Side Trip: Paradise Dungeons (2)

Hello once again, and welcome to the second sample chapter (the first chapter, if you missed it, is over here) of my proposed Wonder Woman project, Paradise Dungeons. Here we start to get at some of the intensely weird and deeply problematic stuff that makes Wonder Woman such a fascinating topic.

I've really loved writing both of these chapters, and really want to continue the project. But there are also limits to how much spec writing of one sort I can do. Simply put, there's not a huge real book market for the sorts of things I do. People occasionally ask why I don't shop TARDIS Eruditorum to a proper publisher, and the answer is simple - because nobody in their right minds is going to publish a ten volume set of Doctor Who criticism. Even Mad Norwegian caps out at six volumes. Paradise Dungeons is only shooting to be a one volume book, but it's still a sprawling critical tome about the BDSM themes in Wonder Woman and their impact on feminism. I think it's a great topic and I'm really excited to write it, but let's face it - no publisher wants this book. (Please note - if you are a publisher and want this book, e-mail me.)

Which is to say, if you want to see more, head over to the project's Kickstarter page and pledge some money. A $10 pledge gets you the book, and to be honest, I think that's a pretty fair deal. And please, spread the word. Seriously. I need to start making some money off of this writing thing.

And we'll be back again on Thursday with The Invisible Enemy. Oh dear.

---

Clay (1942)

The early years of any major comics character are always a bit unnerving to read. On the one hand, the early issues, almost inevitably, are where many of the iconic elements of the character are established, making them among the most influential and fundamental stories of the character. On the other hand, the nature of establishing the major tenets of what the character will be in turn means that over these stories, the character isn’t quite right yet. But with Wonder Woman all of this becomes even more complex because of how uncomfortable or inept many of the later creators are with the feminist and BDSM themes of the early days. The result is that the first year’s worth of Wonder Woman comics - the first twelve issues of Sensation Comics and the first two of Wonder Woman itself - are at once the purest and most complete statement of what the character is about and a sketchy, at times even clumsy, attempt at working out the character.

Let’s start with what is, to a modern reader, by far the most shocking aspect of these comics: Marston and Peter’s excessive fondness for extreme racial stereotypes. The horrifyingly racist depictions of the Japanese can at least be explained, if not excused, by the wartime climate. The minstrel-style black characters, stereotypical Mexicans, interchangeability of the deformed midget Japanese with all other East Asian nationalities, and villainous and treacherous Hawaiians, on the other hand, are much harder to explain without resorting to the uncomfortable but likely accurate truth that Marston and Peter held a host of racist prejudices and that their comics reflect these. (That said, the moment in Wonder Woman #1 in which, in a story with racist caricatures of both Mexicans and Japanese people, a car full of Japanese men crashes into a tree and Wonder Woman comments that they were too lazy to jump out is a sort of bizarre pinnacle of inept racism.)

This gets at a larger aspect of Wonder Woman in her original conception - her fundamental association with the United States of America. To some extent this is simply a cultural artifact: all World War II-era American superhero comics were unrelentingly patriotic and jingoistic. But this is a vague and unsatisfying explanation at best. After all, there are so many ways in which Marston and Peter are decisively breaking from the normal order of superhero comics, both in a storytelling sense and an ideological sense. The fact that strident and unwavering patriotism is one of the things that stays is significant.

This is doubly true given the extent to which Marston builds an entire theology out of pro-American ideology. In Wonder Woman #1, in which Marston retells and reworks the origin story he’d debuted in All-Star Comics #8 some six months previously, he presents the world as “ruled by rival gods - Ares, god of war, and Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty.” In a move that should surprise nobody, Marston further associates men with Ares and women with Aphrodite. But in a move that is at least somewhat more surprising, the difference between the two deities is not their desire to conquer the world. The difference is that Ares specifically wants to conquer the world via force, whereas Aphrodite wants to conquer men with love.

It is in this context that we must read he later discussion between Ares and Aphrodite in which America specifically comes up. In it, Ares (now called Mars) boasts, “Ho! Ho! The whole world’s at war - I rule the Earth!” But Aphrodite responds, “your rule will end when America wins! And America will win! I’ll send an Amazon to help her!” Several things about this are worth pointing out explicitly. First of all, although it is a common enough way to refer to the country, the fact that Aphrodite specifically assigns a feminine pronoun to America. Second, however, is the fact that America is explicitly allied with Aphrodite here. The equating of the Axis Powers with Ares is sensible enough, but the equating of America with Aphrodite and with love is rather more surprising.

But this is consistent with the larger portrayal of America that we get over the course of these stories. Wonder Woman is reflexively patriotic, yes, but consistently in an unusual way. We already talked last chapter about how Steve Trevor is visibly a nod to Marvel’s Captain America, and how he is shown to need the help of the Amazons. Over the course of the first twelve issues of Sensation Comics and the first two of Wonder Woman this perspective gets steadily fleshed out. The American military is on the one hand unequivocally the good guys, but on the other is continually under threat from secret plots of various sorts. The most common plot hook by far is Steve Trevor being dispatched on a mission that is actually a trap laid by a Japanese or German villain.

In other words, although they’re the good guys, America is also shown, at least in its male-dominated and militaristic form, to be woefully inadequate, especially compared to the sneering and imposing menace of its enemies. But this begs the question of why Aphrodite considers America’s victory so important. From a properly detached perspective, of course, we know the answer: because Marston genuinely believed that American victory in World War II would create the conditions for the matriarchal society he wanted to see established. But this doesn’t explain how. And in this case, given that Marston was (as almost every utopian or revolutionary is) wrong about how imminent his desired revolution was, how Marston thought the revolution would play out is a very interesting question.

In this context it’s worth looking at Sensation Comics #1, in which Wonder Woman, the marquee character, arrives properly in Man’s World. After dropping Steve Trevor off at Walter Reed, her first instinct is to go clothes shopping, noting that “mother told me so much about styles of American women that I’m dying to see them.” This moment could be seized upon in order to point out how Wonder Woman is sexist, but doing so would be problematic in a raft of ways. First of all, we return to the basic issue of the material reality of feminism. The fact of the matter is that the fashion industry is a part of female-centric culture in America. Whatever sexist assumptions are bound up in that - and there are many - the fact remains that style and fashion is a clear signifier for women in American society.

Furthermore, although Sensation Comics is less-obviously marketed to buys than All-Star Comics was, and Wonder Woman at least makes the cover here, other than the female lead and the fact that its pirate strip, “Black Pirate,” features an unusually large number of shirtless men, there is little in the comic to suggest that it’s looking for a female audience. The remaining backup features - “Mr. Terrific,” “The Gay Ghost,” “Little Boy Blue,” and “Wildcat,” are all standard male-focused action strips, and the back cover advertisement for Daisy Air Rifles is second only to Charles Atlas in terms of its gendered appeal.

In which case the turn towards shopping and fashion must be taken, like the turn in All-Star Comics #8 from a story about a crashing American pilot to a love story, as a sort of active refusal to cater to the reader’s normal desires. Notably, the previous page of the comic ends with Wonder Woman refusing to fill in the doctors at Walter Reed and running off, leaving Trevor in their hands. Then the next page opens with her deciding to go shopping. In other words, Wonder Woman abandons the plot of the issue (and indeed, in the last panel, is running out the bottom right corner of the page, physically fleeing it in favor of what’s next) to go shopping - an active defiance of the narrative conventions the primarily male readers would expect. Taken in this light, what is interesting about her decision to go shopping is less that it is a stereotypically female pursuit and more that it is overtly not something the male reader is likely to be interested in.

The other thing that is interesting about this delay (which lasts five pages) is that Wonder Woman is deeply naive about the nature of the world. First we see various elderly folks whispering to one another about Wonder Woman, with the men ogling her and the women tittering about her state of undress. From there she prevents a robbery, mistaking the crooks shooting at her for a game of Bullets and Bracelets. Then, after outrunning a car seemingly for fun, she is hired by a smarmy theater booker to do tricks, raking in money as a performer before quitting to go back to helping Captain Trevor. This last point is particularly interesting given the more obvious theatrical role available for an attractive and scantily clad woman. The idea of the male gaze and the sexual objectification of women is implicit here, especially given that the one panel depicting Wonder Woman on stage is drawn with a set of applauding hands visible at the bottom of the panel, but no other aspects of the audience, giving, in that panel, a point of view that seems to be that of an audience member looking at their own hands as they applaud.

But, of course, Wonder Woman comes out on top. Her promoter attempts to steal all of the money she made, and she proceeds to calmly recoup her money from him before just as casually giving it all away in exchange for the credentials of a nurse outside the hospital (thus giving her a secret identity of Diana Prince). In other words, while Wonder Woman is ignorant of the workings of Man’s World, she is also extremely deft at living in it and is capable of thriving despite her naïveté.

Even though this sort of fish-out-of-water approach fades quickly from the stories, the basic dynamic it represents is fundamental to Wonder Woman. Because another way to look at this dynamic is that Wonder Woman, despite declining completely to operate by the rules of Man’s World, ends up being free and in complete control of herself and her destiny within it. Wonder Woman’s power within the world, in other words, extends from her refusal to be subject to it.

In this context we can also make sense of the other major recurring ally of Wonder Woman to be introduced in 1942, Etta Candy. More than almost any other character in Wonder Woman, Etta serves as a challenge to the norms of American superhero comics. A solidly plus-sized chocoholic, at first glance Etta seems like a crass stereotype of an overweight woman with an eating disorder. But as one reads on, a curious detail emerges. Or, rather, an expected detail fails to emerge. Nowhere in these fourteen issues are there any scenes in which Etta is humiliated, looked down on, or shown to be less than capable because of her weight.

Sure, her insistence on bringing candy wherever she goes is played for laughs regularly, but the tone is that of character-based humor about a character with an excessive fondness for chocolate, not as shameful gluttony. And yes, there are a few scenes in which Wonder Woman tries (and fails) to get Etta to go on a diet. But what’s more remarkable is the confidence with which Etta bats her concern away, including a delightful scene where Wonder Woman tries to persuade Etta to lose weight so she can get a man, and Etta points out that once you get a man there’s nothing to do with him, but you can eat candy. Indeed, given Wonder Woman’s own hopelessly fawning love of Steve Trevor, Etta’s level-headed refusal to change who she is to get a man makes her, in that regard at least, even more of a feminist icon than Wonder Woman herself.

Etta serves as the leader of the Beeta Lambda [sic] sorority at Holliday College, which serves to give Wonder Woman a convenient small army of female characters she can call on. This, in turn, helps establish Wonder Woman as a broader social force. She is not merely one strange woman but the de facto leader of a large group of women - indeed, of an entire generation of them. It is not coincidental that Wonder Woman’s allies are all college-age women - i.e. women of approximately the same age as the men fighting World War II. Wonder Woman is blatantly building an army via Beeta Lambda. But, of course, it is an army as only Marston would envision it. In their first appearance, Wonder Woman leads a group of a hundred Holliday girls to walk up to the soldiers holding Trevor captive, move to dance with them, and then surprise them by chaining them up. In other words, the sisters of Beeta Lambda don’t fight, they beguile and capture. This also gets at the other obvious use of the Beeta Lambda girls, which is that they can engage in acts of bondage and spanking and write it off as “sorority initiations.”

Ah, yes, bondage. We were going to have to come around to this point eventually, what with it being in the title of the book and all. It’s no secret that Wonder Woman has a lot of bondage and fetish themes in it. Her magic lasso (which she doesn’t even get until Sensation Comics #6, although the retelling of her origin in Wonder Woman #1 goes back and gives it to her from the start) is the most obvious example of this - a rope that forces whoever is bound with it to obey her. But more broadly, virtually every story involves at least Wonder Woman, and usually several other characters being tied up. Wonder Woman’s major weakness is that she loses her power if she is bound by her wrist cuffs by a man. And, of course, the girls of Beeta Lambda will take almost any excuse offered to bend someone over and begin paddling them.

This is probably the point to make the obligatory admission that Marston’s own sex life was non-standard - he lived with both his wife and his former student/research assistant, and had two children with each of them. The metal cuffs Wonder Woman wears were modeled off of ones worn by Olive Byrne, his research assistant And if you were to assume that his obvious philosophical and narrative interest in female domination carried over to his personal life, you would not be alone in the assumption. But this also means we should stress the degree to which Marston’s interest in bondage was not merely a physical fetish but a philosophical one.

This is made clearest in the story from Sensation Comics #11, in which Wonder Woman, Steve Trevor, and Etta Candy astrally project themselves to the land of Eros, in which being placed in a leadership position is considered a grave punishment and where imprisonment is a reward. For Marston, it is quite clear that bondage is valuable and of interest in a large part because it’s a symbol of the act of submission, which Marston values. (Though, crucially, it’s only submission to loving female authority that’s valuable - the Eros story in Sensation Comics #11 is in part a parable about how everything goes wrong when men start to do the enslaving instead of women because men don’t make slavery fun.)

The biggest problem with all of this is that it at times seems to blind Marston to more blatant problems in his stories. The most obvious example of this first batch of stories is Sensation Comics #9. On the one hand, this is a quite clever story in which a seemingly silly plot conceit from Sensation Comics #1 in which Wonder Woman buys the identity of a lookalike nurse comes back as the nurse returns and wants her job back. A series of plot contrivances leads to the nurse’s husband, Dan White, mistaking Wonder Woman for his wife and chaining her to the stove to prevent her from going and getting a job. But the story completely downplays this horrifying moment of domestic abuse, with Wonder Woman treating it as a joke and the story ending with the reconciliation of Dan and his wife, with Wonder Woman, just to make it all worse, noting that she envies the other Diana’s role as a wife and mother.

To a modern reader, it is difficult to make out what Marston could possibly be thinking here without concluding that he’s being horribly sexist. But this ignores the degree to which Wonder Woman’s entire world is defined by bondage. Simply put, in a Marston story chaining someone to the stove just isn’t as big a deal as it is in the real world. The only really odd thing about it, at least in the context of the rest of Wonder Woman, is the fact that the story is endorsing a man punishing and dominating a woman for being excessively independent. The really jarring part - the horrid abuse - just isn’t something that can be taken as all that abusive in a world as bondage-filled as Wonder Woman’s.
But this is a deeply awkward note to end on, since it comes uncomfortably close to saying that because there’s so much BDSM in Wonder Woman, we can’t take any given instance of BDSM seriously - a viewpoint that amounts to a wholesale endorsement of rape culture (a term we’ll discuss at more length later). But making that criticism misses a rather large point - it’s only 1941.

It is easy, seventy years later, to forget how far ahead of his time Marston is with these stories. He is, in essence, telling a story infused with the ideology of second-wave feminism and the BDSM community several decades before either of those things existed as historical institutions. In her first year, Wonder Woman remains a deeply problematic character. But in many ways, the stories of this first year would feel more at home in the 1960s than they do in the 1940s. Not in all ways - the horrifying racism being the most obvious problem. But in many ways. Under Marston, Wonder Woman has a confused and deeply tangled ideology full of contradictions and problems. Then again, there’s no such thing as a historical ideology without contradictions and problems (and given that all ideologies will eventually become historical ideologies, this fact has considerable consequences for the present).

And so we can at least say this - nothing else in 1942 had problems quite like Wonder Woman’s. Marston was screwing things up in ways that none of his contemporaries were even close to managing. Progress is often nothing more than a matter of making new mistakes. By that standard, Wonder Woman is a quantum leap forward.

I Lived. Everyone Else Died. (The Horror of Fang Rock)

I was going to bring the use of the
book/VHS covers as the
illustrations to a close after Talons
and the close of that bit of my
childhood memories, but this cover
is just way too good. All it needs is
a K-KLACK!

It's September 3, 1977. Anyone sensing a general turning backwards in the music charts will feel quite vindicated upon seeing that Elvis Presley is at number one with "Way Down," although they will presumably be mollified by realizing that it's only at number one because he died two weeks previously. This means that it stays there for four weeks, with Carly Simon, Donna Summer, and SPACE, French pioneers of the space disco subgenre, also chart.

In other news, since The Talons of Weng-Chiang and Philip Hinchcliffe's tenure crashed to their conclusions, the Red Army Faction in Germany murdered federal prosecutor and ex-Nazi Siegfried Buback, and then later Banker Jurgen Ponto. Residents of Dover, Massachusetts witness the Dover Demon on the prowl in one of cryptozoology's iconic moments. Queen Elizabeth II began her Silver Jubilee tour. Shooters opened fire on a crowd of demonstrators in Turkey, killing at least 34. The shooters were never captured, and if you concluded that they were US-funded anti-communist forces you sure as hell wouldn't be the only one. Star Wars came out in the US, but we don't care about that so much yet. The Supremes play their final concert in London and disband, and the Son of Sam killer is captured in New York, which also enjoys a 25 hour blackout marked by looting.

While during this story, gang violence in San Francisco results in the Golden Dragon Massacre, the US agrees to give the Panama Canal to Panama at the end of the century, the Red Army Faction kidnapps Hans-Martin Schleyer, a major head of what is basically an inverse union - an association of employers. The Faction's goal in this is to secure the release of RAF prisoners by the West German government. And Mark Bolan, the glam rock icon better known as T. Rex, dies in a car crash. Oh, and the moment on Happy Days that led to the term "jumping the shark" takes place.

While on television, we have a story with fascinating critical dimensions that we need to disentangle before we go much further. For one thing, we're starting off the Graham Williams era, an era that the word "polarizing" seems barely to scratch the surface of. There really is a visible dividing line that takes place between the Hinchcliffe and Williams eras. The first fourteen seasons of Doctor Who are, all in all, considered to be overwhelmingly solid. Sure, they all have their detractors, but the critical consensus on the first fourteen seasons is that the series defaulted to very good.

No such consensus exists for the final twelve seasons. It's not that they're hated - every one of them, even seasons 22-23, have their firm defenders. But the position that Graham Williams and/or John Nathan-Turner's tenures on the show were flat-out unsuccessful is a thoroughly mainstream one in fandom, and not without reason. (I happen to quite enjoy the majority of the remaining twelve seasons.)

All of which said, it is difficult to think of a classic series story that has had as meteoric a rise in reputation in the last few years as this one. The only other contenders I can think of in terms of stories that have relatively recently joined the list of all-time classics are Power of the Daleks and The Massacre, both of which have a simple explanation for their recent rise in popularity: the Internet made reconstructions more widely available and the stories actually got widely seen enough to be classics. But here we have something odder - a story that sat under our noses more or less unnoticed as anything other than "quite good" for decades, and then recently has become white-hot. Moffat declared it to have the best title of any Doctor Who story ever, it's been singled out for praise on Doctor Who Confidential, Gareth Roberts and Steven Moffat talked about it on Twitter a few months ago. Everybody loves this story these days.

The Penguin Pocket Guide to Generating Blog Traffic thus concludes that the only reasonable tack to take here is to slam the story in an attempt to become the first voice of the backlash. And I would, except that the story really is pretty fantastic. So let's try a different angle. Much of the praise for The Horror of Fang Rock comes from treating it like a holdover from the Hinchcliffe era. This is not completely unfair. The writer, script editor, director, and stars are all veterans of the Hinchcliffe era, and the aesthetic is closer to the horror aesthetic of the Hinchcliffe era than the more comedic aesthetic that would eventually come (fairly or unfairly) to characterize the Williams era.

I'm not going to get too far into how this story fits with the remaining 17 stories of the Graham Williams era here, in no small part because the Williams era is the last chunk of Doctor Who that I haven't seen the bulk of before (it was largely left fairly late in the VHS releases. I ate up novelizations of the era because my parents liked Romana and so I was curious about her, but have seen no more than four stories from it). But also because it's kind of silly to. Yes, this story is profoundly different from the rest of the Williams era in several regards. The amount of clever critical nuance needed to observe a profound difference between this and Creature From the Pit is roughly zero.

What's far more interesting, and what critics largely sail over, is the degree to which this story represents a break with the Hinchcliffe era. This is most obvious when people describe the story as being extremely traditional because of its structure of a monster slowly picking off people in an enclosed space. Which, fair enough. That is certainly the plot of The Horror of Fang Rock. But what was its last appearance before this story?

That's a harder question, actually. The Seeds of Doom and The Ark in Space are the only two Hinchcliffe-era stories with particularly similar plots, and both are a stretch, with the former being more about Harrison Chase and the latter being more about Noah. The remainder of scary stories in the Hinchcliffe era are about much grander and more epic dangers than one monster hunting people down. And the Pertwee era certainly didn't have anything like this. No, pretty much the last time you had a story entirely about monsters picking people off in an enclosed space was, by my count, The Wheel in Space. In other words, the show hasn't done this since before Terrance Dicks was the script editor.

So why does everybody treat this story like a story that was still too Hinchcliffe-era for Williams to screw up as opposed to as a story that does its own thing? There are basically two reasons. The first is that treating this story as if it were really a Hinchcliffe story gives Williams's detractors one less story to make an exception for, reducing the list of stories they have to admit were good to ones written by Douglas Adams. This, however, is stupid and beneath us. The better reason is that it's just about the only Williams story to go for "scary" as its mood from start to finish, whereas the Hinchcliffe era stayed in the vicinity of scary for almost every single story. (There is, of course, also Image of the Fendahl to deal with in terms of scariness, but that's its own thing.)

But there the similarities largely end. The Hinchcliffe era did scary by showing the potency within the dying embers of old myths: Morbius, Sutekh, and Magnus Greel. There was always a sense of the epic there. This, on the other hand, is determinedly small scale - a handful of utterly mundane people trapped in a relatively unremarkable setting. It only becomes clear that there's a planetary threat in the fourth episode, and that's basically just a way to eke another ten minutes out of the thing - it's not the primary tension of the story at all. The monster isn't some ancient and terrible threat but a generic member of its species. And speaking of its species, it's the Rutans! No, not the minivan from Volkswagen. The sworn enemies of the Sontarans! Yes. Even the monster is little more than the b-side of a relatively minor enemy. This is not what Hinchcliffe would have done at all. Under Hinchcliffe, one imagines it would have actually been the Beast of Fang Rock, chained under the sea millennia ago by an ancient race of aliens, and sending out its electricity-wielding servants to gather power for its resurrection. Instead of, you know, just one pissed off alien jellyfish.

It would take a viewpoint of what Doctor Who is good for that is narrow even by the standards of Doctor Who fans to conclude that the smaller approach is in some way a bad thing. After all, so much of what is wrong with the worst moments of the Hinchcliffe era comes when the play of ideas and genres is allowed to get in the way of an investment in humanity, with even Holmes running badly afoul in his last effort. Talons would have been helped immeasurably if the characters had been characters instead of wittily-written Victorian stereotypes. But there's also something to be said for the basic radicalness of doing a small story. The Hinchcliffe era's steady abandonment of contemporary Earth came with the understandable but ultimately unnecessary consequence of moving away from the domestic scale of Yeti-in-a-Loo towards a more epic scale.

As I said, this is understandable - as you determinedly move from Earth to space it's natural to move from Earth-sized stakes to space-sized stakes for your stories. But Robert Holmes often took delightful measures to undercut the vast stakes, whether through the Doctor's witticisms or through making his villains envy vegetables. And no surprise - it was Holmes who showed, in the Pertwee era, how effective it could be to shrink the stakes away from the planetary to the utterly mundane. Because the shift from the free travel of the Troughton years (where the stakes often were smaller) to the earth-based format of the Pertwee years meant that every threat became a planetary one, and Holmes rightly observed that you could do a good story on a smaller scale. But despite this the scale had drifted ever upward, and Dicks was shrewd to pull it back down.

What's further interesting is that he manages to do that while retaining many of the cultural ideas from the previous story. This story is set almost at the same time as Talons (if About Time's analysis of the dating of each is to be believed, you can get away with placing them a year apart. Lance Parkin's endlessly hilarious aHistory puts them at thirteen), and though it is technically in the Edwardian era, itself in many ways just an incremental upgrade of the Victorian era to fill a technicality of calendar space between Queen Victoria's death and World War I, which brought the real shift in culture. (There is an analogy to be drawn here to the producer shifts on Doctor Who. Particularly snide fans may wish to note that you can make this analogy in such a way as to have John Nathan-Turner be equivalent to World War I.)

But instead of the elaborate genre parodies of Robert Holmes, Terrance Dicks takes a more materialist approach to it. Yes, he still has comic relief old fashioned people, but they're not being used for broad social critique. This is a character piece with well-executed stock characters, not a pastiche. That doesn't mean, however, that there's no social commentary. Leela continues her frustrating fade-out, in which it's obvious that she's not being allowed to develop as a character so that she can keep being pushed into comic relief situations, which is even more demeaning than "educating" her was. Where she used to have her own peculiar instincts that originated out of her culture, now she just seems to have superpowers allowing her to detect small changes in temperature. Given that there will be a tin dog to do that starting next story, one shudders to imagine what she'll be cut down to next.

But despite that, she gets well-used here in a variety of ways. The Doctor visibly prefers talking to her to talking to any of the other characters, and her easy competence contrasts well with their period-appropriate foibles. In this regard she is made a critique of aspects of the culture without having to resort to everybody laughing as she comically misunderstands tea while they reflect on how her simple savage wisdom has insight that even we civilized British people can learn from. There may be no more scathing moment of feminism in the show to date than Leela's scorn for Adelaide and all of the implied scorn for the cultural norms she represents.

The Doctor, on the other hand, is more problematic. It's shocking how sharp the change in Baker's performance is here. It changed visibly once when Sladen left, but here shifts again as Hinchcliffe departs. When Paddy Russell last directed the series she got Baker into one of the mummy costumes when the Doctor was supposed to be inside. This time he dominates the frame whenever he's on camera, standing in the center of the shot as characters buzz around him - the polar opposite of how he entered in Robot. Behind the scenes, his antics were flaring up as well. This was, apparently, the story in which Louise Jameson finally put her foot down and stood up to Baker, winning his respect, but on the other hand his relationship with Russell was a disaster.

The result is a Doctor who is a complete emotional cipher, with the actor simply trusting that the audience will simply adore him as long as he turns on the charm. It's a performance of pure egotism that is carried off only by the fact that Baker is right and the audience does like him. The scene in which he delightedly informs everyone that they may be dead by morning is heavenly, and his mocking dismissal of the villain attains a new sharpness. Even without knowing what's going on behind the scenes there's a palpable anger to Baker's defiance now, giving it just a tinge of punk at a point where both the series and punk were still credible enough to have that mean something.

The script also seems aware of the increasingly problematic dimensions of Baker's incarnation. It makes the interesting decision to have the Doctor be very much responsible for some of what goes wrong. And, of course, there's the gutsy decision to have this one be a total wipeout for the supporting cast. For the first time in the series absolutely every character not played by a series regular dies. And unlike many of the later contenders for massive body counts, here they're not just done for flare, but each mark concrete turning points in the plot that drive it forward. Everybody dies in this story, but nobody dies as an exclamation point on an exciting scene or out of some generic effort to "up the stakes." This story keeps the bodies offscreen in what is a clear concession to Mary Whitehouse, but it gives a better sense of the sheer human cost of the Doctor's life than anything since The Massacre.

This makes the Doctor's capriciousness more problematic. But at this point that's all it is - a case of complicating the tone of the series. It's a very distinct step in a particular direction for the series, but unlike most of the later steps in that direction it's utterly unselfconscious about it. In this regard it marks a sort of final comment upon the metafictional excess of the Hinchcliffe era. It manages a crystal clear metafictional comment with no resort to broad symbolism or pastiche or self-reference, but just by telling a particular story with a particular character and letting the frisson between those two reveal something on its own. It's deft and subtle in an absolutely delicious way.

It would be stretching it far too much to call this story a critique of the Hinchcliffe era. It's not. But it is in many ways a diagnostic of it, and a demonstration of what aspects of it are merely the preferences and defaults of its major creative figures and what aspects of it are actually integral to generating the amazing aesthetic effects it so often accomplished. It is in this regard the most sensible statement possible in the face of the battering the show just took: here is what we are good at. Traditionalism has never been so radical.

Side Trip - Paradise Dungeons (1)

Hey all. Some quick orders of business, and then on to our somewhat unusual show for the day.

First off, I'm pleased to announce that the print edition of the Hartnell essays now exists. You can buy it here. It is, sadly, only available from amazon.com, and international readers will have to pay for international shipping. It is, however, quite lovely, and the perfect gift for the overeducated and underemployed Doctor Who fan in your life this holiday season. It's $16, which is the price at which I get the same royalty I do selling the Kindle edition for $5. Speaking of the Kindle edition, it remains available on Amazon.com, .co.uk, .de, and .fr. Buy it with Euros while you still can.

Finally, an announcement about an odd week of posts. This week TARDIS Eruditorum will post on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. On Monday and Wednesday I'll be running sample chapters of the next project I'm trying to get off the ground, a book I'm calling Paradise Dungeons. Basically, it's a psychochronography of Wonder Woman, focusing on the way in which a piece of feminist bondage utopian propaganda unexpectedly became a popular culture phenomenon, and what that means throughout the 70 year history of the character.

Instead of doing this one as a blog, I'm doing this one straight-up as a book, and attempting to pre-finance it via Kickstarter. So if you like the sample chapter below, please swing by the project's Kickstarter page and kick in a few bucks. For a $10 contribution you get the book when it's written, and beyond that there are various other shiny toys available. And, of course, please spread the word. I'm really excited about this project. (And promise it will not interfere with your God-given right to three horrifically wordy posts about Doctor Who a week.)

And we'll be posting again tomorrow with The Horror of Fang Rock, of which Steven Moffat notes that "There's the obligatory THE and OF - and all the other words rock. One of them actually."

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Man's World (December 1941)

The first thing we have to admit is that she does not get a glorious debut. Batman and Superman, the two better-selling members of DC’s supposed “Trinity” of characters, got famous debuts. Action Comics #1 and Detective Comics #27 are two of the most valuable comics in the world, with their debuting characters splashed across the cover in two of comics’ most iconic images. Wonder Woman, on the other hand, debuted as a backup feature in All-Star Comics #8 that was, for lack of a better word, an advertisement.

This is not quite as bad as it sounds. If we’re being honest, All-Star Comics in general was an advertisement. To understand this, however, we need to first explain what DC Comics in general looked like in 1941. The bulk of DC’s line were not single-character comics like Batman or Superman but anthologies featuring a lead story and several backups. So, for instance, Action Comics #43, which came out the same month as All-Star Comics #8, featured a thirteen-page Superman story as its lead feature, followed by five stories featuring more obscure characters (The Vigilante, Three Aces, Mr. America, Congo Bill, and Zatara) ranging from six to thirteen pages themselves.

All-Star Comics is a comic that only makes sense in this context. Its main feature is the Justice Society of America - the first real superhero team, and exemplars of one of the two main approaches in creating a team book out of existing characters: take a bunch of characters that can’t quite support their own book and put them in one book together. Crucially, a typical Justice Society story is not a story of the team working together, but rather a story in which a team-based frame story wraps around solo stories featuring the various heroes on the team, each of which ends reminding the reader what book they can follow the adventures of the character in. It is, in other words, a book that exists to take the readers of, say, Hawkman and persuade them to try More Fun Comics where they can read about the adventures of The Spectre.

Wonder Woman was introduced in the final nine pages of All-Star Comics #8, after the conclusion of that month’s Justice Society story. Not only is her debut, unlike that of Batman or Superman, not the lead feature of the issue, it’s not even treated as a highlight. She doesn’t merit mention on the cover. Her debut is an advertisement for Sensation Comics, the series she starts headlining in January of 1942, shoved at the back of a book that basically consisted of ads for other books anyway.

There are two ways to look at this. The first is the pessimistic way. The entire history of Wonder Woman is going to be characterized, in part, by her having a visibly harder time of it in the market than her male counterparts. Batman and Superman both anchor entire lines of comics, with at least two solo books running at any time alongside, these days, a host of spinoffs. Wonder Woman has had a single title since 1952. Batman and Superman both saw their main books relaunched from #1 for the first time in September of 2011. Wonder Woman had her third relaunch from #1 that month. And, of course, Batman and Superman outsell Wonder Woman by miles. In this context, launching Wonder Woman with an unheralded advertisement shoved in the back of another book is merely the first of a thousand slights.

But there’s another option. If Wonder Woman has never managed to be unambiguously successful and equal to her male colleagues, after all, she’s surely no worse off than feminism, which is itself an unfinished project. So Wonder Woman is compromised and marginalized from day one. It’s hard to come up with a more fitting point of origin for a feminist project than the material reality of second class citizenship.

This sort of debased materialism is, after all, mirrored in Wonder Woman’s actual story. We are told explicitly that Wonder Woman is “giving up her heritage and her right to eternal life” to come to Man’s World. For all that is made of the messianic themes in Superman, fleeing the dying world of Krypton is not half as drenched in Christ imagery as this. Wonder Woman explicitly departs the world of the gods for the mortal world, giving up her divinity to become mortal.

When one looks at Wonder Woman’s first appearance through this lens, the frustrating aspects of it suddenly make an odd sort of sense. Central to the Christ story is the image of the divine incarnating not only in the mortal world, but into the most degrading and humiliating conditions in the mortal world. What’s important isn’t just that the divine walks the Earth, but that the divine is born in a manger and dies in agony nailed to a tree, having spent the life in between walking among the sick, the poor, and the outcast. So too, then, as Wonder Woman descends from Paradise Island to Man’s World, she incarnates first in comics’ most crassly materialist form: an advertisement in the back of a book that only exists to try to sell other books.

But the crass materialism of her landing is not sufficient to define the sublime breadth of her trajectory. To show the equivalence of the sacred and the profane requires more than just the profane. How, then, does this initial story do at capturing that?

Reading All-Star Comics #8 seventy years later, the moment where one turns onto the first page of the Wonder Woman story bristles with uncanny power. This power is not merely the weight of history and the realization that one is about to read nine of the most important pages in comics history, although that is certainly there. The entire tone of the comic changes. The artists over the first 69 pages of the issue fall into fairly predictable comic styles - the cartoonish approach of Stan Aschmeier, the photorealist influences of Jack Burnley, the frenetic, noir layouts of Bernard Baily , and, of course, the scratchy angularity of Everett E. Hibbard. All of these artists, and especially Baily, whose command of the page is visibly miles ahead of his contemporaries, are skilled comics artists who compellingly execute the sorts of styles that fit the strips they’re writing.

But 69 pages of their art leaves one utterly unprepared for the sight of Harry G. Peter’s art. The opening splash of Wonder Woman - a pose recycled for the cover of Sensation Comics #1 a month later - is striking. The image is almost completely devoid of straight lines - even the stars on Wonder Woman’s billowing skirt are bent and lumpy compared to the stars adorning the previous page’s ad for the next Justice Society story. Even the lettering is a sharp change, striving towards the tight regularity of type instead of the more natural and hand-written feel of the issue’s other artists.

But perhaps the most striking difference is the faces. We’ll talk at length about Peter’s art in a later chapter, but for now let’s look simply at Wonder Woman’s face. Her nose is perfunctory at best. Her eyes are far too widely spaced, and misaligned to boot. Her lips are pursed and unexpressive. Her face is statuesque and austere. The result of this is that attention is drawn away from her face and towards the rest of her body. This technique evokes the Decadent-era erotica of Aubrey Beardsley and Franz von Bayros, who similarly simplified faces to draw attention to the bodies of their characters - a far cry from the sort of referencing found in other comics.

But it is also worth remarking on the nature of the image. Peter’s initial depiction of the character is a fascinating mixture of the severe and the libidinous. On the one hand, as one would expect from art with visible influence from Victorian erotica, she is unquestionably a sexy woman. Her skirt billows up to reveal one of her thighs, and though it is tame by the standards of modern comics art, it falls around her in such a way as to be tantalizingly close to revealing her undergarments. On her upper body, her arms and shoulders are bare, and her breastplate is more than slightly complementary to her cleavage. On the other hand, her face is serious, and her eyes are trained not to make eye contact with the reader but to look past them, as if focusing on some larger object behind her. Her build, though sensuous, is also strong and muscular. She is erotic, but not in a sense that lends itself to being claimed or leered at by the reader. She wholly refuses to interact with the reader or to acknowledge their gaze.

By most standards, this is a very strange way to begin a superhero comic. The standard issue explanation of superhero comics, for better or for worse, is that they are power fantasies for the reader - that the reader imagines themselves as the superhero. There are countless reasons to be skeptical of this theory, but even still it’s worth noting how little Wonder Woman’s appearance adheres to that theory, remaining oblique and forcing the reader to watch from a distance instead of investing in her.

And this is, of course, assuming the reader is female and likely to identify with Wonder Woman in the first place. Given that Wonder Woman was not even advertised as a part of this issue, one has to assume the readers of this particular issue were, like those of most superhero comics, overwhelmingly male. Given that assumption, the first few pages of this story would have been similarly off-putting. The story opens with a plane crashing onto an island. Two scantily clad women see the crash and rush to search for survivors. Pulling a blonde-haired man in a military uniform from the wreckage, they are shocked to discover a man on Paradise Island. One of them carries him to a hospital, and we learn that the island looks like Ancient Greece. We learn that he is Captain Steve Trevor of the US Army intelligence Service, and that the woman who carried him to the hospital - who has black hair much like that of Wonder Woman - has fallen in love with him. Upon learning about this, her mother, the Queen, forbids her to see Trevor.

What is most interesting about these first two and a half pages is the way in which they actively push the standard male comic book reader out of the story. Steve Trevor is a standard sort of character. Both his name and his appearance evoke Timely Comics’ Captain America, introduced a little over a year before Wonder Woman with an alter-ego of Steve Rogers, a blonde American soldier. This is, in other words, a character that a regular comics reader already knows on some level and is used to. But here the character is injured, unconscious, and, most alarmingly, seemingly inside some sort of love story. If one does adhere to a theory in which the reader imagines themselves as the superhero, this amounts to a fall that counterbalances that of Wonder Woman’s fall into Man’s World - the fall of a standard issue superhero (indeed, a thinly veiled parody of the DC’s competitor’s flagship character) into Paradise Island.

Here the story does something unusual, breaking into a one-and-a-half page text piece with a couple of illustrations. This is not quite as strange as it might seem to a modern reader. Comic books regularly included a text piece or two - there’s one a few pages earlier in All-Star Comics #8, in fact, about a pilot that provides an odd sort of counterpoint to this. And this is not even the first lengthy block of text in the Wonder Woman story. The first page contains a typically enthused description of Wonder Woman’s might and power (“As lovely as Aphrodite - as wise as Athena - with the speed of Mercury and the strength of Hercules - she is known only as Wonder Woman, but who she is, or whence she came, nobody knows!”). The first sentence of this exultation sets the tone for the later and larger text piece, describing “a world torn by the hatreds and wars of men” and how, at last, there “appears a woman to whom the problems and feats of men are mere child’s play!”

The larger text piece expands upon this idea, describing how Hercules tricked Queen Hippolyte and stole her Magic Girdle, thus enslaving the Amazons and angering Aphrodite, who had given Hippolyte the girdle. Eventually Hippolyte declares that her submission to men is intolerable, and manages to beg Aphrodite into helping her steal the girdle back. With the girdle, Hippolyte defeats Hercules and his army to, on Aphrodite’s orders, leave the world of men for their own world.

Marston then describes the culture of the Amazons, which is defined first and foremost by the need to remain distant from men, which they all wear the bracelets they had worn as slaves to remind them of. Their culture is overtly utopian - free of disease, war, and death so long as Hippolyte retains the Magic Girdle and is not “again beguiled by men!” Hippolyte explains that, with the Magic Sphere given to her by Athena (the sphere, curiously, appears to be a disc) she can see any event in history or any place in the world, and, in some cases, predict the future, and that she has used this to advance Amazonian technology well ahead that of “so-called manmade civilization.”

To call the sexual implications of this story a subtext would be an excessive understatement. The fact that Hercules specifically tricks Hippolyte out of a magical undergarment and that this appears to take place outside of combat strongly hints that he stole it during a night of passion, and that the beguilement of men is specifically sexual. This is supported by the way in which the Amazons react to Steve Trevor’s presence. It is not the fact that there is a man on the island that is objectionable. Indeed, the Amazons act as though they have a duty to help Trevor. No - the thing that makes Trevor dangerous is fairly explicitly the possibility that one of the Amazons will fall in love with him, and that is what would risk losing Aphrodite’s favor. Which is a relatively shocking conclusion given that Aphrodite is the goddess of love. We’ll develop this theme in later chapters, but suffice it to say that Marston is gesturing towards a very, very unusual conception of love here.

The third section of the story, which, at three pages, is both the longest section and fully a third of the story, focuses on the origin of Steve Trevor and is little more than a generic military action story. It serves mostly to reinforce the point we have already made - that Trevor is a traditional male action hero. But we ought remember that these three pages are supposed to be what the Amazons are watching on the Magic Sphere. For these three pages, in other words, the Amazons are effectively reading a standard-issue American comic book.

This is made even more explicit in the final two pages of the story, which open with Hippolyte consulting Aphrodite and Athena for advice on what to do. Aphrodite informs her that she must help Trevor get back to America, while Athena informs her that she “must send with him your strongest and wisest Amazon - the finest of your wonder women! For America, the last citadel of democracy, and of equal rights for women, needs your help!” Although this sounds like standard-issue jingoistic patriotism of the sort common in comics of the era, focusing on that misses the fact that this jingoistic portrayal of America is being explicitly depicted as in crisis and in need of intervention from these female utopians.

This, in other words, is where the divine half of the Christ imagery comes in. On the one hand, Wonder Woman is cast into the degrading materialism of Man’s World. On the other, she is explicitly bringing the power of Athena and Aphrodite - two goddesses - to save Man’s world. But, of course, it’s also important, obvious as it might be, how much she cuts against the Christ narrative. She is a pagan figure, explicitly libidinal, resists any personal relationship with the reader, expressly militaristic, and, perhaps most obviously and significant, a woman. (The real and obvious source myth here is the descent of Ishtar, Babylonian goddess of love and war, and thus a fusion, of sorts, of Aphrodite and Athena, into the underworld)

The remainder of the story is straightforward. In order to find the best Amazon Hippolyte organizes a competition, forbidding her daughter to participate. When the competition takes place, a masked figure who looks and dresses exactly like her daughter shows up and, to the surprise of absolutely nobody who has ever read this comic, wins the competition and turns out to in fact be her daughter. At this point Hippolyte gives her daughter a name (which she had apparently lacked before), Diana - explicitly naming her after the lunar goddess, who is also said to be her godmother, and gives her the familiar Wonder Woman costume before sending her down to Man’s World.

And that’s it. A not-particularly-remarkably plotted story painting the character’s origin and plugging her next appearance in Sensation Comics #1. It is not an inauspicious beginning by any measure, nor is it a triumphant clarion call of feminism.

And yet here is where it begins. A barely believable epic of feminism and sexuality, and one of the most radically left-wing agendas ever to be catapulted into the American mainstream. In nine pages we see a towering goddess descending down into the ugly viscera of our world - into the crassly commercial and blithely jingoistic world of American superhero comics, in all their macho and violent glory.

Now for her seventy year ascent.

Time Can Be Rewritten 14 (Eye of Heaven, BBC Books,

Apparently the RSS feed failed to pick up Wednesday's post about Mary Whitehouse. If you missed it, it's over here. 

Among the most stereotypically overdone debates in all of Doctor Who fandom is the debate that took place over the long interregnum between the so-called "rad" and "trad" schools of novels. This was a proper debate, and thus characterized by each side considering the other's position to be self-evidently silly and essentially unworthy of discussion. Proponents of the "trad" school - short for traditional - favored novels that closely hewed to the approach and aesthetics of televised Doctor Who. They tended to view the "rad" school, with their preference for more radical and experimental novels, as a strange sort of Doctor Who fan who was only fond of Doctor Who when it wasn't much like Doctor Who. The "rads" on the other hand largely viewed tent traditionalists as silly an unadventurous sticks in the mud who failed to appreciate that anything that is traditional Doctor Who now was, at one point or another, radical Doctor Who. (The other 99% of fandom just read books and enjoyed some while not enjoying others.)

As is usually the case with a divide like this, the truth of the matter is that both sides of the debate are rather silly. We've already seen how "trad" novels can be subversive and challenging to the aesthetics and approaches of their eras. And we've followed the progress of the series closely enough to know that the idea that all changes are radical shifts is nonsense. The series has often improved incrementally, with "normality" being established through small shifts. The Hinchcliffe era really only did a dramatic revolution of a story twice: once with Genesis of the Daleks, and even that is still 80% just "generic Terry Nation story done really well" and would probably have qualified as "trad" by the standards that characterized this deeply silly moment of debate because it had Daleks in it and felt like a Terry Nation script. And then, of course, once with The Deadly Assassin, which is unquestionably "rad." Still, one example does not change the fact that even in an era full of iconic stories, not much is actually "rad" in televised Doctor Who. And so in this regard we recognize that in fact the very act of writing a Doctor Who novel means that you're signing up to try to do radical and interesting things within a prescribed form - a tradition, if you will. And that criticizing "trad" novels while extolling the virtues of "rad" ones is the height of idiocy. Right? Good. Moving on.

Here we begin to see the other side. Jim Mortimore is one of the archetypal "rad" writers, which should surprise nobody who has been reading the Time Can Be Rewritten stuff from the beginning. In this novel he manages to avoid casually reconfiguring reality every chapter via an Aristotle-infused video game being played on the TARDIS. Instead he tells his story through two distinct sequences of alternating chapters in which even and odd-numbered chapters each tell a different part of the story. This is not, to be clear, just perspective jumping. The first half of the book is almost all written from Leela's perspective, but  alternates between telling one portion of the story in the odd numbered chapters and a second, chronologically earlier portion, in the even numbered. A similar structure is used in the back half. The result is akin to what would happen if you watched both Part 1 and Part 2 of a story, alternating between them every five minutes or so, and starting with Part 2. And yet despite the ostentatious structure, however, the book is by and large a solid fit with the tone of the show in this period, follows the basic structure of a Hinchcliffe-era story (at least once you put the bits in the right order), and is quite good to boot. So here's the obligatory celebration of going completely nuts in a Doctor Who novel.

First of all, let's put the kibosh on one of the central lines of critique that books like this get: unintelligibility. I admit that I, being an English teacher and all, am one of the least sympathetic ears imaginable when it comes to the complaint that something is hard to read or hard to follow. Sometimes books are hard. The usual complaint - "it didn't make sense" - is ludicrous, and in essentially every case where you're talking about something that is remotely widely read - let's draw the line at "professionally published" for the sake of argument - simply wrong. Books that don't make sense don't get published. But nobody wants to say "I was too thick to understand it," so they blame books and authors for their own intellectual shortcomings.

Let's also note that Eye of Heaven just isn't that hard a book. It only ever alternates between two points in its narrative timeline, and tells each individual part of the story in order. The chapters alternate back and forth. The prose is crisp and clear, with only its tendency to shift among viewpoints and occasionally leaving the reader spending two or three pages trying to figure out what's happening proving tricky or difficult. And if you, as a reader, are complaining that you sometimes have to go a few pages before the context of something starts to settle... jeez. I mean, that's one of the most basic tools of writing you're rejecting there - the idea of revealing key points of context as you go is as basic a literary technique as exists. If you have trouble with it on an inherent level... that's bad. And, I mean, this is more broadly true. I've read an awful lot of Doctor Who books in my life, and anyone who is complaining that they are difficult and hard to understand must break down into a gibbering mess when confronted with James Joyce or William Faulkner. Heck, they must be terrified by Alan Moore or Ian Sinclair. Or, like, this blog. I mean, I'm surely preaching to the choir here, having long since scared everyone else off.

But fine. Let's pare this attack on Eye of Heaven of its more unfortunately anti-intellectual aspects and try for an approach that doesn't lend itself to complete dismissal. Clearly treating the narrative complexity of Eye of Heaven as an inherently bad thing is ludicrous, and clearly you don't want to argue that the book is unintelligible. But like cleverness, complexity is merely something that can be used well, not something that is inherently good. There is such a thing as overkill. The question we should be asking isn't "is Eye of Heaven too complex" but rather "is its complexity appropriate for what it does?"

There are two aspects to this question. The first is whether the book's complexity contributes significantly to what the book has to say. Or, to put it another way, is there a point to all of this, or is it just Mortimore showing how clever he is? The second is whether its complexity is in line with the expectations of its genre. After all, even if we reject the idea that Eye of Heaven is particularly hard as books go, if there is a compelling reason why Doctor Who books shouldn't even be that hard, that's a valid criticism.

We'll start with the first. There are, of course, tons of reasons why one might pick a non-chronological narrative style. Most of them fall under the broad heading of breaking the equivalency between story and plot. The easiest way to explain the difference is in terms of a mystery story. The plot of a murder mystery begins with the murderer killing someone. But the story of a murder mystery ends with that. That is to say, the murder is something that happens early on, but in terms of the order things are revealed to the reader, the murder happens late. I use this example because it should make obvious the way in which it is often important to distinguish plot and story. Because the order in which the reader learns things is a separate narrative logic to the order in which they happen.

In the case of Eye of Heaven, what this lets Mortimore do is have key events - the ones that happen at the end of the even numbered sections - be simultaneously approached from both ends. For instance, at the point chronologically between the plots of the even and odd-numered chapters in the first portion of the book, a major new character is introduced. By interleaving the two sections Mortimore is able to simultaneously build to the character's arrival and show the consequences of her arrival, with the moment of her arrival and the ultimate explanation of who she is coming only when both of those have been explored sufficiently. (A near-identical narrative technique is used in the opening parts of "The Wedding of River Song," and Moffat uses the technique frequently in his pre-Doctor Who shows. Other adept practitioners include Aaron Sorkin.)

But there is a complexity to this book that exceeds what can be accounted for this way. When time-jumping techniques are used on television they're usually accompanied, at least at the start, with helpful captions saying something like "Four months earlier..." or some other clear signpost as to the relationship between the two timelines. Mortimore makes no such concession, jumping back and forth between his two timelines with no explanation as to how they relate or to who is narrating a given chapter.

But this makes sense for what he is doing as well. Eye of Heaven is thoroughly steeped in the intellectual tradition of the Hinchcliffe era that it is supposed to follow from. This is a book explicitly about the repetitions of history and the nature of memory, and so a structure in which one is forced to engage with the story via idiosyncratic chronology is wholly sensible. For a book that is about odd and impenetrable legacies of the past, having odd and inexplicable past events that are nevertheless hugely important to what is happening at any given moment adds obvious dimensions to the story.

All of this is also tied in with Mortimore's unusual decision to narrate the novel from various first person perspectives, the most common of which is Leela. (There are also two sections narrated from the Doctor's point of view that are widely criticized in reviews. These criticisms are wrong - Mortimore is clearly borrowing the narrative voice used on The Pescatons. It's a perfectly fair way to sidestep the question of how to narrate a story from the point of view of the Doctor - use the way it's already been done to nobody's particular alarm. It's also very funny.) The decision to use this particular era for this particular story is in no way incidental. This story fills a major thematic gap for Leela that the series itself was never going to (and really should never have given the limitations it would have faced doing so on its budget) by juxtaposing her with indigenous people of the sort that her character was based on. This book exploits the obvious question poised by a character who is a futuristic member of a "primitive" tribe - what happens if you put her opposite a "primitive" Earth culture.

So, who wants a quick primer on the crushing misery that is doing ethical criticism of art and literature on grounds related to cultural discrimination? Because if any of you do, I'll do it for all of you. What's that? You do in the back? Well, OK. But seriously, this is free on the Internet. Why are you all crowding around one screen. Go get your own laptop or something and read it. It'll hurt your eyes less. (Wow, that transition overran.)

I've been putting "primitive" in scare quotes here because there's a whole nexus of issues with Leela that I've been dancing around and should quickly flesh out. I've complained about the whole "civilizing Leela" tone of stories without really digging into what's wrong with this. At the most basic level, it's just a bit of good ol' commie pinko cultural relativism on my part. The implicit value judgment in saying that a civilization with less advanced technology than ours is inferior to ours is obscene. So when the show dips into creating a value judgment around Leela in which the reason she is less than the Doctor is that she's a primitive or a savage, it's problematic. And I use that word in its real sense instead of in the generic academic "I am hedging because I want to condemn something but opt out of the moral judgment" sense. It's an interpretive problem. Because there are, of course, ways in which the Sevateem or the Rapa Nui are inferior to the Doctor. They are less good at chemistry and yo-yos. It's not, in other words, that every time the Doctor makes a negative judgment of Leela it's bad. Nor is it that it's bad when the Doctor objects to how violent she is, because that's a moral judgment. (Correspondingly, it would not be bad if Leela objected to how cowardly the Doctor is because of his nonviolence.) But on the other hand, sometimes it is bad - the way in which the Doctor makes dismissive jokes about Leela being a savage while visibly liking her less than he liked his previous companion is... tough to get around the implications of, even if you do know that it's really Baker not covering his own dislike of the character/actress/fact that other people appear in his television show.

Then in Talons it managed to acquire a whole new level of problems because Holmes ported Leela-the-savage over to the Pygmalion/My Fair Lady set of tropes it acquired a whole set of prejudices about class (in which richer/more educated people are superior to poorer/less educated people) that, again, hit that difficult point in which there exist value judgments that can be made - the more educated person is, statistically speaking, far, far more likely to have a bitching cheesecake recipe - but where an absolute value judgment is horrific. And now the show had managed to tie those two together, which, of course, isn't that hard because of the fact that education, poverty, and race are correlated due to systemic biases and discrimination in human culture. So this is, basically, one of those really shitty situations that make literary critics want to crawl back into bed instead of writing decently nuanced analyses of.

And where all of this gets horribly nasty is that nothing I've said in the last two paragraphs is actually news to anybody. Which means that when we get our political correctness party going and ramp up the discussion of privilege-denial and negative tropes, what we encounter is usually not frothing lunatics who rail against the fundamental moral inferiority of other cultures or of poor people. Although you will find plenty of those. And I only picked Kipling over Herman Cain because I could find a good link faster.

But more often we find things where people, aware of how horrible it would be to treat another culture as inherently inferior to your own, throw a couple of bones to the "primitives." These bones may range from the horrifically meager (black people sure are good musicians though!) to the exceedingly complex (the subgenre of movies about brilliant minority kids overcoming the odds to succeed), but what they end up doing is creating a cultural norm that reinforces systemic bias. For instance, teaching minority kids that their lives are miserable and hopeless cesspools that only one or two exceptional geniuses will ever rise out of has a disastrous effect on every single minority kid who isn't an exceptional genius. Even though any given movie is in fact made out of a sincere desire to help inspire at-risk kids into doing what it takes to improve their lives, and is based out of a whole host of completely reasonable and understandable and sympathetic and, no, let's go all the way here, ethically good decisions about how minorities have lower graduation rates which trap them in lower-paying jobs that sustain the vicious cycle of poverty. It doesn't erase the fact that it's feeding a larger cultural stereotype that badly undermines everything that a given movie is trying to accomplish.

What I'm getting at in this somewhat torturous digression is that Leela is always a very difficult character to do anything with. Because on the one hand there are genuinely interesting things to be learned and said about how different cultures interact. And these things get very, very interesting and profound when you start running into things that imply some sort of cultural element that exists in some form in all human or even perhaps in all intelligent cultures. That's the sort of thing that science fiction and fantasy were made for as genres. So in that regard, Leela is a goldmine for the show - a vast trove of amazingly interesting stories.

Except that she's slap bang in the middle of a host of cultural stereotypes of the sort that have a few concessions to the ethical value of the "savage" while still declaring that they need rich white people to swoop in and save them. And so you're constantly walking this horrible line between brilliant science fiction about the nature of humanity and cratering race/class fail. And if you find a critic who says that they enjoy picking through the smoldering ethical rubble of crap like this, they are liars and you should not play for money with them. But it is important, and so we do it anyway as our service to you, our loyal public. By the way, and I'll make a bigger thing about this next week when everyone's back from the holidays, but the book's out in paperback now, so if you want to tip your neighborhood rambling Marxist localist monarchist, feel free.

So anyway, connecting Leela with some of the tribes whose culture she was based on is really interesting too. There's a really lovely idea in the heart of this book about how truly and horrifically oppressed cultures - ones that are oppressed into extinction or virtual extinction - survive and propagate. And framing it in terms of the Rapa Nui - a culture that was nearly driven completely extinct in the time period the book is set in - and in terms of Leela - whose culture was destroyed before her eyes by the Doctor, who had destroyed a previous culture to cause hers to be created, and who is a nexus of problems of oppression that are less dramatic than what the Rapa Nui suffered, but that are nevertheless truly harmful - is extremely powerful. And the narrative structure that distances the reader slightly from the action and forces them to feel like cultural outsiders to the story puts the reader in the exact right frame of mind to connect with this larger idea of how dying cultures cause their history to reiterate and survive, for better and for worse.

Which brings us at long last, and some day a copy editor will murder me in my bed for the amount of time I put between these rhetorical flags, the second aspect of our question about whether Eye of Heaven is appropriately complex - is this the correct level of complexity for Doctor Who?

The fun answer is "Well it sure as hell would go over Mary Whitehouse's head."

The larger and more serious answer is that of course it is. It's not one of the best Doctor Who novels of all times. Mortimore is better at coming up with narrative devices than he is at using them - a problem that anyone who generates a large number of clever narrative devices runs into eventually. There is a constant sense that he is hitting the exact wrong amount of trying the reader's patience - that if he'd lengthen his leash and really screw around he might have something really special, or if he reeled it back and tried to take a little bit of the edge off of the alienation of the reader, he might land what he has more effectively. But, look, if you're going to criticize Doctor Who novels for not being as adept at narrative experimentation as Alan Moore or William Faulkner, seriously, you're doing it wrong. The narrative faults of this novel are solidly in the range of what is acceptable for a Doctor Who novel, and frankly it's only because people like Paul Cornell, Gareth Roberts, Russell T Davies, and Lawrence Miles wrote Doctor Who novels that Mortimore's novel even looks imperfect in comparison.

Unless we want to attempt to stray into the much, much uglier question of whether there's something wrong with making Doctor Who too weird or too hard. Or too anything. I mean, let's just go with the broad "is Doctor Who an appropriate venue for aesthetic extremism." To some extent, I mean, I can't take anyone seriously who says no. That just seems to me a boring and intellectually uncurious position of the sort that I just don't have the life expectancy to deal with. But as with most arguments you disagree with you can knock together the best possible form of the argument and then shoot that down and let all the worse formulations go down with it, and that's always worth doing, so let's go ahead and defend the avant garde in Doctor Who. After all, what better time for it than right after the Mary Whitehouse entry, and before Doctor Who begins to meander towards a different type of aesthetic extremism in the Williams era.

The best possible argument I can find for this point of view is one of crass commercialism. That if you push the show too far to the avant grade you lose too much of the audience. Even when the show is a niche set of novels, you want the novels to do well enough that people consider bringing the show back. You don't want the novels to become so weird that the line goes out of print. And weird is harder. You lose readers to not getting it and then blaming the book. That's just life. And so you don't want to be too weird unless you're funded by a model that doesn't depend on having a lot of fans. Welcome to the life of a psychochronographer, by the way.

But there's a moral dimension that can be made here too. Doctor Who is amazing in part because it occupies magically a space between the cultural avant garde and the mainstream. It's a show that does an amazing job of making the unfamiliar familiar to people and of exposing people to new ideas in a way that works. Whether you go back to its original educational mandate, its current "let's have a nice big wholesome cultural event" mandate, or its alchemical mandate, this is very much what the show does. Alchemy through material social progress. This means that it actually can't go too far and still work. If it crosses the line into the completely avant garde, it stops doing one of the things it's there for.

On the other hand, it's a fine line between that observation and "if you act less smart, people will like you more." Which, incidentally, I was told in fourth grade, the year before I discovered Doctor Who. By my teacher. Just to keep that theme in the mix while we discuss this.

It comes down to the fact that Doctor Who is an anthology show. And to the fact that underlies why a bunch of well-meaning movies about smart minority kids become a harmful racist stereotype. Doctor Who novels would be bad if every novel were weird and experimental like Eye of Heaven. Just like movies about minorities are bad because every one is about smart minority kids triumphing over adversity. But notably, not every Doctor Who novel is like Eye of Heaven. Most of them aren't.

But crucially, the entire line would suffer if none of them were like Eye of Heaven. You can't mediate the space between the avant garde and the mainstream without pushing against the lines. (On both sides. Doctor Who would be poorer if it didn't try low-market uninspired crap like The Hand of Fear sometimes to see how far it can go in that direction.) Anthology shows triumph in part because they can pull back from any mistake immediately by just not doing that sort of story again. It's hard to do long-term damage with a poor aesthetic decision.

And one thing that we will eventually discover in the back portion of the classic series is that if you fail to push against the limits of experimentalism and ambition occasionally, the show as a whole will wither badly. And this is the real reason Whitehouse's crusade against Doctor Who and, more to the point, the BBC's utterly cowardly response to it (which is the real crime in all of this - the willingness of those in power to facilitate her bullying) is so bad. The show is, institutionally, going to be afraid of risking it for quite a while now. And that's very bad.

(But as Jim Mortimore demonstrates... it gets better?)

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time For Tea 20 (Mary Whitehouse)

Photoshopped? Oh, probably.

It is, above all else, a profoundly stupid way to go down. Philip Hinchcliffe, after three years of making an enormously compelling case for why he is the best producer of Doctor Who since Verity Lambert, is given the sack in order to appease Mary Whitehouse. Three years of dark fairytale postmodernism with a flare for the cynically epic come to a close because of the incessant complaints of a crazy woman. Not with a bang but a whimper.

There's an odd justice to it, though. If the one aesthetic crime we can firmly get to stick to the Hinchcliffe era is hubris, there becomes a poetic justice to the era being taken down by a deluded fool with the visual literacy of a donut. It's oddly fitting that a show that is at times so cavalier about the material consequences of what it does should go down to a hack that should have been trivial to refute. Doubly so for it to happen under Robert Holmes, who isn't sacked here, but whose hatred for the banal evils of the world makes the show getting brought down by Whitehouse on his watch a particularly savage irony.

Let's discuss some facts then. One of those people who spent almost her entire working life as an old lady, Whitehouse, starting in 1964, was a high profile campaigner in the UK on the issue of excessive sex, violence, and moral depravity on television. An outspoken and evangelical Christian, her initial battle of choice was with Hugh Greene, the Director General of the BBC when Doctor Who was created. It was under Greene that the BBC took its most concrete and visible steps to be a channel not about imposing the ideology and worldview of "establishment" Britain but about creating programming that appealed to all of Britain. Most concretely, this manifested in the production of things like Z-Cars or Cathy Come Home. And Whitehouse hated it. She believed that Greene was "responsible for the moral collapse" of the UK, that he spread "the propaganda of disbelief, doubt, and dirt... promiscuity, infidelity, and drinking," and that the correct role of the BBC was to "encourage and sustain faith in God and bring Him back to the hearts of our family and national life." 

It is possible, and many have done this, to look at the nature of this argument as an art versus commerce debate. This does not even involve ignoring the obvious theocratic implications - the UK is, after all, technically a theocracy, though it manages its condition well through a longterm regimen of secular democracy and keeps acute attacks to a minimum. 

(Because someone is going to comment, the titular head of state is also the titular head of the church. The line between it and destructive theocracy is, in the case of the UK, one of active and continual choice not to do anything unseemly with the fact that they are ruled by a monarch who is also the head of the church. I don't even note this as a fault in the nature of British government - clearly they do just fine with this setup. Complain all you want about the fundamentals, the thing works. In practice, the US has more of a problem with theocratic lunatics than the UK does, so it's not like fundamental separation of church and state is a panacea or even, for that matter, particularly effective. My point here is really just for American readers - not that there are any the day before Thanksgiving, making this a dumb day for a major post, but oh well - the claim that the correct role of the BBC is to bring God back into national life has a different relationship with the structure and principles of British government than it would with the structure and principles of the US government. You're not arguing against the grain of the Constitution there, in no small part because the UK doesn't have one of those.)

(Oh, and for the UK readers, Thanksgiving is what we have as our autumnal holiday because we just can't look ourselves in the mirror if we're calling something "October Bank Holiday." We're not sure if we envy or pity you for being able to.)

Art, after all, in its more Enlightenment-infused senses has always been about the divine, with art being a tool that reveals aspects of the divine to humans. Even in the more secular versions of Enlightenment thought this tends to be fairly close to what art gets valued for, or at least, it seems to be, because let's face it, secular versions of Enlightenment thought are not the place most people go for aesthetic advice, and there's a reason for that. From this viewpoint, the problem with Greene's BBC is that he is turning away from the  production of art and towards mass-market commodities. This is the view that you get if you start pairing Greene off against the so-called Reithian model of the BBC. Wikipedia - I'll admit openly that's what I'm using here - lists the Reithian model as valuing "an equal consideration of all viewpoints, probity, universality and a commitment to public service."

There is a philosophical landmine here that we are going to have to pause on for a moment. Because that list of four values does not cohere. "Equal consideration of all viewpoints" and "probity" are necessarily in opposition. If you hold to a specific moral code, you necessarily consider some viewpoints - namely those antithetical to that moral code - as unequal in stature. That's not equal consideration. Liberal democracy does not hold totalitarianism in equal consideration, at least not unless you dress it up in the rhetoric of self-advancement. There is no such thing as complete cosmopolitanism. And this point underlies the fundamental difference between two visions of liberalism that have been quietly and at times loudly coming into conflict throughout the period this blog has been tracking. And, for that matter, two visions that are still pretty much the big headline because philosophical shifts take place over decades and we're still playing this game. To wit, look at what's going on in the streets of New York, Oakland, London, in Tahir Square, in college campuses across America, and thousands of other places. Yes, this is one of those "let's describe big political realignments" posts that always attract so many comments. 

The first of these two ideologies is Enlightenment liberalism. In this model, the application of human reason leads towards truth. Diversity of viewpoints is valued because of the belief that when the ideas argue against each other the right one will rise to the top. Democracy works because it will produce the best solution - the aggregate power of human reason is viewed as the best decision-making process available. So long as every viewpoint gets a chance to be heard, the right one will, seemingly inevitably, win out.

Postmodern liberalism, on the other hand, rejects this idea. At its most basic level, it rejects the sort of hyper-sanitized purity of it. Democracy doesn't work because it picks the right option, it works because anything else is even crueler. (Which is, of course, basically the content of Churchill's famous line about democracy being the worst system of government. The transition from Enlightenment era to postmodernism was not a lightswitch event any more than the transition to science was. For one thing, you had to go through modernism.) Moral rightness does not inherently rise to the top, and it certainly doesn't with anything near the effectiveness that money and power do. 

And so Enlightenment liberalism tends to mistake the desires of those with enough money and power to win elections for an inherent moral authority. The positions that are given "equal time" are really just sanctioned oppositions - there to be argued down and kept on the margins. Ultimately only those with access to the tools of reason - which, mysteriously, always keep being the tools of the upper class - wield actual power. This is the end problem with Reithianism - in the end, it sustains social inequity by continually making class judgments.

The response is Greene's BBC. And this is where the art vs. commerce angle falls down on this debate. Because, in hindsight, we realize that Greene's BBC was putting out some of the best art ever to be made for television, and thus criticizing him for embracing commerce over art is nonsense. Yes, he did embrace commerce in ways previous heads hadn't, but he did so in a way that did not oppose it to art. Another way to look at this is to say that what Greene did was move the BBC towards a more postmodern sort of liberalism. He actually took seriously the idea that the BBC should equally consider all viewpoints and made television that came from multiple viewpoints. That's the whole idea of social realism - that it gives the audience viewpoints they wouldn't be exposed to and shows them aspects of the world they didn't know about. Television, under Greene, isn't a device to show The Truth but rather a device to show more information, more perspectives, more things. 

There is still an embrace of cosmopolitanism here, but there's a fundamental difference in goals. Enlightenment liberalism embraces cosmopolitanism because it believes that a single "best view" will bubble up to the top. Postmodern liberalism embraces it because it believes that given a sufficient critical mass of views the worst views will wither and die, and that this is about the best you can hope for in terms of social progress. It recognizes that progress is not about approaching a defined goal of the future but about cleaning up the reiterated fossils littering the present. That the march of history is not about the oncoming rush of the future but about the steady killing of the past. The production of new ideas and new perspectives is the material fuel that enables this, and is thus valuable. Postmodern liberalism values cosmopolitanism because cosmopolitanism breeds the conditions in which decaying ideologies are sped to their deaths.

This finally brings us around to the earlier point I made about this being the start of the Long 1980s. It's not a big spoiler that the 1980s, in both the US and UK, were dominated by conservative politics. But there's a particular model of conservatism that we see here - one that's still enormously powerful and is still recognizable as what things like the Occupy movement are reacting against. And what's particularly insidious about this sort of conservatism is that it is in many ways the logical endpoint of Enlightenment liberalism.

In America this fact has become completely explicit, with the right wing clinging to the Constitution in a large part because they want to pretend that no significant developments in moral or political philosophy have happened since 1787. The Enlightenment is, in this context, unambiguously treated as the last word on politics. (There is, of course, an odd fundamentalism to this - a decaying ideology reverting to its original form in a last, choking stab at purity of reiteration.) But more broadly, the right wing trades on an Enlightenment model of individual liberty. And for a variety of reasons, the most obvious ones being that the Enlightenment model of individual liberty was created by rich white men who naively assumed everyone else was basically like them, this model itself is corrupt. It's not a matter of misusing the model. Rather, it's one of utter fealty to the model having catastrophic results. Libertarianism is little more than a proof by contradiction starting with the premises of Enlightenment liberalism in which everybody forgot what to do after you find the contradiction.

It should be no surprise that Whitehouse was, in the end, an ally of the Thatcher government. They shared, after all, a commitment to Enlightenment liberalism. The evangelical Christians that took Whitehouse seriously were part of Thatcher's base. They were not allies as such - in truth, Thatcher's ideology was always more economic than social. But they shared a hatred for postmodern liberalism, and a reliance on the idea of the "silent majority." 

There are few concepts more insidious than that of the "silent majority." This is true for one very simple reason, which is that silence is already antithetical to postmodern liberalism. If social progress is understood as the demolition of the past via the continual acceleration of new forms of thought then there is nothing more toxic to that than the idea of people who simply refuse to play with the creation and engagement of new forms of thought. Silence, in the context of the silent majority, is nothing more than a refusal to play - a complete rejection of the idea that you can be challenged. If there is one point of view postmodernism is very, very clear on, it is that you should make a lot of noise. Preferably obnoxious noise. 

Again, then, no surprise that Whitehouse's arguments, based as they were on appeals to this silent majority, were appallingly incompetent. She had been targeting Doctor Who since about Genesis of the Daleks, with her most famed line being a description of the show as "teatime brutality for tots." But the fuss she raised that ended up bringing Hinchcliffe down was due to the episode three cliffhanger of The Deadly Assassin, in which Goth drowns the Doctor. The director, David Maloney (who, sadly, never returns to the series following Talons of Weng-Chiang, having been working on it off and on since The Mind Robber), opted to do that cliffhanger with a freeze frame on the Doctor's submerged head. And Whitehouse flipped out, claiming that children would think the Doctor's head was underwater for the whole week and would be terrified by not knowing if he survived, while simultaneously claiming, in what seems like something of a contradiction, that they would all try to drown their brothers. Which, I mean, you can kind of get some way of connecting those, I suppose, in which the show is teaching kids that you can hold your breath for a week, but, um, seriously? 

I took a shot at this kind of thinking way back in the Hartnell era, but let's be clearer here. Even if one grants some set of claims about the harmful effects of violence in the media on children - and notably, these claims have generally failed to survive any scholarly scrutiny - this position is indefensible for the simple reason that it is based on normalizing bad readings and sloppy thought. The failure to understand freeze frame only makes sense if you assume viewers who do not think at all about the technical properties of the medium at all in watching it. It relies on a naively immersive model of media in which television is a literal representation of things. 

But look, we know it isn't. We know that camera angles and editing are part of how storytelling works. We know, in fact, that it's impossible to make sense of drama if you don't understand the conventions of visual storytelling. To say that a freeze frame suggests the Doctor's head being held underwater for a full week would require thinking that narrative time and audience time pass at the same rate - an assumption that can't even be taken seriously. It requires that you think of a cliffhanger as a genuine source of danger for the character, and thus to think of Doctor Who not as a television show that exists in a real cultural context but as, to borrow a term from Gayatri Spivak, gossip about imaginary people - a look into the lives of people that could, in fact, simply die at any moment. It requires that the audience watch Doctor Who as found footage of real life as opposed to as a story.

And these are not subtle, advanced issues. The "kids don't understand any of that" argument doesn't wash. These are fundamental aspects of how the medium works. This is stuff you learn not as a value-added extra after learning basic visual literacy. This is the stuff you learn instinctively. As I understand it (and I should note that developmental psychology is not my field), it's actually older people who have the most trouble with new-ish techniques like freeze frame because they've already learned visual literacy and don't do as well with new tricks being added. Kids, as I understand it, pick this stuff up fine. Most people do. It's only when they're misled by morons like John Byrne or Mary Whitehouse that the sense of functional visual literacy they develop by reading/watching is overwritten by idiotic aesthetics of "immersion" and "realism." Even if the episode three cliffhanger of The Deadly Assassin were a terrible thing that would deform children for years, it sure as hell wasn't for the reasons Mary Whitehouse said it was.

And this, more even than the censorship, is what I, at least, find so horrific about Whitehouse's arguments. It's not merely that they attack a show I love that provides what I think is a real social good. (Though I think in the end Whitehouse was either implicitly or explicitly aware of the degree to which the show's ideology was opposed to hers. Simply put, it's difficult to believe the idea of someone who watches and pays attention to a lot of Doctor Who ever agreeing with Whitehouse.) It's the fact that she's doing it by mainstreaming visual illiteracy. It's the fact that on the way to "censor the violence" she insists on stopping off at actually and overtly endorsing uncritical and bad reading. If she had the integrity to actually accuse Doctor Who of being left-leaning postmodernist with Marxist influences, that would be one thing. Instead she just engaged in the narrative equivalent of climate change denial, peddling incompetent practices as something that should be taken seriously.

But, of course, the silent majority is absolved of all responsibility for this. Being silent, their views must be respected without argument, for no argument is possible. You can, of course, try to argue. Every viewpoint must be given fair representation, after all. But the opposition viewpoints are minority viewpoints. They occupy defined roles on the margins, existing only to be rejected in favor of the enlightenment of the majority, which need not argue when it can simply win elections. It doesn't matter how clever you are or how good your argument is, because in the end, you're talking to a brick wall.

This viewpoint was toxic enough when it was used to justify tuning out the counterculture in 1968. But in the 1980s it finds itself wedded to existing structures of power in the worst ways possible. This was, as is becoming increasingly clear, the real horrific legacy of the 1980s - the way in which neoliberal economic policies created the conditions for a media that actively propped up particular forms of ignorance when they benefitted those with power. 

This is where Whitehouse and Thatcher's ideologies part ways. There is no serious way to think that Thatcher's government, profoundly media-savvy as it was, actually believed the incompetent critiques offered by Whitehouse. They were not stupid people. And there's ample evidence that Thatcher had little actual fondness for Whitehouse and her views. Unlike Whitehouse, Thatcher was invested in art vs. commerce debate. Also unlike Whitehouse, Thatcher recognized Hugh Greene's BBC as art, and much preferred to see it replaced with commerce, because commerce would, in the end, reliably reinforce her ideological positions. But Whitehouse was useful in that she could draw crowds, and thus corral the silent majority, which was a useful 10% or so of the population to have on your side. And as long as she corralled it at mutual enemies like the BBC, Thatcher's government was happy to have Whitehouse around even if her actual views were nonsense.

(I'd treat Whitehouse as a victim in all of this, but I can't bring myself to. She was a bigot and an idiot who understood nothing about television and wasn't going to let that get in the way of her crusade. She and Thatcher share their commitment to Enlightenment liberalism. Hers was, in the end, less devastatingly effective than Thatcher's, and so Thatcher won. As she usually did, unfortunately.) 

The real point is that there's an ugly logic to this that is chillingly familiar. The use of power to sidestep the messy materialism of the battle of ideas, treating the fact of victory as an argument for the legitimacy of the victory. Which brings us back to that most inseparable of concepts for me with Doctor Who: bullying.

There are moments in life where you have a sudden and striking realization of just how fucked up a person you are. I had one about a month ago. I was driving past my old middle school - the school I was attending the year I got chicken pox and The Talons of Weng-Chiang. Somewhere in the decades since I left there, an annual tradition of a scarecrow competition began - in Halloween, some class or another within the school makes big, colorful scarecrows and sets them up on the front lawn of the school. The scarecrows are generally in the form of recognizable pop culture icons - Spongebob or Spiderman or the like. And this year, there was a Dalek. And I found myself choking up at the sight of it not just the first time I drove past, but every time I drove past. It was a flawless impression of the presumptuous pathos with which adults view "It Gets Better" ads. (Those being bullied tend to view them with an air of "so stop screwing around with the webcam and make it better, jackass.") 

I talked last time about the degree to which being an American Doctor Who fan in middle school in 1993 was a miserable experience. And we'll eventually get to 1993 and play that story out right alongside the Doctor Who I was reading. But I should perhaps stress the depth of the crap that was waded through. On two separate occasions people stole Doctor Who books from me, destroyed them. Once the torn up remains were shoved in my desk, the other time I got to see them kicking the book around the hall. The defense was predictable - that these people, who had been mocking me for liking this weird Doctor Who thing they'd never heard of for months, were somehow unaware that the Doctor Who books they were destroying were mine. Because, I mean, there were lots of other people with them.

My middle school had, while I was there, an overt policy called "restitution" in which, instead of handling misbehavior punitively, decided that the two sides of a dispute should come to a mutual understanding and that someone who does something to hurt somebody else shouldn't be punished but should have to make it better. 

It was a disgusting system that served bullies above all else. For one thing, it was toothless - even if the school had the authority to, say, make students replace the destroyed books, importing obscure sci-fi books from the UK wasn't something anybody in Newtown knew how to do in 1993 besides my mother. In practice, nobody even tried to make them offer restitution in such an actually meaningful sense. Why would they when they could have us both apologize regardless of what actually happened.

But even if they had, the idea that bullying can be undone is farcical. Even if the immediate damage is subsequently undone, the real damage of bullying is the longer term knowledge that people are going to hit you. They're going to hit you because they don't understand you or because they view your intelligence as a threat. And no restitution undoes that lesson. 

And so I choked up at the sight of a Dalek scarecrow outside my old school. Because the idea that over the course of nearly twenty years my popular culture actually won so that it's possible to have a team of four middle schoolers who build a Dalek in art class and don't get the shit kicked out of them for it is... somehow just too much for me. I am utterly overwhelmed by it. 

So for a fucked up lunatic like me, it's impossible, in 2011, not to see the vicious extent to which the ideological legacy of the 1980s is one of bullying. There's no other explanation for a story like this, about a bank specializing in foreclosures holding a halloween party in which their employees freely mocked the people they were busily throwing out of their homes. There's no other way to read a description of police pinning nonviolent student protesters to the ground and forcing pepper spray down their throats. There's no other way to read yearlong jail sentences for stealing bottled water during the London riots while ignoring the poverty that led to the riots. In every case there's that familiar overexertion of power - the need to demonstrate it for its own sake. And of course there is. Why settle for the banality of evil when you can have the probity of evil. The decent, hardworking middle-American cops of New York City can be trusted to beat socialist hippie dirtbags just like they deserve. 

And, of course, bullying is in its own ways intertwined with the excessive brutality of fan politics, within which there are too many stories of unconscionable acts of sheer nastiness to even sort through effectively. And this is a legacy that spills into the modern show, from the utter hate-fests that review threads on forums turn into right up to the DWM-published fan who was tweeting earlier this week about the inherent worthlessness of a PhD in media studies and how you should beware Doctor Who fans who have them. (Wonder who he was talking about.) None of this is new, of course - I'm not saying that bullying was invented in the 1980s. Rather I am saying that it is impossible to understand the 1980s without understanding the way in which bullying works.

Let's start with a definition. At its most basic level, bullying is the use of power to cause harm when the power is not being used in accordance with the purpose (if any exists) for which it was granted. That doesn't mean that breaking up an illegal protest is bullying. It does mean that holding a nonviolent protester down and pepper-spraying them is. Let's further add a few clarifications. Bullying specifically means the use of force, whether social or physical. Inasmuch as it explains why the person being bullied deserves negative treatment, the explanation is generally based on who they are as opposed to what they've done - they're a nerd, or they're gay, not "they insulted me for being dumber than them" or "they triggered my own neuroses about anal penetration and that made me angry." And bullying carries with it the threat, implied or explicit, of future sanction. The nature of this last point varies heavily based on who's bullying. A sixth grader's threat of further sanction amounts to little more than "and I'll hit you tomorrow too." When you get into powerful political figures making bullying comments, on the other hand, the threat becomes much broader and more ambiguous. But it is still just as clearly received by its intended audience.

This, rather than the actual aggression, is the worst part of being bullied. In the moment, there is enough adrenaline to distract you from a proper consideration of how much this sucks. No. The single worst part are the long amounts of idle time you get to spend constantly formulating escape plans. What seat on the bus gives the driver the best view of you? Which piece of playground equipment is least likely to have anyone bother you? What do you say that gets him not to hit you? It's the way in which your world re-orders to be about avoiding getting hit. So that the existence of people who want to hurt you is just something you assume.

Then come the lessons. There is no reasoning to be done with the people who want you to suffer. That in the end, they want you to suffer because they can make you suffer, and because they can get away with it, so that means it's OK. Whether because the laws that govern it are soft enough to make it de facto legal - as bullying under restitution basically was - or because they have the ability to lie effectively. When raw wealth owns the entire media then it is far too easy to say that you didn't know who's Doctor Who book it was, or that people might think a cliffhanger lasts an entire week diegetically, or that the proposed health care bill contains death panels.

These are the legacies of the 1980s. An economic ideology that fostered profits above all else created a world in which power justifies its own use and the maxim that history is written by the victors becomes a moral principle instead of a cynical observation. Were these the legacies on display at the start? No. We'll get in time to the Winter of Discontent and the circumstances that brought Thatcher to power. But as Magnus Greel revealed to us, the future recurs as well. To go into the Long 1980s pretending that their consequences were other than what they were is foolish.

And this is what makes the Hinchcliffe era getting brought down in an early skirmish of that larger culture war so sickening. Whatever the flaws of the Hinchcliffe era - and there were some, and we identified many of them last entry - for it to be brought down by feckless bullies is just crushing.

But, of course, it's only the Hinchcliffe era that gets brought down. Doctor Who survives. Gravely wounded, yes. And arguably, as I've said, you can start tracing a direct narrative of Doctor Who's cancellation starting here - a chain of creative decisions and reactions against past creative decisions that ends with the show finally losing all support at the BBC. But then, other shows Whitehouse took on (Till Death Do Us Part) got cancelled outright under her assault. Doctor Who survives another twelve seasons, then comes back for another run of, to date, at least seven. Whitehouse lost. We won. The Dalek went up outside the middle school.

But how? This is, after all, the real question. Because one thing that quickly becomes clear when dealing with the conservative ideology that stemmed from the 1980s is that Enlightenment liberalism is completely unsuitable to the task. This is because, as I said, what rose in the 1980s was not, in fact, opposed to Enlightenment liberalism but was the logical conclusion of it. Like any ideology surviving past its time, it becomes malignant. New ways forward are necessary. Or, to put it another way, there's no way to fight back against bullies within their rules. That's the other big lesson. The rules are never going to help you. 

This is the other story of Doctor Who in the 80s. Not a replacement for the story of how a great show finally slips and lands in it, but a counterpart to it. A story about learning how to fight bullies. A story about surviving. If the first phase of this blog - the Long 1960s - was about the history of utopian ideology as told through a British science fiction series, then this is, at its heart, the history of the marginalized and the counterculture as told through one. This is a history of freaks and weirdos of various sorts, whether self-identified or mockingly identified by the people who hate them: Punks, homosexuals, goths, fanboys, women, racial minorities, and nerds, to name just a few. It's a history of how marginal culture works, and of how it finds ways of wielding power. And of how marginal culture gets steamrolled, kicked, and beaten down.

Here, then, is our first tool. Because even after everything that could be found to criticize about The Talons of Weng-Chiang, watching it some part of me, fresh from choking up at a paper mache Dalek, was busy bringing an eighteen-year long wait to a delightful end. For all the deep-seated cynicism of that story, there is also a sense of manic glee to it. A telltale whiff of mercury, if you will. A refusal to slow down or to allow boredom to happen. A driving mania. It is giddily, madly, delightfully fun to watch. It's screamingly obvious why it's been ripped off so many times. It's funny, it's exciting, it has a wonderful and friendly clever wizard who runs about being brilliant. It is so blessedly fun to watch, and fun to love. This in and of itself has power. Once one accepts a position on the margins, one of the most savagely effective moves one can make is to have the unmitigated gall to enjoy yourself there - to act as though one would rather be there.

And then there is also the same thing we began the Hinchcliffe era looking at. Fear. As I have said before, there are few purposes more fundamental to children's fiction than completely screwing up children for life. The best children's fiction disturbs and unnerves. And for all its flaws, The Talons of Weng-Chiang does. Heck, the cackling, snorting madness of Mr. Sin is unnerving even as an adult. But it is, oddly, its ending that is the most satisfying in this regard. The climax of the story is a straight lift from the first episode of The Ark in Space - an attempt to hide as something shoots laser beams at you. It's an odd sort of symbolic unity for the Hinchcliffe era, with the first and last episodes shown each using the same plot point - a reminder that, in this regard, the era put its best foot forward, establishing from the start the thing that would really shape its legacy - a sense of giddy, terrified suspense that guaranteed that it could not be forgotten, not completely. And if something can be remembered...

History repeats itself. And now the dizzying, endlessly complex horror of the Hinchcliffe era is history, freed to happen again and again. Held in the memory of a generation of freaks, waiting patiently for their time to come.