TARDIS Eruditorum - An Unofficial Critical History of Doctor Who Volume 1: William Hartnell

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Anyway, for me this mostly comes down to the twist on the "ghost of Christmas future." As Alan notes above me, Scrooge is living alone and unloved and apparently okay with it, so why would dying that way bother him? I also disagree with the people who have ethical issues with it; old Kazran cannot give consent for his younger self as they are different people (this is why it's possible to change your mind about consenting–the consent you give in one time period is not binding in another), and anyway all the Doctor does to young Kazran is show him his future, which doesn't particularly seem like something that requires consent. Alchemy" was used throughout both the blog and the books as it was by 19th and 20th century mystics. The current consensus in the history of science is that alchemy in the sense practiced by medieval thinkers was a proto-science that was rather rigorous for its day. [5] Miracles; murders; demons driven out and stones roiled from tombs. The cheap glamour did not taint the sense beneath. It was only, in the natural history of the mind, the bright feathers that drew the species to mate with its secret self. Let’s ask instead what’s changed between this and the previous evil computer story, The War Machines. The most obvious difference is between WOTAN and BOSS on the level of personality. Which, I suppose the more basic one is that BOSS has a personality. WOTAN is simply a system of automation run amok—an analogue for capitalism where the wrong value is pursued with a ruthless maximalism that suddenly highlights the flaw in the value. And this is true of most of the computers up to this point. Consider the unthinking rigidity of the computer in The Ice Warriors, or, more broadly, the treatment of the Cybermen as forces of dispassionate, emotionless control. In every case, computers are fundamentally remote, doing what they are programmed to do, only to an extent catastrophically unanticipated by their programmers.

I don't agree with it either, but I think Old Kazran and Young Kazran being different people is the point: the Doctor doesn't need consent from Old Kazran for what he's doing for Young Kazran – which is just showing him some stuff – he needs consent from Old Kazran for what he's doing to Old Kazran, which is replacing him with a different Old Kazran. But here we discover, to our inexpressible joy, that Doctor Who isn't the type of show that jumps the shark. Instead, it hitches it with reins and takes it for a sleigh-ride. In the fifth instalment of this ongoing criticism series, we again get a great collection of essays that make you want to immediately replay the stories discussed to see them anew. That’s surely one of the things criticism should do, and we definitely get that in this coverage of the second half of the Tom Baker era. The Williams era is, especially, given its dues in tandem with an ominous foray into the beginnings of the JNT era.

Of course, it gets followed up with a season that's actually not very much like it at all, but we'll come to that. Every essay on the Troughton era has been revised and expanded, along with eight brand new essays written exclusively for this collected edition, including a thorough look at UNIT dating, an exploration of just what was lost in the wiping of the missing episodes, and a look at Stephen Baxter’s The Wheel of Ice. On top of that, you’ll discover:

Third, I wanted to talk a bit about the Patreon. It took a pretty sizable hit earlier this year when I had to nuke and restart it—it went from paying our rent every month with some to spare to falling well short of our rent. That’s been rough. And so I figured now would be a good time to announce two things. First is that… well, you remember that time I accidentally wrote a book? This time I accidentally wrote a novella-sized essay on Joan Baez. Seriously, there’s a 26,500 word essay called “Queen Shit: A Defense of Joan Baez” up on the Patreon. It’ll be here next week, because I realized while I was writing it that there’s a big Joan Baez documentary out and given that I’m not going to embargo it for long. It is difficult not to read an autobiographical bent in this. A former member of the Communist Party writing a story in which the leftists are all corrupt, megalomaniacal, and profoundly closed-minded is difficult not to read as a settling of accounts, with Hulke writing his own frustrations with leftist radicalism into the story. Certainly what he ends up with is a laundry list of standard leftist failure modes—indeed, not for the first time within Hulke’s Doctor Who career he’s ended up writing Doctor Who that serves comfortably as right-wing propaganda. The failures of Grover and Ruth are essentially the things that the Tories and Republicans accuse leftism of doing, whether silencing dissent or actually being mass murderers. Ruth, in particular, given that she’s played by Carmen Silvera, who would eventually become well known as a comedic accent from her appearances on ‘Allo ‘Allo, feels almost exactly like what Gareth Roberts would do with Doctor Who if he weren’t too much of an absolute asshole to actually get employment on it anymore.… The central moment comes when the bitter, jaded Kazran meets his younger self, and faces just how ethically horrifying he has become in the fear and repugnance of his own younger self. If a child could see the villain he would become, he would want to change his life so that he did not become so irredeemable. The Doctor provides that shot at retroactive redemption. As Phil noted, the timing of this story was essential. To modern eyes, Doctor Who is a show six years in. It is difficult for a modern show to run that long without its audience becoming jaded due to the second law of tele-dynamics (apathy increases). That's why so many shows that reach this stage feel the need to 'jump the shark' just to sustain interest. There seems to be a stark difference between the Doctor warning the villain and giving them a choice, the villain ignoring this warning and making their choice and the Doctor then defeating them somehow, when compared to the Doctor warning them and giving them a choice, the villain ignoring the warning and making their choice, and then the Doctor changing their past and thus their current character, against their wishes, to ensure that they choose the other option.

In this first episode, the questions are obvious. Why is he running? What is he afraid of? Where has he taken Ian and Barbara, and what is going to happen to them? Already, in the first episode, Doctor Who is about its own mystery. About the question of what Doctor Who is going to be. It doesn’t know yet. It doesn’t know what it will become. Doesn’t know the history and wonder that’s coming. Perhaps it’s even scared of that history. Running from it.

Let’s start with the headline: this is a very bad book. I cannot imagine anybody who generally likes my stuff will enjoy much of anything about it. I cannot imagine anybody getting anything of value out of it. Even for Linehan’s fellow virulent transphobes it would seem to offer only the hollowest of pleasures, although I can’t in good conscience pretend that’s not their thing. But broadly speaking I encourage you to not bother reading this book, and if you for some reason feel you must read it, do not under any circumstances pay money for it. I sure as hell stole mine. On the other hand the final episode, in which Douglas Adams creates an added source of tension by establishing that Zanak’s next target is Earth, comes dangerously close to misunderstanding the entire affair. Suddenly the subject of the metaphor becomes a curiously guiltless victim of it. More to the point, however, this collapse of a story largely concerned with metaphor into a story in which the Earth is in imminent peril serves to highlight the fact that the central conceit—a planet that consumes other planets for wealth—dramatically misses the reality, which is that planets consume themselves. All of these, I think, are fun essays that I actually want to write. So hopefully we’ll plow through a good chunk of stretch goals and get to fill out the book with all sorts of goodies.AMY: You're the only person who can let that ship land. He was trying to turn you into a nicer person. And he was trying to do it nicely. In a real sense, this is the appeal of Cornell’s approach. By going after one of the most straightforwardly appealing and consensus beloved stories of the era—one where its political foibles are quieter and its gonzo glam excesses are pronounced—Cornell goes for the throat. Complain about the politics of The Mind of Evil and you can semi-reasonably be answered “yeah, but it’s not all like that.” Complain about the politics of Terror of the Autons and the era’s defenders have relatively few retreats open to them. But Cornell does not actually go for the throat. Instead he takes drab swipes at the acting and production. As I said, it’s not that Cornell is wrong per se about the acting in the Pertwee era—almost everyone involved is various forms of dreadful. But what of it? The next era of Doctor Who is going to prove beyond all doubt that you can build a great show around a poor actor so long as you structure it to use their flaws.… the valorization of the realm of a culture’s ghosts and phantasms as a significant and rich field of social production rather than a mirage to be dispelled… *** …a Marxist genealogy fascinated with the irrational aspects of social processes, a genealogy that both investigates how the irrational pervades existing society and dreams of using it to effect social change. Gothic Marxism has often been obscured in the celebrated battles of mainstream Marxism, privileging a conceptual apparatus constructed in narrowly Enlightenment terms. The Enlightenment, however, was always already haunted by its Gothic ghosts… Part 2 of a consideration of John Carpenter’s In The Mouth of Madness (1994), and other things via it. The ideas in this essay were partly developed in conversation with George Daniel Lea and Elliot Chapman. It also features a little self-plagiarism.

But that history is here. Right here, in this first episode, with its haunting theme music and impossible knowledge of the future and obsession with a Police Box. The episode was clearly made 48 years ago. It is not timeless. But it feels, every second of the episode, like Doctor Who. It feels like it was made by people who knew what Doctor Who was. It’s impossible. The fact that a Police Box would look out of place everywhere in the universe within six years, that the theme and TARDIS console would be iconic, that Britain would go to decimal currency, none of this could have been there in 1963. But watching it, that knowledge does not feel like a secret history, but like a real history, there and unfolding in front of us. And when we stare into it, it is impossibly big. Narrative Collapse: How certain stories in Doctor Who will threaten the very foundations of the narrative, removing all possibility of the show continuing. Pop Between Realities: Commentary on other facets of pop culture, or occasionally the real world. In this case, Star Wars, Mary Whitehouse or rec.arts.drwho. This was a weird era to write about, but it has some of my favorite writing in Eruditorum, especially the Eccleston season, which has multiple mad, gonzo essays, including two that are going to be glorious nightmares to try to format for print. I am thoroughly excited to clean them up and get them into an Official Version, and to finally bring the TARDIS Eruditorum books into the new series.But it’s also a very specific vision of human flaws. The Time Lords’ taste for ceremony and pomp and the derision with which Cardinal Borusa treats Runcible is enough to imply a class system, but there’s no real sense that poverty or deprivation exist. There’s a fleeting mention of “Shabogan vandalism” that some writers have constructed an elaborate and fanciful mythology around in what are easily some of the most astonishingly confused attempts at Marxist revolution ever contrived, but the notion of exploitation is so far outside this story’s vision as to seem entirely nonexistent.…