Epilogues, Doctor Who: Twice Upon a Time, Reviews, 01/01/2018

You can understand Twice Upon a Time as a profound disappointment. I don’t want to, but you can make a very clear case that it is.

An adventure that wasn’t really an adventure, fighting a threat that was actually unthreatening, shoehorning such an obtuse level of fanwank as material from a missing* episode and the most stealth cosplay of Mark Gatiss’ life.

Multi-Doctor stories happening at Xmas provokes very particular
expectations today, all of which should be overcome and outgrown
if Doctor Who is going to progress and continue. Staleness is
something the show can never let itself accept, or it'll be dead in
the water even if the ratings are incredible.

* Albiet fucking legendary.

Turning Expectations Around

By about the end of Twice Upon a Time, I realized that Stephen Moffat had written the anti Xmas Special. I like to think of it as one last, light-hearted experiment in Doctor Who writing before Moffat moves on from the show after nearly 15 years.

So what, judging by each year’s Xmas Special in 21st century Doctor Who, are the typical expectations? Primarily, I’d have to say an epic scale. They’re usually massive in scale or intensity. Sometimes, they contain major narrative developments for the show – regenerations, companion introductions, companion departures, companion re-introductions.

The Xmas Special model – huge, exciting battles against intense evils, and all the drama and pathos that implies – was a creation of Russell T Davies. Drama and pathos is what he does.

By the end of the relatively short Davies years, his pathos was overpowering to the point of frustration. The 20 minute outro to The End of Time, where David Tennant’s Doctor mysteriously appears to all his old companions as he holds off regeneration, remains excruciating to watch without poking fun at it.

Moffat has dialled down the reliance on pathos in Doctor Who. He’s done it with narrative and continuity events like restoring Gallifrey so the Doctor can breathe as a character again. He’s also done it with a new approach to the show.

In the book version of this essay, I think I'll expand on what Twice
Upon a Time has to say about the nature of memory, and integrate
that more smoothly with the ideas in the rest of the essay. Not yet
sure how that will work, but I'll figure something out this year.

A Complex, Strange Brain

Moffat’s Doctor Who is more cerebral – It's still a family sci-fi anthology adventure show, of course. Its stories tend to conceptual complexity, more dense continuity, and pushing what Doctor Who stories can do.

Cerebral approaches to narrative have their advantages and disadvantages. One advantage is that the show has engaged in more complicated narratives in individual episodes and over whole seasons or more.

A terrible disadvantage is that the show has engaged in more complicated narratives in individual episodes and over whole seasons or more. For every triumph like Silence in the Library, The Impossible Astronaut, or Extremis, there are shit-shows like Let’s Kill Hitler or The Lie of the Land** where all the conceptual, character, and narrative elements collapse.

** Yes, I know Toby Whithouse wrote this episode, not Moffat. But I mention this because the production schedule of the 2017 season meant that Whithouse got the call to finish Moffat’s story – and it was obvious from his episode that he understood none of it.

Moffat’s ideals for building Doctor Who stories and narratives take advantage of the possibilities for more dense, detailed engagements with television in the 2010s. Fans of the show benefit from easy repeat viewing, returns to the show on DVD and streaming platforms.

I did truly love Capaldi's Doctor – the GF liked his take on the character
much better than Matt Smith's. When Capaldi's Doctor is at his best, I
do agree. Even though we've come to expect a change in Doctors to
accompany a change of creative producers, there's nothing necessary
to that, and we shouldn't expect it as a matter of course. But it warmed
my heart a little when Capaldi announced his departure after hearing
of Chibnall's preference for Jodie Whittaker to play the next Doctor.

Doctor Who is no longer something broadcast once or twice and forgotten.*** It’s something that can be studied.

*** Or erased.

I think this might be why – in addition to inconsistent scheduling and the 2016 gap year – Doctor Who’s domestic broadcast ratings have fallen so sharply this season. It’s tougher to follow the show as a casual viewer. You’re now going to understand the full depth of what’s happening if you watch Doctor Who in the same way that you watch Strictly Come Dancing.

It’s why I actually have high hopes for the Chris Chibnall years – Broadchurch showed his skills at keeping a tight narrative together, as well as how much he’s grown as a writer and producer since his early years on the sometimes brilliant sometimes horrid Torchwood.

Twisting Conventions Until They Explode

Yes, Moffat has shifted Doctor Who’s tone, for the most part, away from overt pathos to a more multifaceted emotional storytelling. But the Xmas Special has resisted this most powerfully.

An Xmas Special is, by its nature, event television, as I said. Moffat’s best Xmas episodes have been big event stories – regenerations like Time of the Doctor or major character events like The Snowmen or The Husbands of River Song. When he’s done an Xmas Special simply because it’s Xmas – Last Christmas or The Return of Doctor Mysterio – they stink.

I want to clear something up. Yes, Moffat established that Gallifreyans
consider gender to be totally fluid, so it's weird to find Bradley's Doctor
making such old-fashioned comments about gender. But that's where
Moffat's humour gets meta-fictional. Moffat's multi-Doctor stories
involve as much commentary on different eras of Doctor Who the
television series as commentary on the characters themselves.

So what made Twice Upon a Time an anti Xmas Special? Two things. Each of which constitutes

SPOILERS

It openly turned the epic expectations of Xmas Specials, regeneration stories, and multi-Doctor stories upside down. First, look at the storyline.

We have Doctors meeting through crossed wires of time tracks or some other temporal technobabble. The first major escalation of the adventure is Capaldi’s confrontational speech to Testimony – it’s exactly as we expect from such an adventure up against creepy CGI glass.

But all those expectations of epic battles are deflated when the Doctor discovers the central motive of Testimony – they really are just time-jumping archivist historians. Their intentions are good and they’re no threat to anyone.

Second, look at the relationship between David Bradley’s Doctor and the current cast. There’s a little meta-fictional joking – the “smacked bottom” joke, Bradley’s horrified reaction to Capaldi’s cyber-goth TARDIS interior, his and Captain LS’ stunned reaction to Bill’s homosexuality. All as we expect from Moffat going meta.

But the point of Bradley’s appearance, thematically, is emotional and ethical. It has nothing to do with plot or transformation of continuity, like the last multi-Doctor story Day of the Doctor.

Essentially, Twice Upon a Time is an hour-long epilogue to The Doctor
Falls. Think about how you'd engage with Capaldi's last season on a
rewatch – Twice Upon a Time would follow The Doctor Falls within
minutes or at least a day or so. With the stories separated by months,
it's tough to see the connections between the stories. It's one way that
Moffat's method of writing Doctor Who has alienated the casual
audience that dominates its domestic viewership.

Capaldi’s Doctor wants to give up on regeneration because he’s weary, and sees his life as futile. That was the crushing conclusion to The Doctor Falls. He’d spent nearly a thousand years guiding the Master to become at least a joyful traveller instead of a super-villain. But he saw only betrayal.

The Master’s redemption in that story fit with the theme, established in Extremis, that the most profound good is unwitnessed and never remembered. We saw the Master’s redemption on those terms, but the Doctor never did. So he kept trying to refuse regeneration, feeling that all his effort in the world was wasted.

Bradley’s Doctor offered Capaldi’s a contrast that showed him what his nihilism amounted to – fear. Bradley’s Doctor was refusing to regenerate because he’d never transformed before – he was afraid of remixing his personality. It was an immature fear, the fear of a very young, almost childish man – I don’t want to grow up.

It contributed to showing Capaldi’s Doctor what it meant to regenerate – to grow, transform, and change. This time, more radically than he had ever before.

Memoriam

Testimony’s mission demonstrated the importance of memory and knowledge, while the story also made a problem of whether memory was all you really needed to constitute a person. Was this story’s Bill really Bill because she was made from her memories?

Mark Gatiss leaves Doctor Who having achieved all of what his inner
fan-child has wanted for most of his life, probably. He got to write an
epochal Ice Warriors story, and playing Captain Archibald was the
closest he could get himself to playing Brigadier Lethbridge-
Stewart in the main show itself.

For the sake of the story, it ultimately didn’t matter, because Testimony’s role in Twice Upon a Time was to provide Capaldi’s Doctor with some closure as he departed. They restored his memories of Clara, gave him a chance to say something like a real goodbye to his friends, and ultimately made what could have been the most irritating piece of obscurantist fanwank in Moffat’s entire tenure meaningful.

That last moment was – as Testimony and the two Doctors both accomplished – giving Captain Archibald Lethbridge-Stewart enough of a sense of hope that he wasn’t really to shoot the wounded German soldier facing him in the crater.

There was a telltale shot in that last Ypres sequence, a closeup of Mark Gatiss’ thumb refusing to pull back the safety catch of his pistol. It lasted just long enough for him to hear the carols of the Christmas Truce – the one moment of hope in all the terror of the First World War.

As Bradley’s Doctor said, the Christmas Truce was a moment that demonstrated what it truly means to be a “Doctor of war.” Someone whose influence can replace nihilism with hope. Thanks to this feeling of hope that shattered Captain Lethbridge-Stewart’s, the Doctor’s old friend Alastair would have grown up with his grandfather.

Celebrating that hope – a feeling that we definitely need to motivate us through what will be more coming terror and violence in 2018 – is what Doctor Who is ultimately about, at its best. By overturning the expectations of an Xmas Special of epic battles and pathos, Stephen Moffat gave us one last moment of Doctor Who at its most inspirational before the new stories begin.

See you in the Autumn.

Writing A New Master, Composing, 27/06/2017

So I took a break from my Doctor Who blogging, just for this one episode. Next Monday 3 July, I’ll post a review of the Epic Wicked Awesome Body Horror Master Team-Up, taking both episodes as a single story.

A separate essay on World Enough and Time will probably be part of the ebook I’ll publish later in 2018 on the Peter Capaldi years. Now that the Capaldi era is closing, I can actually get a pretty good idea of what that book would look like.

Right now, I have a general count of themes that I’m going to pursue through the Capaldi book. I’m not sure where any principle of unity would come from. I mostly just want to release a pleasantly stimulating book of essays about Doctor Who.

So what would it be about?

Sexual fluidity, for one. Russell T Davies introduced a universe of sexuality’s possibility into Doctor Who, but the TARDIS team itself was dominated by straightness throughout the Tennant and Smith years.

If the TARDIS team of the pansexual Captain Jack’s, the more open character of Rose’s first year, and the queerness of Eccleston’s Doctor had lasted more than three episodes, maybe things would have been different. As it is, we only got to explore a queer TARDIS crew in the Capaldi years.

Clara’s implicit queerness in her final season brought the idea openly into the TARDIS team again, and the main cast has doubled down on queerness through Bill.

But the regeneration of the Master into Michelle Gomez solidly slots 21st century Doctor Who into a queer narrative space. The Time Lords are now canonically and openly able to change genders casually. It’s become so taken for granted in the Capaldi era that there’s an expectation that the next Doctor will be a woman.

Even aesthetically, Gomez's Master dresses in a style that evokes
William Hartnell's Doctor, a science-fictional god in Victorian
inventor's garb.

I do want to explore the centrality of the Master in the Capaldi years. Her power as a narrative force, the new story ideas that Steven Moffat developed for her character. The Master in these years was a destructive anarchist. She no longer thinks of amassing power and conquest – she primarily loves to tear the world down.

Right there is the centre of her redemption arc. All previous versions of the Master were variations on power-hungry schemers. They were tinpot dictators and wannabe authoritarians.

Gomez was the first Master who fully gave in to the Master’s own impulses for destruction for its own sake. She was still a delightful sadist, but was content enough to leave a trail of chaos in her wake.

Just like the trails of chaos and revolution that the Doctor leaves behind him. At this critical point of the Master’s own embrace of the thrill of anarchism and destruction, she’s ripe for an intervention.

The Doctor can train her to channel her revolutionary energy into tearing down the world to provide it new life rather than simply tearing it to pieces. He can teach her that it’s more fun that way.

Just an idea for now.

Desire Creates Us, A History Boy, 16/10/2016

I'm one of those people who always reads a bunch of books at the same time. A little while ago, I finished reading Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. I came to the book in a very simple way, but came to the author in a bit of a roundabout path.

Not the cover of my edition, but I think it's my
favourite. The smoke is the sign of the productive
energy that unites the steamship that united the
narrator's grandparents, the city where she
lived, and the relationship that helped her
fully understand his identity and nature.

Turning From Small Worlds

Eugenides is typically lumped in with David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen – sensitive white male chroniclers of the angst and narratives of the suburban American culture heading for an existential crisis through the 1990s and early 2000s. 

They were the most prominent writers in a clique of American authors that were called a coherent cohort in New York Magazine in 2011, their society and wider meaning unified by in how their culture made sense of Wallace’s suicide a few years earlier. 

Eugenides never had much meaning to me when I first discovered these writers. I bought Wallace’s masterpiece Infinite Jest practically by impulse in a mall bookstore when I was 16. 

When I first read it, I was overwhelmed, bowled over by the massive scope of his literary creation, which was wedded to a narrow focus on his characters’ deep, personal, singular pain. I’d later think of Wallace as prefiguring the drive to sincerity. That cultural drive jacked up seriously after Sept 11, as the ironic reflexes of late 20th century popular culture* weren’t adequate to process America’s intense societal trauma.

* Key example: the cool, smirking, distance of authors like Thomas Pynchon from the interiors of his characters, the postmodern focus on technical and formal experimentation, characters as plays of tropes and pure ideas instead of personalities.

I grew tired over the last decade of both postmodern experimentation and the insular interiority of the Wallace-influenced approach. The deal on Wallace was sealed when I read D. T. Max’s biography of him last year – Wallace spent his life tortured by mental illness, frequently unable to escape his own head and most often a mess. 

His characters fell into such deep and detailed pits of interiority in their depression because that was the arc that kept repeating in Wallace’s own life. His research on settings would be comprehensive. I was especially impressed by how much he learned about tax accountancy for The Pale King, but the story was always the same. A subject's fall into their own sadness. Usually never to emerge.

Eugenides has become my favourite of that cohort of
white novelists of the midwestern suburban
American subjective interior. He breaks their
crushing sameness.

I felt the same about Franzen's work, except on a social level. Wallace and Franzen had convinced me that this crew of writers couldn’t escape their heads and their own, socially isolated worlds. The precious interiority of the middle and upper class white American male of the mid-sized town.

Writing Difference – Imagination at Last!

That article I linked earlier, describing Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot as an adaptation of the sick relationship Wallace developed with Mary Karr, made me think he was little different than the others. But with a little reflection, I thought differently.

I remembered The Virgin Suicides. Not the book itself, which I still haven’t read, but the film. I often thought of it primarily as a Sofia Coppola film – her personality was all over the film. But so much of Eugenides’ narrative voice survived her adaptation. Literally, in the film's narration.

That voice expressed a mind that sought to understand difference. The Virgin Suicides could sound like a journey that never leaves a skull at first sight, because it remains the voice of the boys who followed the Lisbon girls. Boys who follow girls. Say it, and you can hear how easily it can fall into the unseemly.

Yet the voice in that film preserved the love that always disappeared from the true solipsists. Wallace’s writing never escaped the black pits, though he depicted the abyss brilliantly. Whenever I try to read Franzen, I have to stop for the choking odour of mothballs. Eugenides seemed different.

The Virgin Suicides was an attempt to narrate the radically different from the outside. That little boys’ choir narrator wanted to explore this world that was so close to their own, but diverged so radically. 

The steel oppression of social conservatism, even for such a basic, insular neighbourhood society as theirs – and the silent howls of pain as they clawed into a familial coffin – the desperation of the realization that an actual coffin is the only escape. 

A story of the relentless drive of love to uncover an alien neighbour.
The film is a masterpiece you can never watch twice, its violent
sadness overcomes your guts.

The entire narrative was an exercise in the refusal to understand what’s different from you on your own terms. The beginning of the ethical imagination that I know now is the purpose of art. If that was Eugenides’ first novel, then how far would he go afterward?

Thousands of Stories in Each of Us

So one day, I saw Middlesex on sale for $1 at a United Way fundraiser table at my local liquor store. The story and its narrator intrigued me – a young girl grows up in 1960s and becomes a man after realizing that she’s intersex with interior testes. And it also flowed through the story of hir grandparents fleeing war in Greek Turkey to settle in Detroit.

After I bought the book, I looked through reviews. Some of the negative reviews thought that a novel was too unwieldy to contain a Greek immigrant story and an intersex awakening story at the same time. 

But that overstuffed excess of narrative was a selling point for me – real life is always intersectional. Every actual person has multiple heritages and stories within them. I look among my own old and new friends in Toronto for examples. 

A young artist leaves the “new world” for the country of his parents’ birth and sees it undergoing a renaissance, while he also works through the complex heritage of a deceased parent and another whose work sometimes exposes him to the poorest of the poor.

In the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari
write that they wrote the book together and each of them were several
people themselves already. It made their room very crowded. Each of
us is just as crowded as they were.

A woman climbs out of poverty while also growing distant from her earlier religious awakening thanks to hypocrisies in the community, grows alienated from family, and lives through the tension of her own trauma and the mental health issues of her partner.

A man finds financial success and builds a new multicultural family while living the precarious neighbourhoods of a gentrifying city.

A man leaves a dictatorship for a democracy, where he finds love. Only a few years later, he finds himself at the forefront of activism to democratize his old country and bring victims of war to safe shores.

All these overflow the simple narratives that a straightforward literary treatment would make of them. That’s life. It’s what art should depict – the beautiful excess and diversity of human life on its own terms. 

Desire Creates Us From Sludge and Rock

The Greek-American immigrant story of Middlesex blends with the intersex-awakening story of Middlesex even better than simply through an embrace of life’s excessive meaning. I’d actually call it a very Deleuzian book (some relative spoilers coming, though, maybe, depending on your definition).

At many times in the book, Eugenides’ narrator describes himself and his family as assemblages. Particularly, assemblages of genes, phenotypes, hormones, and proteins. We’re chemical as well as psychological and narrative. That doesn’t detract from our humanity – it's part of what constitutes humanity.

Life is physical, an assemblage of forces, imperatives, and tendencies. They all run actively under our intentions and personalities, shaping who we are. We aren’t passive before them, because we’re the actors of our own desire. But those drives and forces, channelled through the personalities they constitute, become desire.

Eugenides depicts a Detroit that becomes a vibrant centre of industry
and a hollowed-out husk within a generation. The Detroit that really
exists. This is Central Michigan Railway Station, abandoned to rot
by 1988.

That's the desire that the narrator’s grandparents Desdemona and Lefty have for each other. Their desire is the vehicle for the proliferation of intersex people, in the deep physicality of their metabolisms and cell nuclei. Their intense sexual desire and deep love for each other drives them to their incestuous marriage. 

It’s kept secret from everyone around them because they’re the only survivors of their home village, destroyed by the nationalist Turkish army. That same desire appears in their son Milton, who seduces his cousin by playing clarinet against her skin. Jazz has rarely been so properly erotic. 

The narrator, faced with the prospect of genital surgery that would destroy her capacity for pleasure, flees and begins living as a man. He’s already been awakened to sexuality through falling in love with a female classmate, and understands that his nature can’t fit in the strict definitions of life in mid 20th century middle America.

That’s another beautiful line of Eugenides’ story – the tension of real human difference with the conservative determination for simplicity and conformity. That’s another way that the immigrant and intersex stories blend together. 

The grandparents flee massacre by a nationalist army – their city Smyrna is burned to the ground and rebuilt as Turkish Izmir. Lefty faces constant company propaganda to abandon his Greek culture and assimilate to WASP Americanism while working at Ford Motors. Desdemona runs an indoor silk farm for a clothing business of the early Nation of Islam.

They give birth to a son who joins the army, takes over his dad’s restaurant, becomes an Eisenhower Republican, and moves his family out to the suburbs when too many blacks settle his neighbourhood. Then that son has a precocious little daughter who grows into a young man by age 15. Every drive to conformity and conservatism is ultimately shot to hell by life itself.

Humans are constructs of desire – made from forces that are prior to our individualities, and always roil beneath our identities and everyday thoughts. That desire pushes us in singular directions, uniquenesses that can’t be tied down to a single code or conform to a unified nature. No matter how much you might believe in the morality that says you must.

That's the story of Eugenides’ Middlesex. Depicting such singular existence is the point of art.

Freedom Flattens Hate, A History Boy, 04/07/2016

I'm not going to make a big, overcomplicated analysis today. Philosophical ideas, ideas for novels or films, thoughts on assembling my workshops – those will come later.

I was thankful I had Saturday evening and Sunday off this weekend, because I feel like I finally got my most proper Toronto Pride experience. Just being able to soak in the celebratory, defiant, fierce atmosphere of the whole event, which I think I’ve never really been able to do before.

Pride and LBGT existence has always been a part of my life – it’s in my family, my circles of close and distant friends – that I’ve always taken that existence for granted, in a way. 

It’s not that I was ever blind to the existence of homophobia or hostility to queer people. I’ve certainly always been aware of the struggles that queer people have faced, and I’ve learned more about those struggles over time.

I may not be gay, but I know the style of a party.

My mother and many of her gay and straight friends lost people they loved in the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 90s. I’ve known men and women who’ve faced the awkwardness and fear of coming out to their families, friends, and peer groups. People who’ve risked losing everything – or even just risked an eventual surgical complication – to come out as trans.

Of course, I’ve only known them. My own sexuality, in itself, has never caused me a problem. I’m just a little socially awkward. I’m still straight. I made some pretty bad mistakes with sex and relationships. But I’ve had it pretty easy.

I’ve heard the repulsive language of insults, hate, and – worst of all, because it's most insidious – the respectability talk. “They have the right to do it, but they should keep it to themselves.” “It’s not proper to have that flag in City Hall. This is a place for representing everyone.” And when the time is right,* I’ve tried to lead people to recognize their words for what they really are.

* That is, when I feel like I can call out their homophobia in a way that’s still polite and won’t encourage more violence or hostility.

But I’ve lived in socially progressive communities – online and in real life – for so long that I’d come to take for granted the freedom to be and become whatever sexuality you want. Where we’d established it, it was here to stay.

The past couple of years, we’ve seen the growth of a powerful movement of open, aggressive racism, sexism, and homophobia. More than just the Pulse Massacre, which was only its most horrifying expression. 

People who hate blacks, immigrants, queer people, who want women silent and subservient – they defend their loud, proud expressions of hatred as their freedom. That is an insult to the very concept of freedom. 

Freedom isn't about being able to do and say whatever you want, damn whatever tightwads may get offended. Freedom is about being able to be whatever you want. To be accepted for whatever you are.

The only identity forbidden under that is the identity that would, by its essential nature, destroy that freedom to become whatever your desires lead you to be. That forbidden identity is the racist, the one who hates. 

Haters are going to hate. It’s what they do. Hate destroys freedom because it literally destroys people for freely expressing whatever their own nature is leading them to become.

We can mock it with the stereotype phrase all we want. But when we’re talking about real hate, its damage is real. Real hate let hundreds of thousands of people die in a massive HIV epidemic. Real hate opened fire with an AR-15 a couple of weeks ago.

Our society is progressive, practically endlessly. We’re so progressive that the biggest controversy about Toronto Pride has become how it feels overloaded with crass corporate sponsorship, and negotiating the balance of power and visibility among all the queer demographics.

In a lot of other parts of the world, the biggest problem of Pride parades and celebrations is whether the police will protect them from the hooligans with knives and baseball bats, or whether they’ll join in. We’re never secure against hate. We always have to push it back. Push at it until no one hates anymore.

Happy Pride, everyone.

A Three-Tiered Shit-Dyke: Joy Needs Love Needs Sex, Sunnyvale, 23/04/2016

One of the benefits of being on Netflix, as opposed to even a post-watershed cable TV channel, is how explicit you can be with sex. Sex is an essential part of the human condition, rooted in our physicalities. No matter what kind of sexuality you may have – and your sexuality is as singular as you are – you will have some kind of sexuality. Even asexuality as a human is a relation to sex. Humanity can’t escape from sex, and we shouldn’t want to in the first place.

Western morality has separated sex from love for so long that a lot of us are still digging our way out from that situation. But we have to understand that the truest, deepest loves express themselves in the greasiest, nastiest, most freakily creative sex. The greatest fucks aren't just genital fucks, but mind-fucks. There should be no difference between body-fucks and mind-fucks – there are only fucks. Body, thought, and spirit intermingling into a dense and complex integration that produces more than either body could become on its own. This is sexuality at the molecular and spiritual level. This is love.

Prince died two days ago. What else could he have taught us but this?

The deepest, most affecting, and frankly most beautiful love story in the entire world of Trailer Park Boys and Sunnyvale Trailer Park is that of Jim Lahey and Randy. Their sexual tension is still thick, solidifying every time they’re on screen together this season. It’s all the more tense because they never act on it. Jim is yearning for Randy, with increasing desperation. But Randy reacts to Jim differently here than he ever has before. He’s loved Jim, he’s been angry, jealous, frustrated, certainly. But now he seems scared. 

Just look at the way Jim rubs cream on Randy’s tortured, wounded nipples after Barb, Donna, and Candy’s latest attack. They’re horribly wounded, the flesh bruised deeply. And Jim rubs tenderly, with the soft brushes of fingertips that penetrate past skin to the heart, to the soul. He’s crying, sorrowful, shredded and quivering. There’s been a crime here, an assault. And Jim's response isn’t like a lawman. He doesn't go out for revenge, like it was some retro Dirty Harry plot. His response is to heal. The answer of love.

Yet Randy’s afraid. He stops Jim. Stops his love. What could have happened to provoke this attitude in Randy toward the only one who’s ever really loved him? When you watch “A Three-Tiered Shit-Dyke,” you wonder about this question. This new season will be incomplete if it doesn’t offer some kind of explanation – and it’ll have to be an answer with the magnitude to match how radical a permanent cleave between Lahey and Randy is.

This season has already seen radical transformations to the landscape and characters of Sunnyvale, and it looks like more are coming. We’ve seen Barb transform into a destructive force and Jim abandon his role as Sunnyvale’s voice of authority. We’ve now seen what looks like an end to the love story between Jim and Randy that's been an important element of Sunnyvale from its earliest days in Canada’s self-consciousness. Now there’s another radical change: Ricky is being pressured to stay out of a criminal lifestyle, and is doing his best to make an actually legitimate living. How successful he’ll be is another issue entirely.

In fact, let’s have a closer look at Ricky here. Of the three Trailer Park Boys of the title, Ricky is the least intelligent. He mangles common sayings, he fails to understand very basic things about ordinary life, like how to dispose of large-scale garbage and how to plan for an actually sustainable retirement. Ricky knows he's pretty fucking stupid, but despite that, he’s still pretty fucking stupid.

Yet there’s one area of life where Ricky is one of the most intelligent people in the whole community of Sunnyvale. Maybe even in the whole city of greater Halifax and the whole province of Nova Scotia. Maybe even one of the smartest people in Canada. That’s crime. Specifically, petty crime like ripping off bicycles from racks to sell at shady bike shops, breaking into houses, and selling fake lottery tickets. He’s also a master horticulturalist and manufacturer, but only when it comes to growing marijuana and refining weed into other products like hash, concentrated hash oils, currency made from hash, and the strongest dab you can’t handle.

Ricky is a verbal and intellectual moron, except for when it comes to calculating a crime. When he’s over-emotional, he gets impulsive and reckless – I still have fond memories of laughing my ass off as Ricky ripped a massive ATM from the walls of a bank. But look at how he plans and improvises his way through the gang’s petty crime spree in “A Three-Tiered Shit-Dyke.”

First, there’s the bike theft at the college. He knows what the bikes are worth and exactly what you have to do to steal them as fast as possible. And when those two hapless student security staff cycle over themselves, Ricky knows exactly how to talk his way out of the situation. He talks with perfect confidence as if he and the crew are some casually dressed contractors, slips them some hash, shit-talks their boss with them, and gives them just enough of an excuse for plausible deniability that they can walk away. 

When they go to that affluent neighbourhood nearby to case for easy robberies, Ricky is the expert reconnaissance man. He knows exactly what to say to appear like an innocent passerby to residents who are still at home, and can break into a house with ease. It doesn’t matter than he can’t pick the lock – he can still get in there and start robbing. 

The problem Ricky encounters in that rich neighbourhood doesn’t have anything to do with any mistakes he makes. It’s that the police have become too attentive. Law and authority are more present in that community, faster, more efficient than seemingly anywhere. The boys are surprised that the police showed up this quickly. They aren’t supposed to be this competent. Ricky talks his way out of the situation with the same ease as he handled the campus security patrol, because he’s only intelligent as a criminal. But he shouldn’t have had to deal with them. The cops arrived whole minutes sooner than they should have. 

Something has changed. Many things have changed in and around Sunnyvale. This isn't the only thing. But the attentiveness and professionalism of the police is the most obvious. The most remarkable. We aren’t dealing with George fucking Green here anymore. What could have caused this new generation of actually professional police officers to appear?

These kinds of cops aren’t typically around Sunnyvale itself. The standard police patrols can easily be kept away with a few well-placed sexual acts of Randy just outside the gate. These kinds of cops come to Sunnyvale after a break-in at an affluent suburban neighbourhood. These are forces of law and order who could actually be a threat to Sunnyvale. Robbing from the types of people these cops protect may actually have consequences – piss these cops off, and you might not get out of jail in time for next season. There’s a new order in town.

Remember some of those conversations a few episodes ago about a new subdivision going up near Sunnyvale? It was just a throwaway comment, but in the light of these new, competent cops in Ricky’s life, we have to take seriously the likelihood of radical change coming to Sunnyvale. Not from any open, violent invasion like Barb’s, even though that is pretty fucking dangerous. No, this is a more creeping, invisible danger.

Could suburbanites be coming to the borders of Sunnyvale? Threatening their joyful anarchy and chaos with actually competent police and law? 

Is this Barb’s actual plan for Sunnyvale? She’s never really been part of the Sunnyvale community before. She was always an authority figure, always at some distance from the real rhythms and styles of Sunnyvale life. Barb has been a creature of law – keeping Jim from drinking, trying to run the park according to explicit rules and regulations. At least that’s how I remember her.

So far this season, we haven’t really heard a justification for Barb wanting to take control of the trailer park. I mean, we’ve heard her justify it as revenge on Julian for weaselling his way into majority ownership while she was shipped off to jail with Donna and Sarah at the end of Season Nine. But that’s not her total motivation – it can’t be. Yeah, she could take Sunnyvale’s ownership back from Julian, but then we’re left with the question of what she’d actually do with it. 

But Barb has never really been part of Sunnyvale. Sunnyvale’s freedom and chaos has always irritated her, hasn’t it? If Barb Lahey has had a nemesis over the last 15 years, it’s been Sunnyvale itself, the trailer park that refuses to calm itself and conform to her wishes for a quiet, uneventful, straight life. Now Barb is unrestrained, a violent bully who has embraced an aggressive lesbian life. Sunnyvale, always Barb’s nemesis, has finally broken her. Yes, Julian was the person who screwed her out of a potentially fruitful real estate investment. But that’s just money. It was Sunnyvale itself that broke Barb’s soul.

With a new, high-end suburban development creeping closer and closer to Sunnyvale, that land is getting more and more valuable. Sunnyvale’s land is more valuable than the people who live on it. I mean, nobody who lives in Sunnyvale even bothers to pay their lot fees. It’s effectively a community without money. No real estate developer could ever make money from Sunnyvale as it is. 

But with the people gone, and only the land remaining, it’s a multi-million dollar investment property. Nothing would satisfy Barb – who’s become a primal drive for revenge and violence – more than destroying the entire society that slowly ground her down into the creature of hate that she is.