Doctor Who: Dinosaurs on a Spaceship

Warning: spoilers.

Much to my pleasant surprise, Dinosaurs actually turned out to be a pretty solid episode, not only by dint of comparison to the monumental arsetripe of Asylum, but in its own right, too. I did have a few points of irritation – Nefertiti hitting on the Doctor, the screamingly camp robots, the frenetic pacing early on and some jumbled bits of dialogue – but otherwise, it managed to take a fairly flashy idea and actually make it work. It makes perfect sense that the Silurians, convinced their world was ending, would send up a space-ark complete with local fauna, while the slow reveal of Solomon’s capitalistic villainy, coupled with his eventual demise gave a nice, dark catharsis to the piece.

The writer, Chris Chibnal, has some pretty great credentials: apart from having penned the brilliant S3 episode 42, he’s been a major force in Torchwood and was also a writer for Life on Mars. Which possibly goes some way towards explaining why, for the first time in memory, we’ve got a DW episode that knows how to handle a bigger cast: apart from the Doctor, Amy and Rory, we’ve also got Queen Nefertiti, Rory’s dad Brian, Riddell the game hunter and villain Solomon in play, all of whom actually get meaningful screentime, and all of whom feel like genuine, fleshed-out characters.  Not only that, but Amy and Rory actually get to do something other than be in a tempestuous relationship: Amy banters with Nefertiti (at last! an episode that passes the Bechdel test!), fights dinosaurs with Riddell, solves the mystery of the ship’s origins before the Doctor does, and still gets to have a touching conversation about being left behind that neatly foreshadows the season end; while Rory gets to talk with his dad (whose presence and character both go a long way towards explaining Rory), demonstrate his nursing skills, pilot a spaceship away from the Earth, ride a triceratops and threaten a couple of robots. And honestly? That’s more than they’ve had to do for quite a while.

And then there’s the secondary characters: Chibnal treats Nefertiti with respect, establishing her firmly as intelligent, powerful and and courageous without simultaneously making sexist or racist asides at her expense (as Moffat has a tendency to do with River Song). Nor does he flinch from giving Riddell the gender attitudes appropriate to his era without making him either hostile to or dismissive of the women around him – instead, he seems genuinely to enjoy being confounded by them. Brian, by contrast, is an utterly adorkable dad, and it’s a testament to Chibnal’s deftness that he manages to both introduce and evolve him within in the space of a single episode: the contrast between his initial travel-related distemper and the final, iconic image of eating him lunch from the TARDIS step is an utterly lovely gracenote, and one that balances neatly against his role in piloting the ship. And then there’s Solomon: a genuine grasping merchant, frightening and cold – who is, I think, the first actual sentient villain we’ve had in ages.

Though Dinosaurs has something of a manic start, it soon finds its feet and manages some truly fun moments: Brian’s trowel, a triceratops who wants to play fetch with golf balls, Amy’s cheerful assertion that yes, she is a queen, and the closing image of Rory having switched domestic roles with his dad. But what really sold me on Dinosaurs was the treatment of the ladies. Not only do Amy and Nerfertiti talk, they actually get along: they trust and respect each other, make jokes with each other, and back each other up. Both of them call out Riddell for sexism – Amy says he needs a lesson on gender politics – but most importantly of all, when Nefertiti decides to go with Solomon to protect the rest of the group; when she holds up her hand, defies the Doctor’s objections and says that, no, it’s her choice? The Doctor lets her go – he respects her agency in the moment, and though he later shows up to get her back, it’s Nefertiti who gets the drop on Solomon, cathartically pinning him with his crutch-arm just as he did to her.

Still, as I said, it’s not a perfect episode: while the image of Nefertiti going off with Riddell was fun in the moment, it was loaded with unfortunate colonial overtones that felt a bit squicky; there was no reason for Solomon to kill the triceratops except as a kick the dog moment; and while I liked the Mitchell and Webb cameo as the robots’ voices, I didn’t like the robots themselves – they were bit too cartoonishly on the nose for my taste. But overall, it was a strong offering from a good writer, complete with memorable characters, solid emotional development, a mystery that made sense while still being compelling, and a proper, well-paced structure. It was, in other words, the polar opposite of Asylum in every important respect, and has gone some way towards soothing my earlier rage. I might not like Steven Moffat, but Chibnall has succeeded in reminding me that I do like Doctor Who – and that sometimes, I get to have the latter without the former.

(Plus and also: Arthur Weasley and Argus Filch in a single episode – squee!)

Politics, YA and Narrative

Here’s a contentious statement: A writer’s personal politics cannot ever be wholly disentangled from what they write. Stories reflect our culture even as they shape it, and as culture is an intrinsically political concept — in the sense of not only shaping and reflecting the politics of the people within it, but actively seeking to comment on how and why this happens — so too is storytelling. At base, fiction is an attempt to answer two different questions with a single answer: nobody can ask what if without first establishing what is. Assumption is as much a part of narrative as invention, and often betrays as much, if not more of the writer than anything they consciously create. Like it or not, our politics — by which I mean, our moral, social and spiritual beliefs about the world as refined through the lens of our individual biases, ignorance, privileges and experience — drive our assumptions; and in fiction, our conscious and unconscious beliefs about what is become the parts of the story we assume the reader already knows — the characters, tropes and logic we assume to be universal, or at least unimportant, and which therefore require neither examination by the audience nor explanation by us. They’re our personal default settings, where personal is the operative word: not everyone will share them, and we forget that at our peril.

For instance: as a teenager, I wrote a number of escapist stories that all began with a bored, frustrated girl of about my age being suddenly rescued from maths class by magic, aliens or something similarly fantastic. I’ll give you three guesses as to my least favourite subject — but while I was fully aware of replicating my own bias, I never saw the harm in doing so. And why would I have? It was my bias. The fact that it was fairly benign doesn’t change its status as an assumption, viz: an aspect of the story that I didn’t intend the prospective reader to question, and whose universality I therefore took for granted — not because I thought that everyone secretly hated maths, but because I wasn’t interested in the feelings and opinions of people who liked it. While the primary point of narrative is certainly to make the reader think, imagine and question beyond the norm, that can only happen if both reader and writer agree on what normal actually is; and if the reader’s own opinions and experiences aren’t encompassed by the writer’s take on what’s normative — if, in fact, they are absent altogether, or else marginalised, twisted and scoffed at — and the reader notices the dissonance, then the likelihood is that they’ll become hostile to the author, or at least to their assumptions, and conclude that the speculative, what if elements are fundamentally flawed by virtue of having been extrapolated from an inaccurate view of reality.

Here’s another, considerably less benign assumption my teenage self made: that white people live in cities and towns, while brown people live in tribal groups in the forest, desert or plains. Not that I’d have phrased it that way if you asked me outright — obviously, I knew people of all nationalities could live in all types of places! But subconsciously, from the culture in which I lived and the tropes I’d absorbed from exposure to other narratives, I’d nonetheless internalised the idea that the type of civilisation I found familiar must always be the work of white people. One brief flash of self-awareness at the age of 14 made me wonder if, just maybe, there was something offensive in my having a lone black character speak in broken English; the thought made me profoundly uncomfortable, and hopefully to my credit, I abandoned that version of the story not longer after. The one that ultimately replaced it, however, while certainly better in some respects — brown people building cities! egads! — was just as racially inept as its predecessors. This time, I wrote about a continent where the indigenous race was dark-skinned, long-lived, innately magical and not-quite-human, and where the human population was descended either from escaped slaves (black) or colonist farmers (white) — and despite having ostensibly created a setting where white-skinned humans were the minority and had arrived last of all, I still managed to have a light-skinned royal family and predominantly white protagonists.

The fact that I had good intentions doesn’t make those early stories any less problematic, and while it’s true that I wasn’t trying to write politically about race, that doesn’t change the fact that I’d internalised enough negative stereotypes that not only had I failed to recognise them as negative, I didn’t even understand they were stereotypes. I had simply assumed that the tropes I’d employed were acceptable, neutral defaults, as inoffensive and apolitical as the classic fantasy usage of elves and dwarves. But our choices always speak to our opinions, whether we mean them to or not. Familiarity is synonymous with neither inoffensiveness nor neutrality, and while the infinite variety of human taste and experience makes it impossible to please everybody, let alone equally, there’s a wealth of difference between causing offence by actively challenging the assumptions of others, and causing offence by failing to challenge your own.

And the thing is, even if you’re aiming for the former option, you won’t always succeed: partly because, as stated, it’s impossible to please everyone, but mostly because we all still need some basic assumptions to work from. A single piece of fiction cannot question the entirety of itself, because then you’d be questioning questions — an infinite recursion without answer or end. But that doesn’t mean there’s no reason to ever challenge assumptions, either; the point is to accept that, all too often, it’s the things we take for granted — the things we neither explain nor question — that say the most about us as writers, political beings, and as people. The argument that stories shouldn’t be judged for anything their authors think is irrelevant therefore strikes me as having fundamentally missed the point of criticism: Creators shouldn’t have a monopoly on interpreting what they’ve made, while the assumptions which underpin a work are just as important as the inventions which make it unique.

To take one example, I’ve written before, in detail, about my issues with default narrative sexism in SFF: instances where fictional worlds and cultures are anchored in sexist social logic for no better reason than that the authors have assumed its existence either to be so fundamental to sentience, or its use as a trope so unremarkable in narrative, that they never considered excluding it. Or, alternatively, their efforts to write an equal society might come burdened with a whole new set of sexist assumptions, the most common one being to masculinise women without feminising men — there’ll be plenty of empowered female soldiers, leaders and spies, but not so many male nurses, teachers and domestics. (A big part of real-world sexism is still to exalt traditionally male pursuits as being objectively desirable for everyone while discrediting female ones as being objectively undesirable for everyone, but particularly for men.)

And then there’s the current, depressing trend in YA discrimiflip novels: stories which all too often base their supposedly egalitarian messages on simplistic, binary notions of discrimination and privilege by taking a mainstream, powerful group (men, the cisgendered, straights, white people, the able-bodied) and turning them into the victims of those their privilege currently discriminates against (women, QUILTBAG people, POC, the differently abled). Ostensibly, this is meant to engender sympathy for the other side among members of privileged groups, but when poorly handled — as, with few notable exceptions, it overwhelmingly seems to be — the egalitarian intention is buried by the surrounding weight of negative assumptions, foremost of which is the idea that there’s anything simple or binary about discrimination to begin with. The most notable recent example of such a discrimiflip novel is arguably Victoria Foyt’s Revealing Eden, where white people are Pearls and black people are Coals, but there are others, too: Laura Preble’s forthcoming Out, where Perpendiculars (straights) are considered abnormal in a world run by Parallels (gays), and Claire Merle’s The Glimpse, which, while not a straight social flip, nonetheless pits Crazies (those with mental illnesses) against Pures (who don’t).

Which brings me, at long last, to the overwhelming number of YA-related arguments in the recent past over issues such as romance, racism, feminism, conduct and reviewing, and what strikes me as being the primary unifying factor in every instance: the presence of a dispute about interpretation versus intention — which is to say, a criticism of the author’s assumptions on the one hand, which cannot help but also be a partial critique of the author themselves, and the assertion that such criticism is unreasonable, irrelevant or unfair. Over and over again, in arguments about the portrayal of romance in YA novels (for instance), certain authors have been accused of presenting as healthy and desirable relationships which critics claim are literally abusive, toxic and dangerous, and regardless of where you might stand when it comes to individual novels, the fact remains that this debate has been stymied in large part by an overwhelming uncertainty as to whether such criticism is valid, and if so, to what extent.

The recent emergence of YA as a mainstream, successful genre and the overwhelming popularity of series like Twilight among both teenage and adult readers has fundamentally altered the concept of YA reviewing — which is to say, has ended its status as a separate kind of reviewing altogether. Prior to the advent of Harry Potter, it seems fair to say that YA novels were reviewed, not as books that anyone might like to read, but as books for children, the crucial difference being that, as children weren’t (and to a certain extent still aren’t) presumed to care about issues like politics, equality, feminism, bias and privilege, pretty much nobody was reviewing YA novels with those aspects in mind, let alone considering that their handling, presence or absence might be a relevant factor in judging the success of a given book. After all, we’ve traditionally maintained different critical standards for stories that are intended purely for entertainment value — action movies, for instance, are still graded wholly differently to serious drama — and prior to J. K. Rowling, what else was YA meant to be for but entertaining children? Certainly, there’s a long history of literary praise for youthfully-oriented issues-based novels, but that’s still a far cry from mainstream cultural analysis, and anything that smacked even slightly of magic or escapism was exempt from scrutiny (until or unless it was old and vaunted enough to be deemed a ‘classic’, of course, in which case scholars were right to treat it with reverence).

But now, in addition to the rise of digital reviewing – which, as I’ve said before, is particularly skewed towards genre novels – YA is being treated seriously. Not only did the success of Twilight prompt a flood of romantically similar titles, all of which have found themselves subject to the same scrutiny vis-a-vis the promotion of stalking and female passivity as the original, but it directly contributed to YA being critiqued for things like whitewashing, straightwashing, cultural appropriation, sexism, racism and homophobia, too — issues which had previously been the critical domain of mainstream literature, if and when they were discussed at all. Which, often enough, they weren’t, literary fiction being possessed of its own, separate-but-related battles with misogyny, classism, genre snobbishness and white male homogeneity. (Suggesting, perhaps, yet another reason why so much political literary criticism has fallen on YA of late: the old establishment still has its barriers up, so that those of us who wish to critique the negative assumptions of writers as manifested in fiction and deemed reflective of society have necessarily had to look elsewhere.) But still, the tension between those who view YA as pure escapism and those who hold it to a greater accountability remains, well, tense — because for every writer of YA who isn’t trying to be political, but whose assumptions about what is necessarily encode their opinions anyway, there’s a flock of readers ready and waiting to dissect their work as a manifestation of culture.

A writer’s personal politics cannot ever be wholly disentangled from what they write; nor should they be, regardless of the intended age of the audience. Though pop cultural analysis has been sneered at in some quarters as an attempt to give trash entertainment a significance far above its station, it can’t be denied that the mainstream is a powerful reflection of our collective cultural subconscious: the assumptions and stereotypes we all quietly learn from childhood, but which many of us never learn to recognise openly, let alone question. Every time we construct a story without any thought as to the assumptions we’ve made that underpin it — assumptions about race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, ableness, privilege, ignorance, bias, identity — we run the risk of replicating the very problems we might otherwise condemn; or at the very least, of being lazy thinkers. The fact that it’s impossible to please everybody shouldn’t make us afraid to challenge ourselves or others; rather, we should try harder to ensure that we’re not alienating people through ignorance. But most importantly of all, we need to accept that no story is told in a vacuum: that the politics, beliefs and assumptions of authors are at least as important to the structure and creation of their narratives as those elements which are purely fictional — and that sometimes, there can be real and significant overlap between the two.

Doctor Who: Asylum of the Daleks

Warning: total spoilers.

I hadn’t planned on watching Doctor Who tonight for the same reason that I didn’t watch the most recent Christmas special, viz: a complete lack of faith in Steven Moffat’s ability to competently write and manage the series. My husband, however, was curious, with the result that we sat down to watch it over dinner. And even though the end result was just as frustrating as I’d feared it would be, having gone to the effort of watching, it seems wrong (or at least, deeply uncharacteristic) not to bother with analysing why.

Thus, I bring you Asylem of the Daleks: a review in three parts.

Part 1: Plot

Amy Pond is still a model, she and Rory are getting divorced, and the Daleks are back: in fact, they’re running prison camps on Skaro, where the Doctor has been summoned to try and rescue an unknown woman’s daughter. As it turns out, however, the woman herself is a trap: she’s actually a Dalek puppet – there’s an eyestalk in her forehead and a laser in her hand, both of which are apparently retractable – and the Doctor is promptly zapped (along with Amy and Rory, natch) aboard a spaceship containing the Dalek Parliament. Naturally, this is cause for alarm, until it becomes apparent that the Daleks actually want the Doctor to save them – a ship has crashed on the Dalek asylum planet, raising the possibility that its mad, bad inhabitants might escape, and because the Daleks are too afraid to go down and turn the force field off so they can bomb it, they want ‘the Predator of the Daleks’ to do it for them. (Amy and Rory are there because ‘the Doctor requires companions’.)

Let’s list the problems in order, shall we?

1) Skaro was destroyed in the Time War – which is to say, declared nonexistent and irretrievable – and nobody mentions this.

2) The Daleks were destroyed in the Time War – meaning they can only show up if they’re listed as having escaped it somehow, which these ones aren’t – and nobody mentions this.

3) Apparently there are human prison camps on Skaro – even though it’s the Dalek homeworld and they exist to exterminate, not enslave – and nobody mentions this.

4) Daleks are not their armour – making the eystalk and laser combination seem deeply weird as a means of indicating Dalek control – and nobody mentions this.

5) Daleks are obsessed with their own genetic perfection: we’ve had multiple episodes detailing their disgust for human impurity, to the point of committing genocide against a human-Dalek hybrid race, and yet apparently they’re OK with manipulating human corpses and putting the resultant hybrid entities in positions of command – and nobody mentions this.

6) Thousands of Daleks, their entire Parliament, the ship in which they reside and the asylum planet have all apparently survived the Time War, even though this is pretty much impossible – and nobody mentions this.

7) The Daleks want the Doctor to help them because they’re all afraid of the asylum inhabitants – and this is treated as normal, instead of absolutely mind-blowing.

8) The Doctor is called ‘the Predator of the Daleks’, a name he’s never heard before, even though he’s known in their mythology as the Oncoming Storm – and nobody mentions this.

9) At no point is the Doctor or anyone else surprised to see so many Daleks roaming about – and nobody mentions this.

10) At no point does the Doctor rail against the existence of the Daleks or even contemplate refusing to help – and nobody mentions this.

In other words: the entire fucking premise is a retcon of epic proportions, undoing a major part of the Doctor’s characterisation and history as established not only since the 2005 reboot, but since Moffat himself took over – and not only is this done casually, in the sense of having no build up or cathartic explanation, but not a single character thinks there’s anything odd about it. Which leaves me to conclude that it was done for no better reason than that Moffat thought the Daleks asking the Doctor for help was such a cool idea that taking the time to integrate it with the existing continuity or explain things at all would only detract from the shiny cool surprise of having a zany madcap adventure that doesn’t make sense. And given the lengthy history of Doctor Who, it strikes me as being supremely disrespectful of the story, world and characters to make such sweeping alterations to the canon out of laziness and ineptitude – as a byproduct of a ‘cool’ idea, instead of to a deliberate, actual purpose.

Part 2: Characterisation

Emotionally, Asylum has four main players: the Doctor, Rory, Amy and Oswin, a perky, flirty, genius girl trapped on the planet after her ship crash landed a year ago (and who’s played by the actress signed as the next companion). We’ll get to her in a minute, though, because first there’s the Amy/Rory dilemma to deal with. We first see Amy posing on a fashion shoot, and when Rory appears, it’s to get her to sign the divorce papers. Later, it’s revealed that the reason for the split is Amy’s inability to have children – or at least, more children – after what was done to her at Demon’s Run: knowing Rory wanted kids, she let him go rather than force him to endure a childless partnership, though until her inevitable damselling forces her to reveal this fact (she lost her special bracelet and was steadily being taken over by Dalek symbiot-eyestalk-implanting nanites or something, of course) he was apparently unaware of why she kicked him out.

And I just… OK. Look. Being as how I’m currently four months pregnant, it’s conceivable (hah! pun!) that I’m more sensitive than usual about plots of this nature, especially when they’re bullshit. But it seems to me that, what with her previous child having been stolen from her and raised by psychopaths after she was mindraped and imprisoned throughout her pregnancy, Amy might reasonably be expected to have a few more issues about getting knocked up than simply being sad that she can’t do it. And not only does no one mention River Song, let alone adoption, but Rory never says anything to the effect of caring more about Amy than about biological offspring – they just magically reconcile when, by all accounts, the actual problem that caused the split hasn’t gone away. And in any case, it strikes me as being excruciatingly cheap to have two characters who’ve literally been to the ends of time for each other break up off screen*, just so your can put them back together again in the next breath.

And then, of course, we have Oswin: a trapped girl who can endlessly hack the Dalek systems, and who has apparently spent the last year making soufles and listening to opera while awaiting rescue. We hear her speaking over the com and playing her music, as do the Doctor, Amy and Rory; we even see her hanging out in her wrecked-yet-cosy spaceship. But in an episode where every other human turns out to have been a Dalek-puppet, the Big Reveal – that Oswin was turned into a full-blown Dalek straight after landing –  is as predictable as it is stupid. Even ignoring the overall continuity questions this raises (how did the crazy Daleks manage it? where did they get the facilities? why and how was she allowed to retain her human personality?), there’s a massive goof in the fact that, when the Doctor reaches her, she’s shown as a Dalek chained in a room: her speaking voice is a Dalek voice, and she has no visible access to anything. How, then, has she been speaking to the Doctor in a voice that was recognisibly that of  a human girl? Where did the opera music come from? Why is she chained up, forgotten and unguarded, if the point of making her Dalek was to orchestrate an escape? How is she controlling everything when she doesn’t have any access to the asylum’s systems – or at least, no access that we can see? How does any of this work?

The answer is, it doesn’t: characteristically, Moffat has gone for the twist-reveal at the total and utter expense of logic. The solution simply doesn’t make sense – but then, neither did the premise, so what else was I expecting?

Part 3: Conclusion

Asylum of the Daleks is shoddily written, poorly constructed and atrociously characterised, all in the name of Shit That Looks Cool If You Have A Limited Attention Span And Don’t Stop To Think About It. Nothing in the script feels necessary to the plot: there’s lots of running through dark hallways interspersed with Daleks repeating themselves and dead/dying women being sad, but none of it so much as winks at the glaring, legitimate questions raised by the sheer nonsensical retconning and outright illogic of both premise and conclusion, which means that the whole episode feels like a badly-managed segue. Even the pacing is flabby: as difficult as it is to make a half-hour episode of action-drama feel both too short (in the sense of not addressing anything relevant) and overlong (in the sense of consisting entirely of things that don’t matter), Steven Moffat has managed the double whammy with aplomb.

And from what I can see, the rest of Season 7 looks to be more of the same: ideas that are flash and dazzle when glimpsed in brief, but which otherwise make no sense, not because they’re inherently unworkable, but because Moffat can’t be bothered to make them work. If I watch them, it’ll be down to a combination of my husband’s love of crap TV and narrative rubbernecking: I simply can’t believe how badly in need of editing his work is. Which, ultimately, is what it all boils down to: the only explanation for the marked drop in skill and execution between Moffat’s stellar episodes under RTD and what he’s producing now is the absence of anyone with the power to red pen to his scripts and tweak them until they’re presentable. He’s certainly never lacked for exciting ideas, but when it comes to narrative logic, pacing and characterisation, he’s far more miss than hit.

*No, I haven’t seen the Pond Life prequels; yes, I know the last episode ends with Rory walking away and Amy in tears. We still don’t get the reason until Asylum, and after everything Moffat’s put them through, giving them a kiss-and-make-up moment in literally the next episode is still unbelievably cheap.