When Words Become Actions Become Protocols, Doctor Who: The Pilot, Reviews, 16/04/2017

When Steven Moffat was establishing himself as a television writer and producer, he did so in the world of sitcoms. Moffat by default writes farce stories. We throw the term ‘farce’ around to describe any old horrible, ironically comical mess we stumble into.

Bill and Heather are actually the most important relationship in this
episode. It's the best example in Moffat's entire tenure, I think, of
his genuinely progressive perspective. He always tries to learn
from his fans, even his fiercest critics. And it feels good for young
queer women to see characters like them in their favourite shows,
and for concerns like theirs to be the pivotal points of their stories.

But the term has a precise technical meaning in the science of writing. A farce is a narrative based around a miscommunication – different people who are all interacting in a reasonably simple situation have, somewhere early on, misunderstood each other.

A very ordinary thing, slightly misunderstanding what someone else says. We do it all the time. Normally, we know we’re confused and ask for clarification, but sometimes we proceed thinking we know exactly what to do. In most of our lives, it turns out not to be important and everything goes fine anyway.

But when this happens on a sitcom, what’s misunderstood is some critical piece of information that throws everyone’s plans and lives into a total mess. We laugh because of the embarrassment (or failure to be so when you really, really should) of the characters.

Just think of the most intense (and ridiculous) example I can find at short notice in Moffat’s career. “The Girl With Two Breasts” from his biggest hit sitcom Coupling.

Jeff, the socially awkward Kramer of the group, starts up a great conversation with a beautiful woman who think’s he’s very attractive. But they share no common language. So, while they believe they understand what they’re saying to each other, they totally misinterpret everything the other is saying.

Watching someone else dig their own hole is a classic farce
scenario, but a big part of why we laugh is rooted in how horrible
it would be if such a terrible misunderstanding were to happen to
us in real life.

The most juvenile detail being that Jeff thinks her name is the Hebrew word for ‘breasts.’
• • •
The farce narrative is a default for Moffat, having shaped many of his storylines in Doctor Who around misunderstandings over a faulty communication or a difference in knowledge of the situation. It’s to his brilliance that he understands this one structure of plot well enough to craft from it intricate narratives, heart-wrenching drama, and hilarity.

Sometimes all in the same episode, when he’s at his best.

“The Pilot” isn’t nearly so complex or multilayered. But it’s intriguing for the insight this episode’s particular story gives into the nature of language and communication itself.

Let’s look at this situation in detail, understanding that there are going to be massive

SPOILERS

involved. We have a fairly ordinary situation. Working-class hipster girl meets cute blonde with confidence issues. Implied to be pretty intense depression, judging from the way Heather seems so tired of life.

Maybe this is just because of my own attitude to stories and fiction that
I love, but I'm not that invested as a viewer in the season arc about
the secret vault under the university where the Doctor's been camped
out like Chronotis for who-knows-how-long. I know we'll find out
later on in the season – probably sooner than later if the cracks back
in 2010 are any sign. I want to see what kinds of stories Bill's
character shapes.

When the liquid spaceship drive activated and read Heather’s thoughts, it read was what most dominant – I just want to get away from here, from everything. That impulse to flee from where she was, was the energy of an engine. Merging with the liquid ship, Heather’s drive to leave became the ship’s own pilot function.

In its purest sense, all semantic content is lost in communication from one medium to another. When I say something, I think of it in a particular way, peculiar to my own perspective.

Now, because humans are social creatures, we learn to think through communication and shared action. So our meanings are all similar enough from building them together all the time. Yet miscommunication is still possible. We’re all individual enough to be uniquely different from each other.

In a farce, there’s one such difference that makes all the difference in the process of the whole story. This episode – perhaps I should call it “The Girl With the Star in Her Eye,” whose tragedy is its true centre – is based on a miscommunication across a huge distance.

Humans think in terms of our personalities and interests. We’re subjects for ourselves, understanding our desires as the constituents of our personalities. So when we think and speak, we think in terms of wants and achievements.

Niklas Luhmann is the theorist who first understood how idiosyncratic
our meanings and thoughts really could be. He was a little too
pessimistic though, actually saying that communication as we
understood it is impossible. He thought so abstractly about systems
and environments that they were literally lines on diagrams. We
don't communicate our meanings like computers, by sending
packets across media. We communicate through affects, literally
prodding each other to respond in a way that's reasonably close to
what we want someone to do.

The liquid ship doesn’t think in this way at all. It has no personality – an artificial intelligence, it thinks only in terms of purpose. That purpose is to repair itself and fly. Thoughts that constitute purposes aren’t wants or achievements. They’re protocols, strategies for action.

So when the liquid ship hears Heather’s profound desire to leave her life, it understands a protocol to pilot itself from place to place. The liquid ship absorbs Heather and remakes her – she's no longer entirely human – her desires and egos are now also mechanical protocols for the functioning of a spaceship.

Just before absorption, one other desire at the forefront of her thoughts – her erotic desire to go with Bill. That’s why, when she becomes part of the ship, Heather essentially stalks Bill throughout the universe. Her desire has been turned into a protocol.

That’s why Bill is able to send Heather-ship on her way so easily. All she does is tell her goodbye. A spaceship – unlike far too many humans – is capable of taking no for an answer. Halt function.
• • •
You can even understand Moffat’s own reputation among Doctor Who fandom today as a farce.

Sci-fi fandom today is riddled with poisonous gender politics. Socially awkward men – radicalized into rabid misogyny in their 4Chan families – have lashed out in resentful rage at women who share their interests.

I will not make a joke about how much Nardole looks like a stereotypical
4Chan shitbag. I will not make a joke about how much Nardole looks
like a stereotypical 4Chan shitbag. I will not make a joke about how much
Nardole looks like a stereotypical 4Chan shitbag. I will not make a . . .

Smart or dorky women who like sci-fi are educated in progressive gender politics better now than ever, whether through school or through support communities after dealing with attacks from radical misogynists.

Politically progressive fans mean well. I can’t think of a nicer direction for society than becoming more equal, fair, and free regarding all kinds of gender power imbalances.

I don’t blame anyone for being quick to anger, given what women have to deal with from intentionally aggressive misogynist pricks. But well-meaning people get caught in the crossfire if they’re out of touch with the communities most on the progressive vanguard.

Steven Moffat was one of the people caught in that crossfire, and he came out looking like Sonny Corleone.

In real life, when farcical misunderstandings happen, the results are terrible and rarely funny at all.

When you're a creative producer Doctor Who, you do it best when you bring a singular creative vision to the show. That’s why we remember Verity Lambert, Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks, Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes, Douglas Adams, Andrew Cartmel, Russell T Davies, and Steven Moffat as the most remarkable.

Poor girl really does look like the monster from The Ring, though.
I'm actually surprised Phil Sandifer didn't mention this in his review.

Having a clear aesthetic vision for Doctor Who doesn’t always mean you’re the best-quality producer. Douglas Adams and Graham Williams’ years on the show were marked by consistent mediocrity, as it was yet impossible to find BBC writers able to match Adams’ skill and talent. The Letts-Dicks-Pertwee era produced some amazing train wrecks.

But they all progressed Doctor Who by adding to the cornucopia of what it could be, the styles and personalities it enfolded in its box. Adventure, camp, existential body horror, meta-fictional parody, punk, melodrama, farce.

Better a flawed but vibrant vision than violent nihilism, reactionary racism, shoving fandom’s head up its arse, or simply not caring about the show you work on.

As much as this was a near-perfectly executed piece of television, it’s mostly old hat. Steven Moffat has been doing this for eight years. Not only is he falling back on his old standard plot scaffold, he’s nicking transformed-girl imagery from The Ring.

I love Moffat’s work. I think he’s one of the best writers Doctor Who has ever had, and I think his vision was unique and fertile, opening up so many more spaces for what Doctor Who could do.

But it will have been eight years. Time to regenerate. What’s next?

This Mad British Monster II: “He’s My Hero, Man” Jamming, 13/02/2016

This weekend, I’m back to my series on the production eras of Doctor Who. After pausing it for weeks and writing the last part second. And again, the history of Doctor Who has been catalogued for decades by better qualified people than me. 

Katy Manning's Jo Grant was a key part of the Letts-
Dicks era aesthetic. She was cast as a generic screaming
peril monkey companion, because Terrance could be
pretty sexist sometimes. But they cast an actress with
the bubbly energy to take over the whole screen like
an adventurous elf.

But there's a development in Doctor Who of the 1970s that changed the show forever. The Doctor became an action hero. 

Now, the Doctor had been a hero since pretty much the seventh episode just after the start of 1964. But he wasn’t an action hero. The original TARDIS crews of the Doctor, Barbara, Ian, Susan, and then Vicki were ensemble casts. 

William Hartnell played the role as a mischievous wizard. In Hartnell’s actual stories on TV, it was only his last full season that moved his character to the centre of the cast. And this was under a producer whose approach did the character few favours, either outright losing, winning with unacceptable costs, or standing up for racist regimes. 

It was really only in The War Machines that Hartnell’s Doctor played the lead hero unambiguously, though we can write all kinds of ancillary stories and fan fiction can explore his character in that role. Patrick Troughton’s Doctor was unambiguously heroic, but always maintained a similar aura of the elfin wizard or mad scientist.

Jon Pertwee’s Doctor was a clear, in-your-face action hero. He played a large role in shaping his own performance, but Doctor Who’s creative producers themselves had similar ideas about the character.

Terrance Dicks, script editor during the Pertwee years, was probably the most traditional adventure writer ever to work for Doctor Who. You can see it most clearly in the novelizations of televised stories, many of which he wrote, and which have a cracking, fast pace typical of mid-20th century young adult books targeted toward boys.

Barry Letts on the left, Terrance Dicks on the right.

Producer Barry Letts accepted this action-oriented direction for the show as part of his radical transformation of Doctor Who. That radical change was a product of necessity, as the Troughton era was very nearly Doctor Who’s last.

The highs of the Troughton era (The Macra Terror, The Power of the Daleks, The Evil of the Daleks, The Enemy of the World, The Mind Robber, The War Games) were very high indeed. But the psychedelic values and tone that Troughton’s weirdest stories carried clashed with the priorities of the producers to make a straight-ahead action show to compete with American imports of Adam West’s Batman.

The result was a fascinating, but very uneven and schizophrenic show whose audience in 1969 was just over a third of what it was in 1966. Letts’ mission was to save the show.

So just in time for Adam West’s Batman to stop production in 1970, Letts, Dicks, and Pertwee launched a Doctor Who that could have won the competition. Keeping the Doctor mostly on Earth for three seasons and giving him a large supporting cast of camp soldiers tasked with protecting the Earth from science-fictional threats paid enormous dividends throughout the era.

It was full-colour, it was action-packed, it had a large recurring cast that included a regular villain in Roger Delgado’s Master. It fit in perfectly with the spy-fi shows that were popular at the time. 

There's a 12-minute video on YouTube of Jon Pertwee's
Doctor having an adventure in anime style. If I ever get
the opportunity to make whatever Doctor Who property
I want, I think I'll pair up with a comics artist and make
a Jon Pertwee Doctor Who manga. The visual weirdness
of his era is perfectly suited to the style.

Letts and Dicks produced Doctor Who with the high octane style of Adam Adamant, the camp fun of The Avengers, the surreality of The Prisoner, a visual style that was of a piece with the fiery madness of Ziggy Stardust. Even when Letts-Dicks-Pertwee era Doctor Who fell on its face, it did so with such a spectacular insanity that you couldn’t look away.

And Jon Pertwee’s Doctor was the egotistical patrician middle-aged drag queen kung-fu master whose unflappable charm held all this craziness together. He was frequently the (didactic) voice of Letts’ firm ethics, which had fascinating roots in his peace activism, vegetarian morality, and Buddhist religion. It made this Doctor a wonderfully insane assemblage.

But every style runs out of steam eventually and nothing lasts forever. By Letts and Dicks’ fifth year at the helm, they were tired of the grind, and everyone was demoralized by the death of Roger Delgado in a car crash as The Green Death wrapped filming.

So Dicks ceded his script editor’s chair to his era’s best regular writer, Robert Holmes. And Letts helped his successor’s transition, Philip Hinchcliffe. They took Doctor Who into an explicit horror sci-fi style. 

Their stories were designed to frighten, a combination of H. P. Lovecraft’s existential terror at the alien unknowable and a visceral body horror that’s of a low-budget piece with the masterworks of David Cronenberg.

At the centre of it all was Tom Baker, the most famous and longest-running of the classic series Doctors. He had a charisma (and an ego as a performer) that put him at the centre of every scene he was in. 

Tom Baker and the first appearance of Davros, in
Genesis of the Daleks.

Every actor who appeared with him in Doctor Who had to tune their performance in relation to his. This was a virtue in creating a strong, attractive leading man for a show that anchored the BBC’s Saturday night programming. 

And the best scripts put this unflappable anchor in dangerous, horrifying situations – the terror came from the fact that this man was taken from his usual total control over a situation to a position of immense danger. 

That was the drama of the Hinchcliffe era to me. You can talk about the aesthetic of horror pastiche in a sci-fi context, which does define their style. But the narrative hooks of the best Hinchcliffe stories are about making you feel the real danger the characters experience when even the supremely confident Tom Baker gets terrified.

Ultimately, that narrative hook brought the Hinchcliffe years to its premature end. Britain’s highest-profile moralistic Christian whack job Mary Whitehouse had, since the horror pastiche aesthetic took hold on Doctor Who, coordinated a letter writing campaign to the BBC calling for its end.

Whitehouse considered the only appropriate programming for the BBC to be 24 hours of G-rated inspirational programming about Christ and British patriotism, with Blyton-level pablum for the children. But she was able to mobilize enough of her fellow repressed ogres to make BBC brass very uncomfortable.

So they caved. Hinchcliffe took over the cop show Z Cars, and Z Cars’ producer Graham Williams took over the production of Doctor Who. Williams had a mandate to tone down the horror of the show. So he rebuilt Doctor Who as a sci-fi adventure-comedy. 

The Williams era also saw the first Doctor-Companion
romantic relationship backstage, between Tom Baker
and his co-star Lalla Ward. They'd go on to get married
and divorced after both left the show. It's now become
accepted in official Doctor Who lore that the Doctor
and Romana themselves had a romantic relationship
during her Lalla Ward incarnation, the invasion of
real life into a fictional world.

This resulted in notes from the BBC brass to tone down the comedy, as executives felt Doctor Who was becoming too silly, at least according to notes from Williams’ therapist.

In terms of quality, the Williams years are something of a mixed bag. A lot of this is because the production values are terrible. Late-1970s Britain was undergoing a period of terrible inflation, and BBC budgets weren’t adjusted in kind. So the money just wasn’t going as far as it used to.

So Williams tried to help his writers develop a tone where the low budgets and largely silly effects contributed to a satirical message. A light-hearted tone that masked incisive messages, themes, and metaphors that explored the injustices of modern Britain and the modern West at every level of cultural analysis. 

Stories explored heady topics like freedom of speech in a religious society, how autocratic governments use welfare state policies to silence opposition to war crimes, the collusion of the wealthy with a violent international drug trade, and the oppression of indigenous peoples to strip natural resources from their land. 

I mean, wow! Why isn’t the Williams era remembered as the satirical tour de force that it clearly is from that description?

Because while the first two of those stories are Robert Holmes’ masterpiece The Ribos Operation and Douglas Adams’ The Pirate Planet, the other two are the disastrously made Nightmare of Eden and Robert Holmes farting up a first draft and walking away from the program with The Power of Kroll.

It takes perfectly pitched writing, acting, direction,
design, and overall on-set production to overcome the
budget difficulties that plagued British television sci-fi
in the late 1970s and create a masterpiece.

That aesthetic is actually very difficult to sustain. For one, the writer must be a genius of balancing tone and characterization while keeping the plot tight and weaving countless themes and ideas into as many different elements of the story as possible. And the rest of the production has to approach the story with the same deft skill, especially when trying to do sci-fi on a late-70s BBC budget.

That’s why the most successful and essential stories of the Williams era were by Douglas Adams.

Because that is, basically, what the Williams era was trying to do. When it was firing on all cylinders, Doctor Who was pretty much indistinguishable from Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy. 

The problem is that Doctor Who has always been a massive show to make, and there are so many cylinders that getting every aspect of production up to that quality is extremely difficult. The Williams era was a wonderful idea that rarely had the resources to succeed.

Some modern writers have tackled the aesthetic of the Williams era pretty successfully. Gareth Roberts is probably the most notable, and his scripts for the Moffat era have achieved a tone and approach similar to what Adams did on his best days. But that era remains best for its few highs, and what we imagine that it could have been.

And ideally, what we can write ourselves today.

Creativity Is About Art, Not Follower Counts, Jamming, 29/08/2015

I read an insightful article on Slate this week about the downfall of Josh Ostrovsky, the uncomfortably named Fat Jew. The link above tells the Ostrovsky story well, but here's the short version. 

There is clearly nothing at all
ridiculous or stupid about this man.

A ridiculous-looking jackass builds a huge following on Twitter and Instagram by republishing jokes and memes from actual comedians and more faceless joke aggregator sites. He always removes the attributions (if they haven't been removed already) and posts them with his own brand. 

He's built a large following of people who like to laugh for five seconds at juvenile humour. And he’s unashamed about the fact that he never writes his own material, only re-posting jokes. He uses this following to score some sponsorships and personal appearance money from Mike’s Hard Lemonade and a wet T-shirt contest for pregnant women.

All class, I know.

Eventually, a critical mass of comedians piled on him. Patton Oswalt was the most notable, at least in my experience of watching the shit go down. I've been a fan of Oswalt for years as both a stand-up and an actor,* and I always enjoy watching him insult someone who deserves it.

* Seriously, if you spend any time this weekend in front of a screen, watch Oswalt's best starring role, Big Fan.

What inspired this pile-on was that Ostrovsky got an offer from Comedy Central to develop his own show. Executives at the network apparently saw what a huge social media following he had, and because he was just one guy, they thought he was a real comedian. 

Now, on the surface, this is just crap research, and some folks in Comedy Central’s talent development wing deserve whatever discipline they get for not actually looking at the content and sources of Ostrovsky's material. All they saw was an individual with a lot of followers who posted funny stuff. He must be a comedian!

No, he's not. He's a one-person aggregator with a bunch of interns who do most of his actual work of poring through Reddit and 4Chan boards, 9gag, Imgur, and the Twitter feeds of actual comedians to find Ostrovsky more jokes to post. His business is using these generic joke reposts to build followers, sell promoted posts, and get paid for personal appearances. He's even said that he will never actually perform stand-up comedy because he can make more money through product placement on his feeds.

A comedian is someone who writes and produces humorous art, and makes money from performing and selling that art. See the difference? It's the difference between an artist and a listserv.

This is seriously the level of Ostrovsky's humour. Look
at Fry dressed like a Street Fighter cosplayer. Laugh for
maybe six seconds and forget about it. Then FOX and
Nintendo each pay Ostrovsky $5,000.

Thankfully, Comedy Central saw sense, probably because nothing worth putting on television ever came out of development sessions with Ostrovsky, and they dropped his deal long before the recent Twitter blitz against him. But even the comedians who railed against Ostrovsky on social media made the same mistake these dunderheaded execs did: they talked about him as if he was a comedian stealing other people's jokes. But he's not. He's a human 9gag.

The clincher in the article is when they talk to people who follow Ostrovsky’s feeds and enjoy them. They don't care that it’s been recycled through a thousand aggregators, or that the new creative content is published without attribution or royalty to its creators. They just want to laugh for five seconds at a juvenile gag.

Since shifting to a career in communications last year, I’ve a lot of very intelligent people in public relations and marketing who've taught me a lot in a short time. They've shown me that, with my understanding and approach to our media landscape, I can achieve some very good work if given the chance.

But there are also dumb people in the media industry, people who don’t understand online media even though we've had years to learn how things work. All such people see are dollar signs and follower counts, not the content that sets real artists apart from trash. 

If you give a TV show to anyone, you should give it to someone who’s already producing creative, original ideas of their own, and lend your company's marketing muscle to people who can do again what folks like Tina Fey, Kristen Schaal, Andy Samberg, or John Paul Tremblay did. Which is create comedy that isn’t quite like anything that's been done before.

You don't deserve to work in media if you can’t tell the difference between a gag recycler like a one-man (with interns) Imgur and an actual content producer. 

And by content producer, I mean creative worker, I mean artist.

You might work in the media, but you don't know what the hell creativity is.

• • •

If you know what the hell creativity is, then you should consider buying my book if you have a spare $20. Under the Trees, Eaten is a science-fiction novel with one finger in the Lovecraft tradition of weird horror. The middle finger, if you must know.