The Sound of Empires Toppling (Frontier in Space)

Only Doctor Who would finally give aliens masks where
they can have facial expressions, then have them
just look tired and busy all the time.

It's February 24, 1973. The Sweet continue to be at number one with "Blockbuster," but are unseated after one week by Slade's "Cum On Feel The Noize," a more emphatic anthem. It lasts four weeks before Donny Osmond unleashes "The Twelfth of Never." Roberta Flack's "Killing Me Softly With His Song," T. Rex's "Twentieth Century Boy," Alice Cooper's "Hello Hurray," and the Jackson 5's, consisting at this point of Jackie, Tito, Michael, Jermaine, and Marlon, cover of Browne's "Doctor My Eyes" all also chart. Also during the course of this story, Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon is released.

The day before Pink Floyd's release, on the other hand, came Thomas Pynchon's release of Gravity's Rainbow. Other non-musical events of the six weeks included voters in Northern Ireland voting to remain part of the UK (Irish nationalists supported a boycott of the referendum), while IRA bombs go off in London. The Governor of Bermuda is assassinated by a small Bermudan black nationalist group. The Watergate scandal begins to blossom in the news, while in the UK is the Lofthouse Colliery disaster, a mining accident in which seven coal workers died in West Yorkshire.

On television we have Frontier in Space, the annual Malcolm Hulke Lizard People Extravaganza. As with all of Season Ten, there's more going on here than in similar stories from past seasons. Which is good. One could be forgiven for thinking that we've been here before, after all. The Master manipulating two parties into a conflict for his own benefit. Misunderstandings between humans and lizard people. Pig-headed military figures. I'd link those phrases to the appropriate Hulke stories, but one is spoiled for choice - literally every Hulke story to date has qualified for at least two of that list.

The thing about the Pertwee era is that in a real sense, it builds logically and inexorably towards a peak in Season Ten. To give a sort of map of the era, at least for our purposes here, it spends its first three years working out a bundle of anxieties and contradictions. Then its last two seasons each end up embodying one half of that split, with Season Ten as the brilliant glam monument and Season Eleven basically flopping around like a dead fish. This is a strange split. It's not that Season Ten is doing something massively different from the seasons on either side of it. Season Nine has its Hulke lizard story. Season Eleven has its Hulke lizard story.

But for some odd, ineffable reason, perhaps down to nothing more than the lingering energy of the madcap singularity that was The Three Doctors, perhaps down to Doctor Who just being in the exact right place to catch a social wave, the show is on fire in 1973. Everything they try comes off, even when (as in the next story), it has no right to. Yes, we'll eventually get to our traditional Sloman Curate's Egg, but even that's good this year, as these things go. So here we get the Hulke story where every part just works.

Part of this is that Hulke, who was always chomping at the bit for the earthbound format's demise, is clearly giddy to have a TARDIS to play with again. The appeal of the TARDIS has always been more than just its ability to go anywhere. Equally important is its ability to leave anywhere - to keep the show from being trapped in one premise for too long. Instead it gets to come up with a neat idea, explore the major consequences and highlights of the idea, and get out before things get too boring.

Just as last time we talked about the comparative ordinariness of situations the TARDIS landed in in its early days, this time we should remind ourselves of the sort of genre romps that characterized the early days of the show - most obviously things like The Gunfighters or The Smugglers, but also things like The Web Planet or the slightly later The Enemy of the World. What these stories have in common is that they all take a high concept setting, explore the high points of dropping the Doctor into that setting, and then end and allow the show to move on to something else. This is one of the basic modes of operation for Doctor Who: drop the Doctor into X, where X is something well known and pre-existing, then pull him out when you've used up your best ideas on that.

So here we get the Doctor thrown into a good old fashioned sci-fi space opera. And it's delightful. Both Pertwee and Manning give the sense of having fun in this story to a degree that they haven't really before, and it carries over to the characters. At one point, upon realizing that an unknown agent is using the Ogrons to try to spark a galactic war between the Human and Draconian empires and that this unknown agent has stolen the TARDIS, the Doctor and Jo seem to be kind of chuffed about it, as if they're glad to be having some fun. Likewise, while the Doctor is emphatic and furious as the leaders of Earth and Draconia ignore his warnings, he clearly takes a real joy in repeatedly breaking their mind probes.

On top of that you've got the basic thrill in the scope of the story. And not only in terms of its steadily escalating scale, going from being concerned about Ogrons raiding ships and a diplomatic crisis to being bout chasing the Daleks, the Master, and the Ogrons around in a desperate attempt to stop an all-out war. The scale and escalation is wonderful, and we'll talk about the absolutely wonderful build and twists of this in a bit, but equally impressive is the degree to which this story moves around. Multiple space-ships, several Earth locations, the homeworld of the Draconians, and the homeworld of the Ogrons are all traveled to, giving this story a sort of giddy sense of scope and wonder.

Yes, the Draconians are just the Japanese in lizard costumes, but again, that curious tendency of Season Ten to just get on with it and make it work is on full display, with the Draconians being the beneficiaries both of Hulke’s hobby horse of making alien species actually have multiple characters with distinct personalities and perspectives instead of a hive mind and from costume designers who managed to give them the ability to still have facial expressions. The masks are as much a high point of the Pertwee era’s effects as the CSO in Carnival of Monsters is a low point. (Legend, used here in the sense of “the stories Jon Pertwee told over and over again in every interview and convention appearance,” claims that Pertwee, during lunch, got to talking to one of the Draconian actors and forgot he was talking to a man in a costume.)

And yes, two empires on the brink of war is not a particularly original concept so much as it’s the most generic pulp sci-fi imaginable. But Doctor Who has never relied entirely or even primarily on original concepts. Yes, it uses them, and when it does it’s usually wonderful - case in point, the last story. But just as often and just as validly, Doctor Who goes with juxtaposing two concepts that are, on their own, fairly normal, but that don’t normally go together. So while warring space empires are nothing new, they’re also not something we’ve see the Doctor running around in the middle of, and they’re certainly not something we’ve seen Pertwee’s drag action hero running around in.

Which is to say that this is a story that is much more than the sum of its parts, and another sadly overlooked gem of Season Ten. On paper it’s filler - a five and a half episode runaround before the Daleks show up and we get a ten minute trailer for the next story without really resolving the plot of this one. But in execution, it’s a masterful slow build that lets the dramatic tension reach its breaking point before finally exploding in a genuinely unexpected direction.

We should talk here, then, about the Master. For the first time in Doctor Who history, he’s actually used as the surprise reveal that eventually becomes so tiresomely standard. But here it’s wonderfully fresh, with the Master being put into an already bad situation and immediately making it worse for everyone. This is the surprise reveal that every subsequent Master story tries and usually fails to equal.

The thing is, if we’re being honest, it’s a bit of a move of desperation. That doesn’t make it any less brilliant or effective - it’s definitely both. But on the other hand, in less than two and a half years, Roger Delgado appears in thirty-nine episodes of Doctor Who. In comparison, Vicki only appears in thirty-eight episodes total, and in the twenty-five months after their first appearances the Daleks and Cybermen appeared in thirty-two and twenty-six episodes respectively. While I love Delgado’s Master, the fact remains that this is a staggering level of frequency for one villain played by one actor.

One result of this is that, inevitably, and with no particular story being at fault, the Master has gone from being a character who transgresses against the narrative and throws it into chaos to being virtually the most predictable character on the show. Where Jo has found more and more outlandish and remarkable ways to break the rules of the narrative, the Master, because he always needs to be defeated, has been trapped in an increasingly small set of schemes. As we feared when it happened, there was nowhere to go but down once he summoned the Devil.

And so introducing him as a surprise twist has to be taken as a survival mechanism - a clever but desperate attempt to find a way to get the character to be unexpected and threatening again instead of a chump who will be defeated the same way he’s always defeated - when his ambitious goes too far and his scheme backfires. Which is how he’s been defeated in every prior story save for The Claws of Axos, whether because his allies betray him (Terror of the Autons, The Sea Devils), because some all-powerful being he sought to control tells him to piss off (Colony in Space, The Daemons, The Time Monster), or because the Doctor successfully turns his own plan against him (The Mind of Evil, and, ultimately, here).

And here we’re forced into a really awkward situation where we have to be very careful about speaking unkindly of the dead. I mean, not that I’ve been hesitant in slamming Barry Letts, Jon Pertwee, or William Hartnell when they’ve screwed up, but Delgado is different. Delgado died far too young, and his death is the sole reason this story is his last appearance. His contributions to the show were uniformly fantastic, and even in a problematic story like The Time Monster, Delgado does an incredible amount with what can charitably be called difficult writing to work with. I have nothing bad to say about Delgado whatsoever, and strictly in terms of the actor himself, it’s an appalling tragedy that his last appearance should be a poorly edited scene with a bunch of grunting monkey aliens as opposed to a proper, grand farewell.

That said, in terms of the Master, this is the best thing that could have happened to him. First of all, let’s remember the story that would have been his farewell had he not been killed in a car crash. A Sloman epic in which we were to learn that the Master is literally the Doctor’s dark side and where the Doctor would fail to save him and be haunted by the guilt. This sounds hackneyed enough reading about it. Imagining it written with the staggering haphazardness of the Sloman/Letts team is simply excruciating. It is impossible to watch The Time Monster or even The Daemons and imagine that this team could have made a story like that work, because they completely botched the dramatic beats and tension of both previous Doctor/Master stories they attempted.

If we assume, as it seems like we have to, that Delgado’s intended final story would have been a train wreck, if nothing else the fact that he got to go out in a clever Malcolm Hulke story instead has to be taken as something of a blessing. Frankly, the character is probably more beloved for having avoided that disaster in the making.

But more to the point, the Master was increasingly starting to fail as a character. As I said, he’d been overexposed without enough variety or new ideas, and ever since The Sea Devils, where he ended up badly dumbing down the moral complexity of what could have otherwise been an extremely successful updating and streamlining of the brilliant but flawed The Silurians, his appearances have been a mixed blessing at best. Delgado is great, but his character hasn’t helped a story in some time.

Hulke, to his credit, actually seems aware of that. Certainly he recognizes that the Master and Jo, introduced in the same story, have expanded in different directions. The Master has progressively become a more and more limited character while Jo has become more transgressive and capable of contorting the narrative. And so in this story the Master attempts to recycle his first trick with Jo and hypnotize her. And she casually kicks his ass. Even when he later tries to reassert his dominance over her by granting her a fake escape to trap the Doctor, it’s rubbish on his part. Yes, Jo led the Doctor to an Ogron ambush, but the fact of the matter is, the Doctor would have gone to rescue Jo even if he had known about the ambush. He was looking for the base and Jo told him where it was. Had she not escaped, he’d have found the base and still been ambushed by the Ogrons. The Master’s “tricking” of Jo has zero effect.

But more importantly, Hulke ends up executing a hilarious and brilliant snub on the overused character. Three episodes after his surprise unveiling as the story’s real villain he gets upstaged by another surprise reveal in which it turns out that he’s not the real villain, the Daleks are. And then he gets shoved offstage unceremoniously so we can have the real star attraction: Dalek fighting! It’s a bit of cynicism worthy of Robert Holmes, but it’s spot on. If nothing else, the reverse reveal - the Daleks are secretly working for the Master - would have been a crushing anticlimax. Hulke is right. The Master is small potatoes compared to Daleks.

So while it’s an awful ending for a great actor, for a character that, largely due to the mistakes of Sloman and Letts, has passed his peak and begun to become a liability, there’s a delightful justice in shoving him offstage in favor of a better foe for the Doctor. If nothing else, for better or worse the character’s survival past Delgado hinges entirely on the fact that he got this sort of unsatisfying abandonment instead of a capstone epic. Because there was something unfinished about the Master, he came back.

But even beyond that, there’s a sense that in that moment the show is making a real and meaningful decision about what it is. The Master, as a character, existed in part because by trapping the Doctor on Earth the show lost one of its major engines to bring in strange and unusual things into the plot. So it created a character who would engage in bewildering schemes that make the stories more exciting. But now that the show is back in space, the Master is a crutch - a way of padding out a story that’s run out of steam. Hulke makes it work here, but it works because it’s the first time it’s happened. The entire Ainley era of the character is a sobering reminder of what happens when this approach becomes the norm.

So instead the show turns away from that approach and towards a belief that the TARDIS means that you don’t need gimmick characters to jumpstart the plot. Instead we turn to the first great monster of Doctor Who and prepare for the encounter that we were teased and denied last time they appeared. It’s time for a big ‘ol Dalek story the likes of which we haven’t seen since 1966.

Because that’s the other thing about this story. The Dalek reveal is, in fact, absolutely brilliant. For one thing, given a need to upstage the Master, the Daleks were literally the only things that could do that. For another, it’s just the right thing to do. Especially since their last appearance was such a tease, having restored the Doctor and the premise of the show, one of the things the show needs to do as a part of showing that it has fully reclaimed its own mantle is to show that it can still do the Daleks.

It is, after all, they who upstage the Master and take over the story. They are, in this regard, the last true threat the show has - characters that can plow in and completely unhinge and distort the narrative. Their appearance is a delicious throwing down of the gauntlet - a case of the show saying “Bah, this situation is too easy for the Doctor to get out of. Let’s see him get out of this!” And Friday, we’ll see how he does.

The Outside Universe is Breaking Through (Carnival of Monsters)

Ah, realism.

It's January 27th, 1973. The Sweet's "Blockbuster" has mercifully brought an end to this unfortunate Jimmy Osmond business, and hold number one for four weeks, marking a pleasant restoration of glam rock order. Gary Glitter, Elton John, David Bowie, and ELO all also chart. In non-musical news, Roe v. Wade is decided in the US, the US ends its involvement in Vietnam by signing the Paris Peace Accords, while in the UK the Sunday Times wins a court case allowing it to publish articles on thalidomide, as it was increasingly turning out that people should probably have figured out that in addition to reducing nausea in pregnant women it also caused them to give birth to deformed flipper babies. Oops.

While on television we have Carnival of Monsters. It ought go without saying that Carnival of Monsters is the best Pertwee story to date, probably the best period, and flat-out one of the best Doctor Who stories ever. And yet somehow it does not go without saying. In fact, on the big Doctor Who Magazine poll, Carnival of Monsters inexplicably finishes behind Inferno, The Daemons, The Silurians and The Sea Devils - and those are just the stories it's completely bewildering why anyone would prefer to this, as opposed to the ones where I can at least squint and pretend that there's some logic to.

The thing is, if you ask non-fans, it's clear this story's reputation is right where it should be. It's not a coincidence that this is the one used for the Five Faces of Doctor Who repeat, was among the earlier DVD releases, and has generally acquired a reputation as the goto Pertwee story for the general public. Which makes this a case of that classic problem where Doctor Who fans occasionally know far less about Doctor Who than anyone else.

It's worth taking a step backwards here and looking at season ten as a whole. Like all the Pertwee seasons, it consists of five stories. Unlike any of the other Pertwee seasons, fully four of these are "event" stories - that is, stories in which a character recycled from an earlier story appears or stories in which a major character debuts or departs. The only other Pertwee season to have anything like this sort of pure focus on event stories is Season 8, and that's only true if you want to overlook the fact that the Master wasn't an "event" yet.

More broadly, the Pertwee era is actually strangely short on primarily self-contained stories. If we take a broad view and count stories that are "events" for historical reasons - things like The Silurians or The Time Warrior - Pertwee ends up with only four stories in his entire tenure that are definitively not event stories: The Ambassadors of Death, Inferno, The Mutants, and this. And save Inferno, that list consists of stories I've claimed are underrated.

The non-event status of Carnival of Monsters, however, is more than just a reason why it's oddly overlooked by fans. It's the entire point of the story. What's so interesting about it is the fact that it is the only Pertwee story to actively pursue a small scale instead of a large one. For the most part only a handful of people are ever in any peril. If you try to spin events you can just about get away with the claim that for a few minutes the fate of an entire planet is at stake, but if we're being honest, the bulk of this story is an old carnie arguing with some bureaucrats while the Doctor runs around inside a television. In a series that was doing threats to the entire universe last week and will be doing galactic war next story, this is astonishingly and willfully low rent.

But to call this a flaw in the story is to commit yourself to a deeply strange view of Doctor Who whereby its purpose is to do vast and sweeping epics. This isn't a criticism of vast and sweeping epics, which can be marvelous, but the pattern of the show in its early years mixed vast epics in with other stories. Something like The Aztecs or The Sensorites is not a huge story about planet and universe-threatening menaces. Even into the Troughton era, a story like Fury From the Deep, The Krotons, or The Macra Terror is considerably smaller scale than anything in seasons nine or ten other than this.

The value of these small scale stories cannot be overstated. One thing that has been frustrating about the Pertwee era has been the way in which Pertwee's Doctor is so patrician compared to many of the others. And part of that is because he's so often removed from humanity. This is a real problem, especially given that the challenge laid down at the start of the Pertwee era was to connect with humanity better than the psychedelic irresponsibility of Troughton's Doctor did. The fact that Pertwee's Doctor spends almost all of his time rushing around offices full of important and powerful men while everyday characters tend to just be generic comedy yokels is frustrating in light of that. Off-planet things have been better, with Colony in Space involving heavy engagement with a more working class band of people and The Mutants interacting heavily with oppressed populations, but more really than any other Doctor, Pertwee's Doctor is one who spends the overwhelming majority of his time interacting with people in power.

And so for this story, the first since the basic premise of the show was restored, it's particularly important to break this cycle and show the Doctor interacting with ordinary people, if only to make sure that that's firmly embedded in the premise of the show. In this regard, Carnival of Monsters is an odd inversion of the last time the TARDIS went on its first trip after the premise of the show is set up - a point that is particularly important given what the next two stories hold.

After establishing its premise in An Unearthly Child, the next thing the show did was go to a strange alien world and show us a truly brilliant science fiction concept in the form of the Daleks. More broadly, it introduced the basic idea of monsters. This makes sense. Having introduced two ordinary characters - Ian and Barbara - the first thing it needs to do is take them somewhere truly extraordinary. But here the show has the opposite issue - having spent fifteen stories doing huge, epic, planet-threatening stories in which the Doctor dashes around in the halls of power, the first thing the show needs to do, ironically, is go for the ordinary.

What's really funny about all of this is that the whole Yeti-in-the-loo premise was supposed to avoid this problem. The whole point of the earthbound format was that it was supposed to show monsters in ordinary places. Instead, it was largely, and even from its earliest moments, about showing monsters in iconic British, and more specifically English, places - Post Office Tower, Gatwick Airport, the Underground, or St. Paul's, for instance. What it has, up to now, basically never been used for is making the stores relevant to the viewer's life. Socially relevant, sure - we've got plenty of that. But relevant in that intimate, personal way? No. That we've basically avoided, with the exception, basically, of Holmes's last story.

It's not until Carnival of Monsters, with our first real back-to-space-and-time story, that we actually get a story that engages the viewer's life and world. Because Carnival of Monsters is fundamentally about the act of watching television. The entire story is a commentary on the act of passively watching spectacles and what that means. In this regard its high point has to be taken as the moment in which Jo responds in horror at the idea that anyone would be so cruel as to want to watch her get chased around by monsters, and says that anyone who does must be evil and horrible. For all that Vorg insists that the purpose of the show is to amuse, as opposed to do something serious or political, the story immediately shows the absurdity of that by turning the very act of watching the show into an ethical issue.

On top of that, there's an emotional realness to Vorg that secondary characters in Doctor Who have lacked up until this point. Vorg is a penniless drifter trying to keep his head above water and barely managing. He doesn't know what he's doing - quite literally, as it eventually turns out he's lost the manual to his miniscope. His major opponents are not horrible monsters but generic bureaucrats. He is, in other words, a very literal working class hero - someone trying to survive in a hostile system that is designed to benefit people other than him. That he's visually still firmly in the glitzy, glam aesthetic of Doctor Who makes the disjunct all the more appealing.

On top of that, we have a proper, classic case of Doctor Who embracing constraints and playing with them. The entire reason this story was made was that, seeing that the rest of the season was going to be really expensive, the show needed a cheap one. And specifically, Barry Letts, who had converted Doctor Who's production method from doing one episode a week to doing two episodes simultaneously in a two week block, wanted to try a specific method of making the show cheaper: have two sets and two groups of actors who would never actually interact with each other. Hence Ian Marter and company are on the SS Bernice while Vorg and the rest are on Inter Minor - Letts could shoot one set of actors in the first two week block, then the other in the second and, in the process, get away with paying all the actors save Pertwee and Manning for two weeks' work instead of four.

But what's interesting is, having come up with a cost-saver, Letts took on the directing himself and gave the script to one of the series' best writers. In other words, the production team came up with a cost-saving approach, but didn't attempt to sacrifice episode quality. They put their best people on the task of doing an episode for cheaper. This is actually a bit funny - after the ridiculous laziness of stories that were supposed to be big such as the almost Dalek-free Day of the Daleks and the almost taste-free Time Monster, the production team finally pulls out all the stops and goes for the throat with their cheap story.

But another way to look at this is something we don't really see often at all in the Pertwee era - the production team trying to challenge themselves instead of playing it safe. Even the Pertwee era's most avant grade episodes - The Claws of Axos, for instance - have a strange conservativeness to them. They do what is expected of them and throw in lots of crowd-pleasers. Compare to Carnival of Monsters, whose monsters look like crap (as Robert Holmes expected, hence him making their names an anagram of dishrags, which he predicted would be what they were made of), but where we have a technically ambitious script, the producer taking an active hand in making it come off. It's refreshing, especially in an era that was often far too willing to decide that just putting Roger Delgado in would liven up a flaccid script.

So what we get here is not a big story. Instead, it's an interesting story, a fantastically made story, and a story where everyone is putting in considerably more effort than they are in many of the "big" stories. It's trying for greatness, instead of being a big hit, and it actually makes it. And yet it's often overlooked in favor of stories that are more like what it pokes fun at - trifles purely to amuse that are big hits with the kids. The fact of the matter is, the worst thing one can say about this story is it really shows how much better the rest of the Pertwee era could have been had the production team gone for "interesting" more often than it went for "big."

Instead we're left with an unfortunate fact: the Pertwee era is at its best when it most resembles the era immediately after it. A lot of what makes this story good is that it displays the traits that Robert Holmes eventually becomes known for. And the fact of the matter is, once he takes over as script editor and most of the stories show at least some of these traits, the show jumps to a whole new level of brilliance. We've brought much of the production team in for criticism at one time or another in the Pertwee era, and here it's time to admit it. The very skills that make Terrance Dicks the best person to go to for a functional novelization - his capacity to efficiently craft extremely competent, exciting plots - are at times a liability for him as a script editor. He can do exciting and thrilling like nobody else, but Dicks is first and foremost an entertainer.

Holmes, on the other hand, is certainly a capable entertainer, but it's not what he is. Holmes has always had more of a willingness to risk upsetting his audience. There's a part of me that thinks The Space Pirates is most easily read as Holmes trying to show Derick Sherwin how dumb an idea asking for a "realistic" space story was in the first place. And even if it isn't, look at things like Holmes's willingness to suggest the audience is morally bankrupt for watching the show in this story, or his eventual aggression towards the audience with The Two Doctors. Holmes weds a fantastic ear for dialogue and a knack for visual set pieces to the fact that he has something to say and the fact that he has a better sense of character than anyone else who has written for the show to date.

The result is a writer who turns out something like this, as opposed to the well-done straightforward adventure yarns Terrance Dicks is the master of. And if we're being honest, comparing this even to the last story (which Dicks did heavy rewrites on), while The Three Doctors is mad and complex and requires an insane blog entry to cover, Carnival of Monsters is by miles the better written story and has the better vision of what Doctor Who should be. Simply put, Holmes has more faith in what the program can do than Dicks. He can't take over as script editor fast enough.

This Point of Singularity (The Three Doctors)

Omega

It's 1807. Major hit songs of the year include Ludwig van Beethoven's Mass in C, the ballet Hélène and Paris, the operas Joseph and La Vestale, and Thomas Moore's publication of Irish Melodies. While in non-musical news, Napoleon makes an attack on Russia, Aaron Burr is acquitted of conspiracy, the England/Argentina soccer rivalry has pre-season friendly as Britain mounts a disastrous attack on Buenos Aires, and Robert Fulton launches his first American steamboat.

While in London, William Blake abandons his masterpiece, The Four Zoas. Intended as the culmination to a lengthy series of what are now described as his "mythological works," the piece was never finished to Blake's satisfaction, although parts of it were recycled into Jerusalem, one of his two last great mythological pieces (the other being Milton, A Poem, whose introduction gave the words to "And did those feet in ancient times, arguably now England's most popular hymn and unofficial national anthem).

Fingers stained with ink and the caustic acids of his relief etchings, Blake stares with an unfathomable eye at angels, gods, and demons. A visionary in every sense of the word, he sees within the festering wounds of industry the promise of salvation, sees the fall of man in a pastoral landscape. From within one meager corner of this unbound and incommensurable vision we see Nebuchadnezzar, bestial king of Babylon cast down into insanity for his hubris. The mad king speaks:

Without me, there would be no time travel. You and our fellow Time Lords would still be locked in your own time, as puny as those creatures you now so graciously protect. Many thousands of years ago, when I left our planet, all this was then a star until I arranged its detonation. It was an honour, or so I thought then. I was to be the one to find and create the power source that would give us mastery over time itself. I was sacrificed to that supernova. I generated those forces, and for what? To be blown out of existence into this black hole of antimatter? My brothers became Time Lords, but I was abandoned and forgotten!

And in his universe of antimatter, dark Urizen prepares. A lost shard of holy Albion, fallen and abject, Urizen spins law, gives shape and form to the universe. A solar engineer, Urizen collapses a sun into a cosmological abscess, a crack in the skin of the world. He does not create law so much as extrude it from his being, forming his net of continuity and myth purely by being. His gravity is inescapable. Here begins the long history of Rassilon and the Other, of secret centuries-old plots to destroy Skaro and looms. Here is the line between question and answer, between mystery and revelation.

He is called a fallen Time Lord, but this is wrong, implying a unity of Time Lords prior to his fall. Rather it is his fall, the schism of some primordial entity, that creates these categories in the first place. Time Lords and Urizen are both fragmentations of some greater being - each the emanation of the other. Urizen is that which is not Time Lord, that which can never be Time Lord. Time Lords are that which is not Urizen, and that which can never be Urizen.

Aware of this gulf, aware of that space his laws cannot encircle, Urizen casts out his emanation as he cast out Ahania, leaves them to wither, draining their very energy, unmaking them. This is not unification, not the reclamation of Edenic totality, but something else, a further splitting and division towards mere corpuscles suspended in ether, a world of single objects in static, known forms.

Dire shriek'd his invisible Lust
Deep groan'd Urizen! stretching his awful hand
Ahania (so name his parted soul)
He siez'd on his mountains of jealousy.
He groand anguishd & called her Sin,
Kissing her and weeping over her;
Then hid her in darkness in silence;
Jealous tho' she was invisible.

If we are to understand the Time Lords as the protectors of the arc of history, then we must understand them first as agents of change. When the Doctor declares that being without becoming is an ontological absurdity, he is firmly within the intellectual tradition of existentialism. To be said to exist, a thing must exist within time, must be subject to change. Central to the idea of a "thing" is the prospect of its encounter and interaction with other things, the prospect of it shaping and being shaped.

Are the Time Lords themselves subject to this process? They must be - to exist they must be changed, must alter continuously. Nothing can exist as a constant, as a defined thing. The Time Lords must constantly change and adapt. Unless we take the corollary of the Doctor's maxim. Being without becoming is an absurdity. But what of becoming without being? A truly unceasing change, so rapid and complete that it never settles, never takes form. The raw power of transformation. This constant change is the shape of eternity. A unity comprised not of form but of chaos. Time becomes not the ordered progression of causal events but a cascade, a tide eroding away the very foundations of being.

At once, Albion casts out its emanation Jerusalem as feet walk among England's mountains green. Omega's black hole drains Ahania's energy, not consuming his emanation but denying it, rejecting it as sin, while at the same time, in a junkyard on Totters Lane, an old man and his granddaughter hide within their magical box. In her garden, Amy Pond spends twelve years waiting five minutes as Edward Young scrawls his thoughts on death and immortality in the margins of Blake's great unfinished epic. Giles Deleuze and his closest working colleague, Felix Guattari, write on the rhizome:

At the same time, something else entirely is going on: not imitation at all but a capture of code, surplus value of code, an increase in valence, a veritable becoming, a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp. Each of these becomings bring about the deterritorialization of one term and the reterritorialization of the other; the two becomings interlink and form relays in a circulation of intensities pushing the deterritorialization ever further. There is neither imitation nor resemblance, only an exploding of two heterogeneous series on the line of flight composed by a common rhizome that can no longer be attributed or subjugated by anything signifying.

The first episode of The Three Doctors is, if not the greatest first episode in the classic series outright, at the very least the greatest first episode of its first decade. With alarming and methodical speed the episode transforms itself, performing the act of becoming that proves so central to its larger existence. It starts as a near mirror for Spearhead From Space, a comedy yokel affected by objects falling from the sky. Then the fixed tropes that provide the framework of the Pertwee era begin to be torn away. The enemy pre-empts UNIT's investigations, making a beeline for Unit HQ until it is under siege from strange and bulbous horrors. The Doctor is given no time to investigate, is in fact given only a few clues before he becomes the very target of the threat. In a panic, he calls the Time Lords, begging them for help.

But they too are victims of this mysterious Urizenic siege, driven to a desperation the likes of which we had thought impossible. Their power almost vanished into Omega's abscess, drained by singularity, they are forced to abandon the first law of time itself, to allow the Doctor to cross his own time stream. Let us reflect briefly upon the implications of this law. On the surface, it is a strange thing to have as the first law of time - more important, it seems, even than their long-standing opposition to meddling.

The only thing it seems remotely commensurable with is the Doctor's old admonition that you can't rewrite history, not one line. The adamance of this plea to Barbara is the only other thing that seems anything like a sacred law of time, and even it, we now learn, is not the first. The first is that you cannot meet yourself. Why might this be?

The obvious answer is that it is a special and even worse case of rewriting history. So what is wrong with rewriting history? Tat Wood, whose observation about the Blakean nature of Omega's antimatter dimension sparked my own observations about the more radically Blakean nature of this story, along with Lawrence Miles, quote David Whitaker:

The basis of time traveling is that all things that happen are fixed and unalterable, otherwise of course the whole structure of existence would be thrown into unutterable confusion and the purpose of life itself would be destroyed. Doctor Who is an observer. What we are concerned with is that history, like justice, is not only done but can be seen to be done.

But as we know, time can be rewritten. Why can time be rewritten where history cannot? The standard answer given in the series - that there are fixed points in time - is strange for a series that has previously declared that a fixed point in time - a fact, if you will - is anathema to the Time Lords. Let us attempt a different explanation - one inspired by a comment from William Whyte back on the Evil of the Daleks entry: that the fundamental bound on changing history has little to do with the stability of the universe and everything to do with the stability of the self. One cannot alter the components of one's self - the stories and memories that create the unity of "I."

The reasoning is clear: in a world defined as formless chaos, the stability of the I, the observer, the visionary, is the only source of being available. The I, by dint of seeing, creates being out of becoming, literally altering the world into vision. To change it is to change the entire universe.

And to allay his freezing age
The poor man takes her in his arms:
The cottage fades before his sight,
The garden and its lovely charms;  

The guests are scattered through the land
(For the eye altering, alters all);
The senses roll themselves in fear,
And the flat earth becomes a ball, 

The first law of time thus abandoned, the Doctor, himself an I altering, is brought forward to meet himselves. But he is trapped in a time eddy. This is a strange concept - a point in which time moves counter to its own arrow, becomes circular, a whirlpool in time. This is fitting. It is, after all, not the first time in which we have seen Hartnell's Doctor in these circumstances. In Totters Lane, before Ian and Barbara fell out of the world and into his now, he existed separate from both past and future, a man without history who has not yet become.

But this is not the first strange hole we have seen. Urizen himself dwells within a whirlpool in space, a point where space itself swirls in on itself. The Doctor's time eddy and Urizen's black hole are inexorably linked, two sides of the same coin, at once equivalent and separate. Thus we must conclude that the Doctor and Urizen are also linked - that the Doctor is, just as much as Urizen, a cast off emanation of some greater eternity.

These are not fixed oppositions, not simple points of defined balance. The Time Lords are not the opposite of Urizen, Urizen is not the opposite of the Doctor, the Doctor is not opposite himself. They are divisions, a fragmentation of a larger concept, each complete reflections of the whole, fractal consciousnesses within the radiant whole. As Donald Ault says of Blake:

The spectator's desire to complete the drawing behind the text in these examples parallels the reader's urge to find an ur-narrative behind the poem. On the physical page, of course, there is literally nothing behind the verbal text, for the rectangular space and the inscribed words constitute their own complete visual field. Likewise there is literally no primordial story behind the surface details of the poem's narrative. The presumption of such a story dissolves under close scrutiny of particulars.

Without the possibility of fixed eternity, with no prospect of single vision to encompass the whole of The Three Doctors, we are forced to a new approach. Our understanding of the story must become polymorphic, incommensurable. The entry must be allowed to shift beneath us. The figure of Omega, his mask a seeming reflection of Blake's vision of Nebuchadnezzar, must also become Urizen, one of Blake's Four Zoas, the aspects of eternal Albion. Urizen is reason itself, accompanied by Tharmas, instinct and strength, Luvah, passion and love, and Urthona, inspiration and imagination. The Time Lords must also be Ahania, the emanation of Urizen. And thus Omega must be Ahania, and the Time Lords Urizen, trapped in their laws, bound helplessly by singular vision.

The entry will not cohere. It will not make sense as such. It will make something else - vision, perhaps, or understanding. Or perhaps more accurately, it will make too many senses. It will be a textual labyrinth - one to get lost in and to puzzle over. The entry must be an act of becoming. But what shall it become?

At the center of things, Los, fallen form of Urthona, hammers forth the heartbeat of the world. Not the arc of change but its engine, he is the force that creates, that first great magick trick, the creation of something from nothing. The throbbing mass of ideas, churning wildly, seems to reverberate endlessly. In Lambeth, William Blake sees each strike as flashes of the world of angels and gods that lives behind his eyes. In London it is David Whitaker tracing the path of a bead of mercury across a sheet of glass seven years long. In Bristol, Bob Baker and David Martin swat desperately at the hydra of ideas the hammer beat brings forth. In Newtown, I nurse a cup of tea and work to tame this impossible tangle, or perhaps to be tamed by it.

Who is this figure at the center of things? Peer through the raging fire and he is as invisible and impossible as the rest. One moment he seems an old man in a strange chair peering awkwardly at cue cards, the next a dashing dandy, Beau Brummel as action hero. Blink and through the smoke you can just make out some strange hobo, a pied piper clad in innumerable secrets. And in the shadows cast flicker countless other forms - a trailing scarf, a cricketeer, an umbrella, a bow tie, and others that you know with eyes that have not yet seen, but someday will. Try even see how many forms he has and you will fail, inevitably losing count at thirteen. Pick one:

When you’re a character actor you’re having to make decisions all the time, and that’s a question of gaining confidence in the part you play, and that takes the time, really. Whereas with ‘Doctor Who’, the three years of it, you weren’t learning lines, really, you were learning thoughts.

Patrick Troughton, whose acting I have praised before, is of course amazing. The most mercurial of actors, he, as ever, works his way through the narrative like a magic spell. His first scene is awkward. Troughton is impeccably gracious as an actor - a trait Pertwee, if we're being honest, never displayed. The two of them got on poorly at first, due to Troughton's tendency to improvise his lines during rehearsal, playing his way through the tone of a scene and learning that, then wrapping his dialogue around his already selected tone. Pertwee was put off by this, and a bit of a tiff ensued. Troughton, the class act of the two, played it Pertwee's way, to the detriment of his performance (as, perhaps, intended - see also Pertwee's flagrant attempt to make sure Richard Franklin knows who the star is on his first appearance. For all that Pertwee was a gracious and fun colleague to many of his co-stars, he could be depressingly catty).

But in the handful of scenes in episode two where he's with Nicholas Courtney and John Levene, both of whom he's worked with before, he visibly relaxes, playing, for that episode, the Doctor again instead of the "Second Doctor," the goofy comedy sidekick he invented for reunions. (Everyone gets shuffled around a bit for the reunion. Courtney, in an inspired turn, gets to play the Brigadier finally snapping, unable to believe what is going on around him, while Benton gets to be the utterly unflappable one, explaining to everyone how the "multiple Doctors' thing works.) But this moment to show himself as the Doctor

(A moment tragically denied to Hartnell, who looks distressingly unwell on the monitor, and is visibly pausing between sentences to peer at cue cards, barely able to get through the lines, little yet add any character to them. It is of course still incredibly moving to see him and to have that connection to the very dawn of the program, but it is moving in the sense of managing to make it to the bedside of an ailing relative before they pass. Hartnell passed away just over two years after this aired of the same condition that was robbing him of his abilities in his final months on the show.)

allows him to assert genuine power over the narrative. He sneaks several moments to shine, is central to figuring out how to defeat Omega. Pertwee's Doctor gets to figure out how to build a gizmo that will destroy Omega, but Troughton's is the one who works out how to trick Omega, and Troughton's is the one to do the deed, giving the moral weight to the Doctors' judgment that death is the only freedom Omega can ever have. In tricking Omega, when he makes contact with himself, Troughton's Doctor turns and makes eye contact with the camera, repeating his frequent trick from his time on the series. This trick suggests that the Doctor controls the medium of television itself - a suggestion we have probed the implications of before. (This is fitting, given that one of the monsters in this story is visually processed so that, despite being made with a physical prop, it looks like a video effect instead of like a physical object) Here, then, the Master of the Land of Fiction himself returns - Los in his most powerful form.

I loved Patrick Troughton, he was smashing to be with, and the whole thing was a real kick. Mind you, concerning the mini-skit I wore in that story, there’s a scene where you can see my knickers! Most improper for children’s viewing time, don’t you think?

Enitharmon, the emanation of Los, deserves to be talked about more, and this is in many ways the place to do it, because once she's paired with Patrick Troughton we finally really get to see how her character works. Enitharmon may have originated in the mould of wholly consistent characters stuck in absurd worlds - beings without becoming stuck in situations of pure becoming, if you will - but she has steadily progressed. All of this is consistent - when she is caught by Urizen in Terror of the Autons because she stumbles and knocks over some crates, the way she rises up with a sheepish look on her face while being captured by someone she knows to be terrifying and evil is sheer brilliance. Enitharmon simply refuses to play by the rules of the narrative, and does so not out of rebelliousness but out of a sort of sheer plucky creativity.

Since then she has developed the process to an art, cheating the narrative regularly without ever seeming aware of it. In this regard, she is most like Los's Troughton, who was also not so much a character as a force of nature within the narrative. This is an essential realization. Los's Pertwee is in many ways the least whimsical of his forms. Or, to be blunter, he lacks mercury. Paired with Enitharmon, who is as steeped in mercury as Troughton, there is a completion. It is very hard to argue that Pertwee is a superior actor to Troughton - in fact, I'd go so far as to say that it is very easy to argue that Troughton is much superior to Pertwee. His tonal readings make the blows of his hammer echo through the entire scene, shaking the very foundations of the story. Pertwee is exciting and charming, but he never inhabits the story itself like Troughton does.

But on the other hand, it is equally hard to argue that the Pertwee/Enitharmon team is anything less than head and shoulders beyond any Los/Companion pairing to date. Even Los's Hartnell paired with Ian and Barbara do not quite sparkle like this. Los's Pertwee and Enitharmon are perfect compliments to one another - the very model of the double act.

Enitharmon, of course, is a complex and libidinous creature. She is on the one hand the Emanation of Los. But her name contains within it the name of another Zoa, Tharmas, who represents sensation. His emanation is Enion, who represents sexual urges. Their successful union produces Enitharmon, who is herself the sexual counterpart for Los.

Fitting, then, that Enitharmon should be the one to pose nude with the Doctors' Shadow. This figure is the darkest part of Blake's fourfold division of man, the ashes left by dead desire festering away. Ahania, originally Urizen's emanation, becomes a shadow when she is cast out and denied by him, just as Omega becomes a shadow as he separates irrevocably from the Time Lords.

From Enitharmon and Los's union comes Orc, the spirit of revolution, at first embodied by Blake, but in time, as Blake grew skeptical of the possibility of charismatic revolutionary leaders, pulled within, made an aspect of the soul.

The terror answerd: I am Orc, wreath'd round the accursed tree:
The times are ended; shadows pass the morning gins to break;
The fiery joy, that Urizen perverted to ten commands,
What night he led the starry hosts thro' the wide wilderness:
That stony law I stamp to dust: and scatter religion abroad
To the four winds as a torn book, & none shall gather the leaves;
But they shall rot on desart sands, & consume in bottomless deeps;
To make the desarts blossom, & the deeps shrink to their fountains,
And to renew the fiery joy, and burst the stony roof.
That pale religious letchery, seeking Virginity,
May find it in a harlot, and in coarse-clad honesty
The undefil'd tho' ravish'd in her cradle night and morn:
For every thing that lives is holy, life delights in life;
Because the soul of sweet delight can never be defil'd.
Fires inwrap the earthly globe, yet man is not consumd;
Amidst the lustful fires he walks: his feet become like brass,
His knees and thighs like silver, & his breast and head like gold.

What, then, do we make of the ending, particularly the somewhat strainedly long scene in which every single supporting character, whether we care about them or not, gets a farewell before stepping through the singularity to be restored to the world? The first thing to notice in this scene is that although the characters enter the singularity one by one, they seem to reappear on Earth simultaneously. Clearly, then, the singularity is not simply functioning as a portal.

We also know that the singularity is at the center of Omega's constructed reality - the tool by which he turns his will into things. (Just as Enitharmon is both Tharmas's daughter and Urthona's emanation, Urizen is also here the Doctor's shadow.) We also know that the Master of the Land of Fiction is right by the singularity, and is moments from asserting his control over the story via his signature gesture of looking out of screens.

So into the singularity are put the elements of Doctor Who. Even the Doctor himself is symbolically there, since the singularity and the time eddy are aspects of the same thing. And then, by consuming their own shadow, Los turns Urizen's necrotic tangle of laws into Eternity.

For one moment, Jerusalem stands within Albion again. And from this moment Los builds Golgonooza, while the Doctors rebuild Doctor Who, or perhaps build it for the first time. In one moment, all of what the show was and ever has been coexists, overlapped, chaotic, contradictory, but there.

Where is the Covenant of Priam, the Moral Virtues of the Heathen
Where is the Tree of Good & Evil that rooted beneath the cruel heel
Of Albions Spectre the Patriarch Druid! where are all his Human Sacrifices
For Sin in War & in the Druid Temples of the Accuser of Sin: beneath
The Oak Groves of Albion that coverd the whole Earth beneath his Spectre
Where are the Kingdoms of the World & all their glory that grew on Desolation
The Fruit of Albions Poverty Tree when the Triple Headed Gog-Magog Giant
Of Albion Taxed the Nations into Desolation & then gave the Spectrous Oath

Such is the Cry from all the Earth from the Living Creatures of the Earth
And from the great City of Golgonooza in the Shadowy Generation
And from the Thirty-two Nations of the Earth among the Living Creatures

All Human Forms identified even Tree Metal Earth & Stone. all
Human Forms identified, living going forth & returning wearied
Into the Planetary lives of Years Months Days & Hours reposing
And then Awaking into his Bosom in the Life of Immortality.

And I heard the Name of their Emanations they are named Jerusalem

Patrick Troughton oozes like mercury around alchemic diagrams, while Roger Delgado leers maniacally. In Totters Lane, William Hartnell bundles Susan through the doors of the TARDIS. Vicki and Jo skip arm in arm down the streets of Skaro looking at shopwindow dummies while fireworks mixed up by Liz Shaw and Ian Chesterton explode across the sky where Steven Taylor draws a Blue Peter Badge in contrails from the Planet Mondas. Jon Pertwee captains the HMS Bessie with Ben Jackson and reminisce about Polly, who right this moment is slipping through the UNIT tearoom planting retcon as part of her new gig with Torchwood. Staying carefully on the other side of the room for fear of offending her ex-husband, Sara Kingdom chats with a familiar looking Brigadier, while Barbara cradles Katarina sapphically. Victoria has odd dreams of Sergeant Benton chasing her through the London Underground, while Mike Yates and Jamie McCrimmon make like Izlyr and Ssorg. And in the sky the Wheel in Space spins like a circle of destiny, as Zoe Heriot calculates the precise arcs of history.

There is no understanding this moment. No comprehension. Singularity itself is destroyed in favor of eternity. An unfinished show, an eternal cliffhanger, an act of eternal becoming. Never perfect, but in turn never done, Los's hammer driving forward in its heart.

And then she rises, Eternity herself in brilliant blue, at last restored to us, ready to take us anywhere. All of space and time. Anything that ever happened or ever will. The hammer strikes. The Doctor fiddles the coordinates. There is a wheezing, groaning sound. Turn on the scanner, see where we are.

I first saw The Three Doctors in late 1992 or early 1993, on a scratchy VHS tape from my parents' collection. It was my first time seeing Hartnell or Troughton, and I remember vividly how charmed I was by the latter. But this isn't the place in the narrative for me. Not quite yet. 

Between The Time Monster and The Three Doctors, Jane Fonda famously makes her trip to North Vietnam to earn the moniker Hanoi Jain. Bloody Friday erupts in Northern Ireland as the IRA kills nine and seriously injures a hundred and thirty more in a series of 22 bombings in Belfast. Then comes Bloody Monday, with three car bombs. In Munich, terrorists murder eleven Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games, while Bobby Fischer becomes the first American world chess champion. A race riot breaks out on the USS Kitty Hawk. Richard Nixon storms to re-election, and the first version of Pong is released. The last Apollo mission flies to the moon. While during the story, the UK finally properly joins the ECC, and Last of the Summer Wine, the world's longest running comedy series, begins. As the final episode airs, Richard Nixon is inaugurated for his second term.

Nebuchadnezzar faces down the Doctors and Benton.

While in music, Jimmy Osmond's "Long Haired Lover From Liverpool" is at number one, and remains so for all four weeks of the story. This has the tragic result of blocking David Bowie's "Jean Genie" from the number one slot, as well as the even more tragic result of having millions of innocent people hearing a nine year old boy promising to be their long haired lover from Liverpool and do anything they say. Less openly pedophiliac songs in the top ten include T. Rex's "Solid Gold Easy Action," The Sweet's "Blockbuster," Carly Simon's song about me, Elvis Presley's "Always On My Mind," John Lenon's "Happy Xmas/War is Over," and Elton John's "Crocodile Rock." It's December 30, 1972.

Time Can Be Rewritten 11 (Verdigris, BBC Books, 2000)

The year 2000, for a generation of Britain, marked the end of the future. A fluke of naming committed in 1977 inadvertently left the most important comics magazine in the UK with a name demarcating a clear and unavoidable sell-by date. It's tough to blame anyone - nobody starting a grubby comics rag ostensibly edited by a fictional galactic conquerer and featuring a barely coherent revamp of 50s icon Dan Dare would have taken seriously the question "but what are we going to do in 23 years." The answer was clear - be working on something else, this magazine having gone under 20 years earlier. But come 2000, there we were, staring awkwardly at one of the most iconic mastheads in science fiction and going "well, that's underwhelming, isn't it?"

2000, then, is the perfect date to revisit early 70s science fiction. In 1972, nobody believed there would be a year 2000. And come the year 2000, it turned out they'd been right all along. There really was no future. Enter Verdigris and Paul Magrs. I've already, in previous posts, hinted that the rise of the BBC Books line to replace the Virgin books line in Doctor Who was a mixed blessing at best, and that the seven years since the series came back have by and large validated that by favoring writers and innovations from the Virgin line while ignoring most of the new blood brought in at BBC Books. Part of that, though, is that there are actually only two real pieces of new blood brought in at BBC Books. The first is Lawrence Miles, who, while he wrote a Virgin book, is most associated with the BBC line having written four key books for them and spun off his own Faction Paradox series from them. The second is Paul Magrs.

Magrs - who I actually, in one of my handful of brushes with Z-List status in he world of Doctor Who, saw give a talk in early 2001 when I was studying abroad at the University of East Anglia where he taught - is an interesting writer. More than almost any other Doctor Who writer, Magrs visibly has a preferred approach to writing Doctor Who and little desire to deviate from it. Admittedly he has branched out considerably over the years, having now written numerous stories without his signature character Iris Wildthyme, but Verdigris isn't one of them, so she's probably as good a place to start as any.

Central to any assessment of Magrs's work, after all, is the initial decision of whether or not an utterly barmy and frequently inebriated middle aged woman who travels around space and time in a double decker bus that is slightly smaller on the inside than it is on the outside is a brilliant idea or the worst thing ever. Many perfectly intelligent and sensible commentators have committed themselves firmly to the latter answer, which, unsurprisingly, presents a somewhat insurmountable barrier to enjoying Magrs's work.

The real problem, though, is that Iris is just the tip of the iceberg. No shortage of commentators have accused Magrs of actually hating Doctor Who based on his books. It's almost, but not quite, completely understandable how they might have arrived at this conclusion. Certainly Verdigris contains no shortage of things that, on the surface, appear to be jokes at Doctor Who's expense. The literal transformation of Mike Yates into a two-dimensional cardboard cutout, for instance, is admittedly hard to read as anything other than a comment on the fact that Yates is... well... a two-dimensional cardboard cutout of a character. Likewise, when a character suggests that Jo "think about every alien artifact or creature you have ever seen. Weren't they always surrounded by a crackling nimbus of blue light? ... Didn't they sometimes look a little... unconvincing?" it is only an act of willful blindness not to read this as an explicit commentary on the visual artifacts left by the green-screen technology of the 1970s (aka Color Separation Overlay, or CSO as I've been casually referring to it for a month and a half now without defining it). Though for my money, the funniest swipe at the series comes at the end of chapter fourteen, when the main villain reveals himself and the chapter ends "'I am Verdigris,' the figure said, and didn't elaborate."

The thing is, arguing that someone who has written, at present, twenty-nine full length Doctor Who stories hates Doctor Who, or even has "contempt" for it, as the more mild phrasing seems to go, is patently ridiculous. Obviously Paul Magrs doesn't hate Doctor Who, and saying he does is, frankly, stupid even by the deeply marginal standards of fandom. That said, the observation that whatever Magrs is doing here, it's not hating Doctor Who doesn't actually tell us what he is doing.

What does tell us what he's doing, however, is David Bowie. The two main and relevant things are first the focus on incongruent spectacle, and second the linking of this to gay culture. We'll set the latter aside for a moment, and deal with the former. Broadly speaking - and really, broadly is the only way to speak about the topic - what we're talking about when we talk about the incongruent spectacle of glam rock is postmodernism. Attempts to define postmodernism are usually comically doomed, but generally speaking a pretty good definition of postmodernism is "taking signifiers out of their context but trusting them to function anyway." So, for instance, David Bowie takes the signifiers of 50s rock and roll and of space aliens, puts them together when they don't actually go together, and then creates something new because two incongruent images are cut off from their normal contexts and forced to do something new. See? Actually fairly simple. (Just don't ask me what the point of postmodernism is. That I can't do in brief and easy form.)

Which brings us to the second issue - gay culture. This is a somewhat trickier issue, in no small part because, as with most issues regarding minority groups, I'm not a member of the group in question and always wary of speaking for them. All of which said... imagine, if you will, that you were part of a group of people who were largely and systematically oppressed, to the point where the very fact that you belonged to that group meant you were a criminal. Now imagine that you had a pressing desire to identify other members of your group and identify yourself to other members of this group while keeping your membership a secret from the larger world. What you are looking for, in other words, is a way of hiding in plain sight - a set of traits that look innocuous to anyone who doesn't know what to look for, but that identifies you to those that do.

Understanding that process is central to understanding virtually all of gay culture as it exists. I talked in the Bowie entry about the way in which ostentatious performance is a marker of gay culture - this is why. Because gay culture is designed to work around the closet. But the issue goes far deeper. The entire link between the arts and gay culture comes down to the fact that the arts, particularly in the UK, were somewhere homosexuals could work semi-openly. (This is why there's a significant generation of great gay English actors - Derek Jacobi, Ian McKellen, Simon Callow, etc. Because at a key moment, acting was the field gay men could safely work in.) Likewise, the knowing embrace of the over the top performativity that we usually describe as "camp" worked very effectively as a shibboleth in gay culture, because the act of embracing the obviously ludicrous is in a fundamental sense similar to the act of creating a public persona that acts normal but flags you as gay to the right people. (Likewise, the embrace of over the top hedonism within gay spaces amounts to little more than casting off the bits of the performance that are "normal")

So there are two things to note here. One is fairly obvious - postmodernism and gay culture are natural allies, because the act of making a symbol work in the wrong context is exactly how what I just described works. The second is less obvious to anyone without a passing familiarity with gay culture. So, OK - one aspect of how the closet works is a careful relationship with the effeminate. I don't want to digress into a massive tangent about drag within a post that's not actually about drag in any direct or meaningful way, but it shouldn't be a terribly controversial observation that within gay culture, women who look like drag queens have obvious social utility. Being a fan of Cher or Bette Midler or, more old-fashionedly, Carmen Miranda is yet another way of covertly signaling who you are. So there's a band of women who serve as gay icons. One result of that is the social institution of (and for anyone who has never heard this term before, I promise it is not considered inherently offensive) fag hags - women who largely hang around with gay men and are accepted as part of gay male culture. (Oh, right, in case it isn't clear, while lesbian culture is not a completely different kettle of fish, the last few paragraphs have referred to gay male culture, and cannot just be applied blindly to lesbian culture.)

So, tracking back to Verdigris, there are two things we should say. The first is that the willingness to remove standard tropes of Pertwee-era Doctor Who from their narrative context and comment on them directly is straight-up postmodernism. The second is that the key to understanding Iris Wildthyme and why anyone thinks she's funny is that she is an archetypal fag hag. And the entire book works because of these two facts.

The many moments in the book in which it pokes fun at Doctor Who have one basic thing in common - all of them are jokes in which the fact that Doctor Who is just a TV show is acknowledged. And the book does this even when it's having fun in ways that don't involve poking fun at the show. For instance, Iris at one point comments that "without me here, [the Doctor] might perhaps be having a quiet week; a restful, forgettable week of holiday." In other words, Iris explicitly remarks on the fact that the book is "giving him extra interesting times" by filling in the week gap between two episodes.

Other jokes are more subtle. At another point, the Master (or, rather, Verdigris pretending to be the Master, though we don't know this yet as readers and the book even in its narration maintains the illusion) is described as having "stood by the gleaming chrome mirror beside the teleporation tubes and gazed into his own eyes, telling himself that he was the Master, he was the Master and he must bow down before his own magnificent will." But even this isn't just a joke about how rubbish the Master is. Rather, it's a joke about the basic absurdity of showing the Master's morning ritual given that the Master is built only to leer, hypnotize people, and create absurd schemes - not to be in such a mundane and real-world setting as getting out of bed in the morning.

So the central concept of the book is that none of the characters (save, partially, for Iris) understands that they're actually just characters in a television program as opposed to real people. Indeed, at one point, in what seems to be the most misunderstood bit in the book, the alien invaders admit that they made a mistake and confused fictional characters for real ones, and further admit that they invented postmodernism in the first place to try to cover up their mistake and successfully infiltrate the planet anyway. And both the Doctor and Iris proceed to criticize postmodernism, the Doctor describing it as "an epistemological quandary that will leave them stymied and perplexed for a century or more," while Iris accuses them of having "turned Earth into a vapid, smugly self-referential abortion of a world."

First of all, the people who take this scene as Magrs attacking postmodernism miss the fact that the Doctor calls Iris out for hypocrisy and notes that she's postmodern herself in the very next line. ("I'd rather have a culture with integrity... one that had nice, unreconstructed grand narratives," she says. "No you wouldn't," the Doctor replies. "You like everything to be as fickle and trivial as you are.") Second of all, this means that the joke is that the Doctor doesn't like postmodernism even though he's stuck in a postmodern novel at the moment. The Doctor, in other words, doesn't understand his own situation. But equally crucially, Iris - being a character who is intimately familiar with postmodernism by definition - does understand. She gets that she's in a postmodern novel and that all of the other characters don't realize that.

Once this is understood, we can finally turn to the actual plot of Verdigris, in which, in a bid to end the Doctor's exile (i.e. change the format of the show), Verdigris attacks the Doctor with thinly veiled parodies of Star Trek and The Tomorrow People. (The Tomorrow People has not, as of late 1972, actually premiered, so doesn't have a Pop Between Realities entry, but it will get one some time between now and when we cover 1979) So the Doctor is overtly under attack from Doctor Who's nearest television rivals. The central tension, then, is establishing why Doctor Who is better than its rivals.

The answer, which is tacitly given by Iris, amounts to the fact that even when you treat Doctor Who as just a cheap sci-fi series with unconvincing monsters, cardboard cutout characters, and a really silly set of villains, there is still some essential genius in the premise that cannot quite be reduced out. The show, in other words, is still fun, just as the book is. The book demonstrates that you can still have fun with the tropes of the Pertwee era even while systematically acknowledging how silly it all is. And that's enormously compelling on its own merits. To go back and celebrate the Pertwee era not despite but because of its faults in 2000, a year that posed a fundamental challenge to the entire idea of science fiction, is a big deal.

But on top of that, we have the implications of Iris - the fact that the specific way in which the Pertwee era is enjoyed is explicitly one that comes from gay culture. Something we've talked about in passing a few times is that, in the UK, Doctor Who has a very significant gay following. And that following has had some real impact on the series, most obviously the fact the it was brought back by someone whose prior resume had Queer as Folk as its highlight. And I've alluded to this a few times, but in a lot of ways the Pertwee era is the point where that really begins, because the glam aesthetic that is so influential on the show under Barry Letts is also fundamentally intertwined with gay culture. And so as much as Verdigris is a celebration of the show's quality, it is also unmistakably a book about laying claim to the show. The show is a great show, but it's great in part because it's so compatible with the aesthetics of gay culture. This obviously doesn't mean the show is just for gay people, but it is a claim that it is for gay people in a real, unique, and special way. And there's really no point in the show's history from Season Ten, which we'll kick off Friday, to Season Six Part Two, which will kick itself off Saturday, where the show's specific and unique intersections with gay culture stop being relevant.

Also, and as a piddly point of correction, apparently the consensus on this book is that it takes place between The Time Monster and The Three Doctors. And while I agree that the ending does lead into The Three Doctors, that point comes after some considerable time jumps. And anyway, every effort to place it after The Time Monster comes with an excuse about why the book acknowledges The Sea Devils as having happened, but says The Curse of Peladon hasn't.

The obvious answer, given the book's overt metatextuality, is that the tangle there is a reference to the fact that The Sea Devils and The Curse of Peladon were the first instance in Doctor Who of stories being transmitted out of production order, and that in fact it takes place in the production gap between the two stories, i.e. after The Sea Devils and prior to The Curse of Peladon. Which also explains why Iris is filling a week with adventures instead of six months.

You're welcome.

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 13 (The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars)

With thankful apologies to Chris O'Leary of Pushing Ahead of the Dame.


1. Five Years


Some say the end is near
Some say we'll see armageddon soon
I certainly hope we will. - Tool, "Aenema"


The smart money, you have to realize, was not on reaching 1978. The question was just which of the myriad of ways we might kill ourselves would pull it off. Nuclear war? Ecological disaster? Social collapse into anarchy? Doomwatch, after all, made three seasons off of cataloging the myriad of ways humanist might slaughter itself.

So it's no particular surprise that Bowie starts the album with a song of apocalypse. And a remarkably concrete song of apocalypse at that - wandering through the streets and observing the people responding to the news that the Earth has five years to live. But notably absent is any explanation of how this happened - of which disaster will befall us. All of them. None of them. In a world in which the end is an absolute certainty, the means are beside the point.

The result, as Bowie exposes, is the fetishization of disaster. The Atrocity Exhibition writ large. The news isn't that we have five years to live. It's that we have only "five years left of crying." The end is a welcome thing. This has always been the logic of Doctor Who - the appeal of looking at the monsters, of seeing the threat. The money shot of Inferno is that we finally get to see the world end in fire instead of just being teased. At last, armageddon stops blue balling us and gives us our payoff. The end of this growing agony and the cathartic release of knowing there is a genuine resolution.  Finally, the finale. At its endpoint, Bowie's song explodes from its initial yearning sorrow into a soaring football terrace song. A rousing sing-along chorus of "five years," the end turned into the anthem it always was. You'll Never Die Alone. You're Going Home in a Nuclear Fireball. Come On You Daleks.

2. Soul Love


The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images. - Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle


In a world defined by its imminent apocalyptic finale, the blinding flash of the nuclear inferno becomes the light of a film projector, pressing nuclear shadows to the screen for us to watch. There is nothing but appearances in a pre-apocalyptic world. Bowie's song begins with a mother kneeling before the grave of a heroic son "who gave his life to save the slogans that hover between the headstone and her eyes, for they penetrate her grieving."

When the ultimate disaster porn spectacle has become the teleology of the world, there is nothing outside the gaudy glory of slogans. Love is nothing but an ideology, a product, another slogan. There is only idiot love, the love of love. But here again, there is a countermeasure to the bleak cynicism offered by this. The fact that love is empty, cold, a rote formal process. Our contact with each other is nothing but the empty, hollow execution of hormones and rhetoric.

And yet there is some faint remaining value. "Love descends on those defenseless" is a cynical sentiment, but still a variation of the sloganistic "love conquers all." The priest kneeling, experiencing "soul love" in the final verse, still experiences and is involved in some transformation. The singer's loneliness evolves.

The spectacle is not the end of love, but merely its reconfiguration. A love that exists in shallow images, and finds its truth in them, the nuclear shadows burnt into the walls begin, tentatively, to kiss.

3. Moonage Daydream


Oh, I'm getting it wrong again, aren't I? I'm always doing that. So many mouths. - Prisoner Zero, "The Eleventh Hour"

Detournement, the great technique of Guy Debord, provides the crucial through line from the revolutionary ethos of '68 to the savage glory of punk and post-punk. Doctor Who rarely loses contact with this arc of history. Detournement devours the debris of images scattered across the culture and spits them back in a vehement parody, parroting the culture back. As he puts it, "in a world that is really upside down, the true is a moment of the false."

There is a roar of power chords as Bowie's vocal track spits braggadocio. "I'm an ALLIGATOR!" Another power chord. "I'm a Mamapapa comin' for YOOOOU."


The whole song - the whole album in fact - continues in this vein. The cliches of rock delivered wrong, and incoherently, with images that are as alluring as they are wrong. "You're squawking like a pink monkey bird," Bowie intones, straight-faced, as if unaware of his own absurdities. And yet out of this we get the soaring, anthemic chorus.

Watching the Ziggy Stardust concert documentary, the most interesting moment that D.A. Pennebaker manages is when he turns the camera on a single fan during the song (about 50 seconds in on that video). In religious ecstasy, she sways and dances, cradling her head in her own hands, pressing her space face close to the music, freaking out in glorious rapture.

This is the central power of Ziggy, of Bowie, of glam, and, yes, of Doctor Who - that in amidst the mad collage of spectacles it is possible to build a genuine moment of drama. This is love in the age of apocalypse. But what is crucial is that it is genuine. We do not need to take this on faith. We do not need to qualify. Stare into the electric eye of this moonage girl and the truth is clear.

4. Starman


Unknown gods who visited the primeval earth in manned spaceships - Erich von Daniken, Chariots of the Gods?


The week after The Time Monster takes its final bow, David Bowie charts with The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. In many ways glam's high water act, this kicks off a phase in which David Bowie effectively has five albums out within a year as his three prior albums, Ziggy, and his followup Aladdin Sane all chart within a twelve month period. But it's Ziggy that is the spark - the album that suddenly explodes David Bowie out into the world.

And the spark that explodes Ziggy is "Starman." The lead single, first creeping into the charts with the last episode of The Time Monster. More than any other song on the album, this is the one that nods at David Bowie's past. The thing about Ziggy is that, on paper, it is in no way Bowie's best album of the early 70s. That would be Hunky Dory, the album that has "Changes," "Oh! You Pretty Things," "Life on Mars?," and "Kooks" on it. But Hunky Dory initially died on the charts with only "Life on Mars" charting as a single years later.

It wasn't until Bowie returned to the themes of his until then one-hit wonder, "Space Oddity," that he took off. But "Starman" is no sequel. Rather, it's a complete inversion. The moment of Doctor Who that tracks most straightforwardly to "Space Oddity" is The Ambassadors of Death, with its bleak and scary portrayal of space and the Doctor sitting in his tin can. This is something else. A starman, waiting in the sky, fearful that his splendor will blow our minds.

This is one of the songs where the supposed concept of the album actually distinctly makes sense. An alien love messiah cum rock star, striding from the sky to offer us salvation, an alternative to the eschatological spectacle surrounding us. Youth culture's rebellion gets stashed in plain sight, the children losing it, using it, boogying their way to a newfound nirvana, a secret midnight rebellion providing the sparkling landing lights for our freaky space age savior.

If it is not too obvious a point to make, this is where Doctor Who and Ziggy come closest to intersection, with Pertwee cast as the transcendent Starman, the great cosmic protector of Earth, the coolest damn thing ever to wear a velvet jacket.

Watch Bowie performing the song on Top of the Pops - the performance that really broke him out. Watch as at first the camera creeps around him, treating the singer not as a beloved pop star but as an object of fear to be crept around - a Doctor Who monster. And then a minute in, Bowie's phenomenal guitarist, Mick Ronson, is suddenly wrapped up in a hug from Bowie, pulled towards the microphone, alien sex god and rock star arm in arm, the cosmos itself giving us leave to boogie.

5. It Ain't Easy


Is the enlightened man subject to the law of causation? - Question in a 13th century Zen Koan.

In the aforementioned concert movie, perhaps the strangest inclusion on Bowie's part is "Wild Eyed Boy from Freecloud," the overtly Buddhist b-side to "Space Oddity." Let us assume that this strange inclusion on the album - a song that Chris O'Leary astutely points out is a mildly baffling inclusion given that in hindsight better-known options like "Velvet Goldmine" thrashed about on the cutting room floor - is there in what is on the album instead of that track.

"Wild Eyed Boy from Freecloud" is a parable of a boy on the margins of his own village, a haunting piece that describes the marginalized prophet being put to death by his village and watching in horror as the Himalayan mountain takes a revenge he never sought on his behalf. This Buddhist parable - a detachment from the material world and society, an absolute understanding of the self.

The imagery of the mountain is present in "It Ain't Easy" as well, starting with a young man looking out upon the world and seeing the places he could be. But then he returns to the world, the strange materialism of the town and the hoochie coochie women. Enlightenment runs aground in the world. The singer of this song does not have the enlightenment of the wild-eyed boy, but instead claws desperately for it as it slips endlessly from him.

Or at least that's perhaps the point. The song is a weak spot all the same, a puzzling side-ender that mostly seems to encourage flipping the record earlier. The "concept album" status of Ziggy Stardust - of all of Bowie's four great "character" records, actually - is easily overstated, and the easiest explanation for this song may well just be that it's a piece of crappy filler. But this parallels Doctor Who at least as well as Buddhist parables and starmen do. A well meaning misstep, a piece that, not for lack of trying, never quite makes sense and never quite works. The only question is which of the many options within the Pertwee era we take as the analogue to this song.

6. Lady Stardust


Yates’ fingers shifted position over his mouth, just this side of a threat to clamp down if he said another word. Benton swallowed and stayed still. He felt himself getting hard against his better judgment. - "Keeping Secrets" by platoapproved, from A Teaspoon and an Open Mind


The faint, tentative cabaret piano that introduces Ziggy's second side moves us to a strange new place. For the first time in the album, we are invited to view the alien externally. A sad beauty, mocked and laughed at even as he pours beautiful music out, singing "songs of darkness and dismay" in sad beauty. Lady Stardust, in this song, is Marc Bolan, lead singer of T. Rex, yes. But perhaps the more interesting fact is that Lady Stardust is a male in the first place, referred to with the male pronoun throughout the song.

The obvious analogy is the drag queen. The main thing to recognize about drag queens is that they are overwhelmingly not transgendered. They are men dressing as women, playing at femininity. And crucially, the drag queen gets it slightly wrong, playing the part with too much gaudy excess. Drag sits on the line between idolatry and parody, between the sentimental embrace of camp and the cynical mockery of detournement.

Put another way, drag is weaponized camp, a loving attack. Drag is inherently marginalized. It transgresses, but is willfully blind to its own failure to "pass." But through its blindness, it manages an eagerness, an honesty, a, dare I say it, authenticity. Just as the girl rapturously presses her space face close to Ziggy's, drag is another moorage daydream, a collage taken seriously. Drag, like glam, is a secret handshake, a shibboleth to the world of the outsider. "He's faking it, so he must be one of us fakers." The closet becomes as much a source of pride as of shame.

(The original drag queen, of course, is Beau Brummel. The dandy is drag to begin with, doubly so when embraced as a slight mis-identification of the decadent cool of the James Bond-era action hero. This is why Doctor Who became  an iconic show within gay culture - because for five years in the 70s, its leading man was a drag action hero.)

7. Star


I cross the void beyond the mind, the empty space that circles time. - Jon Pertwee, "Who Is The Doctor?"

In all of this, there is an unasked question. If the purpose of the exercise is to build a new form of love and meaning out of the discarded scraps of apocalyptic spectacle, can the figure of the rock star ever manage this? There is much to doubt here. The basic idea of a revolutionary cult of personality jars.

But more broadly, much of the underlying theory of this performance is overtly Marxist. This Ziggy Pertwee and the Spiders from Metabelis Three concept works for the era, and I maintain that it is by far the interpretation that throws up the most fascinating wonders, but we have to accept the Doctor as an actively Marxist figure. Which is fine - the era came straight out of psychedelic revolution, and one of the architects of the Pertwee era was Malcolm Hulke. Doctor Who is always allied, on one level, with this.

But here we run into the problematic. The rock and roll star is a capitalist phenomenon, a creature of consumption. Here Bowie sings of a longing to be a rock star, but what he wants are the trappings: the money, the fame, the glory. Once those are obtained, perhaps, he can sleep at night and fall in love. The song begins with friends trying to change the world - fight in Belfast, or go on hunger strikes. But Bowie wants to be a rock star.

This is not a superficial refusal to join the fight. Rather, it is the realization that the revolutionary figure, the great celebrity who can change the world, is still an invention of the very system being fought. In his introduction to The Society of the Spectacle, Martin Jenkins describes celebrity as a capitalist lottery, a system by which just enough people are given the spectacular rewards of capitalism, and because it could be anyone, we all play along.

This is the sad truth underneath the song. The one thing that Bowie cannot do as a rock star is attack the system that creates the rock and roll star. The one freedom the Starman cannot grant us is the freedom not to have to look to the stars.

8. Hang On To Yourself


They're great favourites with the children, you know, with their gnashing and snapping and tearing at each other. - Vorg, Carnival of Monsters

The companion piece, in most regards, to "It Ain't Easy," "Hang Onto Yourself" is an overdone pastiche of rock, a whirlwind tour of snippets from other rock stars. The sting in the trap, if you will, the song where the stitched together fakery of Ziggy Stardust stands revealed as the cheap fraud it is. The first verse sings of a cheap groupie "praying to the light machine," and seems like nothing so much as a slap in the face to "Moonage Daydream"'s space-faced dancer, a mockery of her for being thick enough to embrace something as stupid as the crazy space freak.

And the worst part is, the song knows full well that it's full of it. "You're the blessed," Bowie sings, "we're the Spiders from Mars." The song has the gall to dispense rock star ministry even as it laughs at the congregation. The singer has no such illusions, does not for a moment pretend this is anything other than a cheap act. "If you think we're gonna make it, you better hang on to yourself." Not only can the Starman not provide any relief from celebrity, he doesn't even want to.

9. Ziggy Stardust


This was exactly you. All this, all of it. - River Song, "A Good Man Goes to War"

A rock song after the end of rock and roll. Moments after admitting to the savage vacancy of the part, Bowie unleashes one of the great guitar riffs in rock history. The result is a riff that mourns its own passing, fitting for the song that introduces us to Ziggy himself by killing him. Consumed by his own fans, torn to pieces, consumed by the very spectacle he feeds upon, Ziggy nevertheless is here safely enmeshed in a knowingly iconic song, a glorious creature of guitar riffs and ear worms.

Even after his critique of the rock star, in other words, Bowie is acknowledging its allure. The rock star is in many ways the ultimate alien - always in a fundamental sense distant from the fans whose lives he supposedly chronicles and speaks the truth of. The bliss in which the young girl swaying to "Moonage Daydream" exists not because of the accuracy of the description but precisely because of its source - the fact that it is an alien who can never be a part of the girl's world that seems to understand her.

Ziggy and Pertwee are effectively indistinguishable. Space messiahs in drag, they stand astride the world with growing awareness of the fact that the salvation they offer requires their own death to realize. This song is that growing realization - the sense that even now as we understand the Pertwee era, as we reach his finest hour (and season ten is, without question, his finest hour), that there is something unsustainable here, that the whole thing will, in time, come crashing down.

This song, then, is its tombstone. Here, suspended in that moment, shuddering in the post-coital bliss of Mick Ronson's reverb, we mourn the end with the very excess that brought it around. How glum. How glam.

10. Suffragette City


A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle. - Irina Dunn


Oh, all right, let's talk about Jo Grant - the one thing in Doctor Who more glam than Pertwee, more glam than Axos, more glam, perhaps, than glam rock. The thing about Jo Grant is that in the course of trying to create a dumb broad to get captured, Terrance Dicks inadvertently created one of the great feminist icons of Doctor Who.

The decadent virility of the rock star is necessarily uncomfortable with the feminine. Bowie can wear its trappings, make it fall in love with him, use it, and abuse it. And yet still this song exists, telling of a harsh city of women who can use him better than he can use them. Wham bam thank you ma'am indeed, Suffragette City is the remainder of Ziggy's fall, and, at that, what killed him.

But this is no panicked ball of castration anxiety cursing the vagina dentata. This is an anthem of self-consumption, a man happy to have his spine put out of place by this girl who's total blam-blam. The final form of the elusive lunar goddess in the audience for "Moonage Daydream," we see the power she had at last, the capacity to draw pleasure from the rubble of the spectacle. Even as Ziggy consumes himself for her, she readies her raygun for the next head.

Loved too much to ever be hurt, knowing she can get away with anything, well aware of our gaze, Jo smiles and goes about her business. The Doctor grasps her hand, stares adoringly at his companion, and they run off from whatever monster is chasing them this week, she having the time of her life, he deludedly thinking he's actually in charge here and that he exists for something other than her pleasure.

11. Rock and Roll Suicide


Don't cry. Where there's life, there's... - The Third Doctor, Planet of the Spiders


A mournful eulogy to the burnt out rockstar that gives way to his own garish resurrection, his cheapest spectacle yet proving to be his apotheosis. Torn apart by the very absurdity of a revolutionary rock star, killed by the basic impossibility of being a messianic commodity, Ziggy somehow lives on.

This is no surprise. Created to counter eschatology, to turn the fetishized spectacle of death into a mad celebration, this comeback is not his final move but his first. Of course death is no particular obstacle or stress for Ziggy. How could it be? Built out of the wasted salvage of death to begin with, Ziggy can make himself out of his own death as easily as anyone else's. Consume and burn out a rock star and another will take its place. The role survives its actor, and exists independently from him.

The ironic thing, of course, is that Bowie went on to literalize this final move, nearly flaming out in a staggering feat of recreational pharmacology, reduced to a pathetic shell of a man. This was always a possibility, and Ziggy Stardust is as much a reflection of Bowie's own fears about his family's history of mental illness and how it might impact him as it is a prediction or a diagnosis. But as if to prove his final point, Bowie's own course was to burn out and then move on, to come back, reinventing himself again, and again, and again, as immortal as Ziggy's doppelgänger.