No Simple Victory in a World Such as Ours, Research Time, 18/06/2018

Being a pretty active member – and occasional contractor – for the New Democratic Party in Toronto means I regularly have conversations with lots of different kinds of marxists.

That includes self-identified marxists, and folks who are only considered marxists according to the new popular conception of marxism. You know it – where people who think there should be a state-subsidized pharmacare plan are functionally indistinguishable from Josef Stalin.

The caption reads, "Study! Because we will need all your intelligence."
The painting is by the Italian artist SOLO. Its location is the entrance
to Antonio Gramsci Secondary School on Affogalasino Street in Rome.

See, I don’t really like to call myself a marxist because it always gets people ascribing philosophical views to me that I don’t actually hold. Telling someone that you’re a marxist tends to make a lot of folks think that all your ideas are just regurgitated from the Cliff’s Notes of Kapital. That’s true whether or not you actually want them to think this. Usually, you don’t, but it can’t be helped once you use the m-word.

But it’s a much more complicated tradition that folks in the popular media give it credit for. A lot of that is because of the nuanced analyses of political economy that you find in Marx’s own later works. I was reading about that Sunday morning on a pleasant deck in Riverdale.

Today, I want to go over some of my notes on Gilbert, his take on how Antonio Gramsci transformed the marxist tradition.

As you might remember from my last post, a major task for my district association’s policy work is figuring out the key differences in the drift of working class union folks from the New Democratic Party in Canada. It’s a shift that puts the lie to the Cliff’s Notes version of marxism – class is always the primary vector for social consciousness.

I’ve had self-identified marxists tell me this. They should know better. Don’t act like Antonio Gramsci didn’t exist. His influence remains strong today, in many parts of the world.

Gilbert focusses on what he takes to be a central transformation in how the term ‘hegemony’ was used, giving it an entirely new philosophical spin. He remixed and mangled this old concept from political science – the direct or indirect leadership of a privileged class (inside a state) or a military power (internationally).

The slogans of my own country's current
leading intellectuals aren't quite so
inspiring to me.

He turned this term into a concept that we could use in all vectors of activism that seeks cultural and economic transformation. For a group to have hegemony in a culture means that the group’s mainstream and accepted images, political frameworks, economic systems, moralities, and ethical principles pressure all other such cultural and economic elements around the globe to conform to its own structures.

In other words, the old 19th century political science concept of hegemony: imagine an American fleet pulling into your harbour and forcing you to open up a McDonald’s. Military power backs economic and cultural transformation.

Gramsci’s concept of hegemony: imagine an American businessman flying to your country, co-opting all your local businessmen to open McDonald’s franchises, and then the popularity of their menu causes people to drift away from their more traditional foods. Economic power backs cultural and moral transformation.

Then Gilbert flies through an account of how Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe updated Gramsci’s concepts. They brought research on how the global economy was changing from the era of Western stagflation onward. So from the 1970s.

Laclau and Mouffe – in their joint and solo books – described how cultural power can lead the way in a hegemonic transformation, not only military and economic power. Identity politics like nationalism bind communities together in movements for economic change and even military civil insurrection.

Any aspect of human existence can become the leading edge in a liberating or a revanchist social revolution. It could be violent or peaceful, or a mixture of all degrees of inspiration and blood. What matters is that circumstances align to bring one vector into a hegemonic intensity of influence.

What are those circumstances? How do we manage them? How do we understand them? Change them?

Thought Is Never Private, Jamming, 11/05/2018

Just a short one this morning. I’m writing this after a very long day. Another thinker Paul Patton talks about in relation to Deleuze is Richard Rorty.

The very, very, very short version of Rorty is that he takes the contingency of reality very, very, very seriously. But that it results in the most unserious kind of materialism you’ll ever find. One very out of step with the demands we now face.

He’s another thinker who takes atheism all the way to its final logic. But he’s entirely too complacent about the result. So the conclusion of Rorty that gets you in the most trouble is that our moral principles are a product of our social relationships, our discourses. Being contingently developing organisms, our moral principles are arrived at contingently too.

So there’s nothing necessary about any moral system. As long as moralities can be made to work in the world, individuals can hold them. We each develop our own personal kink in the set of moral principles we socialize into as we grow and age. But all of that is a matter of our discourse. There’s no absolute in morality.

A nice young boy from a respectable family is not supposed to grow up
as a hateful, resentful, racist, misogynist jerk. That's why American and
Canadian liberals have been so shocked to see emboldened extremists
come out of the most unexpected places. James Damore was right
when he said that liberals couldn't even see their own echo chamber.
But I'm glad he could puncture it for them. By now, even the most
complacent liberals should know how seriously you have to take
your values, because there are people who hate you for them.

Naturally, this freaks a lot of people out when you think about it. But as I’ve read different works of Rorty over the years, I find it makes what should be an existentially chilling thought sound like a banal fact to deal with.

Part of that is his skill with language, but part of that is also his own personality. I definitely don’t think you can reduce everything someone wrote to the general conditions of their daily lives. But it does play a part, it contributes.

So I think one of the main causes for Rorty’s ability to be so calm about a genuinely troubling idea is that he was born into a genteel upper-middle class life, and stayed comfortably in the Ivy League (or close to it) for pretty much his entire adult life. And he put his head down for a very conventional academic career for his first couple of unremarkable decades in the field. His life embodies the image of middle American security of the 20th century.

No wonder he was content to say that we’d resolve our moral differences through pleasant conversation over dinner. He lived a life without real hardship, without the kinds of deep ethical challenge that many experience. Never faced racism, misogyny, violence, poverty, addiction, injustice.

It’s very different to know that such things happen in the world, and to experience it yourself. It’s much tougher to know the real stakes of the world. Rorty could take the contingency of the world so flippantly because he never experienced himself the most intense suffering the contingencies of life can offer.

He could never conceive of liberal thinking being challenged, especially not by a resurgence of fascist social values and white ethnic nationalism in the West. He could easily conclude that the Civil Rights Movement was all it took to end the "conversation" over universal human rights; that the Second World War concluded with the "permanent defeat" of fascism.

That's what all good little boys were taught at school, after all. And he spent his entire life in a social world of good little boys grown up and growing old. He could take it all for granted, and so concluded that we could all take it for granted. The world remains much more serious than Rorty ever thought, and it always was.

From Simple Beginnings a Jungle, Research Time, 30/01/2018

I at first didn’t intend to follow yesterday’s post. I’m still not, really. I’m picking up a thread from a photo caption of all things, spinning it into a new point.

It’s a tricky thing, talking about Karl Marx. In a way, I pity the writers of Deleuze’s Philosophical Legacy, and anyone else who specializes in academic Deleuze scholarship.

I mean, I pity all academics who devote their entire creative lives to the scholarship and interpretation of one or a small few number of historical authors. Do we need more commentary, or do we need more inspiration? Need we separate the two so radically at all?

The entire process looks immensely well-ordered, a perfect balance
among so many complex parts and processes. Of course, the most
perfect balances are also the easiest to disrupt. One shift too far, one
change at just the wrong place and time – the entire system flies to
pieces through the same energy that kept it all together.

You probably know where I fall on that question.

Marx wanted to stand Hegelianism on its feet – put the conceptual and analytic frameworks of thinking to work. His exploration of the dynamics of England’s industrial-imperialist economy literally invented a new kind of science – empirical philosophy.

Scientific research on social and economic relationships, understood according to Hegel’s frameworks of thought. Identify the true contradiction among all the forces that constitute a society, analyze how those irreconcilably-opposed forces could bring their conflict to the highest intensity.

It turned out that the problem wasn’t how you orient your Hegelianism – it was with the whole theoretical toolbox. Social structures and systems* are assembled in very complex, contingent ways.

* Or pretty much any structure or system in the world, but let’s just talk about the social ones for now.

They fall apart from chaotic processes too – one little change interacts with everything else going on, as if it were some Rube Goldberg machine that builds itself as it collapses to pieces and brings down the whole house around it.

So you understand how societies transform not by looking for high-intensity contradictions – that’s more like understanding how societies explode, if anything. Societies transform much more frequently, and much more subtly. Though even the most subtle transformations can eventually constitute entirely different worlds.

What was one revolutionary transformation that happened from Marx’s time to ours (or at least to Deleuze’s)? Labour differentiated. In England’s 1870s economy, working people were miners and factory workers. That’s it. Dirty, scruffy men who live horrible, soot-covered, ash-breathing lives before dying of lung disease. Plus all the slave labour around the colonies who did all the same stuff, but in the sun dying of heatstroke.

I suppose you could say that every technology is as convoluted as a
Rube Goldberg machine, and maybe just as unnecessary. What would
that gain you, though?
I ask that as a serious question.

Now, we have a ton of different working jobs. The factory workers, the miners, yes. But also the retail workers, the taxi and rideshare drivers, medical trades, waiters and bartenders, communications contractors, paid-by-the-post bloggers.

The key with the current labour system, so goes this essay on Marx and Deleuze, is that none of these different groups see much in common with each other. Few of them really have much in their identities and lives in common – other than worrying about their finances.

But the class consciousness that was so easy when Mordorish factory workers made up the bulk of working people? That’s long gone. Why? Because things changed. Economic and technological conditions diversified the number of ways you could get stuck as an underpaid wage slave.

And I’m just talking about the mostly-financialized Western economies. Leave aside the extra complexity of a globalized world whose parity is improving daily.

The world need not have changed in such a way. Maybe it only did so because all the communist revolutions across Europe between the two World Wars were put down, and because Stalin took the only successful such revolution into totalitarianism.

But that’s what happened. The capitalist territories survived the catastrophe of the two world wars, and developed computer technology that diversified their economies. Class solidarity evaporated because there was no longer enough in the identities of the different working people to say they could even be in the same community.

Take a 24-year-old punk rocker girl working at Dollarama for minimum wage. A 50-year-old lifelong steelworker who’s lost his health insurance. An overstressed 32-year-old ad copy writer who might make $4000 one month, then $400 the next (and maybe the next too). What do they have in common?

You can give them lots of good answers. What are the chances they’d believe it?

Kill Your Idols II: Power to Which People? Research Time, 08/08/2017

Does the world run like a clockwork, with simple, easily predictable events and processes? Reality is really much more complicated than that.

We may be able to understand the underlying mathematics behind how the world changes, but the relationships of all those actual, ongoing processes cause so many dynamic effects that it becomes computationally impossible to account for them all.

Predictions only occur in laboratory conditions – pristine environments where all relevant processes are controlled. The world is no laboratory. Too much is beyond our control once all the world’s ongoing processes start interacting with each other.

A representation of Ananke, the Greek Pagan name for the necessity
of reality itself, the determination of fate.

Okay, now let’s scale back a bit from the abstract. Step down from this web of time analysis and look at some real historical situations here. That way, we can see how tripped-out abstract thinking is directly and practically relevant to material matters of politics and life.

Let’s go back to Italy in the 1920s. My grandparents are children growing up on farms in the middle of nowhere in Calabria. They know nothing of this, even though this political instability will lead to the wars that determined their coming of age.

Antonio Gramsci is arrested by Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship, as one of the leaders of the Italian Communist Party. He’d eventually die in fascist custody, thanks to the failure of his health in their wretched prison conditions. While dying slowly over ten years, he writes a masterpiece of political philosophy.

He’s wondering where he went wrong. If the time of successful revolutions to build communist societies had begun, why were all the ones in western Europe shut down?

Marxist orthodoxy in early 20th century Europe was that the factory-based proletarian labourer class would gain consciousness of themselves as a class, including their raw deal under capitalism, and that the Communist Party vanguard would lead them into a whole new economic system.

The first I ever learned about the Russian revolution was the story
of Doctor Zhivago, which was one of this movie nerd's favourite
films, even when I was a young kid. The film had an intense hold
on me, sucking me into every scene even though it was nearly
three hours long and I saw it for the first time when I was nine.

That sounds awesome! It never happened. Not even in Russia, where you had an actual Communist Party’s revolution actually being successful.* There was no factory-based economy there to speak of. Most of the country was agrarian and pretty much feudal.

* Sort of. Heavily crippled by a massive civil war in which every major western European power sent armed battalions to help put down Lenin’s government. Causing Lenin so much stress that he died of a stroke shortly after the civil war, and was never able to build institutions around community workers’ councils. Josef Stalin just built a huge secret police state with a bunch of massive collectivized farms. Fuck.

The Russian Revolution itself broke from the doctrinaire marxist script, the script that said human economics and society had a life cycle as natural as an oak tree.

The end of capitalism would come from the industrialization of society and its breakup into a 1% of oligarchs and a 99% of slave-wage factory labourers. The labourers realize their raw deal and the force of their numbers, overthrow the oligarchs, and govern society equally through workers’ councils. The ever-more abundant production of industry would lift everyone out of poverty and we’d live as equals.

Yet the first successful revolution was in a feudal economy, because Czarist Russia had a social division of oligarchs and slaves even more stark than the England whose industry was Marx’s own model for Capital.

To understand time, you mustn't think of it as a necessity, as clockwork,
but as the collision of processes, where even the smallest change
alters the entire system.

European industrialization had taken a turn away from the extremes of the 19th century. Their societies stayed complex, or developed new complexities as the old loyalties and identities fell away. Politics never reduced all the way to economic classes anyway.

Gramsci was stuck in prison trying to figure out why the world wouldn’t go according to the script. Why the conditions of a successful revolution were so different from what he encountered.

Gramsci wrote the template to reintroduce contingency into the marxist tradition of thought. He did more than just do that, though. Because you couldn’t just deny necessity. That becomes a shouting match.

No, Gramsci had to reveal to everyone who philosophized about politics and society the source of contingency in the human realm. That source was the mind of humanity itself, when we all think and talk together. That source is our ethics, values, and morality. It was philosophy in action in the thoughts of every member of a community.

So yeah, no big thing to figure out there. . . . To Be Continued

Open Minds to See Necessary Cruelties, Jamming, 30/06/2017

This week has turned out to be a lot busier than I expected, so I wasn’t able to blog as much as I wanted. I finished reading a really intriguing book by Perry Anderson, The Indian Ideology.

I thought I’d check it out for my subway reading on the way to work. I want to learn more about life and politics in India today, since so many of my students are Indian newcomers.

Anderson’s book is a break from a 1200 page trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz, which I picked up to return to my habit of reading one ridiculously difficult book each year. The prose is beautiful, but I can’t take 1200 pages of early 20th century Egyptian men’s crises of conscience without a breather.

I had to make this the lead photo. He's just so cute!

So there are plenty of ideas to catch you up on. But I was wandering through the news looking for information about the wider world. As I do sometimes. I came across two really illuminating pieces from very different ends of the political spectrum.

I get a lot of my news from Twitter. I follow a bunch of left-wing people and a few right-wing people, including a few women who work at the Cato Institute and the always-sanctimonious Grover Norquist.

I also follow journalists and media folks who I know personally, and a few friends who are just guys and girls with Twitter accounts who like tweeting about stuff. But I always keep that crowd just diverse enough that I hear stuff from outside my bubble of similar political views.

Gabriel Winant wrote a genuinely insightful article about what the new working class is today in America. Democratic Party leaders, he says, focus on an outdated version of the working class that was minted in the mid-20th century. But that class is itself largely of colour now.

So it’s an utter mistake to think of minority outreach as separate from class-based outreach. This profound mistake in understanding demographic categories has become a catastrophe for the Democratic Party, since they no longer mobilize class-based politics among the people who need it.

Because those people are now largely all black, and the campaign strategists still see blackness overwriting their class needs.

I also learned what needlesticks are, the biggest health risk from cutting corners in the healthcare sector in America.

I learned an intriguing international development from a link to The American Conservative that I saw from one of my libertarian think tank writers. It told how Jared Kushner has caused another serious fracture in the executive branch of the United States.

He simply looks like an idiot all the time. And you know what they
say about people who look like idiots.

This time, it’s because Kushner has such close friends in the government of the United Arab Emirates. They seem to have pushed him to bring Donald Trump over to their side in the fight to isolate Qatar.

That was a huge mistake because Qatar actually has been a strong American ally in their fight against ISIS and in other ridiculous military interventions around the Arab world. They bombed the shit out of Libya very effectively, and let the Americans use their massive air force base.

Rex Tillerson and James Mattis are desperately trying to get the Saudis and Emiratis to play nice with the Emir of Qatar again, because this fight is encouraging the Qataris to get closer with Iran and Turkey, and we can’t have that, now can we.

Of course, Mark Perry was a little more dry in his language than me. Maybe didn’t mock it so much. But that’s why I think the right-wing media is best for learning about the different dimensions of war diplomacy in the Middle East.

Left-wing media outlets get too incensed over the fact that the United States is involved in such ridiculous entanglements in the Middle East. So I can never get past the outrage to actual analysis of what the hell is going on.

I need to read the work of someone deranged enough that they can write dispassionately about global war to understand the causes and connections of global war.

“Well, Back to Work. Gotta Win the Pulitzer Prize,” Composing, 13/12/2016

So my project blogging through Class is finished. I feel like the posts themselves had the same anti-climactic, hollow ending as the series did. At the same time, I’ve also gotten pretty well-practiced at these kinds of philosophical reviews by now.

I started writing these three years ago, when I wrote a post about the philosophical themes and ideas in The Day of the Doctor. I’ve improved quite a lot as my blogging style has come along with practice. Following that, the two Peter Capaldi seasons of Doctor Who provoked some really insightful writing.

Introducing my new project as a critic.

Looking back at those series, I think I’ve got some decent material for a few small ebooks of television criticism. Just some self-published stuff through Amazon. Nothing too big. But something I could throw together that people could buy as a Kindle package or a softcover.

I’ll probably bundle the Class reviews first, simply because that show is most recent. And I want to supplement what I’ve already written on the blog – just some new content to bring out some more general ideas about Class and Doctor Who.

Here are some ideas and some provisional titles for what I’ll put together over the next while for my Class and Capaldi era Doctor Who indie books.

“In Your Face”
How Class, in its setup and its best episodes, was a confrontationally progressive show – practically trolling the Brexit set. Not just Quill’s joke about “Not another referendum!” in “The Lost.” Consider the show’s depiction of teenage homosexual sex, its frank discussions of religious beliefs with south Asian origins, and the major role of a character from a Polish immigrant family being the most virtuous member of the cast.

“Not That Shocking”
The legacy of Skins on all teen drama that attempts even gestures at realism. Including Class, its most weird heir.

“A Dark, Welsh Shadow”
How Patrick Ness’ attempt to emulate the kitchen-sink spectacle adventures of Davies era season finales ultimately hamstrung Class with a disappointing, empty ending. A sad way for a season with such interesting storylines to close.

“Hell Sent”
The last two episodes of Peter Capaldi’s second season as the Doctor presented two very different visions of the show. “Heaven Sent” was a high point of Doctor Who’s ability to present existential horror. “Hell Bent” was a celebration of Doctor Who’s mad creativity. How do these two modes of the show work together?

“Under the Lake / Before the Flood – Next Draft”
A treatment of what a better version of last season’s worst story would have looked like, at least as far as I’m concerned.

“And the Moral of the Story Is . . .”
The new era of Doctor Who has focussed on building season arcs. The Moffat years especially have constructed complex story arcs spread across the show’s anthology-like format. I’ll compare the season arcs of Capaldi’s first two years with what Class tried in its debut season to see which of the three approaches is more effective.

“If I Could Create a Virus . . .” Class: The Lost, Reviews, 06/12/2016

My full series of Class reviews is at these links.
1. For Tonight We Might Die
2. The Coach With the Dragon Tattoo
3. Nightvisiting
4. Co-Owner of a Lonely Heart
5. Brave-ish Heart
6. Detained
7. The Metaphysical Engine
• • •
Well, in terms of episode quality, Sandifer’s review was on the money. A big ridiculous mess – some characters are gone prematurely, some storylines are thankfully ended, and the season-ending cliffhanger was completely ridiculous.

I’d actually rather like it if this was the only season of Class, even though I rather like the show. I simply think it would be hilarious for the show to end on such a batshit cliffhanger, though I can't discuss it without an inevitable warning about

If there is a second season of Class that has to deal with the frankly
insane situation of April's mind being trapped in Corakinus' body,
its nature will have radically changed. From a sci-fi story rooted in
the lives of realistic young people with human domestic melodrama,
it would become a sci-fi cartoon. Nothing wrong with that, but it's
quite a different program and appeal than the original pitch.

SPOILERS

because the spectacle of April transported into the body of Corakinus the Shadowkin is the kind of cliffhanger that completely changes what the show is supposed to be.

The Nature of Class

When Class was first announced, its governing concept was to be a youth-oriented sci-fi adventure show rooted in realism. The characters all had remarkably dramatic storylines, but their concerns were rooted through inevitably human situations and perspectives.

Sci-fi premises and storylines – and co-stars – would intrude into their lives. But ultimately, the human cast of Class were ordinary people thrust into extraordinary problems. And their ordinary backgrounds and histories actually supplied them with the emotional and ethical resources to handle their sci-fi stories.

Ram could summon the intense emotions and deep dedication to the things and people he loved to overcome the trauma of seeing his old girlfriend’s death and his injury. April’s personal strength came from her confrontation with her father’s crime. Tanya grows through the losses she experiences in her family, which we see best in “Nightvisiting.”

If we get a second season of Class, I hope we see more of the strange
relationship of Charlie and Quill. "The Loss" implied that they'd stay
associated, and possibly even become friends. They're now the last
survivors of their people – the culture and history that made them
enemies no longer exists, and they're bonding through their common
nature as stranded aliens on Earth.

Of course, Tanya also loses her mother in “The Lost,” just as Ram loses his father. The problem with this episode, aesthetically speaking, is that it’s just too much of an over-the-top spectacle for any of this tragedy to sink in.

“Nightvisiting” makes for a great contrast that can show us what this episode misses. The entire storyline of “Nightvisiting” was centred around Tanya’s confrontation with the emotional legacy of her father’s premature death. It wedded her progress in coming to terms with that event to the resolution of the sci-fi plot.

In “The Lost,” the murders of Varun and Vivian are treated as plot points. The characters don’t do much other than rage. They don’t really have time to do much more. Tanya gets some chance to complexify her performance through her relationship with Quill – she teaches the young girl the power of righteous spite.

But there’s just too much going on here. “The Lost” is Patrick Ness pulling a full Russell T Davies model Everything-Including-Six-Kitchen-Sinks season finale. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have nearly the skills that Davies did at assembling these sci-fi adventure carnivals.

If you read Davies’ book The Writer’s Tale, you see that creating these massively complicated kitchen-sink adventure stories had to send him almost literally into a kind of trance state.

We should and must ask just what these creatures are. Part of that isn't
just their physical nature, but what it is they do.

And even in such intense circumstances, Davies often had trouble sticking the landings. I’d say he really only did it flawlessly with “Doomsday.” Ness just kind of flails around.

Returning to the Genocide Question

If there’s one genuinely interesting element of “The Lost,” it’s the show’s return to the fundamental philosophical question of Charlie’s entire character arc this year. It’s that thorny question of what constitutes genocide.

Remember the question that I set up in my review of “For Tonight We May Die.” It’s whether it’s ultimately right to wipe out the Shadowkin. I worked through the argument implied by the episode, and it amounted to a conclusion that the act would be genocide.

It’s because the Shadowkin have individual personalities, self-consciousness, social relations and moralities. They’re self-conscious subjects, and to kill a self-conscious subject is a moral wrong. To wipe out an entire species or culture of self-conscious subjects is genocide.

But “The Lost” introduces a different twist on this argument. To state it sounds very disturbing – it introduces a situation where genocide is not only the right thing to do in a practical sense, but it’s also a virtuous act.

Total mass murder of the Shadowkin is a good act because of what the Shadowkin do. Remember how they invade a world and kill its inhabitants. They invade a world as a mass and simultaneously kill. They’re an indiscriminate force of death, and are unstoppable once they appear.

When I watched what the Shadowkin do, it reminded me of the
Doctor's dialogue in his legendary first long conversation with Davros
in "Genesis of the Daleks."

When they’re generally living in their mundane existence on their volcano world, Shadowkin are ordinary deranged people. When they’re attacking a world, they’re literally an infestation, a plague, a virus.

The Horrifying Power of Being Boring

For all the ways the Shadowkin are ridiculous, in one way, they’ve one-upped the Daleks. When the Doctor travelled to the origin of the Daleks, he confronted Davros with a thought experiment.

Imagine if you could make a virus. A virus that would be lethal to every other form of life. It would travel the entire universe destroying every form of life it touched, until the only thing left was itself. Would you release that virus into the world?

Davros would do it. Gladly. It would make him a god. Yet the Daleks never really become that vision. They’re too invested in actually being Doctor Who villains – taking part in stories, always being able to generate more adventures.

Daleks are evil forces of destruction, but they can’t literally have the power to destroy the world. They need the world so there are always stories about the Daleks.

Yet however bloodthirsty the Daleks might be, they were never the
nakedly efficient killers that the Shadowkin clearly are. They much
seem to prefer being at the centre of amazing stories.

It’s the very emptiness of the Shadowkin that make them able to fulfill Davros’ dream. They aren’t really interesting enough as creatures to have any more motivation than killing everything they see.

So they can actually lay claim to the power that prevents there from being any interesting stories about them at all. They don’t have the potential to exist at the centre of actually interesting narratives. They appear, they kill everything within minutes, they disappear again. That’s every Shadowkin story.

Could you imagine a “Power of the Shadowkin?” Or “Remembrance of the Shadowkin?” Hell, even a ridiculous carnival shit show of a story like “Shadowkin in Manhattan?” Of course not. They show up, kill everything in minutes, and disappear.

Without the Shadowkin, maybe Class will be able to tell more interesting stories. Like all the stories and moments within stories that didn’t feature Shadowkin.

Punishment and Crime

Yet the show maintains that Charlie has committed a heinous act in destroying the Shadowkin. He feels immense guilt that he wasn’t killed himself in the act of mass murder, and it’s clear that the Cabinet of Light itself keeps its user alive so that he can live with the act of genocide.

In all these ways, Class just couldn't get out fully from under the
shadow of Doctor Who. The heart of Charlie's pathos in any possible
second season of the show would be an inadequate repetition of the
Doctor's own character arc over eight years of the show.

It sounds pretty familiar, doesn’t it? Because it’s exactly the conclusion of “Day of the Doctor.” Rhodia’s morality is pure Kantianism – the intention alone of genocide is the same as its commission. And unlike what turned out to have happened to the Doctor, Charlie actually did kill all the Shadowkin.

The reason the Doctor, when he regenerated into Christopher Eccleston, believed that he had committed genocide to punish him for the intention. Charlie is now receiving a deeper, more authentic form of the same punishment. The Cabinet of Light made him live with the terror of his act for the rest of his life.

Yet there really was no other way to stop the impassive, immovable enormity of the Shadowkin. They’re narrative and mortal nothingness – death in the story and death to the story. They’re giant talking smallpox viruses.

The show itself demonstrated that there was nothing wrong in destroying them. Yet the words of the story demanded that an evil was committed. As if Class is afraid to stare its most intriguing, highest-potential concepts, and truly explore them.
• • •
Because ranking is a thing, here is a rank, from best to worst in my view.

With regard to episode quality, I think direction helps or hurts as much as script. Ed Bazalgette made decent episodes ("Nightvisiting," "For Tonight We Might Die") good and already good episodes fantastic. Wayne Che Yip did a great job on the bottle episode, and made the shit-show "Metaphysical Engine" marvellously fun. But I hope "The Lost" director Julian Holmes doesn't come back to the world of Doctor Who.

1. Detained
2. The Coach With the Dragon Tattoo
3. Co-Owner of a Lonely Heart
4. Nightvisiting
5. For Tonight We Might Die
6. Brave-ish Heart
7. The Metaphysical Engine
8. The Lost

The Real Enemy, Class: The Metaphysical Engine, Reviews, 30/11/2016

Well, having gotten the opportunity to watch “The Metaphysical Engine, Or: What Quill Did,” I think I can agree with Phil Sandifer’s review of the episode. It’s quite the hot mess. A really cool hot mess with loads of crazy and fascinating sci-fi ideas.

The story is balls out, whack-daddy, batshit crazy. But kind of ridiculous. Just the kind of crazy that Doctor Who has been good at since the early days.

Charlie's prohibition of Quill to use weapons carries a remarkable
double edge, given Rhodian pretensions. Rhodian morality is
insufferably Kantian: to think an evil carries the same burden of
guilt as actually carrying it out, and even their weapons are
condescending exercises in moral ego. You can only kill by taking a
blast backward and killing yourself: the ultimate embrace of the
permanence of sin.

With a storyline utterly all over the place, “The Metaphysical Engine” can only find an anchor in Katherine Kelly’s performance as Quill. And she’s thankfully pouring on the charisma, bringing Quill’s intensity to a fever pitch of anger.

To the audience, Quill has a very deceptive demeanour. Kelly’s physicality appears very cold and distant in the initial promotional material. They shoot her like an ice queen, and her behaviour in the early episodes displays a cold, manipulative aggressiveness.

Rage peeks out from Quill’s stony physiognomy occasionally. As do all her passions. Her genocidal anger at the Shadowkin. The desperate eros of her kiss with the android in “The Coach With the Dragon Tattoo.” The giddy glee of driving a bus into a grotesque alien tentacle.

Patrick Ness cheekily subtitled this episode “What Quill Did.” It’s a joke, a counterpoint to the bottle episode of the under-25s cast* stuck in their classroom in a nameless void.

* Class is positively 90210 in casting adults as teenagers. Charlie’s Greg Austin is 24. Fady Elsayad is 23. Vivian Oparah is 19, but she plays a 14 year old. April’s Sophie Hopkins is 26 years old and plays someone who just turned 18.

Quill's role in the early episodes of the show was to be held at a distance
from the main cast. She was the adult, but also a bodyguard, a slave, and
a sardonic commenter on the teen angst that often consumed the rest of
the characters. That aloofness held her distant from the audience too.

Katherine Kelly’s passion is completely unrestrained in “The Metaphysical Engine.” Not only are her emotions beaming from her, but she can turn her charisma up to the highest possible intensity as well.

She has to, because the episode is a ridiculous Maguffin chase. It succeeds only because its actors are totally dedicated to its madness.

More than just saving the episode from collapsing into a pile of disjunctive nonsense flying away in all directions, Kelly’s charisma as Quill effects a very important transformation in how the audience sees the show.

Heroes and Villains

I’ve come back several times to the moment in the first episode of Class, “For Tonight We Might Die,” where the Doctor admonishes Quill for a crime. She defends herself as a freedom fighter, because she’s long become accustomed to people calling her a criminal because of her guerrilla campaign against Rhodia’s monarchy.

But the Doctor’s upset with her because of how she tricked a Coal Hill student into killing himself firing Quill’s self-sacrificing Rhodian gun at a Shadowkin. The point of the moment is that Quill is not the self-evidently obvious villain that Charlie’s described her as.

The Doctor is the ethical compass of Doctor Who’s universe, and if he sympathizes with you, it’s a sign that you’re in the right. At least in part.

Quill's narrative is fundamentally about overcoming domination,
whether it's from the monarchist government of her homeworld, the
condescending slavery of Prince Charlie, or the pretentious
directions of the mysterious Governors who offer her a chance at
freedom. She's been a democrat the entire time.

Quill is a freedom fighter, but the show has been largely focussed on Charlie, his personal self-discovery, and the ensemble of his new friends. Throughout this episode, Quill is a charismatic adventurer fighting desperately for her freedom. There’s no more sympathetic story in our culture.

Because the under-25s are absent from this episode, we can let ourselves sit with Quill without interruption. She’s in every scene of “The Metaphysical Engine,” carrying the story almost entirely on her own.

This has never happened during the entire run of Class so far. She’s essentially locked the under-25s away where their ensemble can self-destruct and she’s taken over the show.

More than that, she deserves to take over the show by the time “The Metaphysical Engine” finishes. Though it constitutes

SPOILERS

to say so, this episode is her emancipation story. We’ve been shown how much Quill is willing to risk for her freedom from the biological weapon in her brain, enslaving her to Charlie.

The show has challenged Charlie on his treatment of Quill before, most obviously in “Co-Owner of a Lonely Heart.” So we’ve been primed to a more sympathetic view of Quill than the show first gave us when she was Charlie’s ice queen bodyguard and the most psychotic physics teacher you’ve ever had.

The episode includes several confrontations with apparent divinities,
which in a more conventional philosophical review series of Class,
would be the primary focus of this post. But what's more important in
the story itself is Quill's words for her god when they meet. The
encounter with God is an element in her own story of liberation: the
moment when she asks where God was when her people were
humiliated and then destroyed. She speaks the fundamental
existential rage in the human relationship with the divine.

But here, we have Quill’s own journey to free herself – travelling literally to realms that only exist as pure thought. The imagined afterlife of the Arn, the hell of Ballon’s people, the birthplace of the Quill god, the Cabinet of Light itself. All this to free herself. It’s a story of liberation that bestows heroism.

So if Quill has become a hero, Charlie would become even more villainous in contrast. It completes the journey from his squeaky clean appearance at the start of the series, through his critiques from Tanya and Matteusz, through his immense guilt and rage in “Detained.”

More than that narrative role, it shows more profoundly than Class has ever done yet what the nature of heroism is.

Right and Wrong

Because when you think about it, Quill has always been in a subject position. Consider the fact that Charlie – her literal master – always calls her by her surname. A surname that’s also the name for her people. It would be like calling someone “Black” or “China” as their name.

Considering that Andr’ath’s rebellion was the uprising of an oppressed class on Rhodia, there’s probably plenty of racism in Charlie’s condescension toward her. So while Charlie’s been positioned as the hero from the early press materials through the show’s first episodes, Quill is the most sympathetic figure according to all our political moralities.

She is a freedom fighter, and “The Metaphysical Engine” was her most intense fight for freedom yet. As an agent of liberation from racism, monarchy, and slavery, there’s no more pure representative of the good and of freedom than her.

Charlie has entered the role of oppressor, and Quill depicted completely as a freedom fighter.

Tell Me Your Truths, Class: Detained, Reviews, 22/11/2016

I'm a bit of a theatre nerd. The first long-form work of drama I ever produced was for theatre. So some of my favourite episodes of television are the bottle episodes. “Detained” was the Class bottle episode.

Just a few special effects like the classroom door floating in the blackness of no-space. The CGI shots of the transdimensional asteroids. The explosions and prop chaos during the asteroid crash and other shenanigans with a smoking asteroid. Everything else is carried on the strength of the dialogue and actors.

On those grounds of basic criticism, “Detained” delivers. Patrick Ness’ dialogue has its clunky moments as usual, but all the actors pull off some powerful, nuanced moments. The episode’s entire concept is about forcing the actors into intense literally confessional scenes. This is Doctor Who does No Exit. Literally.

Because,

SPOILERS

warned – they are genuinely in hell. A one-room prison in a pocket beyond space and time where their only way out means confessing their closest secrets about how they feel about each other to each other.

Many Kinds of Truth

So let’s get the basic premise out of the way. Quill puts the Scooby Gang in detention so they don’t mess with her while the events of the next episode are happening. A freaky asteroid smacks their classroom through the rift and knocks them into a no-space.

The asteroid turns out to be a prison for alien murderers. The only way to find out about their situation is to hold onto a piece of the asteroid and let it take you over. And when you channel the asteroid, it forces you into a confession. A suitable piece of mystical police state technology for the Whoniverse.

It isn’t just a matter of being forced to tell the truth. Truth is more complicated than just facts. Because the gang want to learn facts.

They each take their turn with the asteroid so they can learn enough facts about it and their situation to escape – they can each only handle the asteroid once before it fries their brains, the asteroid is a transdimensional prison, they’re trapped in their classroom with the consciousness of a multiple-murderer. And so on.

So far, so Doctor Who. Affordable TV budgets and high drama with cracking scripts, mad ideas, and quality actors. But since I’m doing philosophy at the same time as I’m talking about science-fiction television, I should ask – What kind of truths are we dealing with here?

Each of their interactions goes in the same pattern. They remember the most intense confession they’ve ever made (or almost made) before, then give a similarly intense confession about their friends in the cast, then force the asteroid/prisoner to reveal a secret about their situation.

Truth as Integrity

You confess so that the truth is known, because you’re compelled to say what’s true. This is why confessions are so powerful in the criminal justice – it’s literally the unfolding of truth. The burden of a secret is lost when it’s told. You don’t feel the pain of hiding anymore.

That’s Matteusz’ confession. He recalls coming out for the first time, to his dying grandmother, who knew from the start and didn’t care. The one member of his family who accepted him was the first to be told and also the first to leave. And he was left with the family who kicked him out.

That’s the same nature of his fear of Charlie, of Charlie’s alien nature, morality, capabilities. There is that deep love, but Matteusz’ fear slowly eats away at his love. Saying it lets them work it through and become closer for it. That’s the ethical confession.

Epistemic Truth

A confession is also how you see the world, how you understand what’s happening to you. Tanya’s first confession is of a shameful moment, when she continued to hide the fact that – after stealing a handful of candies as a child – she had planned from the start to steal. While she told her mother that she thought the sweets were free, that at the time she’d understood it not to be stealing.

Tanya’s confession to her friends is also about how she sees the world. She confesses her belief that she isn’t truly their friend because they think of her as a kid sister and not a peer, that they’ll never understand the kind of life and challenges she faces as a black woman in Britain.

What she confesses isn’t true in a factual sense – The rest of the gang are her friends, and while they may not all (except Ram, and oddly Quill) have experienced systemic social racism, as friends they can come to understand it themselves. The bonds of solidarity she doubts are really there.

Tanya’s is an epistemic confession, an expression of her own perspective on the world, which can be mistaken or incomplete while still being true. It’s the truth of how she sees the world.

The Facts

Then there is simply the factual truth. When you know something concrete about your world, and precisely. Typical for Ram, that’s his confession. He’s a stereotypical footballer again that way, always a simple soul. Saying what he thinks and doing what he wants. Heart on his sleeve no matter how hard (and badly) he tries to hide it.

Ram confessed to his father that he had an alien artificial leg. And he confessed to April that he loved her, but knew that she didn’t love him.

There it is. Behold! Check it out!

Responsive Truth

What do we learn from April? She’s a paradoxical character – Phil Sandifer is right that April’s paradoxes and subjective complexity makes her the most intriguing character on Class. But there’s more to these paradoxes.

April is notable for her personal strength to deal with immense burdens and traumas like her link with the Shadowkin and her father’s attempted murder-suicide. But the show first depicted her as this cloying school keener – the only one who cares enough about the school dance to set it up, even though everybody goes.

She doesn’t express her strength on her own. In ordinary situations, she’s content to be passive and unnoticeable, even if she’s lonely or isolated. Her strength only emerges in response to these terrifying challenges. She has a paradoxically weak strength – April is only an agent when she’s reacting.

So her confessions are reactions. She remembers testifying against her father in his criminal trial after his murder-suicide attempt – expressing a terrible, painful truth because the situation itself demands it. A confession that takes immense personal strength to make, but it would never have been made if not forced to.

What forces it? In the original instance, it’s the need to redress a terrible crime – more than having broken the law, April’s father violently broke the intense ethical trust that bonds a father and his family. That situation calls April to act.

In the moment, Ram has just made a powerful confession of love and trust that she doesn’t know how to reciprocate, and might not be capable of reciprocating. A radically powerful development in a relationship of profound trust calls April to respond.

She summons all the strength she can to make the ethically best response – the consequences will be dealt with, but the response cannot be avoided.

This is a truth of justice.

• • •
Charlie’s confession is a combination of all these. An undeniable truth whose expression unburdens a corrosive secret, pulled from him by the sheer danger of the situation and the need of those he loved.

Yet it’s also a mistake of a sort, based on the folly of his perspective – his deep guilt that thoughts alone require the same ethical culpability as the act. The Rhodian (and Kantian, and Christian) morality that the desire for a crime is indistinguishable (in pure reason, or in God’s eye, respectively) from its commission.

And like all their truths, this is left hanging. Tanya is still alienated from her friends, Ram wounded and April alone, Charlie shouldered with an otherworldly guilt, and Matteusz hoping and doubting he can handle his love’s alien nature.

There will always be consequences. And so more confessions.

A Strange Taste to This Status Quo, Class: Brave-ish Heart, Reviews, 15/11/2016

The full series of my philosophical essays on Patrick Ness' Class. Sponsor the project (and a bunch of other upcoming projects) at Patreon.

1) For Tonight We Might Die
2) The Coach With the Dragon Tattoo
3) Nightvisiting
4) Co-Owner of a Lonely Heart
• • •
As I set out to write this review, I realized that it will likely end up a bit shorter than the other posts in this series. For one thing, it stuck to the fundamental themes of its first part, so there isn’t a whole lot more for me to say about those.

It’s the same story, just the beats that close up the plot instead of advancing it and setting up the pieces. There are some aesthetic and ethical problems with the episode that are starting to appear in the show. Let’s talk aesthetic first, because those are easier to dispense with.

Sophie Hopkins and Fady Elsayed get some great scenes to stretch
their dramatic muscles, which unfortunately are largely hidden in
shadow. It's appropriate for their physical setting for most of the
episode, but it isn't the best for communicating actual drama.

Actors Love It When You Play to Their Faces

I have to praise the cast once again, especially Sophie Hopkins and Fady Elsayed. This is praise with faint damnation, because they delivered such hammy dialogue so well. Punchy dialogue about how neither of them wants to say they’ve fallen in love with each other can work great in a lot of contexts.

When you’re about to have a gladiatorial contest with the supervillain leader of a species full of literal ash demons on a planet that makes Io look like a Bermuda beachfront resort? Maybe you’re stretching it a little here.

The parents’ dialogue amounted to the same mess. Ram’s dad Varun mostly got a bunch of nervous babbling. And since this constitutes

SPOILERS

April’s dad Huw’s speech about his despair and how strong she’s become didn’t come off nearly as well as it could. The thing is, Doctor Who itself can do this kind of emotional confessor dialogue in the most ridiculous situations.

It seems as though the direction dropped the ball on this one. The Shadowkin’s planet is too dark a setting, and the camera holds back too much from closer shots on the actors’ faces. Huw’s speech seriously suffers from this, as he’s held almost entirely in wide shots when the camera should focus on the power of his face.

My discussion of the material nature of a creature's existence owes a
lot to the philosophical vocabulary of Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari, particularly their chapter on their concept of 'becoming-
intensity' in A Thousand Plateaus. If you're interested in a good
#longread open-access article, check out this piece by one of my
favourite Deleuze scholars (and quite a nice guy), Manuel
DeLanda.

Existence Itself as Plague

One success for the direction, however, was in making the carnivorous petals properly menacing. Indeed, director Philippa Langdale did a better job of displaying the petals’ agency than she did the emotional power of her human actors’ performances.

Not only do her cinematographic choices one-up M. Night Shayamalan’s pathetic attempts to make plants scary in The Happening. They also display the peculiar character of the carnivorous petals – they sweep across the screen, cluster and build their presence to take over more and more of the viewer’s field of vision.

The petals express their agency in their motion as a cluster that literally infests the sets, spreading across the visual fields of the viewer’s sight and the physical fields of the sets and actors’ movements. They’re a living infection of physical space, a plague of visual domination.

The parallels with the Shadowkin are clear, yet so are the differences. As Headmaster Dorothea says at the end of the episode, the petals likely only consisted of one soul – one centre of agency. The one-dimensional drive to infest.

The Shadowkin function as a plague in their attacks, especially in this episode, as they manifest as a literal smoke that consumes the petals entirely. But despite their telepathic links and strictly hierarchical society, each individual Shadowkin is a distinct subjectivity.

Although they seemed to move as one with the direction of their King in the first episode, “For Tonight We Might Die,” the Shadowkin are individuals. They have a society, and a morality that links an ontological conception of their nature with a religious perspective about their purpose in the universe. And they have political principles that organize the strict and brutal monarchy of their politics.

"Brave-ish Heart" also has a moral problem of April's healing her
mother's paralysis. Although it was born of violence, Jackie at least
tells her daughter than her act of healing was equally a form of
violence. She had accepted her wheelchair-bound condition, and
April overwrote her mother's agency to repair what she saw as an
injustice. I hope we'll see more of this conflict between them in
the future, as it makes for a burning paradox at the heart of
April's otherwise morally upright character. It's also potentially
very awkward, since the actress Shannon Murray is herself
wheelchair-bound in real life. So filming walking scenes will
get very weird, or just will not happen.

The Shadowkin’s swath of destruction throughout the universe isn’t a function of some autonomic plague nature, but of their morality and religion. Their ethics, their self-conception. What April learns through her link with Corakinus in “Brave-ish Heart” demonstrates that wiping them out would in fact be a genocide.

The Heart of Ethics

Fady Elsayed also gets one of the only philosophical monologues on the Shadowkin world that actually comes off well, despite a few clunker lines. That’s his discussion of the ethics that come with his Sikh heritage.

The outward signs of Sikhism – the five Ks of the long hair and turban, ceremonial comb, bracelet, dagger, and underpants* – are ethical signifiers to yourself and others.

* All these words start with the K sound in Punjabi, you know – Kesh, Kangha, Kara, Kirpan, and Kachera, respectively.

For Ram, they and his father’s more open embrace of them are the links to his heritage. But they’re also his ethical reminders that he must always act in the world so as to do what’s right and best. He wears the most ethically important sign of Sikhism, the Kara, the bracelet that is literally a reminder to yourself to let justice guide your actions.

Even non-consciously, justice and fidelity to the people you care about motivates Ram’s actions. He even jokes, after following April through the portal, that footballers are well-known for impulsively acting without thinking or understanding why. But his impulses aren’t the typical “acting without thinking” of selfishness and malice. Justice remains his motive force. His ethics is built into his subjectivity itself.

I'm quite hopeful for the potential of Matteusz, whose character isn't in
the main cast yet (and he should be, given his talents and role in the
show) in developing through his relationship with Charlie and Quill.

Ethics is, of course, the domain of philosophy about the creation of character, personality, and subjectivity. It contains the concepts that revolve around what and who a person is – the concepts that are the building blocks of a personality.

Those concepts could come from religion, ontology, morality, politics, and even the theory of knowledge or other sciences. What unifies these disparate concepts as ethics is their use – to answer or explore the questions of who you are and what your purpose can be.

If anyone needs that grounding, it’s Charlie, who is tortured by his conflicting loyalties to his murdered people, the traditions of his crown, and his new home on Earth. I’m quite impressed with how central Matteusz has become to this thread of the Class story, and I’d like to see his role expanded in the show’s next season.

Because it looks like Charlie’s ethical mooring will be an important element of the conflicts that define the rest of this season. And since a bottle episode is coming next week, all those conflicts are coming to the forefront.

I love bottle episodes. It’s the theatre nerd in me.

A Villainous Rage, Class: Co-Owner of a Lonely Heart, Reviews, 08/11/2016

Previous philosophical reviews of Patrick Ness' Class:
Episode One: For Tonight We Might Die
Episode Two: The Coach With the Dragon Tattoo
Episode Three: Nightvisiting
• • •
Some critical notes to start my thoughts on this episode of Class. I think it’s a wonderful story, with seamless transitions in tone and style between over-the-top sci-fi spectacle, melodrama, and awkward comedy.

Even when they're disturbed by Cronenbergian alien incursions into
her own body, April and Ram are still pretty adorable. Casting
probably tested all the actors in the top ranks of auditions for
these roles for chemistry with each other.

Patrick Ness sometimes has a tendency to write some very cheesy, clunky dialogue. But he’s also very aware of this limitation of his, and is actually very good at lampshading his dialogue problems. The romantic dialogue between April and Ram is the best example of this I’ve seen in the show so far.

And if we’re going to take all of contemporary Doctor Who into account, he’s far from the worst offender in occasionally clunky writing.

Regarding the philosophical themes of the story, grappling with grief remains a significant part of the Class tapestry. Though it isn’t nearly as important here as in “Nightvisiting.” Actually, the scene where grief as a theme appears, Charlie’s conversation with Matteusz and Tanya about the Cabinet of Light, brings a much more interesting idea to the show.

Of course, I won't even be able to introduce the title of my section about this idea without warning you of some pretty significant

SPOILERS!!

No Royal Wants a Person’s Freedom

I’m not talking about something as ordinary as Prince William being a dick to chauffeurs or anything like that. No, “Co-Owner of a Lonely Heart” introduces a character dynamic to Class that has a transformative potential for the show.

Quill's storyline in this episode is fascinating in its own right. As plot,
it largely feeds into the following episode, but it's of a piece with the
subtlest trick of the Class storyline – How Ness makes you forget over
the intervening episode from the premiere to this week that Quill is a
freedom fighter forced to become an indentured slave.

The first episode “For Tonight We Might Die” introduced the strange dynamic of Charlie and Ms Quill – Charlie is the monarch of the kingdom that defeated Quill’s rebellion. As I said in my analysis of that episode, if the Doctor had appeared on their homeworld during Quill’s campaign, he more than likely would have been on her side.

Charlie would have been the sympathetic villain. Perhaps a villain who comes to see a path to peace instead of violence, defeat, and reconquest. But he’d be a villain nonetheless, the dictator of a government that oppresses and disenfranchises Quill’s ethnic minority.

And let’s be honest with ourselves – a monarch is a dictator. It’s just a dictator that we Westerners feel has a little more legitimacy than a military ruler or a totalitarian party-state. That nasty little concept of the king’s divine mandate can take a long time to wiggle out of our cultural imaginary.

See what Charlie does in this episode – acting more like a dictator than he ever has before. Faced with the potential awkwardness of their parent-teacher night, Charlie gruffly orders Quill to come up with some bluff.

Phil Sandifer’s brief review of this episode spent a moment lamenting Tanya’s relatively small role in this episode. But although she didn’t have too many lines, Tanya and Matteusz are the perfect characters to force Charlie’s darker nature into the open.

The most important aspect of Charlie's character that makes him
different from his friends isn't that he's an alien, it's that he's a monarch.

Matteusz comes from a Polish family, an immigrant community in Britain who until only a few decades ago lived under a police state. Matteusz’s parents would have been born and grown up at least into their teenage years under a communist dictatorship whose government included a powerful secret police institution.

He can recognize in Charlie’s talk of duty and a higher morality for kings and leaders the justifications of state violence that killed many thousands of Poles at the hands of the SB.

And Tanya, as a black woman whose parents are Nigerian and Jamaican, stands in the prime positionality to tell Charlie that his forced servitude of Quill constitutes slavery. His appeals to the different morality of Rhodia can’t stand up to their arguments.

It’s not so much that Rhodia’s morality is irrelevant given the total genocide of that society, though that is what Matteusz and Tanya mention. What carries the real power are their universal ethical objections – that Charlie’s stewardship over a weapon of mass destruction and keeping of Quill in servitude is a stand against freedom.

Once the democratic principle exists in any society, its force drives a universalizing impulse. Democratic inclusion will never stop expanding until there are no exceptions to the freedoms it lets you understand and demand. And his central scene in “Co-Owner of a Lonely Heart” shows that Charlie fundamentally stands against that democratic will to freedom.

Quite a big revelation about someone that’s been set up as a hero since the first few minutes of the show.

The words the Shadowkin often have to say make them seem like
they're made of burnt ham. But they also provide some of the
biggest laughs of an otherwise very serious episode precisely
because they're so cartoonishly evil.

Who Is April? A Regicide

At first glance, it might seem that Charlie’s conversation about his kingly ideas appear like a separate storyline from the main plot this week about April. But it’s actually an important thematic parallelism to April’s plot.

So on the surface, April’s storyline is a return to her conflict with Corakinus the leader of the Shadowkin – he wants his heart to stop phasing in and out of her plane of reality so he can regain his full health. His chief scientist’s shadow-technobabble shenanigans help strengthen the link between him and April.

That causes some entertaining and embarrassing fluctuations in both their personalities. April goes on a rant about the glory and necessity of dying foolishly in battle in the middle of a history class. Corakinus the king of the fearsome and hideous Shadowkin gets an urge to cuddle after the brutal, weird, violent sex of his kind.

But what’s really intriguing about April’s story is that so much of her rage doesn’t originate with Corakinus. Aside from the cartoonish anger of her rant about the Dunkirk evacuation, all April’s anger is rooted in the shit-storm of her father’s return.

Huw is a man whose alcohol abuse and mental illness literally destroyed his family, paralyzing his wife and almost killing them all. He was in prison, and is still subject to a restraining order. All the rage that April has bottled up for years to keep herself and her mother in a sane state spills out.

The fundamental trauma of April's family is entirely in the open this
episode. I think the most illuminating moment comes in Jackie's
supremely awkward conversation just after catching her daughter in
the afterglow of losing her virginity to the former captain of the
football team. She's horrified that April would form any romantic
attachment to anyone at all. When April exclaims that Ram isn't
like her father, Jackie responds that her father wasn't like her
father when they met either. Jackie represents that fatalism that
any emotional openness or vulnerability will end in betrayal and
violence.

She's a better vessel for the anger of Corakinus than you expect when you look at her. And I think that’s an extra element of what frightens her about what she’s becoming in this episode.

And the parallel to Charlie’s subtly brutal morality of punishment, power, and entitlement? In the climactic moment of the episode, April is raging at her father, and about to kill him with the Shadowkin scimitars she manifests when she’s channelling Corakinus’ rage. Her rampage is played opposite Corakinus’ own anger at the apparent failure of his new scientist/lover’s plan.

As she’s about to kill her father, Ram appears and says another of Patrick Ness’ clunky phrases – that she’s April and wouldn’t do this. At the same time, Corakinus is spouting dialogue in the Shadow world that’s barely one degree removed in pompous cartoon villainy from “You have faired me for the rast time, Arrec Barrdwin!”

So April uses some Shadow techno-magic to heal her mother’s spinal column and refuses to slice her father in half. Her giving gesture is a strong contrast with Corakinus slashing another subordinate’s torso to bits. You’d think, based on this, that April is fundamentally not an angry person. That she’s not violent, but a healer. And that’s true.

But she is also actually, genuinely violent. She’s not going to sit back and wait for another attack from Corakinus, especially now that she knows he’s coming for her and the Earth again. April is still enraged, filled with anger. But she’s not channelling her rage into killing the pathetic idiot that’s her father.

Ram is the voice of a more pure mercy in this moment. April’s motive remains her anger. But it’s an anger directed at the proper place – at the figure of an autocrat who rules through violence and control. Corakinus is the brutal king of the Shadows, and April dives into the rift intent on a righteous regicide.

And earlier in this episode, our ostensible hero Charlie has been shown to have just the same brutal streak as any king. If Class is taking care of its Shadowkin plot for the mid-season two-parter, then maybe this last conflict will be the heart of the season’s real climax.