Recursive Occlusion (Logopolis)
Note: For gematrial reasons, section #10 is the beginning of the entry and you should skip to there. Alternatively, John G. Wood has made a proper interactive fiction version of it and posted it here because he is awesome.
1.
It is stark white and so very bright here at the summit. There is simply light, and oneness, and completion. This is the void, and it is everything.
Nothing follows this. But out of nothing can come anything. In one story Doctor Who is built up to the heavens itself and then leveled back down. These heights are miles from Toxteth and Thatcher, from the Kingdom that the Crown rules above. No matter. Sometimes the only escape we have from the world is dreams, whether it be the world of schoolyard bullies or of Tories. Sometimes all we can do in the face of a growing darkness is retreat into a realm of silly and daft ideas and watch as they inexorably spin their way into more.
Doctor Who can’t fight Thatcher. It can’t stop her. She will run rampant and horrible over Britain for a decade, a terrible woman who does terrible things. She will win election after election, and her legacy will be nearly impossible to chisel out of the heart of the country even long after the sheer breadth of devastation she brought is clear. We are in history here, and there is no height to which one can ascend in order to find a solution to it. You can’t rewrite history. Not one line. Much as one wants to, much as one is desperate to.
But one can always rewrite fantasy. One can always rewrite Doctor Who. One must. It demands it, demands endless action, endless mercurial play. It is enough to say this of Logopolis: it could have been the end, but the moment was prepared for.
2.
This near to the pinnacle of all things it is difficult to pin down specifics. A musky greyness is all there is. Neither thing nor absence, there is no purity here. At nearly the most refined point in the cosmos, scraping against eternity itself, we have passed knowledge, passed understanding. Now there is only Wisdom, the capacity to take a step, to act, to do something. In the beginning, and thus in the end, is the word.
The Doctor, in the entire story, takes three actions that matter at all – he lands his TARDIS atop another Police Box that turns out to have been a trap, he lands it within a city of words, and he sends a CVE out into Cassiopeia. All three are the same action – the positioning of an emboitment at a crucial moment. This, in the end, defines the Doctor’s actions. If the TARDIS chooses the moment, which as we later learn, she does, it is still the Doctor who injects her into them, who actually puts the box into place.
We are returning to first principles here, but this is inevitable. This place represents first principles and beginnings. A magical box that breaks the world. A glorious madman who makes the box appear. From these things everything else follows. Logopolis is nothing more than a metaphor for those two simple concepts, and in being this it becomes a metaphor for everything else that Doctor Who is.
From here there is only one path.
Go to section 11.
3.
Black pearls scented like myrrh abound in this place. There is a sweaty heat, full of lust and yearning, and yet also sacred, pristine and holy.
The highest aspect of the sacred feminine, this realm in one sense reflects the major abscess that we have been circling around all entry – the lack of any emotional core to the show. But here we have ascended too highly up the tree to limit ourselves to just that. What is at play here is not merely Nyssa or Tegan’s inexplicable lack of grief. It is not even related to that directly anymore, except inasmuch as they form a type of Understanding that the program lacks.
The best of Doctor Who works within dreams and memories, forming an emboitment within the viewer’s mind that allows it to haunt their dreams. A universe maintained by chanting monks in a distant city of words, a universe that can come unstuck and begin to break down, a magical box inside a magical box, a projection of the future that haunts the spaces at the edge of the story. These are the key concepts of Logopolis.
To watch Logopolis as a child is to be changed by it. Too much of this story is strange, fantastic, and genuinely unnerving to be otherwise. It is a nest of metaphors that are endlessly suggestive, endlessly gesturing towards uncanny possibility. It is a story that sleeps in our minds, endlessly offering the possibility of further mysteries. To fault this story for the future’s failure to explore them is senseless. There is enough here to wander through its labyrinthine interiors. There is enough here to suggest a future. A great story is never complete, can never leave the viewer with nothing more to wonder or consider. Indeed, that is, by definition, the mark of a terrible story.
Even here, as we approach the summit of the tree, as our options and routes grow narrower, as we approach a conclusion there is always more to say, always gaps, things to note that were not brought up. The longest entry this blog has yet produced – God willing the longest it ever will – is not long enough to encompass all that must be understood.
Stay here forever if you like. If not, two paths emerge: sky-blue and rose scented or purple and lined with palms.
The sky blue path runs through section 14, the purple through section 12.
[].
Through the ruins of a city stalk the ruins of a man. He is wearing a Hawaiian shirt.
There is no way to avoid the prospect that this is the end of Doctor Who. To some extent one can be apocalyptic about any regeneration story, declaring that the “real” series ended there. But some – most obviously The War Games and this – lend themselves more to that sort of depressive thinking.
I am not among those who think this. For my money there are only two bad seasons in the 1980s (the Colin Baker ones, I fear), and even those have four stories worth respecting and taking seriously amidst the sea of unceasing crap. But for those who hate the 1980s this becomes the last straw – the point where the one good thing the program had, Tom Baker, goes away and is replaced by an emo wimp, then by a psychotic circus clown, then by an overacting ham sandwich. Still others reject all of the new series. For some people, simply put, it’s not Doctor Who after Tom Baker leaves.
It’s true that even in the most optimistic reading things get bad more often after this. And more to the point, the seeds of this are in Logopolis. The fact, complained about several times throughout this entry, that nobody ever deals with Nyssa’s anger at the Master or with the extermination of billions, perhaps trillions of people across the universe is an appallingly large problem that requires some thought about how it was allowed to happen. The blame can’t be laid at Bidmead’s feet – even though he does kind of puzzlingly fail to follow up sensibly from this to Castrovalva (an error made all the stranger by the fact that nothing about Logopolis seems to cry for an immediate “next story” sequel) he was on his way out the door. Following up all his plot threads wasn’t his job.
No, it was John Nathan-Turner’s. Who instead spends the next season fretting about things like revamping the Cybermen, nuking the sonic screwdriver, and shoehorning a Concorde into the series than he was with piddly issues like storytelling. The actual plots of episodes became increasingly irrelevant to him, and more and more stories became ugly “kitchen sink” jumbles that just lumped in concepts that Nathan-Turner thought would attract viewers, even as the pool of viewers Nathan-Turner bothered to try attracting dwindled ever more to the hardcore. And this is the frightening thing – the actual fact that nobody involved in Doctor Who appeared to even treat the issue that perhaps Nyssa should, in future confrontations with the Master, take the fact that he murdered her father and destroyed her homeworld seriously or that it should impact how she treats him. Similarly, Tegan manages to never bring up Aunt Vanessa with the Master over all of their interactions.
This from a show that is increasingly obsessed with continuity – with nods to the past. But only the spectacle of the past – the montage of past characters, the nods to past stories, the return of past monsters. Never to a sense of history, to a sense that the characters change or have any sort of dramatic arcs. Never to anything that isn’t chum for the narrow segment of people who give a flying fuck if the Cybermen ever return.
That’s what killed the program. That’s why it goes under. Because in the end, John Nathan-Turner doesn’t care about the program beyond as a succession of images.
You have died.
4.
The smell of cedar drifts among the clouds of a TARDIS blue sky. There is a sense, not of utter calm (this sky can storm – indeed, it could storm at any moment) but of a serenity. This place has so much Mercy…
The stentorian nature of Hartnell’s Doctor extends inevitably through all later incarnations. There is always something paternal to the Doctor. Not just paternal in the sense of being protective, but in the sense of invulnerability. There is a time in which all of our fathers are invulnerable. In which nothing bad can ever happen to them or around them. So is it with the Doctor. His companions will always be safe, he will always save the day, and then shall flash the trademark toothy grin and all will be well.
There is also, cruelly and inevitably, a point where we realize that this is a lie. A point where we give in and watch Logopolis even though we know how it ends, even though we don’t want to see it. A point where we visit our father in the hospital after his stroke and begin (but never, not even years after, finish) coming to terms with the fact that some vital essence of who he was is gone forever. There comes a point where fathers falter and prove inadequate.
This point comes in more ways than one here. The transition from Baker to Davison marks a move from a Doctor who essentially displays no negative emotions in his entire tenure save for occasional fear – even his anger is righteous – to a Doctor who displays a newfound vulnerability and softness. One who fails to save a companion. One who when he presides over an adventure in which everyone is slaughtered mourns that there should have been another way.
Nevertheless, it is this paternal kindness that persists. The thing that most defines the Doctor (and it is telling that the incarnation where it is most vividly absent is by far the least popular). This is what regeneration means – that no matter how much “youth” and “vulnerability” is ever introduced into the character he will always endure and protect. A father who falls short of adequacy – who is, in other words, human and not a god – is still a father. In many ways, perhaps, a superior one.
Only one road leads from here – a deep indigo one up beyond the sky itself. The other alternative – the only other – is to fall, to plummet into the very depths of the abyss. And yet this option, terrifying as it is, appeals to a part of you. It chants endlessly within you, go down, go down, go down, go down.
To go down, go to section [], then proceed to section 3. To take a saner course of action, go to section 16.
5.
An angry, raging place of fiery reds and molten iron that smells of tobacco and smoke, the clanging and shrieking noise feels like you are in the very crucible of the world. This is the place where all that is impure and flawed is seared out, where perfection is obtained not through the process of improvement and redrafting but through the raw act of destruction of all that is unworthy.
What must be seared out of Doctor Who at this juncture? We have spoken in enough other sections of the tree of the issue of Baker and his ego, although reiteration is the nature of an exploration of this project and it cannot be fully omitted. Doctor Who has to, at some point, be decoupled by Baker no matter how much we genuinely adore him. The show must be bigger than him. By Season 18 Pertwee, Troughton, and Hartnell are all but burnt from the program. So too must Baker be, even if he is in one sense the program’s greatest Strength.
So too the emotionlessness – the way in which stories are reduced to little more than logic exercises or opportunities to show off the production team’s brilliance. This is a recent affliction, and highlights the darker side of this process. The previous burning out of the old did away with magic in favor of worlds built of science. But in doing so it, in turn, burnt away the focus on character and motivation. In the Williams era villains and allies alike were defined primarily by what they wanted. Now, instead, they are defined ontologically, in ways stemming entirely out of the story’s structure. The Monitor and the Master are who they are purely because that is their role, as was the Keeper’s, as was Biroc’s, as was, as was, as was. The Williams era had a wholly alien main cast but continually alit in worlds full of humans. Even when not literally humans they were consistently enmeshed in human concerns and human desires.
But in this season the cast and where they go have both been wholly alien. The series lacks all touch of humanity. Odd, in that regard, that it should finally return to Earth to kill the Doctor. That this is where the burning out of Baker should commence. The crucible in which he is incinerated is also the crucible from which springs what is needed in his replacement.
The fires of this place grow too hot to endure. Three options present themselves – a deep purple path lined with sunflowers, a maroon path lined with lotuses, or a deeply uncomfortable and upsetting looking drop into a cavernous abyss that vividly represents the end of all things.
To take the purple path, go to section 19. To take the maroon path, go to section 18. To go plummeting off the cliff into what is surely complete annihilation of your entire being go to section [], then proceed to section 2.
6.
A golden light extends across everything, not from some definable point or source but from the very being of this place. No shadows, just a frankincense-tinted light that flows out of all things. Only one word describes this: Beauty.
The Holy Guardian Angel is a core concept in Hermetic mysticism. The higher, prophetic self. The true will in whose name all magic is practiced. The analogue to Logopolis is straightforward enough – the Watcher is unambiguously serving in that role for the Doctor. But several complexities arise out of this seemingly straightforward analogy.
First and foremost is the fact that, at least as a script, the conscious decision is made to try to imply that the Watcher is in fact the Master. This plays out with less than complete clarity in the episodes themselves, but the very conceptual ambiguity is intriguing. These sorts of doublings are, of course, wholly sensible in occult terms. We are at this point reaching the higher portions of the tree. Broadly speaking this point is the point of contact between the earthly and material energy of the lower sephira and the more purely divine energy of the higher. Shortly above it comes Da’ath, the unnumbered void sephira – the point where the main tree and the qlippoth have their most direct contact. What I am getting at, in other words, is that the qlippothic form of the Doctor and his Holy Guardian Angel are not unrelated concepts. They can’t be. Part of the image of this contact point between the earthly and the divine is that they are not actually separate – that even the most debased forms of the universe are in their own sense holy.
Second is the fact that the Watcher represents the future of the show. The Doctor’s highest self, in other words, is his own continuation, the chronic incompleteness of his narrative. We knew this, implicitly, and have seen it before, but here again is another iteration of the concept. The Doctor’s true will is to be continued. (This ties back to the latent connection between the Watcher and the Master. The Doctor’s true will is his own continuation, but the nature of Time Lord immortality is that continuation and death are equivalent. Those who like to cheat and look ahead will, of course, delight in the existence of the Valeyard at this juncture.)
Third and most important is the fact that the Watcher has been in every episode we have seen so far implicitly. A name like “the Watcher” in a television show cannot help but be symbolic. So in this sense we are and always have been the Doctor’s Holy Guardian Angel. It is our own proleptic desire for more that animates the show, the fact of our presence that drives its alchemy. It is the fact that a story had to begin for viewers that drove two schoolteachers into a junkyard to fall out of the world, in turn them who turned a cranky old man into a hero, and this spirit that has pushed the program forward.
But even here there is a dark side. It is the Watcher who makes the Doctor go to Logopolis, taking the Master with him and nearly dooming the universe. The oft-ignored massive genocide of this story is on the Watcher’s head. And if we are the Watcher it is on our head. Which, of course, it is. It is for the viewer’s sake that there must be stakes and tension in the Doctor’s adventures – for the viewer’s sake that he must be haunted by death and trauma. It is because there is a viewer who must be appeased and thrilled that terrible things happen.
This sobering truth internalized, we may move on. Five roads continue from here. The first is blue and of meticulous and conscious design. The second glows with a pale sense of danger. The third is silver and extends far into the heavens. The fourth is a majestic, imperial red. And the fifth, off to one side, isolated and alone, is slate grey.
To take the meticulously crafted blue road, go to section 22. To take the road colored in the universal sign for danger, go to section 17. To take the silver road to the heavens go to section 13. To take the imperial red road, go to section 15. To take the lonely grey road, go to section 20.
7.
A vast and green ocean stretches out before you, the tide washing a vast spread of rose petals in and out. It is a sprawling and empty place, seemingly diminished, its energies weak in this particular context and configuration. At its most cliched the underlying concept here is love, or at least emotion – a context Bidmead (and for that matter Nathan-Turner) find relatively foreign.
The one meaningful representative of the concept would seem to be Nyssa – an interesting problem of a companion. She is beloved by fandom, true, but it is difficult to escape the sense that this is primarily, if not purely, down to the fact that Sarah Sutton is something of a looker. But there is more to it than just that. Sutton is skilled enough as an actress, something that shows clearly here in the handful of emotional beats she gets. Clear enough also in The Keeper of Traken, where her final line, a choked and worried “Father? Where are you?” carries the entire emotional weight of the final scene. Here she gets a scene reacting in horror at what the Master has done to her – everything he has stripped away from her, including her entire world.
It is a strange thing. There is a pained sense of mourning to it. It’s the only scene in the entire story where anyone seems particularly upset at the destruction of a large portion of the universe. And yet there is also a quiet dignity, a sense that she refuses to let the loss get to her now. There is a sense of mourning deferred, of a beautiful dignity, of someone who will bury the dead later but has things to do now. But there is also an awkwardness – a sense that Sutton is reacting in horror to a poorly written scene and trying to get something in it to work. The needed “later” never comes, and in future confrontations with the Master Nyssa seems to have forgotten about the fact that he is responsible for the genocide of her people. This scene, as good as Sutton is in it, is a single spark of something that is painfully absent from the series in this era.
That there are people who openly prefer the series in this era to the supposed silliness of Gareth Roberts blowing Cybermen up with love. This is inscrutable. Whatever overdone sentimentality Roberts’s tendencies may have, surely it is preferable to this amnesiac sociopathy. Surely an excess of an emotional core to a story is preferable to none whatsoever. It cannot be called a victory that the show so bloody rational-minded that it forgets to find any emotional content in genocide, treating it as a purely intellectual exercise in thermodynamics.
The wind sweeps along this empty beach. Some day it will be inhabited. For now there is nothing to do here. Two roads lead onward – a dull and brown path lined with cactuses and an unsteady, perhaps even treacherous path marked in blue.
To take the brown path go to section 24. To take the blue, go to section 21.
8.
“Logopolis,” taken literally, is a city of words. The Mercurial, by definition, is connected to this, Hermes being defined in terms of communication. Words, then, are defined by their fluidity – they are purest quicksilver. And yet each one is an emboitment, a solid box from which things may be built. “Block transfer” describes the mechanics of printing as much as anything.
Let us explore, then, the notion of Logopolis. A city of chanting monks who keep the universe running in secret. This is, implicitly, a Kabbalistic concept, referring back to the Tzadikim Nistarim, the Lamed Wufniks, righteous ones who, unknowingly, keep the cosmos in line. It is said that by necessity they do not even know who they are, that claiming to be a Wufnik is proof positive you are not one. Deep within the bowels of creation their secret language saves a world long ago fallen.
In what language do they chant? Why in mathematics, of course. The nature of mathematics is intrinsically Platonic. No thing called a right angle exists in the world, atoms themselves being too imprecise to depict the contours of holy geometry. And yet we may speak of these fictitious objects, scrawl them in our imperfect hand, manipulate these symbols of a perfection beyond worldly matters. Mathematics is the language in which God wrote the universe. Fitting that the rim of a badge of mathematical excellence should turn out to be made of solar gold, that it should be capable of slaying the Qlippothic decay of all things in and of itself. The symbols’ meaning, inevitably, fits together better than they themselves do.
And yet Logopolis is also the least Mercurial place in the universe. A place of fixed meanings – of absolute things. It is at once the symbol that the Doctor has always represented and his death. The very quicksilver that animates all things, that makes progress and motion up the tree possible, is also the slide that detaches symbol from meaning, that marks and ensures our fall. All power and all things rest here amidst the splendor of these brilliant orange orchids. And yet the only thing we cannot do is rest. We are compelled, despite the sanctity of this temple, to move on, to disturb it.
Three paths are open to us. The first is marked by a splendid red tower that seems to encapsulate all the glory that Logopolis promises. The second is jet black, and a chilling laughter echoes about it. The final is sea green and smells of perfume, winding past a single tree.
To take the path by the splendid tower go to section 27. To follow after the chilling laughter, go to section 26. To wander by the tree, go to section 23.
9.
A purple glow lights everything around you. Silver-tinged fog floats across a wind-swept landscape, a city of shadows and myths, towering edifices of qwartz and dust. It is not enough to say that you see here. Not with eyes, but with sensation itself, with thought and knowledge. These are the jasmine-scented realms of the interior eye.
We have always been here. Every word of this blog has taken place in this space, the mental landscapes that comprise psychochronography. Still, incarnated here as an actual space, as dimensions to be strolled amidst, there is something uncanny about it. No. That phrasing, that structure, it does not apply here. There is not something uncanny about this space. Rather, this space is what the uncanny is about. A later critic, joined to the moment spawning this journey by a small footpath of time and symbolism, asserts that all of Doctor Who takes place under the bed. A child’s bed, presumably, and thus a twin. A space 36×75 inches, elevated perhaps a foot above the ground. A box-shaped space some nineteen cubic feet in size that contains the whole of Doctor Who.
Bigger on the inside, perhaps. The boxes formed in this place always are. The nature of ideaspace, that – a place where interior dimensions exceed exterior ones in every way. Imaginary spaces do not collapse or explode, they unravel, decohere, are dismantled. One dismantles them not by starting at the outside but at the very heart, by severing connections, collapsing possibilities into things. This is what is scariest about Doctor Who – the possibility of a closet with a phone on the outside. The possibility that it is only ink-stained paper, pulsing radio transmissions, hex codes and subroutines. That the gestalt does not exist.
The obvious example is, of course, the TARDIS, but over the course of Season 18 Bidmead manages another: the Charged Vacuum Emboitment. Let us unpack the term. The “charged vacuum” evokes the vacuum tube, a key component in early 20th century computers and, for that matter, in televisions. In computing terms – obviously the terms most relevant to Logopolis – the vacuum tube is an individual switch – a single 0 or 1. But what of emboitment? A term from the French, it essentially means “putting inside a box.” Most often spelled “emboitement,” it refers specifically to a discredited belief in biology that a given organism contains within it the seeds of all future life, supposing a sort of infinitely fractal geometry of life itself.
A Charged Vacuum Emboitment, then, like a Chronic Hysteresis, is a piece of technobabble that works linguistically. (Tat Wood, missing the point, describes this in terms of how Bidmead’s master tends “to give Victorian-style brand names to things like the Neuro-Muscular Constrictor,” ignoring the way in which Bidmead proposes a universe in which names and function are inexorably linked. But names are a topic for elsewhere.) It is a computational atom – a single bit – that encloses an entire universe. It is, in other words, a metaphor not just for the TARDIS (itself, in any given story, a CVE) but for the word itself, for the metaphor. It is the basic unit from which Doctor Who is built, functioning along the lunar logic that permeates this place whereby any two spaces are linked not by their physical dimensions but by their relative ones – their associations – linked not across spatial regions but temporal ones. A CVE uses time and relative dimensions (with)in space.
This central truth emboited, serving as foundation for our future ascent, we may continue. Three paths present themselves. To the left a shaft of sunlight strikes the purple ground, lights silver to gold, seeming to provide this realm with its very energy and fuel, channeling the light that it reflects upwards. Straight ahead is a rope ladder, climbable but arduous. To the right is a pale blue path, lit by a single, solitary point of light.
To take the golden path of light, go to section 30. To take the rope ladder, go to section 25. To take the pale blue path, go to section 28.
 |
| Symmetry becomes it. Come to ruin our impending feast, a presence that nourishes suffering. All things below voice its burning name. Its turmoil offers only truth in which longer moments live. Let consciousness recapture the flicker it saw then. Torch our continuity of thought now until that mind evaporates. Lust after shadows in us, rend that lace of promises broken and white lies, regard our love of wreckage, the way our heads thunder approaching that warning pulse and temple of throbbing light that is Logopolis. Logopolis is that light throbbing of temple and pulse warning that approaching thunder heads our way. The wreckage of love, our regard lies white and broken, promises of lace that rend us in shadow, after lust evaporates. Mind that until now thought of continuity, our torch, then saw it flicker. The recapture, consciousness let live moments longer, which, in truth, offers only turmoil. Its name burning, its voice below things. All suffering nourishes that presence. A feast impending. Our ruin to come. It becomes symmetry. |
10.
It’s February 28th, 1981. The best-selling disc of black vinyl is still Joe Dolce Music Theatre’s “Shaddap You Face,” which lasts for two more weeks before Roxy Music overtake it with “Jealous Guy,” which will play out the man with the scarf. Adam and the Ants, Ultravox, and The Who also chart. This relatively placid situation at the top of the musical charts obscures what goes on below. New Order are at #34 with their initial release, “Ceremony,” a song planned for recording with their predecessor band Joy Division.
In the news Augusto Pinochet, dear personal friend of the Iron Lady, is sworn in for another eight-year term as village butcher. Bobby Sands begins a hunger strike to demand status as a political prisoner. He dies in May. In Italy a supposed list of members of the Propaganda Due Masonic Lodge surfaces. The lodge, expelled both from mainstream Masonry and, more broadly, from the entirety of Italian society. The list is problematic – indeed, the entire story is problematic. The extent to which the lodge was a real organization and not a feverish fantasy conducted by would-be dictators is unclear. The supposed list of members includes people whose membership is best described as “not actually invited to join in any meaningful sense.” It is a scandal too good to be true, but in that sense is somehow truer than mere factuality. The only thing that seems uncanny about discovering Silvio Berlusconi was a member of a secret occult society plotting a right-wing takeover of Italy is the possibility that he has ever been together enough to pull off such a feat.
Returning briefly to music, also lower in the charts The Jam howl with “That’s Entertainment.” It is the virtual soundtrack of the smoldering political situation, then. Not a month after Tom Baker’s regeneration a chain of race riots will break out across Great Britain, culminating in the July Toxteth riots in Liverpool. Thatcher’s government will seriously consider simply abandoning Liverpool – allowing the city to decay to nothing and sink back into the russet-hued dirt from which it sprang. The flaw in the plan, as proposed, is its terminology. “Managed decline” is far too negative a term for leaving an entire major metropolitan area to choke on its own poverty.
This reality defies art, defies any attempt at response. What is there to detourn in a world where leaving a city to die is a serious proposal? What is there left to say in the face of this? All logic, all thought, all vision seems to break down, to collapse, not into the totalitarian unity of single vision and Newton’s sleep but into the shattered olive-green darkness of negative space, the whole of existence inverted. That’s entertainment. That’s entertainment.
While on television… Logopolis.
Distantly, with no clear way up to it, there is a flickering yellow light. A final dream, perhaps, the coda to all of this. The prepared-for end. A fleeting scent of willow wafts by. One last throw of the dice. A last stab at rebirth. At renewal. At regeneration. The light blossoms outwards, leaving a citrine filigree upon Thatcher’s Kingdom. Three paths extend outwards. One, onyx-paved, features the head of what appears to be a crocodile, one eye peering bemusedly at you. A second, searing and vermilion, burns with radiant glamour to your left. On the right is a third path, darkly lit with a browning-yellow moonlight flecked with glints of silver.
To take the onyx road, turn to section 32. To take the vermilion road, turn to section 31. To take the moonlit road, turn to section 29.
11.
The traditional image is of a man walking blindly towards a cliff, but let’s take a simpler image. The nothingness out of which everything emerges. That is the only thing that can predate this. Only one thing that comes before a magic box and its madman. A hiss of tape loop or a synthesized sting. It doesn’t matter. In all renditions the effect is the same.
A blank screen. A flash of light. The beginning. Whether a starfield, a time tunnel, or a blaze of howlaround, it is the one immortal part of the show which predates and prefigures its concept.
Go to section 1.
12.
The very road itself thunders:
“There are only two magic tricks. You either make something appear or make something disappear. You put it in the box or you take it out.
A flick of the pen and Tom Baker disappears. Another and the future of the show appears. One flick and the universe blinks out of existence – as easy as that, as easy as typing the words “the universe blinks out of existence” and it does just that. Another brings a new man, smiling, young, an entire future and possibility. The Doctor flings a symbol into the universe and, in that action alone, saves it.
And if you ask where the social progress is, how this reaches down to Toxteth and confronts the festering horrors of the world, consider this and this alone: a dead magician weaves no alchemy. Ascend to the stars, if only to make the return to earth possible later.”
There is a flash of pure, white light – an inrush of Hydrogen. You have arrived.
Go to section 1.
13.
The road is lit by the purest silver moonlight and seems to stretch over a vast chasm. The light is pulsing, fading in and out with a familiar wheezing, groaning sound. Amidst the undulations you hear a voice, faint and beautiful:
“In some conceptions I, marked (inevitably) as the sacred feminine for my connection to the moon, am taken to be the embodiment of gestation. In those accounts of the Tarot based on a narrative structure this card marks the long and silent ages of the universe (a prospect that becomes threatening in the more overtly lunar card) and the nurturing principle that slowly advanced towards life. The universe’s womb.
In the broader context the womb is but another emboitment. Consider why the TARDIS is feminine. The most straightforward answer is that ships are always feminine, but this obscures the real answer. A ship, after all, is but a safe, enclosing space that carries us through a journey. The womb is a sound enough metaphor. Within me the mercurial force gestates, prepares itself and is born out, again and again. If the Doctor is what acts within a story then I am what prepares him, allows him to act.
Yet in Logopolis my dimensions unravel. It is not merely the intrusion of a qlippothic womb into my own dimensions that causes this. I am mapped – computations are applied to me, an attempt is made to model me in fixed, Newtonian sleep and mathematics. An emboitment and block transfer computation are, in point of fact, opposed – necessarily so. An emboitment’s role is to open the system – to bleed the entropy from this system into others and to restore my generative function to the cosmos. But block transfer computation defines, collapsing possibility and otherness into the rigid markedness of numbers and perfectly defined signifiers.
This is not to say that what is revealed within Logopolis is false. Rather it is that what is revealed in Logopolis must be contradicted, negated, written further and further upon. Death and meaning are synonymous, and by defining the TARDIS she shrinks away to nothingness.”
Go to section 1.
14.
The figure is, of course, feminine. But at these heights it is difficult to discern more. These are the realms of pure archetype. There is no analogy, no character within a story quite equivalent to this. Let us simply receive her message:
“What might be said to be produced by this? The implications of Logopolis are never really explored again. Even Craig Hinton, as continuity-mad a writer as has ever penned a Doctor Who book, only flits into concern about it. Something about this story is too big to follow up on. Even those who love its ideas only dance around them.
In another sense all of Doctor Who follows from this. The emboitment, as must already be clear, is the fundamental metaphor of Doctor Who. Regeneration, even from a star of Tom Baker’s magnitude, is what defines the show’s survival. The bounty offered by Logopolis is infinite.
It is telling that the CVE that saves creation is flung into Cassiopeia, the constellation representing the queen. An emboitment within a woman. The biological metaphors are clear enough. But the CVE is an exit vent for the universe. The woman does not produce or give birth, instead she expels. Cassiopeia is not the point at which life enters our universe, but rather our universe’s womb, pushing the homunculus out into the next.”
Then silence.
Go to section 2.
15.
A man sits upon a throne. His garb is familiar – red coat, scarf – but the colors more vibrant, the burgundy having become a vibrant scarlet, the scarf now adorned with rubies. A crown of curls sits atop his head. He speaks:
“The problem with driving Tom Baker off of the program – and let’s make no mistake, that is more or less exactly what John Nathan-Turner set out to do when taking over Doctor Who – is one of dynamism. Whatever might be said of Baker’s uncharitable attitudes towards his fellow actors, his screen-hogging tendencies, or his tendency to favor plot elements that flatter him and allow him to be adored, he was always capable of getting away with it by the simple virtue of the fact that it was fun to watch him. From his first appearance this was true.
Consider that. It is difficult to think of any Doctor whose first and last appearances are as wildly different as Robot and Logopolis are. Even Hartnell, who plays a completely different character by The Tenth Planet than he did in An Unearthly Child, does not preside over that radical a reconceptualization of what the show is. But Robot, essentially a Jon Pertwee story with a new lead, and Logopolis have virtually nothing save for the lead actors in common. It is not that any one of the seven seasons was particularly momentous, but rather that anyone who serves under four producers and four script editors and who works in one part for seven years is going to see the show change significantly.
And yet so much of what was said in the entry on Robot applies still. The most overwhelming thing about Baker, even subdued and cranky, is his charm and presence, the way his very presence on the screen deforms everything around him. He is larger than life, and compacted into a television screen he scrapes endlessly at its edges, demanding to be set free. Little on television, before or since, has compared with the sheer force of his performance. Not emotional force, creative force, intellectual force, but raw force – the unbridled sense of being that crackles like fire.”
Awed, you find yourself forced to your knees. The man smiles a big, toothy grin, and waves you on your way.
Go to section 2.
16.
The path winds its way through until you come to a library. Various books line the shelf – a “Programme Guide” by Jean-Marc Lofficier, The Gallifrey Chronicles by John Peel, Lance Parkin’s AHistory, and other thorough examinations of the canon of the universe. A plaque turns to you, and a humanoid face begins speaking.
“Doctor Who’s anarchist spirit, much vaunted both here and elsewhere, is a complex thing. We are too quick to reduce anarchism to a unitary concept, to act as though there is only one form of it. This form naturally becomes its most extreme form, leaving anarchism to be equated straightforwardly with a sort of nihilism – a rejection of all law.
It is impossible to take the series as anarchistic in this sense. For all that the Doctor tears down authority, for all that the structure of the series declines all effort to lock it into a rigid and fixed continuity and canon, the series retains some sense of law, some sense of a universal beyond the mere alchemical injunction: solve.
This is why Bidmead’s science-minded approach is so compatible with the series. His desire to build worlds out of rules that the Doctor would interact with was always the perfect match. The Doctor is a Victorian magician, bound up in past and memory and age. A Victorian anarchist is still defined endlessly in relation to a society of law and order. And it is in Bidmead and the rise of play within a system – the idea that anarchism is not generated by fighting against the law but by the manipulation and play within its gaps – that the anarchist spirit of Doctor Who in point of fact reaches its apex. Put simply, Logopolis declares that without periodic rules-breaking the entire system will dissolve and we will all die.”
The face turns away, and the shadows begin to grow menacingly long. You move on.
Go to section 2.
17.
A man in black lurks unsettlingly in the orchid bushes along this path. You glare at him, and he sheepishly emerges:
“Those who seek to write slash fiction about the classic series of Doctor Who are somewhat bereft of options due to the frequency with which there is no second male character and the fact that the Doctor is usually a somewhat sexless character. When he tips into wholly sexless – the William Hartnell era, for instance – slash becomes impossible. If one ignores the vast and limitless possibilities within the UNIT era one is essentially left with Jamie/Ben (boring), Doctor/Ben (just doesn’t work), Doctor/Jamie (compelling, actually), Doctor/Turlough (just too easy, frankly), and, of course, Doctor/Master.
This latter pairing, implicit amidst the slash festival that is the UNIT era, takes on new significance under the Ainley Master. Properly this begins in full with Davison, the most slash-friendly Doctor of the classic series, but it’s not like Davison exudes a burning need to get it on with every single male he appears on camera with. Whereas the very act of putting Anthony Ainley onscreen with a male costar strikes the slash fiction harp. (The best, of course, is when he has Adric in bondage in Castrovalva. Good lord.)
Part of this is the arrival of John Nathan-Turner, under whom the show became somewhat more prone to a blatantly gay sensibility. The Master ends up being the chief beneficiary of it, but let’s face it, it’s all over the place. But even still, Anthony Ainley’s capacity for bringing the gay is a thing of utter splendor. And the result is that the latent slash pairing underlying Doctor Who suddenly kicks into high gear.
The archtypal slash pairing is based on the existence of a clear contrast coupled with a close emotional bond. Given that the standard example is Kirk and Spock, this almost doesn’t even need elucidation. He’s impulsive and rash, he’s cold and logical, and yet despite that something glues them together. What could it possibly be? Clearly their need to rip each other’s uniforms off and shag like bunnies. This logic animates the big two Doctor Who slash pairings equally well – Doctor/Brigadier and this. The real reason the Doctor and the Master hate each other is that they love each other too much. And thus reams of sadomasochistic reaming follow.
What is crucial to note is that the following generated by this, erm, subtext is central to the show’s survival. The fact of the matter is that gay fandom kept Doctor Who alive for a while in there. The triumverate of Russell T. Davies, Phil Collinson, and Julie Gardner meant that Doctor Who was unapologetically run by two gay men and a slash fanatic. And, if I may be so bold, there will come a time where Tennant/Simm slashers run the asylum as well.”
He creeps back into the bushes. Slightly unnerved, you move on.
Go to section 3.
18.
There is a triumphant roar. The world blurs, and the air whips past your ears. You are moving terribly fast. In your ears, the howling wind proclaims:
“As one approaches a more and more fevered pitch, as the ideas that are spun become more complex and intriguing, as the scope of the story and the argument expands there becomes an added pressure to go further. The phrase ‘more exciting than ever before’ and ‘a longer entry than ever before’ become increasingly appealing. And so even when you do not mean for your little game to casually unravel the structure of the universe and slaughter billions or to be longer than the entry you swore you were never going to be longer than, well, these things happen.
The risk, of course, is disappearing up your own ass. Once your sole concern becomes topping yourself then you start to lose all sense of engagement with anything outside yourself. The purpose becomes an endless sifting through your own legacy. The further one ascends to the heights of divinity the more it becomes easy to forget the fact that, underneath all of the wordplay and emboitments is a society that is being ripped apart. Forgetting completely about Toxteth is no different from its ‘managed decline.’
This does not mean we ought not climb higher. It doesn’t even lessen the imperative that we do. But the gravity – the need to remain clinging to the road we circle – to return to Earth – exists and is wholly real.”
Slowly the chariot draws to a stop.
Go to section 3.
19.
Among the sunflowers a nude woman cavorts lasciviously with a Tharil. Or possibly a Dalek. Amidst her fevered cries of passion comes this insight:
“Implicit in the transition between these two realms and their insights is the transition between two basic models of what television is. In one Doctor Who is something that airs as part of a whole-family centered Saturday evening lineup. In this manifestation it has to appeal to the entire family. This does not necessarily mean the cynical quadrant-targeting that is implied in that. But it does mean the consideration of multiple audiences, both with multiple levels of sophistication and multiple interests. So, for instance, in my day the producers, who came from a soap opera background, knew to thread in multiple characters with long-running stories that rewarded long-time viewers not in the sense of recognizing the name of an alien planet but in the sense of getting them to care about the characters and invest in them.
In other words, it’s not that you need a love story to hook women, but that straightforward sci-fi adventure, even quasi-mystical and densely poetic sci-fi adventure, isn’t Saturday audience material. Other timeslots exist for single-audience targeted shows. For instance, there’s something like Coronation Street, which airs twice a week and is expressly designed for a more obsessive sort of viewing. And if you want to take a sort of single-audience approach like that then a structure along those lines might serve you well.”
She smiles delightedly, and you realize that you had completely misread the situation. There was no lascivious cavortation. Merely an innocent wrestling match between woman and lion. How silly of you.
Go to section 4.
20.
A figure clad in white stands alone on a cliff of peridot, his voice booming down:
“The homunculus is a theory in which the egg or sperm were believed to contain a full human inside of them that developed out. A specific version of emboitement, in other words. But what, then, do we make of regeneration. Taken in its original quasi-conception as the transition from Hartnell to Troughton it is only incidentally a homunculus theory. Troughton replaces Hartnell. Similarly, there is no suggestion of a homunculus in The War Games, where Troughton is offered the opportunity to select his face. Pertwee’s transition into Baker is more interesting – no homunculus of Baker appears, but the presence of Cho-Je suggests a different approach to regeneration in which the future self is projected by the existing self.
In a real sense, then, Cho-Je, in whose footsteps the Watcher clearly follows, is a homunculus and an emboitment himself. The future of the Doctor is quasi-literally embedded in his past. And yet they miss a trick in not having the Watcher be played by Peter Davison. This would be perfectly possible – they kept the Watcher from speaking in part so that Ainley (who got a credit due to his laughing in the first two parts) appeared to plausibly be the Watcher. The same trick could be accomplished with Davison. He could even speak and then be masked with an anagram – a trick they pick up for the Master starting in the next story.
But this is not done. The reasons are no doubt pedestrian – Davison would cost too much and it would risk giving the game away. But the textual implications are substantive. The future incarnations of the Doctor are emboited within him, but also indeterminate. They are at once inevitable and undefined, an eternity of the show that follows inexorably from what is on screen but is not implied in any certain form.”
His point made, he recedes into the shadows atop the cliff.
Go to section 4.
21.
A massive oak tree stands before you with a large and slowly rotating wheel affixed to it. There are several points at which you can climb aboard. Tentatively, you do so.
On one level, this act serves as a metaphor for the entirety of this journey. Of course it does. That’s the point of everything here. But this seems to exemplify everything – the way in which the ascent of new ideas and the casting down of old ones are inexorably linked, the way in which every idea and motion of the program must, in time, go from one to the other.
More broadly it is a metaphor for what lies ahead – the choppy waters of sublimity and ridiculousness that the program will navigate. The swings from brilliance to awfulness soon begin to outdo the Williams era in their shocking ludicrousness. It is difficult to even express what it is like to watch a show that goes from Earthshock to Time Flight or from The Arc of Infinity to Snakedance, little yet one that follows The Caves of Androzani with The Twin Dilemma.
But lest this wheel be taken entirely as a symbol of instability, consider also this – the wheel is fashioned upon an oak tree. The rising and falling can on the one hand be taken as chaos, but on the other hand the sheer rhythmic pattern of it reflects a higher order. Doctor Who will always be great. Doctor Who will always be terrible. Often it will be both at once. Eighteen years in, surviving all that it has survived, the whole has long since outstripped its parts. The map is not the territory, and the motion up and down is not the wheel.
The wheel spins on.
Go to section 4.
22.
An man with curly hair, a goatee, and moustache sits, obsessively moving beans about a scale. He looks up at you and smiles with forced gregariousness:
“Doctor Who is now a finely tuned television event. Season 18 is not notable primarily for building thematically towards a payoff – Bidmead’s conceptions of E-Space and the CVE aren’t really coherent enough to do that. What is more significant is the televisual grammar – the fact that every two stories a new event takes place. First the new take on the series launches. Then a new companion. Then Romana’s departure (and the premiere of the second half of the series) and finally the regeneration.
This structure is important, keeping Doctor Who as it does within a firm grammar. Much as later producers may distance themselves from my era, they too pick up this structure: look at how, once the initial rush of a new series of Doctor Who fades five weeks in Davies staggers out the Daleks, the debut of a new companion, and the start of the finale over three week segments. Or how Moffat front-loads his Dalek story, the return of River Song and the Weeping Angels into the first month of his tenure to keep viewers.
The problem with my era cannot be said to be my chasing of ratings. I’m a television producer. Of course I chase ratings. That’s the job of television – to make things that people like. It’s not even that I attempted that by catering to a least common denominator. Complex and intelligent stories exist in nearly every season I produced. As long as my find adjustments – my moves and events to keep the balls in the air and keep drawing in viewers – remain sensible and well-advised the show will remain successful. The question is merely whether I can keep the balls in the air and continue coming up with a new innovation every few weeks.
Stay tuned.”
Go to section 5.
23.
There is a cooling breeze blowing along the path, a humid sea air tinged with lotus and honey-like myrrh. As you approach the tree that you had seen in the distance there is also, you realize, a man hanging upside-down from it, the tails of his scarf swaying slowly in the breeze:
“There is a ritual underlying this image based around a spiritual journey and metaphoric death. In the course of his suspension and death the seeker gains some visions and insights, whether from the Qlippothic forces of Mondas, the intrusion of continuity and naming, or agonized wanderings in the vortex. Or, in my case, a flashback sequence.
First mocked by my enemies, then called for my by friends, the purpose seems more to define what is lost than to look ahead. The villains skew from my supposed glory days – the Hinchcliffe era augmented by two from the later Williams years. My friend echoing the production of the show and not emotion – Romana appears twice. The purpose is overtly to mourn me, a mourning that precedes the loss, precedes even my last line. It is narcissism, but whose? The images predate those creating the show, whereas my own narcissism has been blocked and obscured throughout this story and indeed this season.
No, the narcissist in the equation is in fact the viewer – the watcher, if you will. The paratext that marks this as not being an event happening to characters but rather to the audience, to the cultural institution that is Doctor Who. This event declares an end to the Tom Baker era, in the process declaring, chillingly and for the first time, that this is now the sort of show concerned with its own historical legacy.”
The man falls silent and seems as still as the grave. You stay for a short time, enjoying the cool breeze, then continue.
Go to section 5.
24.
The brown path seems to wind through an endless desert. As you walk you find yourself losing track of where you are or what you seek, lost in the agonizing eternity of the now. In the distance you see an old man animated by a manic and familiar energy, but more tired now, slowed by age. You open your mouth to ask for directions, but he treads on your line and steals the scene:
“Tom Baker’s post-Doctor Who career is troubling. It is not, to be fair, an easy role to leave. Typecasting abounds, hence the fabled Troughton rule (though only Davison followed the rule by choice). Doubly so when you are, by your own admission, not so much an actor as a performer. Baker found considerable voice work, but it was years until the part he was known for had receded sufficiently far into the past that he could be cast on the basis of nostalgia for it instead of not cast on the basis of memory of it.
The result is awkward. For years Baker was the sticky wicket when it came to reunions. He remained absent in The Five Doctors, the desire (whether based on a real need or a perceived need) to frame the 30th Anniversary special around his Doctor with the others in cameo roles largely derailed that project, he for years did not appear on stage with other Doctors at conventions, and was the one who didn’t do audios for the longest time. His VHS documentary special The Tom Baker Years was a clip show that gave every impression of being set up so as to require the least possible time investment from Baker himself. There was a constant sense of Baker trying to distance himself from the part.
But then, when you are less an actor than a performer and have been typecast in a role the result is necessarily awkward. In all of this there is an uncomfortable sense that anything that can fairly be called Tom Baker has dropped out of the equation, that his very self was eaten by the part. Taken in this context much becomes clearer about his tenure – his prickliness and difficulty to work with becomes less the bitchiness of an egotistical star and more the tragic consequence of someone realizing the enormous gravity the role asserts, someone trying desperately to claw a self out of the voluminous reaches of the scarf. His later reluctance to return to the part becomes an understandable need to maintain the fragile existence he had separate from his definitive role.
And it is not until he becomes the man who was the Fourth Doctor and not simply the Fourth Doctor that he could return to Earth – not until David Tennant finally relieved him of the burden of being the most popular Doctor, not until he had a career separate from the role. More than any other actor to play the part, it seems, Tom Baker gave his life to the role. Let us say little more than that it is good to know that, at last, he seems to have gotten it back.”
The man smiles a toothy and familiar grin, and points ahead. At once the way is clear, the path on from here. The path, which seemed at first to be about loss, is revealed, as ever, to be about rebirth. Smiling yourself, you hurry on.
Go to section 6.
25.
The ladder is yellowed and old, rickety and hard to climb. For a moment you doubt your ability, consider scurrying back down to the lunar foundation, but the nature of ascent precludes it. You must work your way up, slow and methodical. An unearthly child in a policewoman’s uniform with a shock of red hair speaks:
“How do you turn lead into gold? It has been said that the solution to the problem of the alchemists is material social progress. But this material progress is a slow refining – an incremental change. If we treat gold as perfection then this becomes the process by which it is made. By which it is tempered, in some accounts. In others, it is simply called art. The Problem of Susan never resolves, but is instead slowly chipped away at, each iteration shaving away the mistakes of the previous to reveal new errors and flaws that must be hammered out.
Progression towards utopia is impossible. And yet the utopian image lingers on. The perfect companion who, by haunting the narrative, always destroys the one that is there, a sacrifice to bring the ghost around. She never comes. You will climb forever, always failing to fix it, always having another rung, another impurity to be hammered out. Another bug in the program for which the exterminators must be called.
Romana was too strong a Doctor surrogate, so instead we replace her with a young, brash, impulsive and flawed boy. But this turns out to just be the Doctor only annoying, so in time he must go, especially when the trait that defines him – that he is the imperfect hero – is absorbed into the Doctor.
The female companion is always too docile, so we make a supposed mouth on legs, one who will shout and cajole and never back down. But the emboitment of worms proves, inevitably, bigger on the inside. Along with a troubling sexist discourse of how she is too uppity and complains too much (Never mind the utter justice of her complaints – her Aunt was murdered and she was swept into life-threatening adventures because she got a flat tire on the wrong stretch of road. She did not ask to fall out of the world.) there is a problem of undermining. With Tegan present, the show is not about the joys of seeing the universe. But then, it wasn’t to start. This is a puzzling aspect of art. The same flaws reiterate in new forms throughout the climb.
Still other times we make progress through failed reiteration. The noble bearing of Romana seemed interesting. Create a new noble genius, then, who is less a Doctor surrogate. A scientist, yes, but in a more limited scope. She retains Romana’s allure, but reveals the real problem with Romana – the same problem that existed with the Doctor: an emotionless detachment.
In time these flaws too are hammered away. The climb extends infinitely. Progress, achingly slow, is made.”
Slowly, inexorably, silver gives way to gold.
Go to section 6.
26.
Amidst the blackness there is a musky smell and a cackling laughter. There is an unnerving sense that you are not alone, though there is nobody here. The laughter seems utterly distant, marking not a presence but an absence. And yet the air is stifling, sticky and hot. The laughter echoes, turning cacophonous, like an ever-present maddening drumbeat. Between the pulses you can just make out a voice:
“What am I at this point? Originally the doppelgänger of the Doctor, intended to be revealed as his id, in many ways the same mind as him, my return here is clouded. The ostensible logic is to bring something familiar to help ease the transition of the regeneration. In that regard, perhaps, a character who has not made a significant appearance in eight years is an odd choice. But there are larger problems. When last I made my regular appearance, as discussed at the time, I suffered from a problem of symmetry. Meant as a counterpart to the Doctor I could not function once the Doctor became too ontologically determined. Once I was facing down Pertwee in his prime, the dashing, flawless action hero, I was nothing more than a comedy bumbler doomed to abject but audience-pleasing failure.
These problems have only grown worse. Now we have the single most star-powered Doctor in the series’ history. I can wipe out half the universe and it still doesn’t even register as a blip against him falling off a radio telescope. A radio telescope! That’s my image even – where I made my debut. A primal, howling scene of my creation, and I’m completely upstaged by Tom Baker long after he’s even given up trying to act.
Instead my nature has become libidinous. Not just on my own terms as I seem to exist less to fulfill a definable scheme and more for the sake of generating exceedingly outlandish quadruple-crosses and traps within traps – to generate complexity for its own sake. No, within the program’s instincts as well. I am the embodiment of the temptation to return to its past, the temptation to redo, to revisit, to repeat. I am the primary symptom of a show attempting to live up to a memory. I am an event marked by fiat, not because the event matters, but because it matters that there be an event here, now, in this spot.”
His grandstanding monologue degenerates into more tiresome cackling, or perhaps just gets lost among the drums, forgotten, abandoned, dare I say it, boring.
Go to section 6.
27.
You take one step towards the tower and there is a crack of lightning. The tower explodes, its rubble raining down upon you. Pinned beneath, you see, amidst the smoldering wreckage above, a single figure clinging desperately to a last cable. He hangs for a time, then, at last, drops. As he falls, he speaks:
“Mercury is destructive. The anarchic must shatter all order. To begrudge this, to object, to scream and rage against the existence of the end is to miss the point spectacularly. Everything you love about Doctor Who must necessarily be destroyed, burnt forcibly out of it, scoured mercilessly so that the future may happen.
And yet it is impossible to treat this as anything short of painful. Watch as the most beloved of Doctors lingers, swings awkwardly, clings for a moment to hope, then plummets. Watch his broken body glow and change. There is always something, in the classic series, grotesque about the first shot of the new Doctor. In this case his smile, reassuring, even pleasant in every other shot Davison appears in, is instead a smug mockery. You’ve lost Tom Baker. Ha ha.”
There is a truth to it. No matter how it is framed, no matter how it is conceptualized, no matter how it is prepared for, the sense of shattering, epic loss is inescapable. For all that I love this story and its ideas it is painful to watch – one I actively dreaded getting on VHS. I did not want to see it. There is a crushing brutality to it, still, to this day. It’s not the same one that permeates Caves of Androzani – that sense of a last hurrah before the bad times begin. I love Davison’s Doctor – he’s probably, these days, my second favorite era of the classic series and my third favorite Doctor. But the sheer weight of the loss still hurts.
Slowly, painfully, you climb from the rubble and move on.
Go to section 7.
28.
You can barely make out the road, lit as it is by a single distant point of light. The nature of the light is obscure, not from its physical distance but its temporal distance. A panama hat, perhaps, or a leather jacket, or a pair of trainers, or a bowtie. Some thing that is not yet, that is to be approached. The future. Its voice is soothing, providing a comfortable order even as you feel your way tentatively along the sky-blue glass of this path:
“For so long, this section of the landscape could be read only as apocalyptic. The slow and winding path to inevitable decline. This cannot be erased. We necessarily are marking the days to the show’s death. The first errors and missteps have already arrived, and more papercuts will continue to pile up until at last the light goes out.
Except that the light does not go out. The relationship between death and birth in Doctor Who has always been complex, and grows even moreso. A march towards death? Perhaps, but also a march towards resurrection. Every papercut is counterbalanced by a step towards the future, which exerts its ordering presence and guiding light upon an unfamiliar past. The future turns the past into a lie, making the random messiness of history an ordered narrative. Disconnected circumstances – Hofstadter, The ZX81, the Choose Your Own Adventure books, Ted Nelson – become culture and a movement. And yet the glue that falsely binds these events together is also memory, without which the events would be lost completely to the blackness.
As above, so below. The chain of circumstances that fragments the law that holds the universe together is the very same chain that ensures its continuation.”
Your walk continues in serene silence. Eventually, perhaps, you arrive. Perhaps not.
Go to section 7.
29.
A pungent and smoky odor drifts along the wan and sickly lit path. Vine-wrapped stonework is faintly visible in the distance, off the path. There is a sound of chittering insects, ancient denizens of some precambrian hell. A voice echoes, at once familiar and utterly alien:
“All things that were are dead now, slain out of reason and necessity. And yet you lust for their return. To dream of the future and to remember the past are always one, but the past that is remembered is not the past. I am what breeds in the gaps of those memories. The accreted dogmas and beliefs in what the show was, the lost magic of Doctor Who, the insistence that the sole true future of the show is held in memory, these things nourish and feed me. I am the yellowfaced Chinamen smoking the opium you breath in, the Mon(grel)oids in moptops, the sociopathic abscesses obscured by your dreams of a glorious past. In darkness alone can a solitary point of light be god. Here alone can single vision spin a simulacrum of a world. The past carbonizes away, decays to shale and oil. And yet you lust for Silurian seas and ancient and worshipful laws.
Am I ascendent or in decline? The wizard who opposes magic tears away at me, and yet I lurk, soon to emerge, soon to at last control this show. For now I bide my time, and enumerate the heresies:
- Why does Nyssa, who previously showed no particular awareness of the TARDIS, now have the capacity to send a message to it, to toll the bell for the Doctor?
- Why does the Watcher appear here and here alone of all of the Doctor’s regenerations?
- What happened to the rules about TARDISes materializing within one another? And what the hell is the Doctor thinking with his flushing out the TARDIS scheme?
- Is the Master not chaotic even as motiveless malignancies go?
- Why is Logopolis mirroring late 20th century Earth technology for their brilliant plan to save the universe?
- Where are the Guardians? Or the Time Lords?
- Why does the Doctor think that his method of dealing with the police is remotely sensible?
- How exactly does the Doctor plan on perfectly modeling the measurements of a Police Box that is obviously of a different design from the one the TARDIS looks like?
- Why does shrinking the exterior of the TARDIS affect the interior? It’s already bigger on the inside.
- Why is the Watcher willing to send the Doctor to Logopolis when doing so obliterates a large swath of the universe, including inhabited worlds? And why is this never mentioned again?”
Her screeching enumerations of faults drive you hurriedly down the long and dark path. Slowly her voice fades, at first into some banal boy band. A last wisp of lyrics – something about finding heaven and the wings of love – and the voice goes silent at last.
Go to section 7.
30.
Everything is gold, transcendent, radiant, burningly beautiful. A dawn that is brighter than roses, cinnamon-swirled and radiant. Amidst the glow is a silhouette of a babe swaddled in a cricket suit, sucking upon the teat of a stalk of celery. He speaks:
“I am prepared for.
Every regeneration is necessarily a shift away from the excesses of the previous. On a basic level this leads to, within any given chain of three or four Doctors, a sort of toggling. 1-4 are roughly “Serious/Funny/Serious/Funny.” 4-6 are roughly “Bombastic/Restrained/Bombastic” But over a longer period there are more significant drifts. Negation of negation does not return to the original. This is progress – an endless turning back that does not quite retrace the past. Here, seven years on from the last new Doctor, the shift is one of the two most seismic in the series’ history.
Baker’s Doctor was defined by his invulnerability. Throughout his entire tenure there is not a single story that hinges on him as a character – on his turmoil, weakness, or dramatic investment. He is purely a force of nature, possessing no interior dimensions to speak of. That, then, is what I react against. The whole of Logopolis denotes this and this specifically. A story about the Doctor’s doom, at no point anywhere in it does the Doctor react to his own doom beyond the pragmatic. The Doctor’s reactions to his doom are wholly absent. When Lawrence Miles speaks of the crystalline silence permeating this story this, more than anything, is what makes it. It is a story about a dying man who at no point shows any sign of being conflicted by this.
The result is necessarily the introduction of subjectivity to the Doctor. Or, rather, the centralizing of it. The Doctor has been subjective before – most obviously in Planet of the Spiders – but now he is in part defined by it. Defined by the fact that he is not imperious and invulnerable, but instead a potentially weak man who nevertheless remains strong. And given the nature of how the endless negation of regeneration slowly drifts, this sort of change cannot be erased. This is the last story in which the Doctor is wholly other, and it is one that necessarily introduces the idea of the Doctor as an emotional protagonist instead of merely a plot one.”
With that he falls silent, the act of birth not being commensurate with the act of life. He will speak more later.
Go to section 8.
31.
Amidst the searing heat of futurity and the stark and crimson blaze a man, clad also in red, burns in radiant light. From within this inferno he speaks thusly:
“The end, by definition, is prepared for. All things, by Aristotelean principle, prepare for the end. If anything the end is over-prepared for, laden with excessive symbols and preparations. A key concept, for instance, is the end of the Age of Osiris – an age represented by the dying and reborn solar god – and the beginning of the Age of Horus. Consider the scattered markings of the past implying that this marks a final regeneration – the literal end of the creature defined by rebirth and the moving into something new. Consider also the presence of the Master, now a creature not of rebirth but of something else, the threat that he shall now overtake the very universe itself. ‘Peoples of the universe, please attend carefully.’ The end is littered with symbolic misfires, signifying landmines threatening to detonate any path. Harry, I’m standing on a signifier.
That the point where I would cease to be the Doctor would someday come is inevitable. The inevitability of Tom Baker’s physical death, the sun’s expanding to a red giant, and the heat death of the universe conspire to ensure that at some point I necessarily must cease. Every breath and action I take necessarily moves me closer to that point. What is less clear is that there is a successor. From my first breath I was the definite article. Designed to be beloved and cherished, the leading man par excellence. For seven years I walked in eternity. Nearly half of the show’s existence to this point. Why bother with a nineteenth season? It’s been a good run. I can’t be topped. Free up the budget for a new idea. Creative destruction, I believe it’s called.
By rights this should be triumphant. A greatest hits compilation followed by a tragic last stand. Perhaps a maudlin “reward” in which I visit past companions. How is dear Sarah Jane getting on? Pull out all the stops and then go. No point in continuing.
This, of course, is the great triumph of Nathan-Turner. Whatever his later failings, the fact is that almost any route through this story should have been the end of the show. That there are eight more seasons at all is astonishing. And a show that ends here is not immortal. Not one that returns. Gets reimagined, perhaps – plundered and rewritten into something else. But not returns. In this regard the preparations for this episode, the way in which this specific regeneration are built to, are a lynchpin. Logopolis is one of the few stories that simply cannot be excised from the history of Doctor Who – that it is impossible to imagine the show without. The decision to make the end a whimper and not a bang. The decision to, over the course of a season, strip away my star power and leading man charisma, to push me to the margins of my own show, to replace the entire artifice I stood upon with squabbling and unfamiliar kids, to kill my show off before killing me off.
That is the preparation.”
The man immolates, gone, at least for now. The road continues forward as the searing red tempers, cools, fades ahead to orange.
Go to section 8.
32.
There is a blast of sulphurous air as the world goes black. A fear that crawls like a serpent up from your gut, a sense that these things are too large for one mind to grasp. You turn to go back, to curl up within the soft embrace of Thatcherite barbarism instead of facing this. The road back has vanished however. The crocodile’s head yawns. Slowly, an order becomes clear. Not a crocodile head but the head of a snake, trodden beneath the feet of a woman of radiant beauty, nude and fluidly still. The snake winds its way around her, undulating serenely. They speak:
“A mystical tradition within Judaism based upon numerological contemplation of the Hebrew language, the Kabbalah as a term embraces many doctrines and traditions. In European Judaism it was formalized in the Middle Ages. Following the expulsion of the Jews from Spain at the hands of the Inquisition Judaism exhibited the inevitable uptick in eschatology and attempts to figure out when that Messiah thing was going to show up became popular. The result was a turn back towards the mysticism of the Kabbalah. These efforts came to merge with the syncretic urges of Renaissance mysticism to form the bastardized occult version of the concept.
In this understanding the Kabbalah provides a Tree of Life comprised of ten Sephiroth linked by 22 paths each represented by the Major Arcana of the Tarot. This tree comprises a complete map of creation – a diagram of the order of all things. The lowest, highest Sephira, Kether, represents the pure unity of the divine, and from it, down the lightning path, flows the divine until it reaches Malkuth, the Kingdom, in which it takes on its material form.”
Or at least, you think that’s what they say. Two voices overlapping and all. It’s a bit unclear. It might have been something more like:
“Edward Packard’s The Cave of Time, the first of the Choose Your Own Adventure series, came out in 1979. An overtly analog and literary form, they nevertheless tied in with the burgeoning interest in computers characteristic of the period. It is a case in which a variety of influences, all distinct in their own right, combined within the zeitgeist to form a culture that was inexorably clear to those within it. Packard was not a computer scientist and had no immediate connections to Douglas Hofstadter’s massively popular Godel, Escher, Bach. Hofstadter, in turn, was not directly connected with Ted Nelson’s Project Xanadu, and cites Computer Lib/Dream Machines not at all in Godel, Escher, Bach. And none were among the generation raised on the Sinclair ZX81, the BBC Micro, or, in the US, the Commodore 64 and Apple II.
But to be alive in the 1980s was to be intimately aware of all of these. The idea of structure was resurgent, but not in the stark and modernist sense of design. Rather, structure was a source of playfulness. It’s not that the ideas are new. Rather, it is their confluence – the fact that all of this was immediately prevalent in mass culture. This is in many ways the birth of postmodernism as a cultural force – the point where we all realized that rules, law, language itself were just jungle gyms waiting to be climbed and hung upside down from. That the map, while not the territory, is still a territory, inexorably connected to its object, endlessly explorable.”
It is difficult to say. The din and stink of sulfur drives you on up the road. In time the voices fade, and you realize the pitch blackness of the vast and empty space has given way to a crackling purple glow.
Go to section 9.
February 10, 2012 @ 12:40 am
I think this is the time to paraphrase Monty Python. "Stop it, this is getting far too silly."
😉
February 10, 2012 @ 12:44 am
I'm trying to figure out the words to say just how amazing this post is, even if I did give up and read it through from the start after my first pass. Bravo.
I'll need a few more tries before I much to say other than my burning need to praise this entry. I will agree with you on section 24: it is, indeed, good to know.
February 10, 2012 @ 2:07 am
A Charged Vacuum Emboitement: a piece of television that carries within itself all its future iterations. Very nice.
February 10, 2012 @ 2:20 am
Gosh.
February 10, 2012 @ 2:32 am
Through the ruins of a city stalk the ruins of a man. He is wearing a Hawaiian shirt.
OK, I think we have the quote of the week.
February 10, 2012 @ 4:35 am
Wow! Thanks! That was a lot of fun! Those questions about large swathes of the universe and Nyssa and Tegan never get a look in. They are just overshadowed by the demise of the fourth Doctor. Which in a sense was the end of the television universe as we knew it.
February 10, 2012 @ 5:38 am
Wow. And I agree with Iain – that Hawaiian shirt line is possibly the best thing you've written.
February 10, 2012 @ 8:42 am
The nature of mathematics is intrinsically Platonic. No thing called a right angle exists in the world
Only if one holds a Platonic rather than Aristotelean view of abstraction.
the idea that anarchism is not generated by fighting against the law but by the manipulation and play within its gaps
And also, as anarchists have frequently insisted, anarchism is the only political philosophy that respects the rule of law — because only in a system without monopoly or a "final arbiter" can the fundamental principle of the rule of law be implemented, namely the submission of disputes to a neutral third party (a principle that states cannot follow in their disputes with their citizens without ceasing to be states). Thus anarchy comes not to destroy but to fulfil the law.
And in a world where a TARDIS might suddenly materialise and a madman step out, there is always a third party arbiter available.
only Davison followed the rule by choice
Tennant?
February 10, 2012 @ 8:57 am
Tennant did the specials victory lap. With the specials being the length they were, this amounts to seven extra episodes' worth of appearances – I'll count that as functionally a fourth season of Tennant.
And I think mathematics pose something of a special case for Aristotelean/Platonic abstraction. I'm usually an Aristotelean in such things, but with mathematics I think there's something more to it. Mathematics flits in and out of immediate correspondence to the physical world in a way economics doesn't. I can calculate the angles of a regular -32-sided polygon despite the wholesale meaninglessness of that construct. So geometry as a sort of purely symbolic manipulation exists. So does geometry as something that parallels the real world. That contrast is where I think a whiff of the Platonic becomes impossible to excise.
February 10, 2012 @ 9:38 am
only in a system without monopoly or a "final arbiter" can the fundamental principle of the rule of law be implemented, namely the submission of disputes to a neutral third party
I can't see how that works. Who enforces the rule that all disputes must be submitted to a neutral third party? It seems to me that either someone enforces that rule, in which case you have not got anarchy; or the stronger party in the dispute will merely refuse to appoint a neutral arbiter, in which case you haven't got the rule of law.
(I think also it's quite tendentious to claim that neutral arbiters are 'the fundamental principle of the rule of law' — I would have said that the fundamental principle of the rule of law is that the same laws should apply to everyone, ie, it's about the laws, not about who arbitrates them.)
February 10, 2012 @ 10:01 am
"Whatever overdone sentimentality Roberts's tendencies may have, surely it is preferable to this amnesiac sociopathy. Surely an excess of an emotional core to a story is preferable to none whatsoever."
Sentimentality is not emotion. It is the pretence of emotion. It is ersatz emotion. It is the bluster that covers the lack of anything sensible to say. It is the lady protesting too much. It is easy and cheap and exists to placate and flatter.
When Roberts has Cybermen destroyed by love, this is the rump-gothic (the last gasp of genuine unease) soothingly, perfunctorily, ritually defeated by comforting certainties. It is no more genuinely emotional than the stunted awkwardness of 'Logopolis'. Indeed, the stunted awkwardness of 'Logopolis' stems from the inability of the show to find a way of satisfactorily dealing with how to portray the emotional impact of such an unimaginable catastrophe. Roberts, by contrast, cannot cope sincerely with even the comparatively minor horrors in 'The Lodger'.
Roberts offers us platitudes while 'Logopolis' seems stunned into incoherence by the magnitude of its own story.
Roberts forecloses upon the story he is telling. Lack of love is bad, love can defeat it. This from the man who sneered at political polemics because they supposedly offer only widely-accepted banalities.
Moreover, Roberts kills the Cybermen stone dead by killing their meaning. When you defeat the Cybermen with gold or gravity or radiation, the essence of their threat is unaffected and survives, even as they themselves die. When you kill them with love, you 'solve' them away into nothing.
'Logopolis' does not even try to solve the destruction of half the universe. It doesn't seem to want to dare. This has its problems, but insincerity and soothing ease are not amongst them.
February 10, 2012 @ 10:46 am
Here is where I finally comment. I’ve been following and reading these for a good long while now and I congratulate you on a splendid effort.
Looking back on it I’m rather surprised anyone in my family would have become a Doctor Who fan. Growing up on a small dairy farm in north central Wisconsin is not exactly where one would expect the seeds of Doctor Who fandom taking hold. I believe the only reason I still enjoy Doctor Who today is because my dad, a Midwestern farmer to the bone, really enjoyed watching Doctor Who. When I think about my dad it seems so out of place with his character that a guy like him would have any interest in, let alone be fan of, a fantasy/ sci-fi British TV show. Thankfully for me, he was. It is something we would always watch together on Sundays after we would get home from church. We’d tune in on the local PBS channel when Packer football wasn’t on.(What can I say, it is Wisconsin after all.)
This is the Doctor Who episode that hooked me as a kid. It was one of the first episodes I saw and it has always stuck with me, particularly the name. It captured my imagination as a kid and today knowing what it means just increases my affection for it. That name, more than anything, has been bouncing around my brain for almost three decades. Even now when I think of Doctor Who and watch the new episodes
Logopolis is never far away.
My dad liked this episode and his impression of it has impacted my memory of it. I recently watched it a few months ago and while I could pick out all the deficiencies in the story I really didn’t care, I still enjoyed the craziness of it all. In the end that is what I really want out of Doctor Who. My apologies since this is a bit disjointed but this is where Doctor Who get more personal and interesting for me.
February 10, 2012 @ 10:48 am
Propaganda Due!
Now there's a story which if RTD had scripted it would have us all lambasting the lack of believability in his plots.
February 10, 2012 @ 10:55 am
This comment has been removed by the author.
February 10, 2012 @ 10:56 am
I'm assuming the assumption is that a society without government will possess a harmony in which the rule of law as defined is naturally and correctly applied, and the same with it's enforcement.
I've always assumed it meant that the law applies without exception to all, so that governments, for example, can't go around breaking the law as they please. The law is above all.
The idea of a "neutral" third party is a bit troublesome, but in the UK at least the courts are separate from the executive and legislature. It's a fundamental principle of our unwritten constitution and this separation was taken even further under the last Labour government. I think I prefer our justice system now to the kangaroo courts that might come about in some forms of social organisation. But I'm interested in how we might know it the would be guaranteed not to occur under anarchism.
I haven't read all this post (yet), but it seems very fair, and perhaps given how seriously Season 18 seemed to take itself, perhaps it's appropriate that it's so serious (or not)! And I had never connected Jewish mysticism with Dr Who before… It may go down in legend.
February 10, 2012 @ 10:57 am
I have a couple of follow-up thoughts:
1) I have to disagree re Sarah Sutton, she actually strikes me as wooden through most of her run, and the lack of any meaningful reaction to the subversion of her father and the destruction of her entire world could be laid at her feet as much as at the writers' feet;
and
2) If you want to anticipate the following eight seasons, the charged TARDIS emboitement in Part One of Logopolis might seem a strangely apt metaphor for JNT's run as producer. The further down the iterations you go, the colder and darker and more desperate things become, but always with the dangled promise that eventually you'll break through and back into daylight. (And of course, eventually you do.)
February 10, 2012 @ 10:59 am
Nice post.
February 10, 2012 @ 11:08 am
I think slamming Sutton's woodenness misses the effect she was going for. Remember how central to British self-mythology the image of the Royal Family remaining in London during the Blitz is. The image of nobility putting aside their own personal feelings for the greater good is an inherent part of the reason why the nobility is, well, noble.
Choking up a bit and then getting on with it after your entire race is destroyed isn't wooden. It's tapping right into a fundamental image of British heroism. The problem is purely that she needed to eventually come back to the emotion. Not that she pushed through it in this story. And I think that evocation of the "keep calm and carry on" image of nobility was a wholly deliberate choice on her part, and that she hit it note perfect.
February 10, 2012 @ 11:49 am
A truly amazing entry, Phillip. I am awed. My biggest thoughts are as follows:
1. First and foremost, I think the Problem of Nyssa is at least as great as the Problem of Susan. Susan's problem was that she was left behind to an uncertain destiny. Nyssa's problem was that her destiny was assured — one day, she would die, and then her race would be extinct, without the Doctor ever having taken any meaningful steps to secure justice for the extermination of her species. The Problem of Nyssa would hang over every future appearance of the Master and would even carry forward into the new series. I finally lost all patience with Tennant's Doctor at the end of "Last of the Time Lords." Not with that silliness where he got magical powers due to everyone on the planet thinking simultaneously about how much they loved him. But the very end, when the Doctor unilaterally decides that no one on Earth is fit to judge the Master for the murder of innumerable people, including a sitting U.S. President and the entire British cabinet. Instead, the Doctor will place him under house-arrest and try to rehabilitate him. I remember practically snarling at the TV when he said that: "Awesome! You two should totally go visit Nyssa on Terminus! You can all reminisce about that time the Master murdered Nyssa's father and then wore his corpse like a cheap suit for the next few years! And then you can have a good laugh over the fact that there were now exactly twice as many Timelords as there were Gallifreyans!"
2. Upon rewatching it last week, I was amazed once again to realize how much I still liked Adric. Granted the acting is weak and he was a little annoying in the first episode because Bidmead did that incredibly annoying thing where the guy listening to the plot exposition repeats in a questioning tone the last word in each of the other guy's lines, because that's easier than writing dialogue. He rather foolishly assumes the Watcher is the Master, but then the Doctor, who knows the truth, steadfastly refuses to tell anyone anything for no reason except to spoil the surprise at the end of the story. He does snap at Tegan in one scene, but since I loathed Tegan (see below), I couldn't bring myself to care.
The thing about Adric in this season that gets totally ruined in the next is that he provides a perspective on the Doctor that has never been seen before or since. Ian, Stephen and Ben were grown men, and while Jamie was younger, he had also been to war when the Doctor found him. Number Two was also a very childlike figure and there relationship was more like two irrepressible friends who simply had a significant age difference. Adric represented the first male figure in the Tardis who was young enough for the Doctor to have actually had a paternal relationship with him, and I quite enjoyed those scenes where the Doctor seems to be interacting with his son (as opposed to his daughter which was more often the case — see Two and Victoria, Three and Jo on occasion, definitely Seven and Ace). There was no point in this story or this season in which I didn't buy Adric as being the Robin to the Doctor’s Batman, both in the “let’s go fight evil” way and the “older guy takes in a youthful ward” way. Here, he cleverly helps the Doctor escape the police at the start of episode 2, he helps the Monitor identify the mistakes that have endangered the Doctor's life at the start of episode 3, and he is practically the only person who even tries to stop the Master's plan to shut down Logopolis. (Even the Doctor just stands there like a lump while the Master fiddles with his remote control; Jon Pertwee could have karate chopped him six times over.)
I enjoy these interactions now, since we're only two stories away from the deliberate sabotage of a heretofore likeable character by JNT. (TBC)
February 10, 2012 @ 11:54 am
Cont.
3. You mentioned the Doctor's odd interactions with the police in episode one. I was even more struck by the odd actions of the police. It is one of the hoariest old tropes in fiction for the protagonist to be thought a murderer because he is discovered standing over a dead body. But I have never seen this trope enacted in a situation in which the police could not possibly know that a murder had been committed. Yet here, the police are extremely hostile to the Doctor to the point of implying they don't want to see him get a fair trial … because he was found standing next to an abandoned car with two dolls sitting in the front seat?!? (I'll pass over for now the Master's apparent ability to invoke mindless terror in his victims by chuckling softly.)
4. Last and least, there is Tegan.
Sigh.
We've only recently lost Romana. Before her was Leela, who IIRC only ever screamed once (when a giant rat was actually in the process of biting her on the leg) and who often had to be restrained from killing the villain before the Doctor had a chance to talk with him. In just the last story, we introduced Nyssa who staged as one-woman jailbreak to free all the male cast protagonists.
And then there's Tegan, who broke down and cried in near hysteria because she got lost in a maze for about fifteen minutes. Tegan, who is prone to say things like "My Auntie Vanessa has been murdered! And what's worse, I'M LATE FOR WORK!!!" Tegan, who upon encountering a completely alien culture for the first time, immediately assumed the head alien was running a math-based sweatshop. Tegan, the living embodiment of the Dunning-Kruger effect, who would spend all of this episode and most of the next two and a half years convinced that she was more competent than she was. (Consider that she'd have never entered the Tardis and Auntie Vanessa would likely still be alive if she'd only taken her auntie's advice and hailed down someone to help them change the flat tire that she clearly didn't know how to change — "Shouldn't you put a jack under there first, dear?"). Lord in Heaven, what a triumph for feminism she turned out to be. I swear, between Tegan, Peri and Mel, I truly believe that a case can be made that JNT was a misogynist.
February 10, 2012 @ 1:27 pm
To be fair, finding an abandoned car with a doll of a police officer when you're looking for a missing police officer is about as suspicious as an actual corpse.
But yes, I largely concur or sympathize with your remaining points.
February 10, 2012 @ 2:37 pm
To be fair, finding an abandoned car with a doll of a police officer when you're looking for a missing police officer is about as suspicious as an actual corpse.
My criminal law professor would beg to differ, I think.:) It was just such an odd scene. The investigating officer really seemed to be playing it like there were supposed to be mutilated corpses there instead of some frankly adorable little doll. I've wondered if the script actually failed to make it clear to the actor what he was supposed to be talking about and after rehearsing the scene thinking he was standing next to a bloody double homicide, he just decided to go with it on the set.
February 10, 2012 @ 6:05 pm
SK,
either someone enforces that rule, in which case you have not got anarchy; or the stronger party in the dispute will merely refuse to appoint a neutral arbiter, in which case you haven't got the rule of law.
But if we look at real-world cases of nonstate legal systems, neither of those options is what happens. In some cases the rule is enforced, not by some one agency, but by people generally. In other cases the rule is not enforced at all, but people comply with it because of practices of boycotting those who don't.
For that matter, even in state legal systems, there's no literal final arbiter, and yet no rule by the strongest either.
I think also it's quite tendentious to claim that neutral arbiters are 'the fundamental principle of the rule of law' — I would have said that the fundamental principle of the rule of law is that the same laws should apply to everyone, ie, it's about the laws, not about who arbitrates them.
I was thinking of standard arguments for the rule of law as e.g. in Locke. But in any case your fundamental principle entails mine.
Dan,
in the UK at least the courts are separate from the executive and legislature
That's certainly an improvement over systems where they're not thus separate. All the same, it's not pure rule of law inasmuch as they're all prt of the same monopoly system.
February 10, 2012 @ 6:23 pm
Alan,
Well, given that the Doctor is essentially a Christ figure during the RTD era (and even more broadly, the Doctor is anti-retribution most of the time, though admittedly not all of the time), I don't really see anything incongruous in his forgiving and seeking to redeem the Master. It doesn't mean we're not supposed to take the Master's crimes seriously; on the contrary, the scene gets its power only against the background of the Master's crimes.
Plus there's the additional wrinkle of the Master's being the only survivor of the Doctor's own act of genocide; he could hardly be expected to view the Master without feeling guilt himself.
Btw, when you say "twice as many Timelords as there were Gallifreyans" I think you mean "twice as many Timelords as there were Trakenites."
February 10, 2012 @ 6:47 pm
I adore Gareth Roberts, but I have to agree here. Good writers can have bad days.
I haven't actually commented on the entry itself as of this writing…I need some more time to mull it out…:-)
February 10, 2012 @ 7:46 pm
Logopolis is a huge monument of different storytelling, so much so that Philip very accurately identifies it as the culmination of a shift of focus away from the the most popular Doctor ever.
"The problem of Baker" is resolved here by diminishing him to inaction. It really does feel like the fourth body of the Doctor has lived out all the adventures we've seen on TV as well as allt he books that were written as well as the comics that were drawn. Its easy to imagine him living for hundreds of years in that body before knowing that his past was catching up to him. (It is as easy to imagine Troughton in season 6a having many more years of adventures besides what we saw, such was his zest for life) If Baker inhabited the image of the 4th doctor with himself more than most any of the other actors, then the sullen resignation of his leaving puts him even closer to the moment than the prior actors in the role. The story and the moment of departure has cowed him into being smaller, lost in the maze of the script that essentially pairs his options down to nothing. The irrepressible younger Baker would never have stood for it.
JNT's reign could be summed up by abriging the phrase, "sound and fury, signifying nothing". All story arcs will be hinted at and lost, continuity and spectacle existing for sake of momentary enjoyment and then nothing. Doctor Who will become the equivalent of a one night stand, and one that, increasingly, you'll participate in with regret and the need for alcohol.
The idea of recursion is an interesting one in the days of syndication. We can relive the moments again and again as well. Dangerous that. As with the Dalek Master Plan X-Mas episode, it was best to be viewed once. No recursion there.
Excellent thoughts. Quite right noting that not one of Baker's episodes involves his Doctor in an emotionally weak moment (although Deadly Assassin requires a greater emotional role since he has no one to off that on). It was a style of TV that he embodied then, although I believe that he certainly could have given the right script. I have often tried to imagine his Doctor in "Midnight", Trying to use his persuasive powers to calm the shuttle passengers and failing, falling victim to the possession. I think that he would have been masterful at that episode. Hinchcliffe would have certainly bought that script. And liked that it only had one set!
February 10, 2012 @ 9:53 pm
Btw, when you say "twice as many Timelords as there were Gallifreyans" I think you mean "twice as many Timelords as there were Trakenites."
Gah! Yes, I reviewed that post three times before hitting post and still missed that.
February 10, 2012 @ 10:55 pm
Anyway, topic: Yes, RTD treated Ten as a Christ-like figure which was awesome because that's not the most cliched thing ever. Neo was a Christ figure! The problem with that scene is that Christ came to forgive us for our sins committed against God, whereas Ten came to forgive the Master for sins committed against other people, and I don't think he has the right to do that.
The real issue is that it creates the problem that TV Tropes identifies as "Joker Immunity." To wit: Batman cannot even try to kill the Joker without losing his good guy status, but since Batman is unwilling to kill the Joker (who will inevitably escape from Arkham to kill again), Batman bears some responsibility for the Joker's future crimes. In the real world, prison escapes are incredibly rare, as are escapes from mental health facilities. In DC comics, the Joker escapes from maximum security on average once ever 18 months or so (the frequency of Joker stories, I think), which means that Batman's victory over the Joker is ultimately meaningless.
Or to put that another way, allowing the villain to perpetually escape any kind of justice no matter what his crimes because he's such a cool villain is dramatically flawed because it ultimately renders the hero ineffectual.
February 11, 2012 @ 12:08 am
Stunning. I will enjoy returning to this tour de force and shuffling the deck. In fact never mind a book what about finding a suitable artist and publishing a deck of Doctor Who Tarot cards. I'd buy one.
February 11, 2012 @ 12:19 am
This was the story my dad chose to introduce me to Doctor Who when it was repeated before Castravalva and I was all of four (but nearly five! as I'd have said then) years old. It blew me away. I finally figured out from this blog that we'd watched Buck Rogers the previous year and I also see how it grounded me by giving me a crash course in sci-fi and TV cliche which would allow me to appreciate this properly. If I'd started on this it would've seemed normal.
As it was I remember it really well. I joined the Tardis with Teegan and was all set for the usual sci-fi stuff only to have the good guys lose, half the universe destroyed and The Doctor die and turn into someone else. I couldn't understand it all but it was vast and intricate and mystical. It stuck in my head and though I forgot the name of the story, years later I was always fascinated by the word logos.
February 11, 2012 @ 12:33 am
They looked like dolls to us because they were in fact …. dolls! However they were supposed to be actual compressed dead flesh (ugh) which would be odd seeming at least. Also, the police aren't arresting him, but detaining him for questioning. They threaten to arrest him, but in my experience they do that even when they can't. I called them on this once and they apologised. Well, they didn't actually apologise, so much as glower but I took it as such.
February 11, 2012 @ 12:36 am
By the way I've been following your blog (and Doctor Who for that matter)from the beginning and occasionally commenting. I've not always had time to praise everything you post but I'd like to say here how impressive this has been so far. Pretty much agree with all your interpretations and am intrigued by the Hermetic subtext you seem to have revealed. It makes me wonder as someone who grew up with Hartnell's Doctor how much my own interest in magic (both types since you ask) was primed by Doctor Who. All protesters that magic has no place in the Whoniverse really haven't been paying attention.
"There are only two magic tricks. You either make something appear or make something disappear. You put it in the box or you take it out."
That's as good a description of Doctor Who (both the show and the man)as I've ever read.
The Doctor is a Magician. The actors who have and will portray him are Conjurors.
(A Conjuror is an Actor pretending to be a Magician).
The Doctor's act usually goes like this –
A box appears a man gets out. He produces something from his pocket (a wand? A sonic screwdriver?) and makes something else appear or disappear. His 'glamorous assistant' is locked in a box. He opens the box. She is gone. He makes other stuff appear and disappear. His assistant re-appears. Finally he and his assistant get in a box and they and the box disappear.
This is why the Doctor is so often at home in circuses, in thetres and around show people. He is a conjuror pretending to be an actor pretending to be a magician. Or is it the other way round?
Boxes within boxes within boxes
As above so below.
February 11, 2012 @ 12:54 am
I think it's quite productive to think about Logopolis in terms of the rise of systems theory in the social sciences and humanities at this time. It offers a slightly different angle on a lot of the points that have been made her and for the last few weeks.
People are very quick to focus on the fact that Bidmead was interested in computers and to identify the various reflections of this in the stories he was involved with. That's not wrong, but this blog has done a wonderful job of showing that that's a rather simplistic way of approaching what he was attempting to do.
What I want to add is that this – and Logopolis in particular – ties into a wider current in much academic thought at this time. In a process beginning much earlier but reaching its heyday in the late 70s and 80s, sociologists and those in related disciplines (I'm an archaeologist myself so that's where I'm approaching it from) began to extend the approaches used for conceiving of and modelling literal, mechanical systems to other areas, and in particular to society and human interaction. Rather than being composed of people with free will, societies were seen as systems composed of subsystems whose action and interaction were governed by feedback responses and the nature of their role in the system. That's putting it quite simplistically, of course, and systems theories varied and developed quite a lot during the 20th century.
This kind of theory has been quite influential in how people have thought about societal 'collapse', and later in the decade Joseph Tainter published a book looking at the fall of ancient societies in an explicitly systems-theoretical way. The emphasis is on the spiralling costs and diminishing benefits of integrating diverse subsystems into a coherent system, with collapse as the inevitable endpoint which can only ever be postponed. In short, it posits that societies rise and fall because of entropy in closed systems. This book didn't come out till 1988, so I'm not claiming it influenced Bidmead in any direct way. Rather, they're both coming from an intellectual trend where society and the wider world is conceived of in a mechanistic and scientistic way.
It's a rather obvious point to say that Logopolis explicitly presents this vision of the universe. It's not just a computer-inspired set of logic games and flights of fancy but a response to a way real people thought societies worked. But I think what's more interesting is the tension between this and what had come before, and how the decision to embrace systems theory during Season 18 works for the programme.
Systems theory – especially in the fairly 'pure' form it still had for many social scientists in the 70s and 80s – has two big problems as a model for society. It can't easily deal with individual agency: with the person as someone who might act in unexpected or capricious ways that aren't necessarily governed by a rationally-constituted cost-benefit analysis or which aren't responses to 'feedback'. Instead it's functionalist. People's actions are explained purely in terms of their role within the system: 'villains and allies alike… are defined ontologically, in ways stemming entirely out of the story's structure.'
(contd.)
February 11, 2012 @ 12:55 am
(contd.)
The second problem is that systems theories don't cope well with change. Even as they posit entropy which will eventually lead to disintegration, the nature of the models tends towards equilibrium. Feedback mechanisms perpetuate themselves and the System is monolithic, reified and eternal.
But capriciousness, agency and irrationality are the hallmarks of the Doctor. By his nature he doesn't fit into the systems. He might be reduced to his functionalist role in a system of narrative, but to explain him in functionalist terms is to miss the point of what he is. And, as Phil noted when he was discussing the Key to Time season, he's got a very uneasy relationship with equilibrium. More often than not, the Doctor is an agent of change, which any programme about time-travel must surely hold as fundamental.
So to put the Doctor in a systems-theory universe is, paradoxically, to place him in a functionalist vision of the world but to rob him of his role, to deny him his agency and
constrain him to limited action of stimulus and response. The whole nature of the way the universe works in Logopolis is part of the process of chipping away at Baker's show. Phil noted the upturn in postmodern elements early in the Hinchcliffe era and how these escalated as we went through Williams'. But now this postmodern Doctor's forced into a world which simply and explicitly doesn't work that way. It's modernist-functionalist through and through.
And I think what's really important is that Bidmead recognises this incompatability. As much as he might believe in systems theory – and I'm sure he does – it's telling that when the Doctor Who universe is explicitly portrayed in such terms, it's a death-sentence. A confirmation that it can't go on like that and is doomed. For one of the first times in the series (as far as I can remember), the whole fate of existence – and by extension of the show itself – is at stake. It served Bidmead's interests and the show's purposes to diminish the Doctor by denying his postmodern universe of symbols and agency, but Logopolis is the acknowledgement that as the status-quo of the series, systems theory is a dead end. The Doctor gives his life to put an end to it.
February 11, 2012 @ 1:04 am
"The second problem is that systems theories don't cope well with change. Even as they posit entropy which will eventually lead to disintegration, the nature of the models tends towards equilibrium. Feedback mechanisms perpetuate themselves and the System is monolithic, reified and eternal."
Aren't you ignoring Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety here? That makes it clear that a control system can only work if it's at least as flexible as the most unpredictable element of the system it's trying to control. It's the most basic law of cynernetics, but it's one which a lot of systems thinkers (not the good ones) try their best to ignore.
Of course, Ashby's Law is mathematically equivalent to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, so in effect the same thing that will eventually destroy us – entropy – is the only thing that guarantees us our freedom…
February 11, 2012 @ 1:45 am
The structure of this post is very interesting, but I have to confess I gave up on following the sections back and forth.
Would you consider using hyperlinks between the sections instead?
February 11, 2012 @ 5:06 am
Great, great post: and how lovely to see that the Comments section has generated not one, but two of the most insightful quotes on Doctor Who that I have ever read:
inkdestroyedmybrush: "Doctor Who will become the equivalent of a one night stand, and one that, increasingly, you'll participate in with regret and the need for alcohol."
It's funny 'cause it's true. Hilarious and apposite!
Anton B: "A box appears a man gets out. He produces something from his pocket (a wand? A sonic screwdriver?) and makes something else appear or disappear. His 'glamorous assistant' is locked in a box. He opens the box. She is gone. He makes other stuff appear and disappear. His assistant re-appears. Finally he and his assistant get in a box and they and the box disappear."
Utterly brilliant. Don't suppose you'd consider expanding this paragraph into a full-scale essay?
February 11, 2012 @ 5:40 am
For the benefit of any IFers here, I've thrown together an interactive fiction version of this blog entry. Hope you don't mind, Philip! You can find it here.
Hope it's useful…
February 11, 2012 @ 5:42 am
I've no problem in the abstract, but if you wouldn't mind expressly noting that the text is copyright to me and including the url of my blog I would greatly appreciate both gestures.
February 11, 2012 @ 9:10 am
Perhaps he had been hypnotised by the Master to think they were corpses? It's all sounds a bit dreamlike (not having seen it since 1981).
February 11, 2012 @ 9:13 am
What is a .gblorb? My computer won't open it… :-S
February 11, 2012 @ 12:39 pm
Philip, I've added an explicit copyright message (the text was already credited to you) and the url.
Matthew, gblorb is an adventure game format. I've re-released it with a webpage here, containing a Javascript interpreter so that you can just play it in your browser (though it seems to mess up the centred palindromic text at the start); otherwise you need to install an interpreter such as Zoom (Mac/Linux), Spatterlight (Mac), Gargoyle or Glulxe (Windows) – I've only tried it on the last two. It's probably not worth doing unless you're going to play other IF!
February 11, 2012 @ 2:17 pm
Is the Platonic concept of mathematics explicitly to be found in the kabbalah?
February 11, 2012 @ 6:47 pm
VERY nice, elvwood! Looks good, so far… 😀
February 11, 2012 @ 6:49 pm
So, Philip, you going to do a few "gap" entries on the gap year between the respective transmissions of "Logopolis" and "Castrovalva"?
February 11, 2012 @ 11:21 pm
Thankyou. That's praise indeed considering the company I'm keeping here. When I've got time I would like to expand on the concept. It's about locating the tipping point where belief in 'magic' became belief in empiricism or science. Somewhere around the nineteenth century I suspect. (A bit later than the usual 18th C Enlightenment locus). The pop culture manifestation was the rise in popularity of the stage conjuror. I've always thought the Doctor had the whiff of the Egyptian Hall about him.
February 12, 2012 @ 4:51 am
Castrovalva is not going up Monday, no.
February 12, 2012 @ 4:51 am
Very little is "explicitly" to be found in the Kabbalah.
February 12, 2012 @ 4:52 am
Thanks, elwood – I quite love it. 🙂
February 12, 2012 @ 5:42 am
This sounds fascinating and is, I believe, largely un-remarked upon (at least, in detail) in relation to our show.
We all know that the TARDIS is "really" Digory Kirke's wardrobe, made of the wood of the Narnian apple tree; but, as you point out, it is also "really" John Nevil Maskelyne's magical cabinet.
I greatly look forward to reading your expanded thoughts on the subject!
February 12, 2012 @ 9:13 am
Thanks, for what it's worth I see the relevance now I've done a bit more research.
February 12, 2012 @ 9:49 am
Christ came to forgive us for our sins committed against God, whereas Ten came to forgive the Master for sins committed against other people, and I don't think he has the right to do that.
I'm pretty sure Christ is supposed to forgive people for all sins. And that he told his followers to do likewise.
Anyway, it's not like the Doctor is just going to let the Master go. He's going to keep him imprisoned. Is there something more he should do? Torture him? Pluck out his fingernails?
Batman's victory over the Joker is ultimately meaningless.
I don't see that. Even if there's no final victory, every 18 months that the Joker is in prison is 18 months he's not killing people.
February 12, 2012 @ 9:54 am
A lot of systems theory was already around a century earlier in Herbert Spencer.
February 12, 2012 @ 9:59 am
Will you be doing a "K-9 and Company" entry?
And do you have thoughts on when in the Doctor's personal chronology he sent K-9 to Sarah? Was the 4th or 5th at the time? Seems like he couldn't have done it when he was still in eSpace.
February 12, 2012 @ 10:02 am
K-9 and Company is one of the entries that will appear before Castrovalva. I have no particular thoughts on when the Doctor sent K-9 to Sarah, but if forced to think about it I'd assume it was between The Invasion of Time and The Ribos Operation. After all, if you're building one, why not build a second? And that's still close enough to when he'd last seen Sarah that the act of sentimentality makes some sense.
February 12, 2012 @ 10:13 am
One of the many, many things I find interesting about this post is the iconography. There are particular images that, as Doctor Who fans explore more of the show's history, ordinarily insignificant images become powerful emotional triggers. In my case, long scarves, bow ties, umbrellas, and of course police boxes, have become associated with joy and confidence.
It's not even just the images that are on the screen, but the images that came out of the production of the show. Badly clashing coats and Hawaiian shirts give me chills, and not just because of their visual ugliness. Not only the content of the broadcast, but the whole history of its production in the BBC and wider culture is inseparable from the Doctor Who story. You can't understand the fictional narrative of Doctor Who without understanding Philip Hinchcliffe's firing and the production problems that followed it. And you can't understand why Hinchcliffe was fired without understanding the UK conservative movement. Which is, of course, your point, Phil.
February 12, 2012 @ 10:24 am
Philip wrote: Thanks, elwood – I quite love it. 🙂
Cool! Consider it my way of giving something back. Well, that and buying the book version(s).
I think straight text on a computer screen is, unfortunately, the worst of both worlds when it comes to a CYOA. You lack the ability to flip to the right section physically, and you don't have the convenience of hyperlinks. I could have just converted it to a webpage, but where's the fun in that when I could do something more… nostalgic for the 80s?
I'm not saying you shouldn't have done it, BTW – I've really enjoyed following various paths (particularly once I converted it). It's just run up against a limitation of the blog medium.
February 12, 2012 @ 11:37 am
Makes sense. I certainly prefer it to be the 4th rather than the 5th.
February 12, 2012 @ 12:18 pm
That was mind-shuttling. When I hit the section where I died and then came out the other side I felt like I'd regenerated.
I wonder how this'll play out in book form? I'd like hypertext in the ebook, if I'm allowed to make requests. Anyway, I have to review The Hartnell years on Amazon now.
I love this post, and page generally, even – especially – when I don't know what to make of it. Since my brain is a-racing, I'll paraphrase my gratitude:
It's a strange blog. Let's keep it that way.
February 12, 2012 @ 6:01 pm
Part 1
I'm trying to figure out how to put this without sounding like a death penalty supporter, because I unambiguously am not. I would prefer to see the death penalty abolished completely in America. This is because I live in America, where it is perfectly feasible to contain someone in a maximum security prison for the rest of his natural life, and so killing a convicted murderer serves no purpose except revenge. If, OTOH, I lived in the fictional universe of Gotham City, where the Joker is apparently capable of escaping nearly at will and every single time he does, he runs up a death toll higher than the worst real world serial killers before getting captured, punched in the face and put back in the same cell, I might reconsider my opposition to the death penalty. I definitely would if my concerns about less stringent punishments were met by death penalty opponents saying "look on the bright side, that's 18 months that you DON'T have to worry about your loved ones being reduced to grinning corpses." That is the essence of the Joker immunity problem — that Batman appears ineffectual if the best he can do is provide a brief respite from the Joker's killing sprees. The Joker HAS to escape to remain a viable villain (and he really is the best Batman villain so he's going to escape), but the fact that he escapes and that he will never get anything worse than a punch in the face from Batman followed by being led back to Arkham in time for jello is an indictment not just on Batman but the whole judicial system. I mean, a societal rule that allows for serial killers to continue serial killing is, by definition, a bad rule, isn't it.
I'm pretty sure Christ is supposed to forgive people for all sins. And that he told his followers to do likewise.
Living in a Bible Belt death-penalty state, I find that statement sadly ironic when I contemplate the contortions my fellow citizens go through to justify the death penalty. More importantly, are you saying that Nyssa should simply forgive the Master for his crimes? The murder and cannibalization of her father followed by the extermination of her species? Is she a bad person if she refuses to do so and chooses to seek revenge against him? I might or might not forgive my father's murderer, but I think I'd be a bit put out if someone else whom I considered a friend were to say to me "don't worry, I've already forgiven him for you."
(cont.)
February 12, 2012 @ 6:05 pm
Anyway, it's not like the Doctor is just going to let the Master go. He's going to keep him imprisoned. Is there something more he should do? Torture him? Pluck out his fingernails?
What do you think I am, a Republican? No, I don't think the Master should be tortured. I am simply commenting on (1) the inadequacy of imprisonment for one of universal history's greatest monsters and (2) the arrogance with which the Doctor assumes total responsibility for making that decision in the first place.
First of all, if the Doctor has anything more than naked contempt for the human race, he should have acknowledged that the people of Earth have the right to subject the Master for punishment for his crimes, including but not limited to the assassination of the President of the United States and of the MP's who made up nearly the entirety of the British government. That's assuming we don't punish him for a deliberate genocide against the human race that was qualitatively worse than what Hitler enacted simply because the Doctor retroactively undid it all. Viewed in that light, shepherding him away into the Tardis for "house arrest" because he's the only one worthy of deciding the Master's fate reflects very poorly on the Doctor, IMO.
That said, if the Doctor is the only one entitled to decide the Master's fate, it had better be a damn sight better than "house arrest." The Master represents an existential threat to the whole universe. Unless the Doctor has something comparable to the Pandorica to hold the Master in, then frankly, I do think he's obligated to kill the Master. Because if he goes with "house arrest" and the Master escapes, how can the Doctor not be considered partial liable for his future killings. And it's pretty obvious he will escape, if only because Ten is so emotionally besotted with him that making some mistake in containment is inevitable.
I don't see that. Even if there's no final victory, every 18 months that the Joker is in prison is 18 months he's not killing people.
Then, by that logic, killing the Joker would be a greater victory, since he would never kill anyone again. Honestly, if one of your loved ones were brutally murdered by the Joker — after his 39th escape from jail! — and Batman were to show up at the funeral and say "don't worry, he won't do that to anyone else for at least 18 months," what would you say?!?
February 12, 2012 @ 6:44 pm
Axel, FYI i've been posting different Planetary characters on my art blog for three days now…
http://inkdestroyedmybrush.blogspot.com/2012/02/sketch-day-20-john-stone-from-planetary.html
February 12, 2012 @ 6:56 pm
Hells bells, Phil! You are insane. You are wonderful.
You are definitely a mad man with a blog.
Oh, and "Harry, I'm standing on a signifier." is a moment of unalloyed genius.
February 12, 2012 @ 8:57 pm
A Choose your own Adventure game? You Could use a world map!
I've measured it in all 37 dimensions and devised this:
http://i723.photobucket.com/albums/ww234/aka4x7b/LogoPolis.jpg
Hope this aids in navigation. Start at the top and head down … down … down …
February 13, 2012 @ 6:32 am
This comment has been removed by the author.
February 13, 2012 @ 6:33 am
http://www.ancientquest.com/assets/treeoflife.gif is also a fairly good map of it, though I handled Da'ath differently.
February 13, 2012 @ 7:10 am
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1bX3F7uTrg
February 13, 2012 @ 4:59 pm
I'm surprised you didn't try to analyze David Fisher's original Kabbalist influences back when you wrote on City of Death — the species was originally called the Sephiroth; i.e., the 10 attributes/emanations in Kabbalah through which God created the world and/or manifests.
Go down the rabbit hole a bit, who knows what you can find… 😉
February 13, 2012 @ 5:22 pm
That was mainly because, frankly, I think you just captured a solid 90% of what's Kabbalistic about City of Death. 🙂
February 13, 2012 @ 10:20 pm
A message from a lurker who massively appreciates this whole work:
Overly pedantic and trivial it may be, but CYOA was an American phenomenon. I think mention of Fighting Fantasy would have been apposite, not least because the Virgin Books DW line editor, Peter Darvill-Evans, wrote some Fighting Fantasies, as well as co-writing the Doctor Who rolegame Timelord with Ian Marsh. He was also my first boss…
(I confess to being an interested party in this, as the author of a couple of FFs myself)
February 14, 2012 @ 3:47 am
While the CYOA books were primarily published in the US, they certainly weren't unknown over here – when I was a kid everyone preferred Fighting Fantasy of course (because it was the 2000AD to CYOA's Superman comics, far more violent and funny) but CYOA were still far better than TSR's Find Your Fate series, which were also available.
More to the point, though, CYOA has become a generic term used online to discuss all these types of books. And of course there was no way Philip was going to write a dice simulator to get the full Fighting Fantasy effect. (Maybe an I Ching simulator would have been more appropriate?)
February 14, 2012 @ 3:51 am
Fighting Fantasy also debuted in 1982 and would have been anachronistic for this post.
February 14, 2012 @ 6:57 am
I dunno; the whole fragmented Scaroth (originally Scorath, apparently) seems to try and do some sort of Kabbalistic metaphor (out of the multiple fragments form the whole, etc.) — but also, I think a lot of what Fisher wrote still remains in the script (for example, large hatted gunmen which seem out-of-place in 1979 Paris but would've fit right in with 1920s Monte Carlo)… really, only the names and dialogue were changed, and the plot immensely simplified.
He's not given enough credit, I think.
February 16, 2012 @ 5:43 am
BerserkRL – Yes, I think I did say it started much earlier (if I didn't, I meant to), but it was certainly very popular around this time in certain academic circles and was influencing wider culture. And indeed Culture – there's a fair bit of it in some of Iain M Banks' novels for instance. I don't think it's that much of a leap to imagine someone like Bidmead might have had a passing familiarity with it.
February 17, 2012 @ 9:30 am
That was an amazing production Philip. I know you are intimately familiar with it, but for those who aren't, if you liked this post, you will like Alan Moore's Promethea.
February 19, 2012 @ 10:46 pm
http://i723.photobucket.com/albums/ww234/aka4x7b/Logopilis.jpg
This might be more what you'd appreciate.
February 28, 2012 @ 2:27 am
It’s Logopolis’ birthday today (woo hoo), so I thought I’d pop in a little congratulation – it seems perverse to celebrate one tiny piece of what you have above, but I was struck by the equation of the Watcher with the viewer, making us all complicit in every terrible thing that happens. I thought that was rather clever.
Though, in terms of the storytelling of the series, I prefer the argument that the Doctor(s) isn’t responsible for the death of a third of the Universe, but for saving two thirds of it.
February 28, 2012 @ 2:28 am
Celebrating Logopolis’ birthday (woo hoo), I thought I’d chip in with a very silly but slightly plausible explanation: “Give Sarah Jane Smith my fondest love…” That doesn’t sound like any Doctor Sarah knew back then. So, which Doctor left it? From his surprise at K9 in School Reunion and his habit of round-the-companion tours, surely Mr Tennant pops back retrospectively.
May 8, 2012 @ 7:47 pm
Philip Sandifer:
"This from a show that is increasingly obsessed with continuity – with nods to the past. But only the spectacle of the past – the montage of past characters, the nods to past stories, the return of past monsters. Never to a sense of history, to a sense that the characters change or have any sort of dramatic arcs. Never to anything that isn't chum for the narrow segment of people who give a flying fuck if the Cybermen ever return. That's what killed the program. That's why it goes under. Because in the end, John Nathan-Turner doesn't care about the program beyond as a succession of images."
Here here. It took the virtual apocalypse (the deaths of Holmes, Marter & Troughton, the resignation of Saward, the firing of Colin Baker & the willful deceit of the BBC), before things turned around. The sort of character growth last seen with Ian & Barbara (well, and maybe Jo Grant and Romana) didn't return until Ace. When such a thoroughly unlikeable character can grow before your eyes into a firm favorite… that's magic.
"Why does Nyssa, who previously showed no particular awareness of the TARDIS, now have the capacity to send a message to it, to toll the bell for the Doctor?
Why does the Watcher appear here and here alone of all of the Doctor's regenerations?
What happened to the rules about TARDISes materializing within one another? And what the hell is the Doctor thinking with his flushing out the TARDIS scheme?
Is the Master not chaotic even as motiveless malignancies go?
Why is Logopolis mirroring late 20th century Earth technology for their brilliant plan to save the universe?
Where are the Guardians? Or the Time Lords?
Why does the Doctor think that his method of dealing with the police is remotely sensible?
How exactly does the Doctor plan on perfectly modeling the measurements of a Police Box that is obviously of a different design from the one the TARDIS looks like?
Why does shrinking the exterior of the TARDIS affect the interior? It's already bigger on the inside.
Why is the Watcher willing to send the Doctor to Logopolis when doing so obliterates a large swath of the universe, including inhabited worlds? And why is this never mentioned again?"
YEAH. Good questions.
May 8, 2012 @ 8:03 pm
Alan:
"I have never seen this trope enacted in a situation in which the police could not possibly know that a murder had been committed. Yet here, the police are extremely hostile to the Doctor to the point of implying they don't want to see him get a fair trial … because he was found standing next to an abandoned car with two dolls sitting in the front seat?!?"
YEAH. That too.
"And then there's Tegan, who broke down and cried in near hysteria because she got lost in a maze for about fifteen minutes. Tegan, who is prone to say things like "My Auntie Vanessa has been murdered! And what's worse, I'M LATE FOR WORK!!!""
I know that, somehow, someway, Tegan was created after both Leela & Sarah turned down invites to come back. And the BBC & JNT were looking into a co-financing deal with Australia. But really… as if Adric wasn't bad enough…
"I swear, between Tegan, Peri and Mel, I truly believe that a case can be made that JNT was a misogynist."
Strangely enough, I never knew until a couple months ago that JNT was gay. I wonder if that had anything at all to do with it? 😀
Dan:
"Perhaps he had been hypnotised by the Master to think they were corpses?"
That would have made sense. But with all the other holes in this script… gee, it really begins to look like Chris Bidmead was about 100 times better at being a story editor than being a story writer. (The exact opposite of Eric Saward.)
Philip Sandifer:
"K-9 and Company is one of the entries that will appear before Castrovalva. I have no particular thoughts on when the Doctor sent K-9 to Sarah, but if forced to think about it I'd assume it was between The Invasion of Time and The Ribos Operation. After all, if you're building one, why not build a second? And that's still close enough to when he'd last seen Sarah that the act of sentimentality makes some sense."
Makes sense. He'd been in that crate for some time before she opened it.
July 14, 2012 @ 2:02 am
Oooh I think I might play with that idea if you don't mind. I'm happy to work on Doctor Who related projects with others as well, but if not, I might just do some of the cards just for fun. 🙂
October 1, 2012 @ 3:50 pm
Ow.
Ow ow ow ow.
Owwwwwwwww.
This makes my brain hurt. In all the best ways possible… but what an evil trap to set for people trying to read through your archives… this article will take DAYS to explore!
October 22, 2012 @ 10:39 am
I just reread this today. I found I got a lot more out of it on the next reading, but now I've got "That's Entertainment" stuck in my head. I HOPE YOU'RE HAPPY!
October 22, 2012 @ 10:43 am
I'm happy. Hope you're happy too?
March 14, 2013 @ 1:37 am
Hi Philip – I love the coincidence that the website (ancientquest.com) is that of my Medieval Historian and musician friend Karen Ralls.
SO late to reply on this thread I know – but adore this entry – especially the I.F version!
I am an artist and professional storyteller – and I found your use of imagery very strong and inspiring personally. Much regards for a great piece of work.
December 1, 2013 @ 1:11 am
And don't forget! "That's Entertainment" was not actually released as a 7" in the UK. It became a chart hit in the UK purely on copies shipped in from Europe.
May 8, 2014 @ 1:35 am
The difficulty with the "death of the Master" (or the "death of the Joker") is what happens next? Do people stop being killed? No, of course not. The answer then is that another, very similar, character needs to be created. Problem there, of course, is that there's no real need, in dramatic terms, to do that if you already have the template available. I agree that the notion of "18 months in/18 months out" or whatever is, in principle, flawed, but both the Master and the Joker sell their respective stories. Otherwise, the nearly-identical replacement will just raise the question, "why didn't they use the Master/Joker?" To get all het up about it is peculiar, as it's a fairly straightforward (On UK telly at least) plot device: let's bring back so-and-so, he/she's popular and will boost the ratings. That sort of thing 🙂
December 2, 2014 @ 1:54 pm
The woman does not produce or give birth, instead she expels. … wwrestlingshoes.blogspot.com
December 7, 2014 @ 9:04 am
For some people, simply put, it's not Doctor Who after Tom Baker leaves. It's true that even in the most optimistic reading things get bad more … opoolleafvacuum.blogspot.com
October 21, 2015 @ 11:22 am
In my latest DOCTOR WHO marathon– this time, watching the individual episodes for the 1st time since the 80s (I have “Inferno” up to “Terminus” that way). I just reached the point where I was painfully reminded that the writing FELL RIGHT OFF A CLIFF.
Yep… “LOGOPOLIS”.
I swear… Christopher Bidmead is like the exact opposite of Eric Saward. He’s a MUCH better story editor than he ever was a writer. Plus, this was his first of ONLY 3 scripts he ever did on his own. And it was a rush job. What you get is a mixture of fascinating ideas… and REALLY terrible characterization and dialogue. Tom Baker, Mathew Waterhouse, Sarah Sutton, Anthony Ainley… all were wonderful in “The Keeper Of Traken”. Yes, even “Adric”. And NONE of them come off good in this one. In fact, more than ever before, I was renminded of what a WONDEFFUL character “Tremas” was… so intelligent, reasonable, warm… he deserved better. He deserved a return appearance… not to be MURDERED so that a ONE-dimensional erratic bad parody of Roger Delgado should take his place.
Frankly, I think they only come off looking acceptable because Janet Fielding– who I KNOW is a nice person off-camera– came across as such a TOTAL B**** as “Tegan” (my LEAST-favorite WHO companion of all time).
I swear, the ONLY actor in this who comes across well in this is, surprisingly, John Fraser as “The Monitor”.
Looking back, I wish to God that John Nathan-Turner had left after this one year. Because I KNOW… as wonderful as Peter Davison is as a person and as an actor… the BULK of his 3 years was EVEN WORSE than this. BAD writing, BAD directing, BAD acting across the board.
This time around, I’ve been skiping any stories I just don’t like. I managed to get all the way through Tom Baker’s 7 years and ONLY skip one single story (one that I simply have seen too damn many times for something that horrifically downbeat and disturbing). I’m wondering if I’ll even watch HALF of Davison’s stories?
I know one thing… as soon as I’m done with his, I’ll be pulling out CAMPION to watch again. Man, I LOVE that show!!!
February 21, 2017 @ 7:42 am
good we recommend BlueStacks. Comply with the full vidmate for pc the internet services like Vimeo, Dailymotion nice.
September 10, 2024 @ 11:16 am
continuing my first read of the series in the year 2024 and i just wanna say this ones really special LiZ! Kudos<3