever saw Romeo and Juliet on the stage, at the Young Vic in the 80s, the Montagues were all played by black actors and Capulets were all played by white actors. Not what you would call subtle, but it made it terribly easy to keep track of who was on which side.

In the excellent National Theatre play about Nye Bevan, Winston Churchill was portrayed by a non-white member of the ensemble. They had the voice and the mannerisms and everyone understood what was going on. Most opera singers capable of singing the role of Cio-Cio-San don’t have the figure to pass for “fifteen exactly” but the audience uses their imaginations. 

There are, in fact, several famous non-white historical figures other than Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King. I agree that you probably wouldn’t use “colour blind casting” in a story which is about racial difference. Unless you did: I could imagine it being a really interesting avant garde experiment. On the stage, anything goes. But you certainly wouldn’t do it in something like The Crown where part of the fun is that the actors look enough like the historical characters that we can pretend we are watching candid historical footage. Beatles fans have already decided that the projected tetralogy is or ought to be a deep-fake reconstruction of real events and that since Barry Keoghan probably wouldn’t pass for Starkey in a looky-likey contest, the film will be a travesty. 

If you think that the whiteness of every white character in the Marvel texts and the Shakespeare extended universe is as important as the blackness of a black civil rights leader in a film about a black civil rights leader, then I think you need to take a long, hard look at yourself. Have I explained why the truly authentic way of adapting Spider-Man would be to make Peter Parker a Muslim)? [1]

There will always be someone who sees a person of colour playing Hamlet and says “I don’t understand — I just don’t see how a Danish prince could have African heritage.” That same same person will often see the same actor playing Othello and say  “I suppose nowadays only actual wizards can play Prospero and only actual sea-monsters can play Caliban.”

As a matter of fact, I think that it is quite clear that Tolkien intended the Shire to be a slightly idealised and slightly comedic version of a small English town. I think that he is well aware that if you think about it too much, that it stops making sense. Hobbits are a brilliant dramatic device: by accidentally placing them in his Silmarillion universe, he created a viewpoint position and a way of making the mythological epic accessible to people who find mythological epics a bit heavy going, but at the expense of sacrificing the strict “realism” of his work. 

There are hand waves about the freedom of the translator to use anachronisms. TH White talked about Arthurian knights sending their sons to Eton, and provided a footnote that Eton did not in fact exist at the time, but that if he had mentioned the actual school, no-one would have heard of it. So Hobbits get to have umbrellas, and post offices, and matches, and book-collections, and clocks, and pocket handkerchiefs, and generally act as if they are from the end of the eighteenth century even though the the Riders of Rohan are clearly living in the tenth. 

I have no particular problem with saying that these almost cartoonishly more-English-than-the-English stereotypes all have white skin. It’s not an issue. Forty-eight hours ago I would not have given the matter the slightest thought.

However, it turns out that there are significant numbers of American Tolkien fans who see The Lord of the Rings as an irreducibly ethno-nationalist text. Tolkien, it seems, was creating a mythology for England, and “England” is synonymous with white people. Any colour-blind casting, let alone any suggestion that there actually were dark-skinned Hobbits, goes against the Professor's intentions, and is therefore to be perceived as a personal insult, resulting in the posthumous necromantic gyrations that dead authors always seem to suffer from. 

Canonical questions about ethnicity in Middle-earth can be left for another day. Tolkien, we know, was engaged in re-writing his mythos from the ground up when he died, because he wanted to make it more consistent with plausible scientific reality. The Third Age ended about 4000 BC, so either he imagined that human ethnic and racial difference arose in the last six thousand years, or else he imagined that there were racial distinctions in the original creation. It is an open question as to whether he himself believed in Darwinism, and how he reconciled that with either his catholicism or his Middle-earth mythology.

If the toxic Tolkien fans are correct, and Tolkien’s mythos is irreducibly ethno-nationalist, can we continue to read it? I have argued, frequently, that it is possible to enjoy texts with toxic ideologies and certainly texts produced by toxic individuals. Economic considerations apart, the Harry Potter series itself is not primarily about the mystical essentialism of bathroom arrangements. Wagner’s proto-nazism is arguably more central to his operas, but seventy five years of productions makes it possible to hear Alberich the dwarf obsessing about his gold without automatically thinking “and that, of course, is what Wagner thought Jewish people were really like.” 

I fully accept that if I was Jewish myself, I might not find the process of de-Nazifying Wagner very edifying: but at a purely artistic level, it is the case that once you ignore the poison, there is some non-poisonous stuff left. 

I remain convinced that Cerebus the Aardvark is one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century: but I would never express that view without also saying in large block capitals double underlined in red that it is shockingly misogynistic. 

In the case of Rowling and Wagner, we are either separating the art from the artist; or else deprioritising secondary themes in the work. “The person who wrote the book is horrible, but that doesn’t mean the book is horrible, necessarily.” “This book contains some horrible things: but it contains not-horrible things as well."

In Sim’s case, more problematically, we are privileging form over content: saying, in effect “This text says a horrible thing superlatively well”. It is certainly not the case that you have to agree with a work of fiction before you can read or enjoy it: indeed, if you can only enjoy books you wholly agree with you could probably never read any book at all. The Right very frequently say that The Left disapprove of (or, in fact, Cancel) anything which doesn’t meet their exacting standards of orthodoxy; although other aspects of The Right actively campaign for certain kinds of literature to be removed from school libraries, and indeed libraries in general. 

I think that most of us in practice apply a sliding scale: the worse the ideology, the better the book needs to be to justify us reading it. We put up with Shylock in Shakespeare because Shakespeare is Shakespeare. We wouldn’t put up with him anywhere else. I tolerate the ideology of Cerebus because I rate the work so highly. 

Some people might say that if something contains Bad Ideas, it cannot, by definition, be Good Art. And other people might say that if a work of art is Good, the ideas can’t, by definition, be bad. That’s why you get Bishops saying that Life of Brian was unfunny, fifth rate, undergraduate humour and Imams saying that the Satanic Verses is an unreadable novel. And also why some people are prepared to say that since Life of Brian is incredibly funny, it can’t possibly be offensive; and that since Satanic Verses is a work of brilliance, it can’t possibly be blasphemous. Some people even go so far as to say that those who take offence do not by definition have a sense of humour, and that the opinion of people who do not have senses of humour should be ruled out of the discussion of comedy movies.

What hardly anyone ever says is “You are a very funny man and that was a very clever joke, but it was completely wrong for you to have made a joke on that particular subject”.  

I was distressed to learn that some Doctor Who fans are still arguing: 

1: That Talons of Weng Chiang can’t be racist because it is such a good story. 

2: That it doesn’t matter if Talons of Weng Chiang is racist because it is such a good story. 

3: That it doesn’t matter if Talons of Weng Chiang is racist because racism wasn’t considered so bad in the 1970s.

4: That Talons of Weng Chiang can’t possibly be racist because some Chinese people really do work in laundries and talk like that. 

5: That no-one really believes that Talons of Weng Chiang is racist, but some people pretend that they think it is for bad motives. 

Spoiler alert: Talons of Weng Chiang is, in fact, racist. 

My position has always been that two things can be true: “This is an excellent Doctor Who story” and “This Doctor Who story is incredibly racist”.  But the existence of toxic fans who cannot see or do not care about the racism increasingly makes me inclined to revise my position. 

If the Lord of the Rings is incidentally or secondarily or accidentally ethno-nationalist, then we don’t have a problem. It was written by a rich white guy in the 1930s and contains many of the attitudes of rich white guys from the 1930s: it may never have occurred to Tolkien to do it in any other way. And he provided us, very conveniently, with a Watsonian get-out clause. We are supposed to imagine that the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit are very free translations of ancient texts. If the 1930s translator can give Orcs cockney accents or make Hobbits talk like posh English dons and school boys [2] then we can assume that a 2025 translator would have seen things that Tolkien did not see and overlook things which Tolkien saw.

If you can accept Frodo pushing Gollum into Mount Doom, or that Pippin clumsily knocked an armoured skeleton into the well in Moria (rather than foolishly dropping a pebble into it), you ought to be able to accept that some Hobbits have darker coloured skins than other Hobbits do. If you cannot, I respectfully submit that your problem is not about textual fidelity.

If the Lord of the Rings is centrally and irreducibly an ethno-nationalist text — if by “a mythology for England” Tolkien meant “a white mythology” then we have a very big problem indeed. If an adaptation cannot introduce of colour without violating the very heart of the text then I don’t think any decent director would touch it with a bargepole. The underrated movie version of John Carter of Mars eliminated the references to slavery from the character’s background, which had no discernible effect on the story. Conversely, there have been no serious modern attempts to adapt or revive Tarzan of the Apes because the colonial and patrician ideology is too central to the story. 

The Lord of the Rings is not, in fact, an ethno-nationalist text. Tolkien didn’t strongly believe that all English people were white, though he may have tacitly assumed it.  There was, in 1999, no obligation on Peter Jackson to introduce black or asian Hobbits into the Shire, and we should not retrospectively blame him for having made the artistic decision not to do so. However, the existence of toxic fans trying to appropriate the Lord of the Rings into their vile ethno-nationalist ideology does create such an obligation. Like it or not, he will be signalling which side he is on. I can’t discern any neutral position. 

Plus: annoying these people is a good thing in itself. It is one of the few redeeming features of Rings of Power. 

[1] Although now we have had Ms Marvel  that would be redundant.

[2] There was a period of about forty years when the idea that the Hobbits who patrolled the boundaries of the Shire were called "bounders" would have been funny.  

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Canon Lore

The Mandalorian and Grogu is a joyless slog. 

I’d somehow picked up the impression that this would be the movie that tied all the threads of the various TV shows together — The Mandalorian  himself, baby Yoda, Admiral Thrawn, Ahsoka, Ezra, the Imperial Remnant…. But the big cross-over conclusion is still a few years in the future. For now, what we have is — well, an episode of The Mandalorian. Three, probably. With quite a lot of money spent on them. Any individual scene is tremendous fun; but cumulatively, it added up to…

The Mandalorian is the best thing which has been done with Star Wars since, literally, Star Wars. Yes, I know, the Empire Strikes Back is marvellous. Yes, I know, the Empire Strikes Back is the only example of a sequel which is better than the original, apart from the Godfather. [1] But the Empire Strikes Back wasn’t a sequel to Star Wars. [2] On this hill I will die. The Mandalorian gave me back that sense of being inside a universe, a universe with a history which I missed, with heroes who are embedded in that history and make a difference to it.

Granted, at the time of the original Star Wars, the galaxy’s history existed only in the mind of George Lucas. Mando and Ahsoka and Thrawn have back stories that can be found in two extended TV series, The Clone Wars and Star Wars: Rebels. The whole idea of Mandalore as a planet and a race, as opposed to a manufacturer of bounty-hunter armour, comes from those series. The Clone Wars is the second best thing to be done with Star Wars since Star Wars, and it is as close as we are ever likely to get to what George Lucas originally wanted the saga to look like. 

The various iterations of the new Star Wars canon reference each other promiscuously. When Boba Fett, in his self titled TV show, fights a blaster duel with a gangster called Cad Bane, he remarks “I’m not a little boy any more”. If you happen to have seen some episodes of The Clone Wars in which the young Boba hangs out with the younger Cad, that’s quite a nice little moment. Some Star Wars fans enjoy easter eggs and literary hyperlinks of this kind. Others find them highly aggravating. But I think the average viewer — if such a thing as Star Wars has average viewers any more — seems hardly to notice. They just accept Star Wars is the kind of thing which refers to in-universe events that the characters know about an we don’t. They may think this is part of the magic. Christopher Tolkien covers this at some length in his introduction to the Silmarillion.

I think we could all do without the word “lore”. It seems to imply an added extra; a dash of chilli in the narrative stew; a sixpence in the Christmas pudding for the hard core follower to bite on. “Oh, did. Prince Hals’s dad appear in Richard II? You can’t expect me to keep track of all this lore.” And clearly, Star Wars and the Marvel Universe do attract more than their fair share of train-spotters, people who care much more about the livery on the second X-Wing on the right than about the actual story. You may very well think I am a train spotter because I have heard of Cad Bane. 

Many, many years ago I uncharitably suggested that some science fiction fans of my acquaintance were using “consistency with the rules of Star Fleet Battles” as the main criteria by which to judge Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country. (They felt that a Klingon Bird of Prey ought not to be able to outrun the Enterprise, or at any rate that it was fitted with the wrong brand of photon torpedo.) I was clearly in the wrong; but I don’t think I was completely in the wrong. Some people do use genre movies primarily as sources of data about the setting. Others use fiction primarily as raw-material for fan fiction, or as inspiration or settings for role-playing games. And very, very many think that the main purpose of literary texts is to give elderly professors something to deconstruct in post-grad seminars. All of the above are, on CS Lewis’s terms using the text, rather than receiving it. 

And some people think that all negative critical reactions are really pedantic quibbles about lore, and can therefore be disregarded. If I say that I think Rings of Power is bad there will always be someone on hand to tell me that I am sulking because one particular orc-sword was a few inches shorter than it says in a foot-note to an appendix to a volume of Tolkien’s unpublished notes that it ought to have been.

I did, genuinely, come across someone on Facebook the other day who was denouncing the new series of Beatles biopics (not due to be released for another two years) because backstage footage appeared to show Paul Mescal as Paul McCartney wearing a badge on the wrong lapel during the Candlestick Park concert. 

If I had to explain Star Wars to a complete newbie, I don’t think I would say “It’s about a farm boy who through a series of accidents ends up being the only one who can destroy the bad guy’s ultimate weapon and save the life of the princess with whom he has fallen in love.” I think I would be more likely to say “It’s about how the Old Republic fell to treason, and how one of the last of the Jedi passed his knowledge on to the son of his old comrade, who defeated the turncoats and started the whole thing up again.” Something like that. At the very least, you have to know the time-line, or you have at least to know that there is a time-line: Andor is set after Revenge of the Sith, when the Empire is building its power and the Rebel Alliance is coming together. The Mandolorian is set after Return of the Jedi but before the Force Awakens, when the Empire has recently been defeated and the New Republic is establishing itself. Ahsoka is a child in The Clone Wars cartoon, but a venerable Jedi Master in the TV series. Indeed, the point of  “Baby Yoda” may be to connect the current milieux to that of a future movie set a slightly less long time ago, in a galaxy still a fair distance away. 

So perhaps we should say that Star Wars is nothing but lore. In 1979, some people imagined that Star Wars 2 would simply show “Luke n’ Han n’ Leia off on another thrilling adventure.” Some fans, indeed, are  still very aggreived that the Last Jedi didn’t deliver exactly that. But every successful addition to the franchise has been a thrilling adventure that moved the galaxy forward in some way. 

The Mandalorian and Grogu largely ignores the rich background that has accumulated over five TV series and an infinite number of cartoons. We may recognise some of the aliens and hardware and characters from previous iterations but it doesn’t make any difference if we don’t. Mando spends a lot of time hanging out with a purple furry alien called Zeb. I, being a train-spotter, can tell you that this is Zeb Orrelios, one of the heroes of Star Wars: Rebels, set about a decade earlier. In the cartoon, his relationship to the trainee Jedi, Ezra, is that of an elder brother to a younger — quite like the relationship between Ben Grimm and Johnny Storm. He pranks him and roughhouses with him, but is always heroic when the real adventure starts. There is none of this in the movie: literally not one single scene would be different if Zeb were a human NPC name C.O Pilot. It’s cool, but not very cool, to see a cartoon character make the jump to live-action. I look forward to seeing him reunite with Ezra in Ahsoka series two. 

I saw the X-Files movie (1998) having seem maybe six instalments of the TV show, and had no idea what was going on. I had no idea what was going on in Firewalk With Me (1992) but neither did anyone else. It looks as if the next Spider-Man movie will be predicated on viewers already knowing who the Hulk and the Punisher are, or else on it not making any difference. In the olden days, things like On The Busses and George and Mildred and Til Death Us Do Part and The Sweeney tended to remove the cast from their normal environments for the movie iteration: partly to make the big screen experience distinct from the small screen, but also to make it a stand-alone work. 

Presumably, the eventual “big screen cross over conclusion” will have to address this issue: but I would think that, Star Wars being Star Wars, there would be no difficulty in opening the story in media res and bringing new readers up to speed.

Ezra: he’s an apprentice Jedi who was trained by one of the last survivors of the Empire’s purge; he’s been missing in action for a decade.

Ahsoka: she’s an old Jedi who left the order when she thought it was corrupt.

Thrawn: bigwig in the Empire, trying to start the whole thing up again. 

On the small screen, Mandalorians were somewhere between the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and the Knights of the Round Table: a noble warrior race who all wear flying power armour, with fierce rivalry between different ruling families. By the time of the live action TV show, they are mostly deprived of their home world, and operating as freelancers, especially bounty hunters, in the rest of the galaxy. On the big screen, Mando is a guy in shiny steel armour who does missions for the New Republic. He says “This is the way” once or twice. There is a brief sequence in which he is miffed because the bad guys force him to take his helmet off. Not so much a space samurai with an interesting back story and code of honour: more an overpowered viewpoint character in a third person shoot-em-up computer game. 

The point of Grogu is that he looks like Yoda (who is the elderly Jedi who trains Luke in the Empire Strikes Back). He wears similar armour to Mando, but also does levitation and healing by means of the Force (which is  the energy field which gives Jedi Knights their power). By the end of the movie he has even acquired a stick like Yoda’s and is seen meditating. But his personality and attitudes are those of a toddler, stealing food and being mildly naughty and doing double takes at the wonder of creation. There is a kind of mystery associated with Grogu: around his origins, his relationship to Yoda and Yaddle (the female of Yoda’s race briefly glimpsed on the Jedi council in Phantom Menace), and about whether he has really forsaken the Jedi way to become a Mandalorian. None of this is remotely implicit in the movie: if anything, he is in the Jar-Jar Binks role: comedy relief to counteract an overly powerful protagonist. 

But granted that our heroes have been denuded of nearly all their points of interest, any twenty five minutes of the movie is terrific fun. It’s essentially a tapestry of missions and side missions and McGuffins. The Hutt Twins (who we met in the Boba Fett TV show) are prepared to tell the New Republic where a nasty Imperial Warlord lives if, and only if, the New Republic rescue Rotta, Jabba the Hutt’s surviving son, from the planet on which he is being held as a gladiator. (In the cinematic prequel to the Clone Wars cartoon, Anakin and his new apprentice Ahsoka had to rescue a very cute baby Rotta from Lord Dooku.) Everyone has got bored with subtitles, so the Hutts can now form coherent English sentences. It turns out that Rotta is a really nice guy who quite likes being a gladiator, and that the Hutt twins want to kill him to secure their control of the crime empire. So Mando won’t hand him over. So in vengeance the twins send a bounty hunter to capture Mando….

And so on, and so on, and so on. It is relentless. Mando escapes from the Twins, but in the process is bitten by an always fatal Dragonsnake. Grogu successfully nurses his foster-dad back to life and Mando says “The old protect the young and then the young protect the old this is the way”. There was a brief moment of joy when I thought that was the end of the movie, but inevitably Mando announces that it is his duty to go back to the castle and slay his captors. (This is important, because the Code used to say “No-one can ever see a Mandalorian’s face; but it now says “No-one can ever see a Mandalorian’s face unless he kills them”.) So: more robots, more explosions, more duels, more fights, more monsters, and an extraction by a fleet of X-Wings. The last time I felt this inclined to cry out “please, please, make it stop” was in the third Hobbit movie. 

It looks fabulous. I enjoyed the glimpses of the rusty trade federation robot dressed in skins. I enjoyed the extended, whimsical sequence in which Grogu is Mando’s sole protector. I thought the pre-cred opening sequence in which Mando single handedly takes on some Imperial Walkers on an ice planet was as a good as Star Wars action sequence as I have seen. I enjoyed Rotta, even though he says that he is not his father slightly too many times. (I have seen this movie before: he will end up shooting a policeman, hiding out in Sicilly, and taking over the Family.) I enjoyed the fact that the aliens Rotta fights in the arena are the same as the figures in Han Solo’s holographic chess set. I even enjoyed the fast-food truck run by a four armed chimp (possibly voiced my Martin Scorcese). I wish that fast food outlets in the Star Wars universe looked less like fast food outlets any where else, but that ship probably sailed when Anakin and Amidala caught a greyhound bus from Coruscant to Naboo. I enjoyed the little Minions who helped Grogu rescue Mando. They are actually called Anzellans and are the same race as the fellow who took Threepio apart in Rise of Skywalker. 

Compared with other two hundred and fifty minute fight scenes, it really is perfectly okay. You are being encouraged to watch it at your local Imax if you want it even bigger and even louder. I’d recommend streaming it in easily digestible chunks. If you don’t watch Star Wars TV shows, you may find it fresher than I did. On the other hand or you may find it is completely impenetrable. People who think The Mouse raped their childhood presumably do not read my reviews. I am still hugely looking forward to Ahsoka Season Two. I think there are rumours that we might get more Acolyte. 

1: Also: The Lord of the Rings, Don Quixote book 2, and everything which isn’t the Colour of Magic.

2: Star Wars is the title of the stand-alone film which came out in 1977: A New Hope is what it is called when considered as part of a wider saga. Also, Frankenstein was the name of the creator, not the monster.

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