The Beast Below

Stephen Moffat’s second episode of the series owed a large debt to the Russel T Davies style of storytelling and perhaps suffered for it. Here was a world based loosely on ours but with a significant twist, a heavy dose of modern parallel, followed by a choice and a heroic solution that leaves no one hurt. However there was a sharpness and a quality here that was missing from RTD’s usual episodes. The dialogue snapped and there were better laughs, side characters were well developed, the world was better realised than any I can remember from the RTD era.

Starship UK

Modelled on a rundown Seaside resort, the boulevards of Starship UK, covered in bunting and the kind of union jack laden miscellanea eagerly snapped up by modern day tourists, pines for the comforts of old cruelly destroyed in the fires of the sun. Its enforcers, the Winders and Smilers are equally nostalgic. Smilers evoke the amusements that delighted Victorian sun seekers, whilst Winders recall the heights of Tudor England’s terror. Cycles and hand wound devices are the order of the day, adding a delightfully steam punk esque look to the episode. There is much left to be seen of the starship and I imagine it will be revisited, something I look forward to.

Liz Ten

Starship UK’s enigmatic leader is a touch of sillyness at the heart of a serious story about choice and the value of life. The reveal of her character is the height of writer’s wish fulfilment, a black cockney queen, magic. She believes she is a benevolent leader, a saviour for her people, but ultimately she is revealed as the creator of the demonic police state. This reveal is at the heart of the episode and it adds a tremendous weight to her character, and demonstrates Moffat’s penchant for playing with perceptions of time. Liz Ten is a fun character but adds to the sheer ridiculousness of the plot, thus detracting from the drama of the episode. There is clamour for more episodes featuring her, I’m not sure I agree but it is nice to have a three hundred year old queen not played by John Barrowman.

The Voting Booth

By some distance the best sequence of the episode, Amy Pond faces a terrible choice and proves herself unable to see past the myopia of her humanity. The choice is a wonderful invention, an uncomfortable question that probes at your psyche, to forget and continue your life or to protest and end your nation. Amy’s message sets up a beautiful conflict for the episode that is never fully played out but plants a seed of doubt in the Doctor’s mind about how much his new companion can be trusted. She has already chosen humanity over an alien once, and tried to prevent the Doctor from making the same choice. The part of the video that is shown layers intrigue on the plot and opens the reveal up to any number of possible solutions.

The Doctor and Amy

This is, as tradition dictates, the companion’s story. She goes from wonder, to intrigued, to direct conflict with the Doctor. If the first episode hinted, this episode states it, this is damaged companion. She is untrusting, distracted and on the run. Her investigative personality is a natural fit with the Doctor and is shared with nearly all her predecessors but her anti authoritarian streak is a mile wild. She ignores the Doctor’s instructions by not asking Mandy about the Smilers, then Mandy’s by investigating the “hole”, then everyone’s by hitting the abdicate button. By the end the Doctor and Amy are closer, a partnership but there is little Amy reveals that companions haven’t previously. Perhaps this is just the Doctor remembering why he has companions.

The Doctor himself is angrier than before and noticeably more anti-human. Carrying on from his disparaging comments about video phones last episode now the Doctor unleashes his anger at Liz Ten and Amy. It is enough to honestly believe that if the Doctor drops Amy now he may never take another human. What strikes this episode and this doctor out as different is the speed at which he works out what is going on. He knows well beyond his anger bubbles over, and it is the slow burn of his rage that makes it interesting. Also to note is the further sexual development of the Doctor where it is stated even more obviously than previously that he slept with Elizabeth I.

Other notables:

Magpie Electricals, just a throwaway, or a hint at the damage wrought by the cracks in the universe?
The crack in the starship at the end of the episode. Obvious but not overwhelming, this year’s arc.

Best line: The Doctor, “This isn’t going to be big on dignity.”

Supremely Undemocractic

Obama isn't even halfway through his first term, and his re-election is by no means certain but he is set to appoint his second Supreme Court Justice. Not only that but he will have a remit to appoint the most liberal justice on the bench. Supreme Court Justices shape the ideological framework of the law for decades after their appointment, and decide the fundamental rights of American citizens. This seems a phenomenally large impression for a potential one term President to make on his nation.

Imagine a scenario where Obama fades massively over the course of his term and is embroiled in scandal. Even if he loses every state in the next election his legacy will still affect American politics for years, potentially decades. This is the madness of the American system of law, to have a Supreme Court that are accountable to no one is debatable enough but to have it's appointments dominated by politics is quite another. Unanswerable power coupled with the faux legitimacy that the appointment process brings creates monsters out of judges. They believe they can rule any way they want, whether they get appointed as a conservative and then turn into arch liberals the second they take the vow, or ignoring centuries of legal precedent to determine a ruling only counts once.

Above the law and yet in control of the law, the Supreme Justice is a relic of a time when no one could see past absolutism. The law is not beyond politics, it is the substance of politics, to attempt to separate the two as America have tried is to lie. The Supreme Court is an overtly political body, its rulings have a direct impact on the acts of elected legislatures, by falsely separating them the American system has created a supreme power, beyond accountability but mired in realpolitik.

Tulisa Contostavlos, You’re a Moron

It must be near election time, all the usual stories creep out of the wood work, from ill conceived gaffs suddenly blown into national significance to idiot popstars whose barely intelligible views are represented as speaking for their generation. This election Tulisa from N-Dubz has been appointed spokesman for the yoof, which is worrying for two reasons, firstly it means someone, somewhere believes a person that incoherent and that stupid should be a spokesman for anyone, secondly it means someone, somewhere honestly believes that she is representative of the 18-25 year old bracket.

She begins by arguing that Politicians, for here they are a homogenous group of faceless individuals, have done nothing to reach out for her vote. Odd really, given that one of Labour’s election pledges is to offer a job or training to everyone under 25 who has not been in either for more than 6 months. But then poor Tulisa wouldn’t know if that was the case because “Knowing about politics seems to be a bit like learning a foreign language - unfortunately it is one I was never taught.” Yes, lucky I caught those lessons on how to speak and read that tricky English language the politicians use, because without it I’d be quite lost. So firstly its Politicians’ fault for not reaching out to her, but even if they did she wouldn’t understand because apparently English is beyond her, which if you’ve read even a page of the N-Dubz book you’d know is quite possibly true.

But have no fear because Tulisa has some suggestions to fix all these problems. Firstly politicians should flyer outside clubs, because that’s a place where people really want to think about politics, and everyone knows the most read form of literature are flyers. Secondly Tulisa believes there should be some TV programme or website that explains in simple terms how elections work and who the parties are. BY GOD, WHAT GENIUS, its such a brilliantly simple idea that its already done by thousands of sites, including voteforpolicies.org.uk that presents part manifestos in easy to read chunks and lets you judge the parties side by side. Alternatively, why doesn’t Tulisa read the fucking paper she is writing in, I mean it’s the Sun so it’s not exactly hard to read and it does write about politics. It even analyses the Chancellor’s debate on Channel 4, and better yet, its published daily so you can keep up to date all the way until election day. It’s almost like someone, somewhere is making it incredibly easy to keep informed, as if to be truly ignorant of politics actually requires effort. In fact from accusing Tulisa of laziness, as she fears people might, I think she is the perfect example of active apathy. The willingness to push beyond normal ignorance of politics and delve deeper, to actually rid yourself of all willingness to learn. Tulisa has decided to turn how own uselessness into a virtue, now she defends the rights of all morons to remain morons, as if resistance to reading a paper is a good thing. Tulisa is not actually retarded, she hasn’t grown up in a third world country, she’s been taught to read and write, there is only one person to blame for her ignorance, her apathy, and her myopia, herself. Tulisa get over yourself, read a paper, google how an election works, read some Wikipedia pages, whatever, just stop fucking whining.

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/columnists/2915566/Tulisa-Kids-who-dont-vote-need-MPs-help-the-most.html

A Day That Will Live In Infamy

It’s a momentous day, one that will be remembered for decades, perhaps for all the wrong reasons. It’s the day when Scrabble allowed proper nouns. No longer is it a game of linguistic skill, no longer a way to teach children words and spelling, no longer an excuse to have an oversized vocabulary, now it’s just another hollow reminder of everything that’s wrong with modern life.

To allow proper nouns is a breach of the very ethos of the game, scoring points for lesser used letters, except that they are far more commonly used in proper nouns because of their rarity. Not only that but now any word that can be spelled is potentially allowable if you can name a product, person or place referred to by it. Not only that but Hasbro announced there would be “no hard and fast rule over whether a proper noun was acceptable”, so no more even adjudication by a dictionary then. Instead we have a malaise of incoherent rules and arguments over how many modern misspellings of names are allowable.

Worse still is the revelation that this has come about to encourage younger people to play the game. Frankly younger people can piss off if they can’t be bothered to use real words, what next, fucking text speak?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8604625.stm

South Africa On Fire

The murder of a hated man brings tears to few eyes but in South Africa Eugene Terre’Blanche’s untimely demise may yet have a country all too familiar with sorrow drying their communal eyes once again. A violent white supremacist who clung to the iconography of the Nazi Party, and served a prison sentence for beating a black security guard almost to death, Eugene Terre’Blanche was another sad reminder of a troubled past. It is perhaps to the nation’s credit that he had sunk largely into obscurity in recent years. An obscure figure at his death and if he had simply sunk into his deepest sleep there would be little remark on his death, such is the damage an ill advised push for independence for Afrikaners did to his reputation.

Instead he was brutally murdered by two black employees in a row over unpaid wages, an act that has inflamed the extreme right. It has been taken as a sign of rising racial tension in the country, with Terre’Blanche’s organisation, Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB), claiming that he is only the latest in a pattern of murders of white farmers. Adding to this racial maelstrom is the ANC’s youth leader’s repeated performances of an old resistance song called “Shoot the Boer”. Boer being a commonly used name for white farmer and a term that Terre’Blanche took up as a trophy. The performance of this song marks a new long in the attitude of the ANC to South Africa’s white minority and its general failure to push South Africa forward is coming back to haunt them. Now the AWB are able to make sweeping statements, accusing South Africa of being too dangerous a place for a World Cup, a “land of murder”. Such is their lack of faith in the system that they are planning their retribution rather than wait for the courts.

One party states don’t work as a rule, competition is the oxygen of democracy, it fuels creativity and imagination. The ANC is simply too powerful to properly examine its actions, evidenced by their election of an oaf as President, and their continuing failure to act as a leader in African affairs. Jacob Zuma now has a chance to prove himself, can he be the leader he was elected to be? Can he manage this crisis so that outrage does not spread from the extremists to the wider white population? Most of all, can he act like a statesman in reaction to a high profile murder and prove that South African politics are about more than race? If he does it would be an achievement to match anything Mandela managed.

Is it OK to be a Tory behind closed doors?

It’s not that Chris Grayling is homophobic, I don’t believe he is, it’s that he believes he has to pander to homophobes that is so grating. By doing so he has revealed a number of old Tory failings, failings as old as the party itself. The Tory party contains a great number of people who believe small government means the right to cling to your old prejudices without government interference, it is less a policy than it is a group sentiment. Perhaps it is the reason why many of them joined, they could not be considered Conservative in any of their views but they see the party as a home for bigotry, a last outpost of what they see as sanity and what we see as unacceptable social repression.

Grayling was appealing to the misguided classes when he stated his view that banning gay couples from a B&B was acceptable behaviour. He went onto add that this would be unacceptable from a large business or hotel, making it clear that he does not think homophobia is acceptable, it just shouldn’t be discouraged. He was drawing on the age old myth that a person’s house is their own private domain where no law can touch, a view that used to be espoused by liberals who wanted to legalise homosexuality and now by conservatives who want to legalise homophobia. There are two problems with this, firstly, he was talking specifically about people who have made their home a place of business, thereby losing the protection that their dwelling would normally have. He was rightly criticised for effectively supporting the old “No Blacks, No Irish” signs that were once so common.

Secondly, why should someone’s property be outside the bounds of law? The law is meant to protect us, from others, from the state, even from ourselves. Do we step out of that protection when we step onto someone else’s land? If we accept that self facing laws exist , that drug use is unacceptable and therefore that banning it is a worthwhile use of Parliament’s time then why should this not be the case in our bedrooms. There is a separate argument for a separate time about self facing law but the law must be powerful everywhere if it is to be effective, if we accept that people’s houses are some sort of anarchic safe zone then we accept that law itself is wrong. If it is right to pass a law then it must be right that it affects everyone, everywhere. That is the test by which law should be measured, if it cannot pass that test then it should not be made law, a far better result than being made law, but not where it could affect people.

Things we Learnt about Steven Moffat’s Doctor

Time travel is a violent, unnatural, unordered process.

Lightning and fire dominate the opening title sequence, the time vortex reimagined as a brutal, dangerous realm where the Doctor’s wooden box battered and electrified is more coffin than space ship. The Tardis is, more than ever, a character in this play, one that changes itself and locks the Doctor out. It goes where it wants, looks how it chooses, and decides when its ready for the Doctor. The Doctor has lost even his cursory control as his Tardis veers wildly into the future, leaving him as much a passenger of circumstance as his companion. He is left ragged and tatty as his machine crash lands, thrown unceremoniously into his library/swimming pool. He cares less about the ordinary passage of time, aliens appear in the sky but he does nothing to explain their presence, he dispenses scientific marvels to gain trust with no care for the impact they will have. This doctor is less the strange outsider here to the save the day, more the Shakespearean comic interlude drunkenly stumbling onto stage halfway through the action, making a fool out of himself and, ultimately, the protagonist.

Lonely, no more.

Gone are the moments of self doubt, gone are the pregnant pauses when friends or family are mentioned, this Doctor believes he is lucky to not have an Aunt. Maybe the violent reminder of Gallifrey’s last days in The End of Time were enough to kill his inner romanticism for the Timelords of old, maybe he’s just used to having human friends now. This Doctor seeks out companions, pursues them through time, doesn’t disappear to never come back, he might even stay for dinner, although he does have special dietary requirements. He makes no show of inviting his latest traveller in, he makes no complaints at meeting the family, he doesn’t even insult the boyfriend, well, only a little.

A mad man with a box.

The previous Doctor wanted to be a man of peace, the fire of the time war still burning within him he declared himself the man who would not, but it was a hollow claim, he admitted he manipulated others into taking their lives, he used combat to send the Sycorax on their way, he drowned the last of the Racnoss under the Thames. This Doctor brings fire and fury to every aspect of his life, yelling and cajoling his human helpers, flinging his bread and butter away as if it was explosive, a man who rips a breach wide open to close it. He uses the rhetoric of power and anger, this time it is his enemies who are told to run, even turning his ire on a duck pond because of its lack of ducks. This is a doctor who does not shy away from the word ‘evil’, even if he is describing beans. He levels his fury at not just his enemies, but those who see Earth as an inconsequence, dispatching prisoner zero back to his death penalty with no consideration for his crime or the conditions of his captivity. But his guards are not to get away free either, this Doctor will call them back just to threaten them, he is proud of his battles, he is worse than everybody’s Aunt, he is the man who would.

The Runaway Bride

Still in her childhood room, surrounded by fairy lights and cardboard models, Amy Pond has always dreamed of running away, from her Aunt, from the crack in the wall, from her sort of boyfriend who she is now marrying. She is frustrated by the Doctor, he leaves her unsatisfied twice, whilst she dresses in her kissogram outfit and makes her boyfriend play the raggedy Doctor in dress up before leaving her wedding dress on the hanger for a chance to ask ‘what if?’ Brave and smart, she aids the Doctor even when unconscious, and is afraid of nothing, except cracks in reality and interdimensional multi phases. Amy tries to join the Doctor 3 times over the course of the first episode, but she is not a lap dog, she demands answers, hits him with a cricket bat, and locks his tie in a car, less the doctor’s companion than his match.

A universe, not a villain.

A crack in space, an escaped convict, and intergalactic prison guards all present themselves as the monster of the week at some point during the episode but none of them really are. The crack is at most a forewarning of strife to come, the convict never kills and the guards are uninterested in Earth’s fate. This is Earth once again as plaything in the arena of gods and monsters, not a trophy but a stage for their own plays of life and death. Where once the Earth was a launch pad for a new Timelord empire now it is collateral damage in the pursuit of one being. The Doctor may act as a warrior but in reality he is a facilitator, easing other’s use of Earth to protect it. If it is not a problem then it won’t be erased. There have been pursuits of fugitive’s before but Russell T Davies’ plasmavore was prepared to kill the Earth to cement her villainy, this time it is the pursuers who will burn everything.

No Tardis, No Screwdriver, Twenty Minutes.

As much a statement of intent from a writer forging a brave new universe as a Doctor finding his stride, this episode was notable for the lack of space age technology. Gone are Delta waves, in are emails, texts, facebook, bebo, twitter, radar dish, this Doctor harnesses the power of now. Messages transmitted at the speed of light, across every country, across every device, if Stephen Fry can communicate from a stuck lift, the Doctor can spread a virus to the farthest corners of humanity. Everything links back to a phone, not a specially made alien array, not a timey wimey detector, but a phone. A phone that can contact aliens via MMS, a phone that can call spaceships, if you dial long enough, a phone that is recognisable, that is human, unlike its user.

More than just a new mouth.

This is a distinctly new Doctor Who, a more childish but also smarter take on the central conceit. This version plays with time and consequence more, develops its own logic and knows its place. The direction is different, more active, more concerned with framing the action in an interesting way than just observing. The writing is smoother, funnier and more childish without losing its dramatic heart, this Doctor eats custard and fish fingers but he understands fear better than before. I could, and probably will, be wrong but its one episode in and I’m on board, and judging by the way my Dad giggled along as the Doctor rejected different foods I’m not the only one.