The one thing you can say about Moffat stories is that they are bursting with ideas, sometimes they don’t mesh well (a problem I have with the Library two-parter) but when it works the show is just alive with creative energy. This week we had: many, many details of River Song’s increasingly temporally confused backstory – the crew of the Enterprise manning the T-1000 with polite and deadly robot jellyfish, travelling through time, setting right what once went wrong with horrible horrible torture – a mysterious religious order devoted to answering the final question and ending the universe – extractor fans! This had it all.
Clearly the crew of the Justice Vehicle are pretty awful people. Most stories about time travellers who try to kill Hitler give them a motive of trying to prevent the wrongs of the past (and then learn important lessons about knock-on effects), the ‘travel to the very last moment of their life and torture them’ approach is more respectful of the timeline but also more morally reprehensible. It has no deterrent effect, in fact it’s vital no one knows about them because telling people about it would effect the timeline – what it comes down to is people in the far future judging your life according to criteria you’re not aware of and punishing you in a way that’s really only to the benefit of their bloodlust. Hitler I imagine we can all agree belongs on the shit list, but if Churchill (not universally a wonderful person) had a visitor to his deathbed people might be more split.
Time travellers creating an afterlife because God let us down by not existing is also dipped into briefly in the Baxter and Clarke novel ‘The Light of Other Days’, where towards the end the perfection of time-traversing wormholes allows the far future to download and recreate the brain at the moment of death. Sufficiently advanced technology indeed.
Questions that cause the universe to end have a good pedigree. While the obvious association of an ultimate question given Adams’ Who connection is to Hitchhikers, what this made me think more of more are two classic short stories, Clarke’s ‘The Nine Billion Names of God’ and Asimov’s ‘The Last Question’. In ‘The Nine Billion’ a computer is built to systematically list all the possible names of God in the belief that when this happens the purpose of the universe will be fulfilled and it will promptly shut up shop – the final question is answered and silence will fall (coincidentally, the stars going out now qualifies as a recurring thing in New Who). In ‘The Last Question’ successive generations from the near-present to the heat-death ask a question of the increasingly sophisticated machines they’ve created, a question that’s at first an intellectual curiosity and then gradually the last and only relevant question: “Can entropy be reversed?”. While interesting I don’t think this is any use for plot guessing purposes, I’m just hoping for something better than “Doctor Who?” (Although there would be something very Adamish in an inter-temporal war and attempted universe-cide resulting from a very badly misunderstood knock knock joke.)
As Mels grows up alongside with her parents, Moffat seems to be pushing the idea that effectively they did raise her anyway and so this solves the problem of how the show can tonally have Amy and Rory having adventures not related to getting their stolen child back. I’m willing to accept this-ish,but clearly Rory and Amy would be better parents to a child now then they would have been when they themselves were children. Given Mels seems to have a slightly rocky life and most of what they know about River’s later life is that she’s imprisoned in the Stormcage (which really in terms of actually keeping people in is almost as bad as Arkham), it’d be easy for them to imagine that Melody would have had a much better life if they’d properly had the chance to raise her. It's a bit of a serious downer and I’m curious to see if the show has any further interest in addressing it.
Is the Doctor just dressing to go out in style, or does the outfit change signify like in ‘Flesh and Stone’ that there’s a bit of story missing that might appear later on? As ever, there is insufficient data for a meaningful answer.
I've just finished Andrew Rawnsley's The End of the Party and in the period when Brown thought a Lib-Lab coalition was a possibility there's this brief anecdote:
'He felt his legacy could be a progressive coalition. Brown imagined a final six months at Number 10 as the sort of benign, presidential 'father of the nation' figure he had often dreamed of being. Talking to Tom Fletcher that evening, Brown said: "If we somehow pull this off, you'll find I'll turn into President Bartlet.'"
That Brown with his long-standing affinity for America would reach for The West Wing as a model for a national leader perhaps isn't that surprising but the infulence of the show is a recurring presence in British politics, from rumours that George Osbourne was basing a No. 10 floor plan around the West Wing to a'West Wing plot' leading to a government defeat and, more recently, Ed Miliband's advisors ending meetings declaring 'Let Bartlet be Bartlet'. Biblical allusions might now past us by, but everyone knows who Josh is.
Tom Harris takes the lack of a British West Wing with an optimistic and positive portrayal of politicians partly as a failure of the nation's appetite (which he sees as being incapable of digesting a show that earnest if the accents were closer to home), but also the nation's writers – unable to write politicians as anything other than cynical or corrupt. I think this oversells the case, British television may not have produced the West Wing but American television only barely did, producing it just once and common portrayals of politicians in the US often skew closer to the cynical. Not to say there's nothing to the idea of national tastes but I think that there are specific structural problems with crafting a positive show about the machinery of government that make it easier to achieve in the US than the UK. A clue as to why is Abigail Nussbaum's take that the West Wing is essentially a show about the royal court of a more politically acceptable medieval monarchy. Interestingly she points out one of the most obvious example of this interpretation is from the same episode that Miliband's advisors are drawing from, "Let Bartlet be Bartlet":
Leo turns to each of the staff as they recite "I serve at the pleasure of the President of the United States." He isn't leading a pep rally; he's reminding them of their oaths of fealty, and reminding Bartlet, who is standing just outside the room, of the courage and devotion of the men and women he commands.
Put in this context it's quite clear why something with the tone of the West Wing would be quite hard to achieve in the UK – while the US political system sanitised the trappings of monarchy, the UK instead moved power into different arenas. The characters in the West Wing are all attempting to implement the agenda of one man while also trying to shape that agenda – the show's universe revolves around the President and his staff's loyalty to him. While the British Prime Minister is potentially more powerful, they are not the only one in the room who matters, their power base is only one among many. In the Parliamentary system many of the key positions of government are staffed by MPs with their own electoral mandate and their own overlapping and shared (but also unique) agendas. Prime Ministers live with the constant knowledge that the party as much as the electorate will be the eventual decider of their fate. If a British Bartlet had concealed their MS, their decision to seek a second term would be likely to be far less of a personal decision.
Conflict is the bread and butter of drama and while the check-and-balance heavy US system is filled with potential external opponents for the team (it's not a coincidence that there's a Republican Congress for the entire run) meaning that while there are conflicts within the team, they remain low key and amicable. For a UK government with a majority there are few effectual external opponents – the primary antagonisms are then within the party, within the government and within the main cast. The West Wing transplanted to the New Labour era would have the PM with the ability to do pretty much anything he wanted, unless it was blocked by the second-billed character, a long-term friend turned antagonist. Bartlet's troubled relationship with his Vice President is ultimately harmless because the Vice Presidency isn't necessarily powerful (it's not a surprise that Iannucci's US version of The Thick Of Itis based around the VP), the nearest analogy would be if Bartlet and Leo were at each other's throats – it would be very hard for for the West Wing to be an optimistic show in this context.
Because the institution of the Prime Minster is relatively flexible, depending on the circumstances of their election and the style of the leader (the Major era very different from Blair, very different to Cameron, etc) there's no equivalent to the status of the Presidency (except, of course, the Monarchy). The positive feelings and glorification of the institution's history as well as the status-quo bias of the US policy process justifies a kind of mythic stasis – big projects of the staff like Sam's Manhattan project for beating cancer, Josh and Toby's tax-deductible tuition are ultimately stories about why these things didn't happen. There are battles, some of which are won and some of which aren't, but the status quo of the West Wing mostly remains the same – there have always been kings and knights on horses defending the realm and there always will be, they will be fighting about gun control, gay rights, religion in government, today and tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow. That the characters take sides in this eternal conflict without scoring any lasting successes (this only really applies to the Sorkin era, once he leaves they quickly bring peace to the Middle East) is arguably realistic in the context of a political system where paralysis is envisioned as a positive feature and so even failure can glorify the system. The ability of a British government to achieve change (and the expectation that they will which stigmatizes failure) combined with a lack of a long-term, static institution of the Prime Minister would make it difficult for a British West Wing to find the same amicable atmosphere where characters sit around and talk about timeless issues in a consequence-free way.
While none of this completely rules out the possibility of a optimistic and earnest show about British politics (I've been trying to get hold of the 'Number 10' Radio 4 plays to see if they pull it off), it does make it easier to understand why The West Wing has only happened once in the US and not at all in the UK. The 'royal court' take on the West Wing would actually suggest we've had several films in the previous decade that had optimistic and positive portrayals of the British system, they were just all about the monarchy.
Whenever there's a big ruckus on something race-related I like to wait till someone at the Telegraph writes on it before forming too much of an opinion. Usually their defense of whatever awful thing someone's said makes it far clearer exactly what the issue is. James Delingpole's 'If David Starkey is racist then so is everybody' is a perfect example of the genre, where Starkey is a victim of an evil BBC/Leftist trap where they invite him on TV and, here's the really clever part, let him say things. Cunning, cunning leftists.
He then went on to make an almost equally controversial observation about the Labour MP for Tottenham. “Listen to David Lammy, an archetypical successful black man,” he said. “If you turned the screen off so you were listening to him on radio you’d think he was white.”
Owen Jones leapt on this: “You said David Lammy when you heard him sounded white and what you meant by that is that white people equals respectable.”
This is classic Owen Jones, classic BBC. Note that what Starkey is saying here is actually pretty reasonabble. If you listened to David Lammy on the radio you could indeed very easily think that his educated, non-ethnically identifiable (and mildly effete) speaking voice belonged to a white person rather than a black person. But in Jones’s world – and that of his puppetmaster the BBC – the truth in these matters is no defence.
While it's bizarre to me that there are people who don't understand the problem with "Why if I didn't know better I could have sworn that well-spoken man was white!" what's even stranger is that while I thought Delingpole was linking to an example of Lammy's white white voice, the second link is actually to a Chris Rock routine that is skewing this exact thing. Having noted that Colin Powell gets complimented a lot simply for "speaking well" , Rock rages that "he's a fucking educated man, how the fuck you expect him to sound you dirty motherfucker". Quite.
What this really exposes is the flaw in the sourcing of discussants on these kind of shows. Once someone's reached a certain level of public notoriety from their specialty (historians, scientists, comedians, etc), they seem to suddenly become credible 'opinion-havers' on any subject whatsoever. Given they're constantly outside their area of expertise, saying something stupid is just a matter of time – it's like Russian roulette with ignorance. Starkey is a perfectly fine TV historian, but if we're going to have people who's only real qualification for commenting on events is having commented on other things, I do at least want them to be good at that. Saying that criminal whites 'have become black', before saying that actually he was talking about only a certain kind of black culture (dubious in itself, but anyway) is just a terrible way to make a point. If I said "racism is a problem in Tory culture" and people got angry I don't think that explaining that, actually, I was just using 'Tory' as a shorthand for a particular subculture (and so non-racist Tories shouldn't be offended) would get me anywhere.
Of course, if you want to know what really caused the riots look no further.
Edit: While I'm being mean about the Telegraph, it's probably worth pointing out not all their writers are on the same wavelength.
On June 15th 1910 a supply ship set sail from Cardiff, Wales. Aboard was the British Antarctic Expedition which took it's name from the vessel they sat upon, Terra Nova. For next three years the expedition invested themselves in pursuit of exploration, the understanding of science and the glory of being the first to the south pole. In short, things did not go to plan. And I do a great disservice to skip over the full story and also the history of its later glorification, which remains as a peculiar residue in shared memory. Of all the journeys undertaken on that trip, the failures, stories of heroism, dismay and tragedy; that of Apsley Cherry-Garrard most catches my eye.
Setting out through the fierce Antartic winter of June 1911, his team aimed to travel about 60 miles to find (of all things) a Penguin Eggs. They hoped it would reveal vital information, extending our knowledge of evolution. The journey was by many measures a disaster, temperatures fell to −77 °F (−60 °C), they could often travel little more than a mile a day and the egg they returned debunked the theory their patron set out to prove. Cherry-Garrard recounted the story in his volume "The Worst Journey in the World" describing in detail the depths of mental and physical hell the men put themselves through, very real brushes with death and the final blows of tragedy which ended the Terra Nova expedition. In doing so they embodied a profession that is largely closed to us today. They were explorers.
We live in a world that is mapped, where the completeness of google earth treads heavily on the dreams of those hoping for some undiscovered island or spot of Terra Incognita. Today spaces for the unknown seem much reduced and to those, like myself, who might still dream of Cherry-Garrard's hell. Frustrated, I've been left with only one venue to turn to, ponderous exploration of philosophy. If the maps are drawn, I've thought, I have only two choices. To quietly accept the state of affairs, or suggest there remains something wrong with the map. Possibly though, there is something more in this than childish desire throwing rattle from pram. Philosophy as a word gets a fair share of abuse and sometimes it seems easy to suggest why. Sometimes just the preserve of old bearded men clucking and crooning until incomprehensible gibberish leads us so far from sense we are taken from a world of our own and dropped in confusion and mystery. Or, perhaps worse still, it is viewed as the shadowy art of truth seeking, finding us the way forward when all else are blind, the critique that is the rants of idealists who never have to live with the least of their dreams, but think we should anyway. I'm less suspicious. The kind of philosophy that I'll sneak in here is an attempt to return the possibility of exploration. It starts by going back to the map and asking what on it we choose to believe. To elaborate further I turn to, who else, but a bearded white man.
Unlike these 'comets from outer space' so much of our everyday life, practices and even thoughts is very much mediated by history. In a way that is as true of the science of Deep Impact or Armageddon as it is of philosophical thought. They derives from standpoints, beginnings, orientations if you will. These are the maps handed down to us by the mental and conceptual explorers of old with which we plot not only where we are going to and from, but also where the possibility of further exploration lies. These thoughts, much like the antarctic maps of today, too often taken as given, just the way things are, self-evident. Mount Terror appears where the map says it will, so it must be there as the map tells it. Reality on the map. What we lose in all this is the simple idea that maps are merely descriptive, they are merely a way of pointing us to things and places, and the direction from which we arrive will change what we end up seeing.
So this blog will be about challenging the maps and approaches of old and new by pausing for a while. By channeling the idea of those who had a blank space, unknown answers to questions and the desire to explore them. In this we hope to return a new sense of the unknown sights and lands that might lie beyond. So pry and prod here, peer and trudge, redefine questions and explore answers and consider what maps we ourselves might be using to start on these journeys. Succeed or fail, retrieve a penguin egg or end in disaster are considerations that pale next to impulse to explore. I'll close this post as Mr Cherry-Gerrad closed his book , I apologies for quoting in full, but I hope you will agree it is a worthy cry his profession.
"There are many reasons which send men to the Poles, and the Intellectual Force uses them all. But the desire for knowledge for its own sake is the one which really counts and there is no field for the collection of knowledge which at the present time can be compared to the Antarctic. Exploration is the physical expression of the Intellectual Passion. And I tell you, if you have the desire for knowledge and the power to give it physical expression, go out and explore. If you are a brave man you will do nothing: if you are fearful you may do much, for none but cowards have need to prove their bravery. Some will tell you that you are mad, and nearly all will say, 'What is the use ?' For we are a nation of shopkeepers, and no shopkeeper will look at research which does not promise him a financial return within a year. And so you will sledge nearly alone, but those with whom you sledge will not be shopkeepers: that is worth a good deal. If you march your Winter Journeys you will have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin's egg."
Assorted 'Let’s Kill Hitler' thoughts:
Whenever there's a big ruckus on something race-related I like to wait till someone at the Telegraph writes on it before forming too much of an opinion. Usually their defense of whatever awful thing someone's said makes it far clearer exactly what the issue is. James Delingpole's '
On June 15th 1910 a supply ship set sail from Cardiff, Wales. Aboard was the British Antarctic Expedition which took it's name from the vessel they sat upon, Terra Nova. For next three years the expedition invested themselves in pursuit of exploration, the understanding of science and the glory of being the first to the south pole. In short, things did not go to plan. And I do a great disservice to skip over the full story and also the history of its later glorification, which remains as a peculiar residue in shared memory. Of all the journeys undertaken on that trip, the failures, stories of heroism, dismay and tragedy; that of Apsley Cherry-Garrard most catches my eye.
"There are many reasons which send men to the Poles, and the Intellectual Force uses them all. But the desire for knowledge for its own sake is the one which really counts and there is no field for the collection of knowledge which at the present time can be compared to the Antarctic. Exploration is the physical expression of the Intellectual Passion. And I tell you, if you have the desire for knowledge and the power to give it physical expression, go out and explore. If you are a brave man you will do nothing: if you are fearful you may do much, for none but cowards have need to prove their bravery. Some will tell you that you are mad, and nearly all will say, 'What is the use ?' For we are a nation of shopkeepers, and no shopkeeper will look at research which does not promise him a financial return within a year. And so you will sledge nearly alone, but those with whom you sledge will not be shopkeepers: that is worth a good deal. If you march your Winter Journeys you will have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin's egg."