Monthly Archives: August 2012

What Doctor Who must do in 2012 to not be shit

For no other reason than I did it last year, here’s my run-down of what I want to see done differently in the upcoming seventh series of Doctor Who.

Asylum of the Daleks

1. Bring the timey-wimey stuff down a bit…but not too much.
As a long-time fan, I really enjoyed the complex plot lines of the last few years utilising time travel in the same way that Heroes and Misfits have done: a messy clusterfuck of time-travel continuity that more or less works itself out over the course of the series. However, the show has always had the appeal to a wider audience specifically because of the nature of the story: everyone knows the main premise, so let’s have an adventure. Russell T Davies’ era did this well by having stories that were fairly standalone, but had references to an overarching plot (revealed in the finale) dotted lightly around the episodes. The last season’s post-break opener, ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’, was a convoluted mess of an episode that even I had trouble following. Yes, it was the resolution of a two-parter set up three months prior, but given how hyped it was in publicity it should’ve been a more accessible episode. Seemingly in response (but clearly not), the first five episodes of the latter part of the upcoming series (it’ll take a short break over Christmas, with a special, before resuming in 2013) is slated to be five standalone stories, with the fifth seeing the departure of the Ponds.

2. No more James Corden
Based on Gareth Robert’s short comic story between the Tenth Doctor and Mickey, the adapted episode ‘The Lodger’ was the unexpected jewel in the fifth series’ crown. The annually-dreaded ‘budget episode’ that each series since the revival has endured (‘Love and Monsters’ being the main example) caught us by surprise by being a witty and heartfelt story, with Smith’s Doctor given the best chance he’d had thus far to show off just how alien his take on the character is. It was a seminal episode that marked the change in Smith’s portrayal to how he plays The Doctor now. Corden was also fantastic and had obvious chemistry with Smith that came through both in the episode and behind the scenes. But, as with Blink (I’ll get onto that), they couldn’t let one success go un-imitated and tried to do it again with last season’s ‘Closing Time’. I could forgive the cheap gags if it hadn’t been billed as a Cyberman episode, yet gave the long-running villains less screen time than Craig’s infant son! The alien plot just came off as an afterthought, which would’ve been fine if it’d been done with a new or more obscure race that we know are useless; but not the Cybermen!

The Lodger

As of yet, there’s been no indication that Cordon is to return as Craig Owens, but Roberts previously suggested that Craig’s arc could be a trilogy, so we’ll see. He could catch Catherine Tate syndrome and be cast as a full-time companion down the road; Donna started off insufferable and evolved into a great character so it could work out well. Of course, Jenna-Louise Coleman is currently set to take over the fanboy-service role of attractive primary companion, but a second one is never out of the question.

3. Enough with these cop-out resolutions to the plot! No more psychic-matrix technobabble.
My disdain for ‘Closing Time’ notwithstanding, I think the moment that this irritation crystallised into a full-blown nerdrage was when The Doctor and Craig both agreed that he’d successfully “killed the Cybermen with love.” KILLED THE CYBERMEN…WITH LOVE! Now, granted, they do explain that there was some psychic-link bullshit explanation, but a technobabbled cop-out is still a cop-out. This isn’t necessarily directed at Moffat’s tenure exclusively because Davies had his fair share. ‘Fear Her’ had them sing a psychically-manifested abusive father out of existence, ‘Last of the Time Lords’ had the population of Britain believe The Doctor back into action (again with a psychic field to aid him), ‘The Big Bang’ had the Pandorica’s psychic restoration field bring Amy back to life. Actually, any resolution that has to use the word ‘psychic’ is going to come off as a deus ex machina, avoid it.

The resolution of The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon was a great example of how a Doctor Who story should be resolved. We’d learnt enough about The Silence over the course of the story, and The Doctor was clearly working towards a plan through cryptic shots of him. This ending used genuine psychological phenomena (namely hypnotic suggestion), rather than psychobabble, in line with the established nature of the threat to create a satisfying ending.

4. No more Weeping Angels
Don’t get me wrong, I loved ‘Blink’ and unlike most I didn’t think that seeing more of them necessarily detracted from their scariness. What I do balk at is the sheer frequency of use. The Tenth Doctor outright said that they were monsters of legend and mystery, that they’d always existed and their origin is unknown. Yet they run into The Doctor so many times that he probably has their phone number. ‘Blink’ worked so well as a story because we didn’t know much about them, so we spent most of the episode with them just nearby and the characters realising the horror of the situation too late, which is why characters other than The Doctor were at the heart of it. Now that we know about them, their threat is diminished and to keep any semblance of tension the heroes have to be put into apparently inescapable situations and rescued by a hastily-written workaround (“Walk like you can see”? Come off it). Of course, we already know that the Ponds bow out in an encounter with the Angels, so maybe some of their power will be restored in that episode. Especially since, as Moffat has so often said, one or both of the Ponds don’t make it out of that situation alive.

Weeping Angels

5. More high-concept storylines
As much as I’ve bitched, the last series had a lot more good episodes than poor ones. Episodes like ‘The Almost People’ and ‘The God Complex’ demonstrate that the show can do interesting things with high-concepts whilst still keeping the necessary tension to make it an enjoyable story. I realise that a premise in which one main character is unknowably wise with an audience-surrogate in tow means that The Doctor will usually be seen to have to more informed opinion. Tackling it on even grounds in dialogue is almost impossible, but the plot itself can do that for itself whilst the cast simply move the story along (it’s easy to see why there are so few of them done well). Nevertheless, I’d like to see Doctor Who take a more philosophical bent that is so good in science-fiction.

Enough moaning, what I’d like to see
I would really like to see The Silent cult return as recurring villains, they can serve as an active threat to The Doctor that works on elaborate schemes to stop him; you can take it further by giving them a reasonable motivation and backstory. If they ever wanted to bring back The Master (which, of course, they should) then he could easily take the place of their leader, since the ‘Cult of Saxon’ stuff was seeded in his last appearance. The Silence could be like a more overtly antagonistic version of UNIT, it’d be great to see the two armies take each other on sometime too.

River Song is already slated to appear in the seventh series, so I’d like to see more normal adventures with her and The Doctor. We know how their relationship ends, we now know how it begins, so we need to see more of the interim to understand how their relationship developed from the latter to the former (or former to the latter…you know what I mean). I’d also like to see more ties to Who’s recent history, such as bringing Captain Jack in for an episode or two, or possibly reintroduce Martha by having an episode involving UNIT. Obviously, the finality of both their last appearances was clear but it could be done.

The Ten Commandments: Basis of British law?

Is that...Gerald?

I’ve heard it said many times that the Ten Commandments of Christian theology is the basis of morality and the legal system, at least in the UK. This claim has been made by all number of people, from friends to politicians to authors like Peter Hitchens, a man who appears to be constantly trying to work out if he recognises you. Though I admit he looks familiar himself.

The Decalogue actually has two full recitations in the Bible, owing to the fact that God carved the original set into stone tablets and gave them to butterfingers Moses whilst the poor bugger was trying to negotiate the climb down Mount Sinai. The second set, given in Deuteronomy 5, are effectively the same but I thought it worth mentioning because I like the idea that the origin of the supposed basis of our morality played out like a Mr. Bean episode. Since the claim to British law must necessarily pertain to our state religion, I’ll use the earlier Exodus 20 version used in Anglican canon as a reference to examine this assertion.

The first three (concerning apostasy, graven images and taking God’s name in vain) alone can lay waste to the claim, since these are not proscribed in English law nor would they be considered immoral acts by any thinking person. Punishment for apostasy (daring to “have other Gods before” the Abrahamic deity) is incongruous with the developed world in which prolific human rights laws guarantee the freedom of religion. The making of “graven images” is flouted by every believer choosing to wear a crucifix depicting a human being (ostensibly God incarnate) being subjected to horrific torture, and blasphemy is a victimless crime. Meanwhile, Islamic theocracies take these rule to their most inhumane (and, as it happens, most immoral) extreme by subjecting anyone who so much as hints at insulting Islam or depicting Muhammed to death via the most brutal means possible.

The next has long-since outgrown any practical utility: ‘Remember the sabbath day to keep it holy’, the fourth commandment, is vehemently debated between mostly Christians and Jews as to which day of the week God took his snooze on; though this is not an argument we need concern ourselves with. Regardless, a prohibition against any kind of exertion during that particular rotation (punishable by death, no less, in the days of antiquity) have been discarded. Whilst we still have Sunday trading laws, these have become more out of concern for worker’s rights than out of deference for some desert God’s sleeping habits.

You dropped it! You damn, dirty, slightly evolved primate!

Number Five (Honour thy father and thy mother) is poorly worded in my opinion since the implication that the mere act of being a progenitor automatically entitles you to respect and honour is a horridly short-sighted edict. Though I rather suspect that its inclusion by the desert scribbler who wrote the Book of Exodus some two centuries after Moses lived (if indeed, going by what scant historical evidence there is, he lived at all) is more a subliminal way to coax loyalty to the patriarchal church. But I’m just theorising, after the Machiavellian stuff is nicely dealt with, shit gets real…

Eventually, more than half-way through Yahweh’s Top 10, we finally get something that remains illegal to this day: Thou shalt not kill. To be a bit more specific, the passage actually refers to “murder”, defined as the unlawful killing of another human being, which frees up those in attendance to snuff out anyone they wish provided the Holy law-giver says that it’s gravy. Good thing too, since in Numbers 31, at God’s behest, Moses orders his men kill all the Midianites and sternly admonishes them when they show even a modicum of compassion in leaving alive the women and children. He subsequently orders that all the surviving boys and defiled women be killed, but allows his men to “save for [themselves] every girl who has never slept with a man.” Convenient for them (almost to the point of being suspect) that God’s commandments don’t say anything about rape.

If I seem like I’m dwelling on this point more than the others, it is to show how superficial and condescending the argument for Biblical morality is. Before this Heaven-sanctioned massacre occurred (though historical record indicates that it most likely didn’t), the species Homo Sapiens had survived what anthropologists debate to be anywhere between 50,000 and 200,000 years, since reaching what could be described as more or less our current state in evolutionary history. Even if we’re generous and take the lower end of that range, there are still epochs of time throughout which religious apologists would have us believe we were under the misapprehension that murder (and, as I’ll come to later, theft and deception) was perfectly acceptable. The evolutionary advantage of altruism and aversion to killing members of your own species (or tribe) is well documented as being vital to the development of all social species, humans included. If we hadn’t figured this out for ourselves already then, to quote Christopher Hitchens, “we wouldn’t have got as far as the foot of Mount Sinai or anywhere else”. I could turn this point around and accuse religions of providing a cheap excuse to murder, ostensibly on divine command, and bypass the normal psychological hurdles it requires, but that would go further off-topic.

The point is this, that to say human morality and the legal system that mediates it is predicated entirely on divine edict (let alone the half-remembered anecdotes of illiterate goat herders passed down the centuries) fundamentally undermines our species, reducing us to infants in need of a cosmic rulebook rather than the result of a long, protracted evolutionary struggle.

Battle of Gideon against the Midianites

Moving on, we have the seventh commandment warning against committing adultery, and once we again we come across something that is not against the law in the UK. Once again, we can identify several distinct evolutionary and social benefits in monogamy that pre-date and supersede the “because God said so” reason. Once again, we have a tenet that is far too myopic in describing a complex issue. I risk repeating myself so I won’t linger too long on what I hope should be a fairly self-explanatory point. However, I will say that in Matthew 5:28 Jesus tells his followers that to so much as lust after another person is adultery, showing the contempt God has for his own creations, which I’ll come to later on.

The eighth commandment (concerning stealing) is a commandment that every known civilisation, including our own, has had a prohibition against. Whilst at a very basic level you would expect the biological imperative to lean more towards stealing as a means of survival (who would admonish a starving animal for seizing food from another animal?), in a tribal scenario the tendency towards a shared division of resources carries the greater advantage. Why, then, do we feel an injustice when property surplus to basic survival is taken from us, so much so that we commit it to law? It opens a philosophical and psychological can of worms regarding the nature of ownership and our attitudes towards it, something I am far from qualified to speak on. But suffice to say that its historical recurrence shows that aversion to theft came long before its inclusion in the Decalogue.

Bearing false witness (Number Nine) has attained a strict definition regarding wilful deceit when giving legal testimony, but is debated amongst theologians as to whether or not it forbids lying in general or just instances of subterfuge. Either way, this has clearly been discarded since, though many courts still expect you to swear on scripture, the previous forfeit of one’s soul for perjury (“…so help you God”) has since been replaced with worldly punishment. Conversely, in a less liberal interpretation, this commandment is flouted by every creationist organisation that wilfully ignores or misrepresents contrary evidence.

Yahweh rounds off his list with an injunction against coveting your neighbour’s possessions or, in short, jealousy. But what the all-wise God seems to not understand is that jealousy is a good thing! Seeing what other people have motivates anyone who aspires to it, and the aforementioned prohibition of stealing will stop anyone from obtaining it by fraud. What’s more, the feeling of jealousy is not a conscious act but an impulse, yet you are guilty of it regardless. It seems downright sadistic for the perfect creator-of-us-all to have imbued us with emotions over which we have no control and then condemn us to eternal hell-fire for using them. It’s thought-crime of Orwellian magnitudes.