8.3: Robot of Sherwood

--I thought you were with the circus? 

--That was a long-a time ago,  last week. Since then I have lots of jobs.
         A Night at the Opera

It’s not easy being a semi-professional geek.

If you aren’t at all careful, comic books and movies and TV shows are all reduced to "stuff for me to say smart things about on my blog." Clergymen often see the Bible as "that thing which I preach sermons from" and fan fiction writers think that stories only exist as raw material.

If the main point of Doctor Who is for me to review it, then episodes which yield up challenging exegesis are the “good” episodes and the simple episodes about which there is not very much to say are the “bad” ones.

This is why I haven't really written much about the Marvel Comics Movies. A thousand words of me saying "Wow. They really do what they set out to do" is almost as dull for me to write as it is for you to read. I did the Captain America marathon without any real plan to write about it, which was why actually writing about it turned out to be fun.

Oscar Wilde believed that criticism was the highest form of art: poems and plays were just the wood or the marble which critics carved their work from. But Oscar Wilde was a bit of a twit. 

So: Robot of Sherwood. A Doctor Who historical story re-imagined as a Hollywood swashbuckler?

It was funny; but not very funny. It was silly; too silly for Doctor Who, I think, and that’s a pretty high standard of silliness. It passed the time enjoyably. It didn’t make a great deal of sense; but it didn’t matter that it didn’t make a great deal of sense. I quite liked it. 

And that's about as much attention as this romp deserves to have paid to it.

Wonderful Clara wants to meet her hero Robin Hood. The Doctor thinks he is a fictional creation, but he turns out to be entirely real. The Robin Hood they meet isn’t the Robin Hood of medieval legend; and he certainly isn’t a dark ages outlaw. At the climax of the story, he make a big heroic entrance, jumping from the balcony with Wonderful Clara in his arms, digging his dagger into a tapestry to slow his descent. All swashbucklers do this at one time or another. Orlando Bloom does it in Pirates of the Carribean; Errol Flynn does it it in the Sea Hawk — but no-one did it before Douglas Fairbanks in the The Black Pirate (1926). This is a "real" Robin Hood who is only interesting buckling 20th century swashes. Tom Riley’s costume is one part Richard Greene and two parts Errol Flynn; but his characterization is one hundred per cent Carey Elwes playing the Man in Black in the Princess Bride. Ben Miller reciprocates by playing Christopher Guest playing Count Rugen playing the Sheriff of Nottingham, and is still a good deal less hammy than Keith Allen in the Beeb’s actual Robin Hood series.

But it's a mistake to invoke the Princess Bride quite so obviously. The Princess Bride is a cult movie because it plays so cleverly with the difference between history, real life, and story-telling. Westley, with his left-handed sword play and immunity to poison, could only exist inside a storybook; but we don’t love him any the less because he's not real.

The medieval Robin Hood ballads may possibly have had some basis in fact. But characters like Alan A'Dale and Maid Marion are purely fictional: added to the story in the 16th and 17th centuries by writers who were only interested in telling a good yarn. Friar Tuck is Robin's friend in some of the older versions, but there certainly weren't any friars in England in 1198! Doctor Who has never cared all that much about historical accuracy — it’s had cavemen who talk in posh English accents and Charles Dickens exclaiming “what the Shakespeare was that!” and Johnny Ringo dying at the OK Corral. But the Kings Demons, the Crusaders; and indeed the Time Warrior all go to some lengths to present themselves as “real life” according to the prevailing conventions of historical drama at the time they were made. Robot of Sherwood goes to some length’s not to. The whole point of it is that it looks and feels and behaves like a Robin Hood movie, or in fact, like a parody of a Robin Hood movie, with a purely fictional Robin at the center of it. And a lot of the time, that’s great fun: the archery tournament is over-done, but the Doctor and Robin’s contest of egos, repeatedly screwing up their own escape plans, is quite funny. It’s only when someone tries to tell us what it all means that things full apart.

The message of this romp is that everyone will think that Robin Hood is a legend and the real man will be forgotten -- but that's okay because stories are important. And the Doctor is also a story. But the episode is trying to have it's jelly babies and eat them. People may indeed think that Robin Hood is a legend, but according to this story, that legend is literally true in every respect, even the bits that weren't invented before 1938.

Off the top of my head, I can think of three or four better treatments of this idea. For example:

The Doctor takes Wonderful Clara back to 1198. It's all history and gore and grime and there's a realistic outlaw called Robert Hode. But as we get to know him, Robert Hode turns out to be just as heroic as the legend he was the basis for.

The Doctor takes Wonderful Clara to what is apparently 1198. It's all shiny Hollywoodized Merrie Englande, with a Robin Hood in lincoln green tights. Of course, it turns out we're in some parallel world where stories are real -- call it the Land of Fiction, maybe. Wonderful Clara is sad when she realizes it's just a story, but decides that stories are important too.

The Doctor takes Wonderful Clara back to 1198, and encounters a fairly unpleasant fellow named Robin who is obviously the basis for the Robin Hood legends. Against the Doctor's will, Wonderful Clara tries to wean him off human sacrifice persuade him to be more heroic and ends up getting crucified in his place creating the legend she came to witness.

The Doctor takes Wonderful Clara....But no. That way fan fiction lies.

The season opener had me convinced that Doctor Who was trying to re-invent itself as drama. But that was two weeks ago; plenty of time for a complete rethink. It is hard to believe that "Deep Breath" and "Robot of Sherwood" are actually part of the same series. 

STILL AVAILABLE 

Every word Andrew has written about Doctor Who in one handsome volume. 

And if you want Andrew to carry on writing about Doctor Who then please consider supporting him on Patreon. 

8.2 Into the Dalek

--Was the sermon good?
--Yes.
--What was it about?
--Sin.
--What did the preacher say?
--He was against it.
               Calvin Coolidge, attrib.

Daleks are fun. Daleks are baddies but they are fun baddies. Children are scared of Daleks but they mostly want to be Daleks. Pirates are baddies but children do not on the whole go to parties dressed as the noble members of Her Majesty's navy who arrest them. It's more fun to be bad. And members of Her Majesty's pirate-hunting forces don't say "Arrr". 

Last week we had “regeneration considered in the style of a BBC drama”. This week we have “Daleks considered in the style of a big budget sci-fi movie.” I enjoyed the spaceships whizzing around Lucas-style in the pre-cred. I enjoyed the “rebels” — the sort of nasty space soldiers that populated Terry Nation universes, with some modern family angst to keep us rooted in the modern age. (Does anyone know what they were rebelling against?) I enjoyed the all-too-brief scene inside the Dalek spaceship, with loadsadaleks in the control room. I enjoyed the big fight scene with space marines and walls of flame and ray-guns, oh my.

But it only looks like a movie. Like a collection of movie-ish vignettes. It's actually another Dungeons & Dragons scenario in which a party of not terribly interesting characters explore a mysterious alien environment and the Doctor goes all psychodrama on us.

I like Daleks. I have the 60s Dalek annuals displayed in my study. I have read the 70s Dalek annuals so often I could set them to music. Thumping military choral music. But it felt like the rayguns and explosions and space ships were there as an apology, as a sop, a bit to put in the trailers and then rush past as quickly as possible so we can get to the angst and characterization and a big dramatic revelation about the Doctor which is exactly the same as the last seventeen big dramatic revelations about the Doctor.

Laugh? I almost typed “J.C Wright has a point.”

Back in 2007 when New Who was New and could do no wrong, there was a story about a Dalek called Dalek. It was a reworking of a Big Finish story about a Dalek called Jubilee. Both stories were sort of experiments: is it possible to write a script in which a Dalek has a personality —  even a sympathetic one — but is still a Dalek? (A “good” Dalek — a friendly creature that just happened to use stylish pepper pot shaped wheel — would be perfectly feasible but entirely uninteresting.) The answer was “yes”, and virtually all subsequent stories have allowed the Daleks to be just one shade more nuanced than they were in the olden days.

There is a moment in the TV version when the Doctor is ranting at his ancient foe (”Why don’t you just die? Rid the Universe of your filth!”) and the Dalek responds “YOU-WOULD-MAKE-A-GOOD-DALEK”.

This is a crucial moment in the Season 1 story arc. Doctor Chris, as a result of his experiences in the Time War has become like a Dalek. And that is not who he is. His relationship with Rose, and his eventual regeneration into Doctor David, is framed as a kind of redemption.

Seven seasons, three Doctors and oh god about eleven Dalek stories later, “you would make a good Dalek” has become practically the whole of the Doctor’s personality. I think it may be part of the series-bible that ever episode has to conclude with the shock revelation that that gee-whizz the Doctor is a twisted reflection of his enemies.

There is a Dalek. It appears to have discovered morals. It is quite literally a good Dalek. (And therefore not very good at being a Dalek, because Daleks are meant to be good at being bad.) For reasons I didn’t exactly get, the space marines decide to miniaturize the Doctor and insert him into the Dalek to find out why. The Doctor remembers that there’s a movie called Fantastic Voyage but forgets that there was Doctor Who story called The Invisible Enemy. He makes a bum joke.

One of the fun things about Fantastic Voyage was that Prof. Scientist kept telling you interesting stuff about the part of the body the miniaturized submarine was currently passing through. One longed for those kinds of scenes tonight. “We are now crossing one of the Dalek’s balls: they are really sensor devices you know…” “This is the bit where the sink plunger connects to the stick: let me tell you an interesting thing about sink plungers”. I failed the Anti-Dalek Force aptitude test in three consecutive years, but let me tell you: all those schematics look as if a Dalek is a big machine with wires and cables and gears. Climbing along wires and cables and gears and seeing a Dalek from the inside should have been fun. But it turns out that the inside of a Dalek looks pretty much like the inside of any spaceship or shopping center. All these corridors look the same to me.

New bits are added to the Dalek mythos, on the hop, to create little computer game actiony bits. The Daleks have got on just fine for years without being space cannibals. We really don’t need to be suddenly told that they liquify their “victims” when they need protein. There is no particular reason why a Dalek shell shouldn’t have “antibodies”, any more than there is any particular reason why, a Sontaran’s ray gun shouldn’t occasionally catch a cold. But I liked it better when the machine was a big scary tank that the Dalek creature lived in. 

It transpires — excellent word to use when you can’t really follow the plot — that this good Dalek turned good not because of radiation or a previous Doctor injecting it with the Human Factor but because it heard one of Sarah-Jane Smith’s speeches about how the universe is a wonderful place and you can be anything if you try. OK, if you insist, it saw a star being born. There is a bit of jiggery pokery in which it loses the memory of this event and turns evil again; and then Wonderful Clara works out how to restore the memory. But the big set piece is when the Doctor plugs his Time Lord mind into Dalek’s mind while acting a lot.

And get this: what the Dalek sees in the Doctor’s mind is not how much the Doctor loves the Universe but how much he hates the Daleks. So the good Dalek reverts to being a good Dalek: except instead of wanting to exterminate all humans it wants to exterminate all Daleks. The Doctor is horrified by what he has done. “I am not a good Dalek”  the good Dalek explains. “You are a good Dalek.” And we’re back where we were eight years ago.

Since the days of Stan Lee, all superheroes have been reducible to their origin story. And ever since Tim Burton’s daft Batman movie, it’s been fashionable for superheroes and supervillains to share the same origin. If possible, the hero and the villain are supposed to be mutually self-begotten. Batman was responsible for the accident that disfigure the Joker; and the Joker was responsible for the tragedy which caused Batman to become a crime fighter. I made you but you made me and so betwixt the pair of the them they licked the platter clean.

The Doctor, whose origins are by definition shrouded in mystery, acquires a new origin myth at the rate of about two a season. They always diminish the character. Before you make up a silly story that tells us how the Doctor became what he is, you have to know what the Doctor is, and the Doctor isn’t any one thing. 

So, this time, the big revelation is that the Doctor is defined by his hatred of the Daleks – which is ironic because “hate” is the Daleks’ schtick, which is why he would make such a good Dalek.

“See, all those years ago, when I began. I was just running. I called myself the Doctor, but it was just a name. And then I went to Skaro. And then I met you lot and I understood who I was. The Doctor was not the Daleks.”

It doesn’t matter that this isn’t true. Our folk memory of what happened in old episodes is much more important than the episodes themselves. If the Doctor now says that he was radically changed as a person when he first encountered the Daleks then it is neither here nor there to say that no, that’s not at all what happened on the DVD. (Running? The original Doctor was a wandering scientist, interested in learning stuff, and trying, not very urgently, to get back home. The Daleks he first met weren’t the embodiment of evil, but bitter deformed survivors of a war that wasn’t completely their fault. Changed by the encounter? He tells the Thals he’s too old to be a pioneer, and spend the next few months meandering around the Far East with Marco Polo.) What does matter is that it’s boringly, tediously reductive. The Doctor, defined by not being the Daleks? Defined by not being the one-dimensional embodiment of total nastiness? You might as well say that your unique selling point is that you’re in favour of happiness and against wickedness. 

There is a sub plot.

There is a teacher at the school where Wonderful Clara teaches. He teaches Maths. He used to be a soldier. He is a good soldier, because when one of the children ask him if he ever killed anyone, he cries, and good soldiers feel bad about killing. Wonderful Clara and him are going to go on a date, awkwardly.

Does anyone know what Wonderful Clara teaches? I suppose the references to Roman Emperor’s is supposed to imply “history”? There is a precedent for lady history teachers from Coal Hill School travelling with the Doctor. There is even a precedent for them being fond of soldiers, assuming Ian had done his National Service.

We see where this is going. Wonderful Clara no longer thinks of herself as sort of dating the Doctor so it’s okay for her to start date a normal guy in her place of work. I imagine it will end in tears.

Do you know what I would like?

A Dalek story.

Not a story in which the Daleks are a metaphor for id evil dark reflection ego fascism, but a story about outer space robot people hatching a dastardly plot to conquer the entire universe and world and the Doctor foiling them. 

In the meantime, this was actually an okay story. The Dalek fizz was fun but the symbolism was flat.

STILL AVAILABLE 

Every word Andrew has written about Doctor Who in one handsome volume. 

And if you want Andrew to carry on writing about Doctor Who then please consider supporting him on Patreon. 

8.1 Deep Breath

In the perhaps over-discussed Comic Relief skit "Curse of Fatal Death", the Doctor regenerates into a lady. Emma, his companion, who he was planning to marry, cannot accept this: "I don't think this phrase has ever been used quite so accurately" she says "But you just aren't the man I fell in love with."

In Deep Breath, Wonderful Clara finds it almost impossible to come to terms with the fact that the Eleventh Doctor, who she kind of loved, is now the grumpier and older Twelfth Doctor

In the perhaps unjustly neglected Children In Need skit "Time Crash" the Tenth Doctor explains to the Fifth Doctor why it was that the first (and presumably youngest) incarnation of the Doctor looked so much older than the later (and presumably older) versions. " Back when I first started at the very beginning, I was always trying to be old and grumpy and important, like you do when you're young."

In Deep Breath, Madam Vastra explain to Wonderful Clara that the Eleventh Doctor chose to look young, even though he is really incredibly old.  "He looked like your dashing young gentleman friend. Your lover, even..... But he is the Doctor. He has walked this universe for centuries untold, he has seen stars fall to dust.....He looked young. Who do you think that was for?"

A wise man once said: Moffat repeats himself; the first time as farce, the second time as melodrama.

*

Peter Capaldi was always going to be a hard sell.

Matt Smith is the first Doctor I have properly mourned. When Jon Pertwee left, I said “Wow! I’m going to see one of these regeneration things I've heard about”. When Tom Baker left, I said “Wow! Multiple companions in the TARDIS and the return of the Master!” You don't want to know what I said when Peter Davison left.

Matt Smith's going still makes me sad. His tenure still seems like a wasted opportunity. Here today, gone yesterday, so little time to establish his character and yet for with barely time to establish his character; and yet, for a few moments in Season 5, defining and becoming and inhabiting the Doctor in a way that no-one since Tom Baker ever has. No-one since William Hartnell. It was so so right that Matt should be the one looking across the TARDIS console at Bill in Adventure in Space and Time. I wish he could have stayed forever.

I get that Doctor Who is about change and change is the only constant and the one thing that doesn’t change is that it keeps on changing. But does every regeneration need to be a complete reboot, with a new logo, new theme tune, new title sequence, even a new TARDIS interior?

I don’t hate the title sequence. I know that it was based on a pitch by a fan. I like the way it’s trying to represent “time travel” visually, through the numbers on the Doctor’s watch. The bit I liked best in the fan pitch was the camera zooming in on the watch. That's the bit that was dropped.

I loved it that Sylvester McCoy’s TARDIS was basically the same as Willliam Hartnell’s TARDIS. I hate it that Peter Capaldi’s TARDIS isn’t even the same as Christopher Eccelston’s.

But let's accentuate the positive, no? After all, I applauded Moffat’s last re-imagining of Doctor Who as a dark (but not that dark) fairy tale, with Smith coming in as Santa Claus and bowing out as Gepetto.  So let's try to give at least two cheers to the latest relaunch. It give a pretty broad hint about what the next 45 episodes of Doctor Who are going to be about.

Doctor Who is now a Cultural Phenomenon. People who don’t watch Doctor Who but who do know that someone called Capaldi has replaced someone called Smith may well tune in to this episode to see what all the fuss is about. And everyone knows about regeneration, or at any rate that the Doctor Changes.

Rose just accepted that the new guy was the old guy straight off. “You’re so different” was, I think, the whole pitch. Martha and Donna and Wonderful Amy only knew one Doctor each. Wonderful Clara is the first one who has properly had to struggle with Her Doctor not being Her Doctor any more.

So wouldn’t it be a wheeze if, instead of making a classic Regeneration Story we made a BBC drama in which a lady has to come to terms with the fact that a man who she kind of loved has turned into a different man, a man who she is not sure if she can love? A man who is older, not so good-looking, not so charismatic, not played by such a good actor, and Scottish.

I would have liked it better if Peter Capaldi had been given a script which involved him doing something harder than reading out old Matt Smith lines with a Scottish accent. But if I am going to stay on board, I have to accept that that's what Doctor Who is from now on. The underlying deep down personality of the Doctor is of a brilliant, mildly autistic man who talks to himself, zones out when other people are speaking, changes his mind mid sentence, fakes being a genius and generally isn’t quite as good as Benedict Cumberbatch. Doubtless when Moffat goes, that will go as well. But for the time being regeneration involves changing some mannerisms and giving him a different hat.

So: the dark (but not that dark) fairy tale has been re-invented as a movie, or at any rate a drama; or at any rate a BBC romcom. I had a sense that I was watching an episode of a non-existent TV series called The Adventures of Madam Vastra (with the same theme music as Brett’s Sherlock Holmes, obviously) guest starring a whacky time traveler called Doctor.

But although the form is now “grown up drama” the content remains disconcertingly “fan boy”. I like fanboy stuff. I like it that Madam Vastra says "Here we go again" when she realizes the Doctor has regenerated and Wonderful Clara say "You've redecorated. I don't like it" when she sees the TARDIS interior. But I am puzzled when large chunks of plot seem to depend on you knowing your Doctor Who lore and caring about it a good deal.

Have a look at the scene with the homeless man. (I hope that this is a one-off vignette, but there is a serious danger that he will turn out to be Clara’s dad three episodes down the line.) It is as serious and grown up a dramatic scene as I have seen in New Who. In a few paragraphs, I am probably going to complain that New Who rushes from set-up to conclusion without lingering in the actual story; but this scene lingered with a supporting character, and with the Doctor’s poster-regeneration psychology, for fully ten minutes. It's really nicely done. It's what New Who should be. (One of the things that New Who could be, at any rate.)

But the content of the scene seems to be an explanation of why the New Doctor looks like the old Roman guy in the Rubbish One With the Volcano, on the assumption that "because they were both played by Peter Capaldi" is insufficient. It seems to me that this is a lot like writing scenes to explain why until 1980 Dalek spaceships traveled around the universe on the ends o wires but that after 1980 they had blue liens around them. Or, come to that, why the Universe was black and white until 1969.

The idea that the Doctor can choose his face goes back to the War Games. (Douglas Adams riffed on the idea, imagining that choosing a new body was just like choosing a new outfit.) We really can't make up our minds what regeneration is meant to be. As recently as Time of the Doctor, it was meant to be an actual bereavement. We are supposed to mourn Doctor Chris and Doctor David and Doctor Matt as actual people who are actually dying but who somehow pass their essence on to their successor; like that slug-thing in Star Trek. But now we are being asked to think Doctor Peter is simply Doctor Matt wearing a different form.

I was initially inclined to describe this episode as a game of two halves. 60 minutes of BBC drama about Wonderful Clara coming to grips with the fact that the New Doctor is different but also the same as the Old Doctor with part 4 of an old Tom Baker silly monster story tagged on at the end. And, in truth, New Who remains more condensed than I would like it to be: rushing from set-up to resolution without lingering in the story. (Told you.) But on a second viewing, it has a more even tone than I gave it credit for. The Doctor and Wonderful Clara  remain very much the same characters in the Serious Drama bits and the Spacey Action Bits. Too often, in this kind of thing, the interesting characters are replaced with action figures during the big flashy special effects laden climax. (I am looking at you, Fantastic Four.) Although we only see the robots for a few minutes, their back story, their objectives, and the fact they’ve been on earth for a gazillion years is established quite well through dialogue. I am almost tempted to mutter "Aristotelian unities" under my breath.

It may be that young people are better at absorbing information than me. It may be that Doctor Who is now the kind of thing that is only meant to make sense on a second viewing. It may even be that I am the only person on earth who still expects it to make any sense at all. Certainly, lines are spat at us at huge speed. I don't see how anyone could hear, let alone decipher the joke, in this kind of thing....

--Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor. Last of the five good 'uns. Stoic philosopher.

--Superlative bass guitarist. The Doctor really knows how to put a band together.

--And the only pin-up I ever had on my wall when I was fifteen.

…without pausing and rewinding. (*)

It’s quite hard to keep track of what you are meant to know and what you are not meant to know -- which must be maddening for the casual viewer. My reaction to seeing the droid impaled on the clock tower was not “Gosh! How ambiguous! We don’t know if the Doctor pushed him or if he jumped” but “Whaa… did I miss a bit?”

But “missing a bit” is what Moffat does. Most drama is about starting at Point A and getting to Point C. Point B is where everything happens. It is what me normally mean by "story". Moffat rushes headlong to point D and expects you to infer A - C along the way.

Most of this episode does, in fact, make sense. But most of the sense it makes is about imagery and connections and parallels, lines which the viewer is intended to draw for himself.

• Madam Vastra wears a veil because not everyone can accept that she’s a lizard. 
• Madam Vastra and Jenny role-play a master/servant relationship. 
• That’s kind of like like the way the Doctor plays at being Clara’s boy-friend. 
• The Doctor’s face is like a mask; that's kind of like a veil. 
• The alien robots physically steal faces from humans to use as masks. 
• The robots have replaced their body parts so many times that it’s not clear if there is any of the original left.
• The Doctor has changed so many times that it isn't clear if the Doctor is still the Doctor. 

It's not un-clever. But I'd rather have a story.

I would say that this is about as successful an episode of New Who — of New New New Who as we had better not start saying — as if I have seen. It may be that Doctor Who ought to be a grown up cartoon, with cliffhangers and silly baddies. In fairness this one did have a giant Victorian dinosaur. But discussions about what Doctor Who ought to be are never worth having. This reboot says that Doctor Who is a serious romantic dramatic comedy in form, but a Moffat non-linear fanboy deconstructionist riff in content.

I can live with that.

(*) Day of the Doctor begins with Wonderful Clara quoting Marcus Auerelius to her school class - "Waste no time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one." This sort of thing may be clever, but it is not big. 

STILL AVAILABLE 

Every word Andrew has written about Doctor Who in one handsome volume. 

And if you want Andrew to carry on writing about Doctor Who then please consider supporting him on Patreon. 

Loyal To The Dream

"Have you ever heard anything about God, Topsy?"

The child looked bewildered, but grinned as usual.

"Do you know who made you?"

"Nobody, as I knows on," said the child, with a short laugh. The idea appeared to amuse her considerably; for her eyes twinkled, and she added, "Don't think nobody never made me. I ‘spect I growed"

                      Uncle Tom’s Cabin

There is a very bad issue of Cptain America, probably one with zeros on the end, in which Captain America meets Johnny Appleseed and John Henry and Uncle Sam and says “gee, I guess in a very real sense we’re all American legends”. (He wakes up and discovers it was all a dream...or was it?)

After reading more issues of Captain America than is remotely good for my sanity I have come to the conclusion that Steve Rogers is indeed a folk-hero. No-one created him; but somehow, in 70 years of story telling, he grew.

Spider-Man is also a folk-hero. He's passed through many creative hands and people who've never read a Spider-Man comic know who Spider-Man is. But Spider-Man has, and I think always will have, an ur-text to go back to. One writer may go right back to Steve Ditko for inspiration; another may be looking at last month's episode, which is copies from someone who was copying from someone who was copying Ditko, but however Ultimate or Superior he becomes, Spider-Man is always to some extent an Amazing Spider-Man #1 - #38 tribute band.

Captain America, not so much.

Oh, writers and artists genuflect at the shrine of Simon and Kirby, as well they might. But Simon and Kirby is where we started, not where we ended up. The apple-seed isn't the apple tree. No-one remotely wants this months Captain America to look as if it came from 1942. Those issues are primitive and ground breaking and visceral and ever so slightly racist and probably not canon anymore.

You don't need to go back to Captain America #1 or even Avengers #4 to find out what Captain America is meant to be like. You certainly don't need to read every single issue. That way madness lies. You already know.

One possible definition of "myth" is that it's a story which can be told in a hundred different ways and still be the same story. When Jack Kirby drew that image of the skinny recruit being "inoculated" with the super-soldier serum, he created a genuine myth.  When Stan Lee add the image of the man frozen in a block of ice, slowly melting, he gave that myth a tragic depth. None of the dozens of retelling of it is the real thing. Unless every retelling of it is equally the real thing.

Maybe that's why the Bold New Directions never work. You can’t give Captain America a new girl friend or a new house or a new job any more than you can relocate Father Christmas to the South Pole and decide that he's going to shave off his beard. Oh, you could write a story in which that happened, and it might be a very good story, but 20 years later that story would be forgotten and the myth would have reverted to it's original form. The only way a myth can change is organically, from the inside, so slowly that you didn't notice it happening.

That's also why there is so little distance between movie Captain America and the comic book character. Robert Downey Jnr and Andrew Garfield are playing characters somewhat inspired by Iron Man and Spider-Man. Evans is simply being Steve Rogers. That's all he needs to do. We all know who Captain America is.

And finally; that's why very bad ideas seem to do the character so little damage. Twenty years from now, the weeks when Sam Wilson carried the shield will be a footnote to a footnote in the long, long history of Steve Rogers. Dimension Z will be so much scar-tissue. Captain America is who Captain America is.

You were expecting me to finish by saying something deeply Cambellian, about how the priest embodies the god and the god is literally present every time the priest embodies him; and how Captain America is the story which America tells America about America; or maybe the lens through which America sees America. You are expecting me to say that he's so much a part of the landscape that it takes and Englishman to really see him. You are expecting me to contract American patriotism with English patriotism. (The English don't even have a dream to be loyal to.)

But none of that rings terribly true.

Every frame of the Lone Ranger -- the recent movie version -- creaked with the knowledge that the Lone Ranger is an American Myth (exclamation mark exclamation mark). The Captain America movie hardly seemed to care about that angle. Maybe there's a hint of it in the first Avengers movie, what with Agent Coulson's picture cards. But it avoided the portentous. We didn't feel that Captain America was somehow symbolizing Captain America. We didn't feel that Being Captain America was what the movies were about.

I was left with two overwhelming feeling after coming to the end of my ludicrous Captain America marathon.

One: that Steve Rogers is a person. 

There has been wild talk from quarters about how the huge complexity of the Marvel and DC Universes meaning that they are, or are on the point of, becoming semi-sentient entities. (Philip Sandifier thinks; or finds it interesting to pretend to think; that Doctor Who is a sentient meta-fiction.) That's all a lot of nonsense. But it's true that folk song that's been passed down through many generations of singers takes on a form that any one individual singer finds it very hard to emulate. Improvisational performers sometimes report that personalities can emerge in a group that no one actor could have come up with individually. If one writer writes about a pretend person, and another writer makes a copy and adds a bit and another writer makes a copy and ads a bit; then would it be very surprising if what you ended up with was a character who seemed to exist, not in any one comic book, but somehow out there.

That's the first thing I took away. Steve Rogers isn't a character in a comic, he's a person. And the second thing was this: he's a person I like very much indeed.

Andrew Rilstone here. If you have enjoyed these articles, please consider pledging to pay 50p or £1 each time I write an article in the future. I know I'm asking a lot. But the price of blogging has always been high. If I'm the only person prepared to pay it, so be it. But I'm willing to bet I'm not. 

Obey Captain's Orders -- CLICK HERE
Betray the West to Hydra -- CLICK HERE