Degeneration 101 (old stories re-imagined in the spirit of the new series) Part 21: Survival

Run. Run for your life. They can always hurt you if you bleed. The Doctor and River have no mercy.





OK, it was either that or a picture of River and a gag about Mrs Slocombes pussy having teeth.

As we all know Survival is beautiful. It has a story, depth, layers, characterisation, an alien race who are not evil but simply adhere to a different morality, a re-invention of The Master which actually works and a subtle lesbian subtext. In short, a talented writer intelligently exploring complicated ideas and what it means to be human without prejudice or being morally judgemental.

However if the new programme makers got their hands on it and gave it to one of their loyal hacks to re-write here is how the trailer would run...

Scene 1: Doctor stands facing Cheetah people in all their snarling ferocity.
Doctor: Oh. Ah, I think I see some puddy cats. Err, good pussy...
Scene 2: Cheetah people surround Rory and try to attack him.
Scene 3: Doctors dialogue played over assorted shots of humans being menaced by Cheetah people.
Doctor: This is not an invasion, it’s survival of the fittest. The human race has to fight and prove its fit enough to survive in the universe.
Scene 4: Wounded Cheetah person crawling to a lake edge. Amy jumps on it and punches it in the face.
Amy: Don’t mess with my husband you bitch
Scene 5: Doctor on horseback, River standing beside him. A flash and jeeps carrying big game hunters materialise and head towards the Cheetah people firing.
Doctor: Ah, as always the cavalry arrive just in the nick of time.
River swings onto horse behind Doctor and cocks laser rifle...
Doctor: Giddy up Mr. ED
River: Now the hunters become the hunted.
As they ride towards the battle River begins firing into the backs of the fleeing Cheetah people.

Next Time – Kinda: where the Doctor helps a lone officer in the space colonial service destroy a savage tribe who violently resist the progress humanity offers them.

Harry Potter and The Impossible Astronaut

One of the many visual puns for the phrase totally pointless...







I have never been able to understand magic eye pictures. They were all the rage at university, usually on the opposite side of the room to the Dali poster. Their owners would show them off to admiring crowds who would see dolphins, flowers or the meaning of life but all I ever saw was an image resembling vomit made by a rainbow after a Smarties bender. Well that and the headache, nausea and, on one occasion, blackout. I would blame dyslexia but other dyslexics seemed to get them. Eventually a medical student told me some people are not able to visually process them, usually the intellectually sub-normal ones. Great, thanks for that.

The reason I tell you this is it may help put what I am about to say in to perspective. I did not get it, any of it, on any level at all. Yes I watched The Impossible Astronaut & Day of the Moon; call it a sado-masochistic impulse without a happy ending.

My sidebar review was going to read as follows...

A factious exercise in instant gratification that lacked story, character and sense.

However I should probably explain the thought process behind this assessment (please excuse the flagrant immodesty of quoting myself)

1) “factious exercise”

It is not hard to see that Moffat has a few ideas which he simply cuts up and re-uses.

• Time paradoxes and time travel as a get the writer out of a hole mechanism.
• Children – especially young girls. This obviously leads to the juxtaposition of a young girl and her sexualised older self.
• Temporary/fake death of main characters.
• Monsters designed to be what someone imagines will scare rather than having any thought behind them.
• Sex. Handled in a way that makes Doctor Who seem like an episode from Coupling.

Using the above the BBC may as well publish a Make your own Steven Moffat Doctor Who adventure book. Here is a sketch of my attempt


One of The New Day Rising because, according to Moffat and the BBC, a few adult sex references in a childrens show never hurt anyone.










Pre-credit sequence: in the interior of Tardis characters goon around and talk about Earth. Tardis stops, Doctor checks monitor
Doctor: Oh, that’s not cool.
Amy: We’re not on Earth are we?
Doctor: Well, yes. Well, no. Well, the Tardis isn’t sure which one we were meant to be going to.
Cut to exterior. The Tardis is in space surrounded by seven identical Earths.

What ensues is various mincing around as the Tardis crew land, meet The Six, all different versions of child Amy from the alternative Earths (to fulfil the juxtaposition with older, sexually active self just have the six discuss who they would prefer to marry when they are older – The Doctor or Rory), get chased by the main villains of the piece – gimp suit wearing The New Day Rising (imagine temporal Cenobites and you'll have the right idea) and die.

Basic plot: The New Day Rising has engineered several Earths in an attempt to ensure their evolutionary timeline, abandoned by our Earth and timeline, can come to fruition. Episode one can end with the Doctor materialising the Tardis around the six Earths he believes to be fake as they are due to be eradicated in a way which will release enough energy to sterilise the remaining Earth. As he does so The New Day Rising reveal to Amy/Rory/Winsome Song that the Earth he has left is one of their engineered models and The Doctor has served their purpose. Inside the Tardis the Earths begin to explode, tearing the ship apart and causing the Doctor to fall into the fiery maelstrom the Tardis has now become.

Resolution: As the new Earth and timeline begin to reset (World landmarks and people begin to disappear in time with Big Ben chiming – itself fading before the final chime) The six search the vanishing streets finding the Tardis console and a burnt skeleton (just to add to the ridiculous the fire can have burned all the flesh away but left the Doctor’s jacket scorched as a clue to the corpses identity) The regulars are phased out of existence but the six child versions of Amy use the Tardis console and pilot it into the Earths core. Here they are able to re-write everything in a haze of blue light (probably using the residual temporal energy from the changeover in reality is a way to explain away the improbability of this) Cue The Doctor and co in front of the Tardis and a muddled explanation of how the Tardis remembered the Earth and its original timeline back into being (you can even have a line like “Hey nonny nonny, my gal remembered it bonny”)

You see, it is that easy. Don’t deny it. If this was written by Moffat the forums would be quivering with a servile acquiescence to his genius.

However it means nothing. It is a cut and shunt job. If it were a car it would fail the MOT. This is what I mean by factious exercise. It is a programme being written by joining dots rather then any desire to create a congruent story. Like the Harry Potter franchise it has no meaning outside of its own fictional context and merely lowers the expectations of a generation by presenting a level of facile banality. As I have said many, many times there is and always will be a difference between story (what a writer intends to say and drives the events, characters and themes) and the plot (what happens) By joining dots like this there will only ever be one plot, re-presented time and time again in a variety of guises and lacking any story to drive it.

2) “instant gratification”

The main problem with these episodes and others written by Moffat is that they exist to serve the moment. Every scene, every dot and moment is purely for itself.
Already I hear the hordes screaming about the series arc; the temporal pregnancy, the regenerating child and Winsome. These are not linear or congruent aspects of plot or story. Consider the two episodes just passed and ask the following questions. Who were The Silence? Why were they evil? Simply living on the Earth at the same time as us and nudging our history every now and then does not necessarily make them bad. The very cells to our own bodies carry symbiotic organisms which live in harmony with us. How were they linked to the destruction of the Tardis? Why was every creature in creation scared of them? Try to answer them based on what has happened rather than using what we think has happened to fill in the gaps. The answers are pretty sparse. According to the Radio Times The Silence blew up the Tardis. How? Why? The actual answer is that it does not matter. The events happened to serve the moment of television which was being viewed. Think chewing gum without the added bonus of fresh breath. It is a momentary attempt to engage a viewer on an arbitrary level.
This is how modern drama pans out these days. It is easy to write like this. TV people these days use emotions in the same way a drug dealer uses smack; make people experience some form of emotion in excess to the relative experience and they believe people will be hooked. It may not be true but it promotes two unintended results. The first is bad writing. Emotions are a thing of the moment. An emotion can only exist in the present context and is not tethered by reason or rationality. As such drama has stagnated by the obsession with the emotional here and now. Every drama has to continually raise the stakes to keep the emotional provocation working, hence why Eastenders is just downright nasty and malicious. Secondly it can de-sensitise an audience to real experience and sends the message that an emphasis on exaggerated emotions is good. It is not. Have you ever met an emotion junkie? A person who needs to be stressed/angry/happy etc to function? They let the chemicals flow through their bloodstream because it gives them that fix and makes them immune to logic and reason and rationality. Exaggerated emotions are dangerous things, trust me. I’m bi-polar and have experienced enough of them for myself and seen the results in others.
The result is that people who make television programmes do not aspire to an artistic vision or making great drama simply because they rather patronisingly believe that an audience is not interested in such things. There view of the public is so low that they assume people can only function or perceive at the given moment in time on an instinctive, emotional reaction.

3) “lacked story, character and sense”

Some reviewers will credit the episodes as being complicated, this is wrong. They are not complicated just badly written. Congruency was sacrificed for cheap, attention grabbing moments. The reason it appeared complicated is because it was written by someone trying show how clever they are rather than actually being clever.
Look at the fiasco which was the Christmas special. Did anyone in the production team point out the moral implications of what The Doctor does in this story? Essentially changing history and re-writing one mans past to suit his needs is totalitarian. Think what happens to Winston Smith in Room 101. His identity is changed to serve the purpose of a corrupt state. It does not matter if the man was good, evil or misunderstood. In a just democracy even the evil (and lets be honest that word is used to describe almost anyone the right wing press dislikes these days) are entitled to a fair trial. The Doctor abandons any notion of justice or liberty to re-write reality in a way that suits. He wins by cheating rather than doing anything brave or noble. This new Doctor executes The Silence without giving an exact reason as to why they deserve to die other than the fact that these aliens have been living on the Earth and they are different to us. The rather uncomfortable and right wing parallel to immigration here goes against everything the show stood for in the first 26 years.
The fact is the modern show appeals to the middle class right not because the production team are right wing, probably far from it but because of the lazy undercurrent of bourgeoisie humanism. This bourgeoisie humanism is dangerous not because of the good it seeks to do but the arrogance which it promotes. A belief in bourgeoisie humanism is no different to believing in the age old religious notion of human supremacy. Instead of being special because we are chosen by God we become the centre by our own evolutionary prowess. As such any notion that the individual or our species are a transient moment in a greater journey is lost. There is no responsibility inherent in the actions taken because our own transience is ignored for the precious here and now.
In The Brain of Morbius The Doctor states “Death is the price of progress” Moffat reverses this to fall in line with the ideas of human-centric thinking. Death in Doctor Who is no longer real, the lead characters die but come back unharmed. Russian Cosmonists like Federov and his ilk believed it was possible to reverse death and even resurrect the dead. They pictured a glorious and undying race who would reign like Gods. In truth immortality would be hideous. It is the obsession of the unimaginative, decadent and corrupt. Death is the only thing given to us at birth, not just as a leveller but as a motivation. Without death any concept of evolution and the progress which follows wither and stagnate. Moffat is obsessed by faking/cheating death simply because it is the moment, forever and unchanging, and our place at its centre is assured. The Doctor now represents the middle class, human ideal. He does whatever is required to maintain the status quo and prevent progress.
This is what happens when plot is placed over story. You get a series of events that make little sense and promote an agenda which, hopefully, was unintended. Any idea of sense becomes drowned amidst a wave of moves designed to distract the attention rather than engage.
The character of The Doctor is no longer that which I grew up with. He is now a set of mannerisms and tricks of personality that evoke an artifice of moral unaccountability.

Anyway I’ve probably said all of this before. In fact I swore I would never say any of it again.

Look at Transition by Iain Banks (I would actually recommend the unabridged audio version simply because the narration and voice acting is superbly executed.) It is clever, complicated and discusses ideas and concepts through a story not just a plot. It is also about morality and how we must fight to preserve it (left wing in the proper sense of being left wing, not the modern BBC idea of it) It is everything Moffat pretends to be but fails to become.

Sod it, this time I genuinely will read Olaf Stapledon instead.

Doctor Who: A Christmas Carol

Oh, for f***sake.

Ghosts of a Future Lost

This is where my fandom, my hopes and dreams die to become nothing more than a sense of time, place and memory.













"Steven Moffat, who's just the most brilliant writer, told me when I first met him that the interesting thing, the defining thing, about The Doctor is that he never quite knows what's going to come out of his mouth in any given situation."
Matt Smith

Oh dear. Moffat seems to have found a revolver and blown the life from the last vestiges of my fandom.

Now I’ll avoid the bit about Moffat being a brilliant writer (cynical and manipulative, yes – brilliant writer, no) and focus on the main issue I have with this statement. The Doctor is defined by not knowing what he is going to say next.

For me this is at odds with what actually defined the show. The defining thing about The Doctor was not verbal incontinence but a sense of moral purpose. When I say moral I do not mean in the sickening Disney sense of the word but something altogether more elemental. Hartnell described The Doctor as a moral magician and in many ways no one has bettered this statement. The show I grew up watching featured a hero who stood against moral and spiritual corruption; a champion for justice and liberty. He stood against oppression, disarmed mass murders and promoted a little anarchy to ensure victims could shake free the bonds which bound them. This Doctor always knew what he was going to say but did not have to witter on like a lunatic to prove his point. The Doctor stood outside the compromised world of human concerns, able to offer a commentary on the evolution and progress of humanity for all its rights and wrongs.
The Doctor lacked cynicism in his approach to life. He believed life was worth fighting for and his adventures through time and space were, for my growing mind, a search to find a better way of living. The show chided imperialism and xenophobia where other shows did not and lost themselves in a neo-right wing haze (anyone who thinks ST:TNG is liberal really needs to take a long, hard look at their value systems) If anything the cultural ancestry of Doctor Who is rooted in the reforming zeal of Lloyd-Gorge and the Churchillian concept of making a stand against evil.
Above all The Doctor engaged the most exotic and endless resource available, the imagination. Just having monsters and sci-fi plots did not make it imaginative, it was the way the show conveyed all of the above. In many ways the budgetary and technical limitations of the past are what made it. Writers could not indulge in pointless set pieces or SFX designed to distract the attention. Instead the show had to draw from the principles of gothic fiction. The show had to lean towards melodrama and metaphysical concerns.
Now I am aware that the past is not 26 years of perfect television. I have watched The Dominators. Yet the above was the ethos which drove it and some writers understood these underlying ideas more than others. At least it tried even if it was doomed to failure.
However The Doctor is now reduced to a series of catchphrases, gimmicks and tricks to affect a sense of personality rather than an actual character with purpose. There is no concern behind the episodes other than that which is in the plot and the SFX drive and set pieces prove the show is a distraction and little else.
This is best demonstrated by the recent case of Norton’s revenge. I missed the actual incident but saw the wave of fanboy fury because a little cartoon Graham Norton popped up at the end of the episode. So what? When the show was relaunched those involved talked of it as a drama programme. A year or so later they began talking of it as a children’s show. The fact that the BBC had a Saturday indent featuring a cartoon montage of Doctor Who, Total Wipe-out and whatever that piece of Lloyd-Webber trash was (I still have trouble believing he is allowed to use the BBC so he can simply fill his already overflowing wallet, what a @*&$) should be enough indication. Modern Doctor Who is nothing more than a bland and sterile piece of entertainment, it is not meant to engage or provoke on a level more than Total Wipe-out.
Ultimately what Moffat is actually saying when he says The Doctor does not know what he is going to say next is that he himself does not know what he is going to have him say next. This is simply because there is no tapestry of meaning or concern anymore. This is not only wrong but leads to questionable writing practices.
Example 1) Paul Cornell always struck me as the kind of person who believes they are left wing but are only left wing in the same way as somebody who sits in Starbucks sipping a fair-trade coffee and reading Things Fall Apart thinks they are being left wing. His work has a major flaw and it is one which stands at the heart of the present show. If you listen to Seasons of Fear you will hear the Romans worship Mithras which, according to the story, is a mystical bull. No, he was not. Mithras was not a bull but an early Christ like figure (the similarities are almost embarrassing for Christianity) What Cornell actually does is what the white Anglo-Saxon protestants always do; reduce other religions to some form of monstrous barbarism. In his novel Revelation we have The Doctor friends with a sentient church and a reverend. In Father’s Day the only sanctuary is a Church and Human Nature is about white, posh upper class people being terribly brave in the face of nasty aliens/the Hun. It is important to stress this simply because we now have a Doctor who celebrates Christmas and Easter. The Doctor has been reduced to a WASP messiah for middle England. Any idea of characterisation has been sacrificed so we have a Doctor who soothes us rather than judges us. The modern show is intolerant to difference and diversity. Aliens have to be evilly monstrous and the hero has to sacrifice his alienisms to be more like us for acceptance.
Example 2) Now Chibnall needs to stop. Everything. There really is no point.
Example 3) The thing about Mark Gatiss is he still thinks Nigel Kneale was a good writer. Almost every script indulges in a bit of necrophilia with the Quatermass legacy in some way. For me Doctor Who, as I knew it, has more in common with the works of Charles Chilton than it does Kneale. The Quatermass stories are about threats to the status quo and how to save it whilst Journey into Space is about questioning the present to evolve for the future. Doctor Who questioned. Doctor Who was about progress and change for the better, not the unquestioning maintenance of the present.
Example 4) Obviously the nastiest example of modern Doctor Who is the Matt Jones cataclysm. A story so devoid of any redeeming features it borders on just being cruel. Somehow the whole story takes the essential core meaning of the first 26 years and reverses it. The Ood are an oppressed race and The Doctor does not even question it. Instead we get a ropey political metaphor about possessed masses rising up against their captors deserving to die (in the subtext the possession can be paralleled to political awakening or knowledge) and some guff about the devil, which Phil Collinson thought made it better than Pyramids of Mars. Of course this is the man who also thinks Emmerdale counts as a serious drama programme.

It would be easy to suggest the casting of Matt Smith lacked imagination. I have nothing against him in particular, if anything he is preferable to the celebrity attention seeker who we have just got rid of, but he was a safe choice (the costume an even safer one) The fevered brains of media execs would have baulked at the possibilities of doing something different simply because they are driven by a paranoia fuelled sense of worst case scenario thinking. This type of over wrought imagining leaves those in charge of artistic output paralysed by a multiplicity of possible failures any choice, be it revolutionary or regressive, offers. It is patronising to always think an audience will reject something because contrary to what these people believe there is no such thing as a typical Doctor Who viewer. In fact there is no such thing as a typical viewer for any type of programme. Yet the belief that there is persists and eventually limits the cultural and artistic quality of what is on offer.
As Stephen Fry pointed out television is now a question of perceived demographics. Every programme is parcelled and delivered to a specific audience type which, in my reckoning, probably does not exist. He also points out that Doctor Who is a children’s programme. Again, this is a problem. Doctor Who was a drama programme. When it returned with Christopher Eccleston it was a drama programme but somewhere along the way it was decided to aim at a particular audience group. I disagree with Fry when he says the show is well written. It is not, Chibnall proves that much. Even if it is for a children it should not mean that any sense of being something more than it is should be eradicated. Even a children’s programme should not be childish in its dramatic vocabulary. I have discussed audience chasing before and will re-iterate that it limits and patronises. A genuine piece of drama has no audience in mind simply because it discusses the basic human consciousness we all share, there is no need to target a particular group because it recognises there is no one overall group. It is accessible to all.
If the Stephen Fry interview did not annoy fandom then the restrained comments of Christopher Eccleston surely must have passed the dozing masses by. In an interview with the Radio Times he talks about his reasons for leaving. For me, it was heartbreaking. Let me re-state for the record, Christopher Eccleston was everything The Doctor was, should have and could have been. He realised the character in a manner which released 26 years worth of pent up potential and I will always love him for it. I’m not going to elaborate on the article, mainly out of respect. It is not for me to use the words of Christopher Eccleston to justify my own argument. Read it and draw your own conclusions.


Now I’m arrogant enough to consider myself right on all five of my predictions about The Pandorica Opens but the fan forums practically had to clear their boards of fan-jism as people climaxed over the episode, even though it was nothing more than a Brannon Braga re-write of Doctor Who: The Ultimate Adventure (and that is wrong in at least two very fundamental ways) I have actually begun writing this, I’m thinking of it as my fandom’s suicide note, hours before The Big Bang. I think I may watch it but would not be bothered if I missed it. I am no longer bothered about seeing another episode for many years to come.
I find myself alienated, or perhaps I am alienating myself, from the show. It is no longer a unique and beautiful programme but a process of reduction and distraction. Leaden ideas are given a glitzy make over to compensate for a paucity of content and imagination, all thanks to a tightly knit cabal of writers intent on re-living their childhood fantasies free from the responsibility and desire to progress human consciousness or culture.

There is nothing in Doctor Who for me now.

There will be no more posts.

My fandom dies here.

This is the end.

The final end.

Jack in the box - Part 2

The Pandorica Opens

Meanwhile, at the Legion of Doom...

Jack in the box

Five Ood like predictions about The Pandorica Opens.

1) Rather than containing the most evil thing in all creation, the Great Vampire in a Mara skin coat for example, it will contain something as threatening as a pale green Sunday.

2) Matt Smith will be made to recite dialogue which sounds more like a DVD commentary entitled The Plot Explained rather than an actual character talking.

3) Yet again we will learn that the Doctor only meets people bound up the fate of the Universe and his destiny.

4) Not only will it be a cynically written, Moffat does Doctor Who-by-numbers, fanboy fetish but fandom will love it simply because it is a cynically written, Moffat does Doctor Who-by-numbers, fanboy fetish.

5) Remember how the original Star Trek considered cliched time paradox storylines as cutting edge sci-fi drama? Well, here we go again... forty years later...

A rose by any other name...

The tragedy of a great man who could not reconcile his genius to the world around him... Soon to be in the West End after Andrew Lloyd Webber and Graham Norton use more public money to cast a private enterprise in Any Ear Will Do


Ok, this week stood on the edge of greatness but fell short.

The programme makers seem to harbour a near all-consuming cowardice in regards making drama. This probably stems from a patronising belief that a wider audience, children included, would not have the intellectual capacity to deal with something genuinely affecting.
Calling the episode Vincent and The Doctor was misleading as it was not really about either. Any time the script started to approach some form of character integrity it was undermined by the need to have a pointless monster stomping around. Essentially the episode had a story smothered by the production teams need to play upon shallow hokum and turn historical figures into a celebrity of the week.
The episode did not need a monster. It was pointless. The actual story, albeit struggling to emerge, was about Vincent, Amy and the Doctor. The idea of Amy trying to change the tragedy of Van Gough’s suicide, with the Doctor knowing the inevitability of history, would have made an episode above anything on TV that week. The best points of the episode were the ones separate to the usual monster mash we have come to accept. Amy presenting Vincent with the sunflowers; Van Gough’s bi-polar swing from melancholy to anger making him unpredictable to be around; the great mans disregard for his own work. These were some of the best written scenes the show has seen since RTD wrote for the Christopher Eccleston era. However, before you think I’ve gone soft in the head and started saying nice things for a change...

I have a problem with Curtis and much of his work. Firstly he is prone to sentiment. The final scenes of Vincent in the gallery were just wallowing and a cheap shot to provide an emotional denouement for the audience. The drama would have held the context on its own. The second problem is that Curtis deals with what we shall loosely term “issues” in the way that all middle class, champagne socialist, liberals like to. He lectures in the belief he is making a difference when, in actuality, he is just conscience soothing. By telling others of the importance of Africa or mental health issues he may believe he is making a difference. No, this is just a messianic conceit. Look at how Bono lectures others on poverty whist wearing designer clothes or how Slumdog Millionaire made people feel better about third world poverty because it portrayed hope in, what is really, an endlessly hopeless situation. It has nothing to do with resolving a situation but everything to do with exploiting it for a selfish moral reassurance and sustaining of self-worth. People who genuinely care about these issues do not make fortunes from shoddy rom-coms and then tell others about how guilty we should all feel. They dedicate their lives to their cause. Anything else is just the worst kind of self-deceit imaginable.
Incidentally, I’m pretty sure Van Gough is unlikely to have used the phrase sonny... ever, in his whole life. If you’re going to write stay true to the characters.

Anyway, next week it is a Gareth Roberts story. I’ll be giving it a miss, that man has already wasted an hour and a half of my life.