The Rankings: Peter Capaldi Year 3, Doctor Who Reviews, 09/07/2017

Sad to see the Peter Capaldi Doctor on his way out, but as far as I’m concerned, the future looks bright. Soon, we’ll see the rumours truly swelling and the name of the next Doctor announced this Fall – I and many others have high hopes for her.

What's interesting is that, as I take stock of the last Capaldi season, I find myself in a bit of a contrarian attitude about it. Maybe it was just the hangover from fandom’s major public love with Clara Oswald, but my sense of the consensus was that the 2017 season was a little underwhelming.

You've all done amazing work, everyone. Applause all around.

But I thought it was fantastic. In my immediate experience of watching and in my critical evaluations in retrospect, it’s on par with Capaldi’s near-universally loved first year in quality.

Here’s how the rankings themselves worked out. Stories with the same letter grade are arranged according to small gradations of quality, complexity, and dynamic aesthetic harmony.

Quality: How well a story is executed technically, its craftsmanship from idea to script to set to editing suite to screen.

Complexity: How many creative ideas across setting, character, narrative, and theme fit together.

Harmony: How well all those complexities interact to produce a philosophically thick final product – a text which always rewards you with new dimensions every time.

The Doctor Falls A+
World Enough and Time A+
Thin Ice A+
Extremis A
Oxygen A
Eaters of Light A-
The Pilot / The Girl With a Star in Her Eye A-
Empress of Mars A-
The Pyramid at the End of the World B
Smile B
Knock Knock B-
The Return of Doctor Mysterio B-
The Lie of the Land F

Whithouse didn't even include the most superficial parallels of the
Monks Trilogy in "The Lie of the Land," like a third version of
Bill's date with Ronke Adekoluejo's Penny. It would have been
nicely bleak, as fits the story. But he couldn't even manage that!

As I said in my review of the episode itself, “The Lie of the Land” was a profound screw-up of the highest order. It’s rare when I see a writer so profoundly fail to understand any of the interesting or innovative aspects of a story he’s commissioned for.

The Monks Trilogy was, in my view, the single most ambitious Doctor Who story Steven Moffat ever conceived and actually got on screen. But the messy realities of production meant that the worst writer in his whole stable got stuck having to stick the landing. Whithouse is the only writer in the current stable who’s gotten worse as time went on.

I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a Doctor Who story crash and burn as badly. I think it comes down to the need to have split the entire Monks Trilogy over three different writers. If the whole story could have relied on the one writer who conceived of it being in charge from beginning to end, we would have gotten at least a consistent script from the whole affair.

I count “The Return of Doctor Mysterio” as part of Capaldi’s last season for a few reasons. It’s established Nardole as a companion, foreshadows Bill’s arrival, and most importantly marked the return of Doctor Who since its gap year of 2016.

The show’s absence for an entire year was a strange period – it evoked echoes of the 1986 hiatus, even though the earlier gap was the function of a production and aesthetic catastrophe.

Doctor Who took on the superhero sci-fi genre for the first time with
"The Return of Doctor Mysterio," but couldn't figure out how to
overcome that genre's most ingrained problem, its deep sexism
and refusal to question the ego of the fragile male characters that
make up so many of its traditional protagonists.

Doctor Who was assured a comeback, of course – it was still one of Britain’s most popular television shows domestically, and its leading global export. The contrast was the most jarring aspect of the 2016 gap year.

Two years before, the BBC sent Peter Capaldi and Jenna Coleman did a round-the-world tour in a week to promote the premiere of “Deep Breath.” Now the show was going on break for a year?

So it was wonderful seeing a story as fresh and fun as “The Return of Doctor Mysterio” kick off the return of Doctor Who. And it was a straightforward story of Doctor Who riffing on a classic sci-fi genre it had never tackled before, with a few questionable sexual and romantic threads woven in without question. A fun story that left an icky feeling in me for a few days afterward.

Speaking of icky feelings, “Knock Knock.” Doctor Who goes full Freudian horrorshow with a script that dropped the ball on comprehensive characterization. Despite this, it had some fine camerawork that evoked the classic late 20th century aesthetic of Hammer horror, haunted house films, and a pre-watershed riff on the slasher genre.

“Smile” worked out the same way, but Frank Cottrell Boyce crafted a better story overall. The inventiveness of the setting and the nature of the Vardy robots were its best features.

Good work overall in a very creative story. Frank Cottrell Boyce is
becoming Doctor Who's go-to for the trippiest settings and kinds of
existence in the writers' stable.

The visual storytelling was wonderful as well, the contrast of the Vardy surface city and the human spaceship underground overflowing with thematic and conceptual meaning. Boyce seems to be one of the best in the current Doctor Who stable at developing radically different kinds of life.

It was also a great decision to make most of the story a two-hander that gives Pearl Mackie a chance to stretch Bill’s character – a fairly generic approach to the companion lets the actor find her own nuances in the performance. But the very ordinariness of the basic story and plot weighed “Smile” down a little bit.

Speaking of ordinary stories, “The Pyramid at the End of the World” suffered from that a fair bit. Peter Harness’ commission consisted of repeating all the general military action story styles of “The Zygon Inva/ersion” but in a thematic context so different that they’re all kind of empty. He even brought us back to Turmezistan.

That was the main problem of “The Pyramid at the End of the World.” The psychological terror at the heart of the Monks as a concept didn’t fit the story style and setting of the international military thriller. Other than that, Harness understood their core concepts very well.

With “The Empress of Mars,” we really get into the brilliance of this season. Mark Gatiss told a simple fable of the immoral, criminal, petty, chauvinist, cruel, hateful nature of the too-often romanticized British Empire. Not a word or even an image was wasted (even if Friday kind of disappeared from the story in the last act and he just gave up on integrating Nardole into the story).

I'm kind of glad Mark Gatiss will probably never get to play the Doctor
officially, but he's already made a significant historic contribution to
the franchise in so many different ways. His work has only improved
as his time with Doctor Who has gone on.

He did it while expanding the culture of the Ice Warriors in creative and fruitful directions, so future writers have plenty of new places to take these creatures so deeply embedded in Doctor Who. This and “Sleep No More” were his most creative and ambitious stories.

Whether or not he writes for Doctor Who in the future, his best work is probably in front of him, and that’s fantastic.

“The Pilot” was of similar quality – Steven Moffat can write tightly-structured, thematically-deep, characterization-rich companion introduction stories in his sleep by now.

“Eaters of Light” is the best of the stories of A- rank because it was the story that best-balanced the TARDIS team of the Doctor, Bill, and Nardole in an everyday setting. It was also another stellar contribution to the general theme of this season, Doctor Who’s rejection of Brexit morality.

Like “Empress of Mars,” “Eaters of Light” was fundamentally about the rejection of militarism, imperialism, and nationalism to embrace a plural society whose powers are stronger for their diversity and mutual respect.

Its only real flaw was that the story structure of splitting the main cast up to explore the world efficiently through parallel adventures doesn’t have room to breathe in a single 45 minute episode. It was well-suited to the classic series, where stories were 100-150 minutes long. But now, it’s too rushed.

"Oxygen" was one of the few stories this year to make good use of
the three-person TARDIS team, involving Nardole significantly in
the action as well as Bill. I think a lot of Doctor Who writers don't
have the skill to weave a TARDIS crew of more than two people
into a story effectively, simply because most of the show has
featured only a two-person TARDIS crew. Future writers of a
three-person main case should study this episode, "Eaters of Light,"
this season's finale, and the Pond family era.

“Oxygen” is a grade above because its story was perfectly in tune with the possibilities of the 45 minute episode. It was a simple setting – a base under siege – which the Doctor and Bill explored in a clear linear order, where each event revealed more about the central mystery of the story.

It carried another aspect of the anti-Brexit political message of this year’s Doctor Who with an intensely punk fire – a world that opens everything to be bought and sold as a commodity robs all dignity from people’s lives. Their own existences are only as good as their short-term profit margins – we aren’t lives, but assets to be managed or replaced.

“Extremis” was the only part of the Monks Trilogy that carried off its core themes and ideas without a hitch, because the person who conceived it is also the one who wrote it. Steven Moffat’s most ambitious story perfectly designed and executed.

“Thin Ice” was the clearest and best-executed story that carried Doctor Who’s opposition to Brexit ideology. It firmly punctured the Brexit myth that British isolation was a time of cultural, moral, and political greatness.

Bill visits a world where a petty, self-absorbed racist aristocrat has become an energy industry oligarch by enslaving an alien creature. Here’s a story where poor orphan children, a black lesbian, and an anarchist professor overthrow a repressive business leader and steal his fortune.

Most of the time in "The Doctor Falls," John Simm's Master is part of
the storyline focussing on that character. But it made for a fantastic
moment when he stepped into Bill's storyline to show, univocally,
what a wretched monster the Master is. His taunting her was a
collision that showed the high stakes and radical shift the current
Master was undergoing.

The finale was the pinnacle of this season’s success, however. “World Enough and Time” was a perfectly-made story that assembled a complex script built on a brilliant scientific conceit. Its time dilation narrative hook returned to the 54-year-old mandate of Doctor Who for popular children’s science education.

Meanwhile, that hook was also the lynchpin in a terrifying story of cybernetic body horror – the haunted hospital of living monstrosities, perversions of humanity, and manipulative villains in disguise.

But “The Doctor Falls” was where everything came together with such wonderful perfection.

Its three core stories – Nardole integrating with the Mondasian community, Bill adjusting to her existence as a mutilated Cyberman, and the Master’s ethical redemption – played in parallel with perfect balance. All the performances were at their A-game, perfectly fitting what was necessary for each of their central moments.

Pearl Mackie played her bombast at the epic scale it required – and Rachel Talalay shot it perfectly, cutting between Pearl and Cyber-Bill at just the right moments to maximize her story’s power. But Michelle Gomez gave the best performance of all, because of the subtlety and complexity of her own performance.

In the whole history of the Master's character, from 1971 to today,
46 years later, Michelle Gomez was the most epochal.

Pay close attention to her face and speech in the final confrontation between the Doctor and the two Masters. It tells you all you need to know about how radically the Master has transformed, all in the smallest details of facial expression and voice.

Ultimately, it was a tale of redemption, which is a narrative central to Doctor Who – there can always be a better way forward, even when there isn’t. There’s no better way to have ended the Capaldi years.

So this Xmas is going to have a lot to live up to.
• • •
How does all this stand up to previous Capaldi seasons? His second year was probably the most problematic. Several stories were excellent, particularly “The Zygon Inva/ersion” and “Face the Raven.”

“Heaven Sent” was a revolution for the show, a moment where Steven Moffat brought such talent and concentration to a story that it put an episode of Doctor Who on the same level as the best works of Philip K Dick or Ursula LeGuin.

But Capaldi’s second year suffered from Toby Whithouse’s worst (and now second-worst) script. Plus, there was a lack of thematic unity that led to a kind of scattershot unfolding.

At this point, the arc from "The Doctor Falls" to the Xmas Special is a
serious contender for the best regeneration story in the history of
Doctor Who. If you're going to go out, leave them wanting more.
Even after eight years.

Ashildir’s story was closest to supplying the unity that contemporary Doctor Who seasons need, but it often danced around the potential of her character, staying ultimately at a very superficial level.

The deepest she could explore her isolation was in the joke of naming herself Me, a few scenes of crying in “The Woman Who Lived,” and some bemused indifference in “Hell Bent.” It wasn’t due to Maisie Williams’ performance – she did very well with writing that had trouble grappling with the real existential depth of immortality’s horror.

“Heaven Sent” is where you go for that horror. But the season overall was a grab-bag of mostly disconnected stories with a few ideas – Clara’s recklessness, the experience of immortality – that recurred now and then. Would have been a brilliant construction in the classic era, or even the Davies years. But Moffat has raised the standards on season arcs too high for us to stay with this.

Capaldi’s first year was the tightest story – something of every episode contributed to developing the Clara-Danny love story and the Doctor’s role in it. Its conclusion in “Dark Water” and “Death in Heaven” was beautiful in its power.

But the season itself was so tightly bound to that story, even stories that had little to do with it like “Flatline” found themselves shoehorned in. So there are benefits and problems to that approach.

When it's all over, but not quite yet.

Where does the Capaldi era break down? What was the best season? Well, I can give two answers. One is just with math. Let’s count the number of A-level stories in each season and see what they are as a percentage of the whole.

I’m calculating Capaldi Year One simply as the main Fall run from “Deep Breath” to “Death in Heaven,” counting “Dark Water” and “Death in Heaven” as a single story. Both the Xmas specials “Last Christmas” and “The Husbands of River Song” are part of Capaldi Year Two because they serve as prologue and epilogue to that season’s main run.

Year Three is as I listed above, with a caveat that its score would change depending on the upcoming regeneration story. So the scores.

Year One: 7/11 64%
Year Two: 5/10 50%
Year Three: 8/13 62%

What’s my second answer? It’s about progress. How does each season innovate in what Doctor Who can do? Frankly, I think Capaldi Year Three did the most.

The show developed a strong, principled aesthetic and ethical response to the explosion of Brexit nationalism. In the Monks Trilogy, Moffat crafted his most ambitious piece of writing in a career in which he’s refused to stop pushing himself creatively (even if it did fall flat at the ending).

This season also completely rejuvenated and transformed the character of the Master, so that now the character will be defined by its pre-Gomez and post-Gomez nature. A snarling, cackling villain has now become a nuanced parallel to the Doctor’s own complexity.

That’s what we want Doctor Who (and all our storytelling) to do, right? Spin me a narrative that I haven’t quite heard before.

That’s Certainly a Lot of Composing, Composing, 07/07/2017

I had to take yesterday off from the blog because I had to hit the emergency room Tuesday night to deal with an injury. It was nothing serious – I still have all my limbs, organs, and brain cells.

I’m missing some skin on my ankle, though. Thanks to the GF and my GP, that wound is now covered by a bandage that I actually know how to change myself. This is already more practical medical knowledge than I’ve ever had before.

Getting ready to close another era of Doctor Who with my first scheme
to make a little cash from it.

One good thing about having to sit in an emergency room for four hours is that I got a lot of reading done. So I have a bunch more blog entries to work through.

I also owe my Doctor Who analysis readers a rankings post. I’ll prepare that over the weekend, though I’m having trouble figuring out the best breakdown. I can rank them according to pure quality of story or their contribution to the ethical theme of the season, and I think both would be useful. But the lists would end up looking very different.

It’s also tough to figure out the best way to deal with the Monks Trilogy in the rankings. It’s a three episode story, but each episode is handled by a different writer and has such wildly varying quality that we’re best to treat it as three stories.

There are two ways I could go on both these issues, which make me think that this is the sort of thing to start talking about on Patreon over the weekend when I start promoting my Capaldi Era book. I choose one of each to put on the blog, and leave the alternative for the book.

As part of that work on Doctor Who, I’ve actually connected with some folks who are preparing a pretty substantial fanfic / media project. More news about this as the details firm up over the next year. But it’s going to be quite a lot of fun.

No, he's not that kind of founder.

I also published my first long-form blog post as part of my work with a young marketing firm. The Founder won’t mind that I linked it on my own blog in a Composing post because he specializes in SEO and this is how that whole process works.

I’ll be promoting these communications / marketing posts with a few key influencers I know. It’s a project that I think will let me contribute to the discussions of professional communications and marketing in a way I’m well-suited for – philosophical analysis of trends in online marketing, communications, and new media technology.

Long-term, I think my work with Rosaline Digital Marketing could give me the background to become a kind of in-house futurist. Yes, I know that sounds horrifyingly pretentious. I’m simply speaking here about branding, developing an approach to marketing and communications planning that sees the weaknesses of conventional wisdom by the time it becomes conventional.

All of this is very provisional planning, new writing ventures that have come up lately. It’s quite a few hats to wear, in addition to my work as a teacher, filmmaker, and political philosopher. But there are all enough common themes that, as all these ongoing projects come together, you can see the singular nature of all my work, its core unity.

Typical of most of my projects. I can’t tell you what it’s really about until it’s over.

A Trustworthy Protector I: The Paradox of Government, Research Time, 05/07/2017

After reading through a bunch of The Federalist Papers, I thought I’d grab a few foundational texts of new liberalism again. I think I have a few posts (and beyond, depending on what writing project you’re talking about) in me about Milton Friedman.

Immediately speaking, I’m comparing and contrasting Friedman and his ideas to Friedrich Hayek’s work. I had a historical / anthropological look at Friedman’s major popular work, Capitalism and Freedom. Putting it next to Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, I can say that Friedman does come off as the better thinker.

That's not exactly a difficult achievement, though. I could go into the many fallacies Hayek commits in his analyses of how government, economy, and freedom relate to each other. But I’ve already explored a bunch of them.

I'd wager that you could call Milton Friedman a philosopher. He was
never part of that discipline in the academy, but he was a
fundamental thinker, able to arrive at the most important questions
to ask.

Just start with this series of old posts for a good refresher, then click on the “Friedrich Hayek” tag and explore wherever you feel. This blogging project is almost four years old, and there’s plenty of material to wander around.

Consider the most egregious, ridiculous thing Hayek said in The Road to Serfdom. He said that the real problem with Hitler’s government was that they took complete state control over the economy, and that Nazi racism was largely immaterial to their politics, a mere piece of propaganda to justify their expansion of state power.

I could almost appeal to their positionalities to find that blind spot. Hayek grew up in an upper-class Austrian social network, and left continental Europe long before the rise of Nazism for Britain. So he would have always been blind to racism, and never saw the beginning of Nazi political racism in the German-speaking world.

You won’t find a guy named Milton Friedman making that mistake.

So I’d like to start my extended look at Friedman’s popular work with a gesture of kindness. He’s vilified by much of the left today – for some pretty good reasons. He was one of the pivotal intellectuals of the Mt Pelerin think tanks that have shredded social democracy as a set of ideals for governing in the West.

As a social democrat, I’m not a fan of that, by far. But I do agree with Friedman about a very abstract form of a single, foundational political principle.

The essential purpose of government is to protect people’s freedom. 

Capitalism and Freedom is a popular work, but written with considerable philosophical thoughtfulness. His goal was to communicate the core of his political ideas to a wide audience, so he had to write accessibly and think clearly about the foundational principles of this thought.

All too often, academics dismiss popularly-aimed works as beneath the stature of a researcher – our purpose should be writing only for refined minds. But that all too often results in over-technical, increasingly specialized, solipsistic research and communication networks.

That communicative isolation makes most academics’ work fleeting and impotent.

Friedman focusses the central ideas of all his research, writing, and thinking down to a simple principle that is easy to understand. The kind of principle that any reasonably educated person – as in, they paid attention in high school and have a little college – could grasp and reflect on.

Consider the idea that government’s essential purpose is to protect people’s freedom. Now consider the idea that the biggest threat to people’s freedom is the concentration of immense police, military, and economic power.

That’s why Friedman opposes the expansion of government in things like welfare state agencies. What bigger concentration of power appears in a person’s daily life than the state itself?

So we have a paradox of government. We need a state to protect our freedom, but the more powers we give to our state government, the greater the threat that our own protector is to us.

Think about it. I will over the next few days. . . . To Be Continued

When Federal Government Was Built to Protect the People, Research Time, 04/07/2017

Here's the thing that seriously bugs me when I read The Federalist Papers in the 21st century. Those who most loudly claim fealty to the founders of the United States are in fact the ones who betray most blatantly their vision for how the country’s government should work.

I’m talking about the founders’ philosophical vision for the country in the second constitution, the one they’re still running the US government on.

Happy July 4 to any readers in America. It'll always be a land of
possibility and hope.

Knowing what I’ve learned over the last few years about the libertarian right over the last few years, I think I can make a few general statements. At least I can make some general statements about the intensely anti-Obama, pro-Republican libertarian right.

One. They genuinely believe that the federal government has very few politically and ethically legitimate rights against them, that most laws, taxes, and domestic government departments are immoral because they impinge on individual people’s freedom.

Its most philosophically consistent form is the writing of Robert Nozick. Its most extreme political form is the anti-government militias of people like Amon Bundy, who carry out semi-competent occupations of federal nature reserve. Its most deranged extreme political form is the sovereign citizen movement.

Two. Most also fall in line with the ‘states’ rights’ message from right-wing organizations. This seems to be an incidental detail, but reading Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, you see how important it is.

Hamilton’s argument for having a strong federal government was to protect each individual American.* The main sources of tyranny was in the governments of individual states.

They all know the helicopters are looking at them. He's doing it to
flaunt his power. He knows that in today's America, he can do this,
be roasted in social media, and get away with it.

* Yes, he’s only talking about white people. Bracket this for now, just as we do with every other Western political theorist who was only ever talking about white people. Say citizen just as far as understanding the concept goes. Racial justice would bring Hamilton’s country in line with Hamilton’s ideas.

Governors would use their powers to seek corrupt privileges while denying their citizens even a functioning government. State legislatures would deny huge swaths of their citizens the ability to vote or even get basic services. Among other everyday injustices.

A strong federal government was required to defend the rights of citizens from these abuses, and maintain the political and social equality of all citizens across all the states.

Today, so many think of centralizing power in a large federal government as dangerous to individual liberty and freedom. And certainly quite a few federal powers can do a lot to take away people’s liberty and freedom.

But the most dangerous abusers of government power were the local governments, the petty tinpots.

The Highest Nobility Is Our Virtue, Doctor Who: The Doctor Falls, Reviews, 02/07/2017

How much is going on in “The Doctor Falls,” really? Was I right to save the entire entry on this two-part story for the second week? Honestly, I think I was.

Was this also a scheme to boost a little visibility on Patreon once I start promoting my upcoming book of Capaldi Doctor Who essays? Honestly, I’ll openly tell you that of course it is.

The next few months of 2017, leading up to Peter Capaldi’s actual regeneration in the Xmas Special, will see me actually paying some attention to my Patreon page. I’ll be posting old Doctor Who philosophical reviews a couple of times each week, just to encourage some attention, and driving some social media attention to the page as well.

"The Doctor Falls" provides the narrative gravity of the beginning of a
(21st century Doctor Who style of a) regeneration story by bringing
powerful ideas out of a small setting. The Doctor's greatest nobility is
in the utterly innocuous, a setting without spectacle. Not the whole
Earth at risk, but just a small community of people.

Each of these old posts will be reposted through my Facebook fan page, and through Patreon too. The goal will be attracting a larger audience than my current small set of patrons to fund a larger project – re-editing the old essays, expanding some ideas, and ultimately launching my own book on Capaldi-era Doctor Who.

What more significant place to splash the first step of that promotional campaign than in my review of “World Enough and Time,” and “The Doctor Falls.”

The Weight of the Occasion

“The Doctor Falls,” as an episode of Doctor Who, was written so carefully that almost every line was maximally portentous. Steven Moffat has written eleven season finales or stories with the same symbolic importance.* What do I mean here, when I talk about the symbolic importance of a story.

* I'm counting “A Good Man Goes to War,” “Angels Take Manhattan,” all three “X of the Doctor” stories, and “The Husbands of River Song,” as having the same symbolic importance as a season finale. You’ll see why when I answer the above question.

Let’s start from a common theme that tends to occur in a lot of Doctor Who stories these days. Quite often – but especially so under Moffat’s tenure as creative director and in his stories – 21st century Doctor Who stories tend to include ethics statements for the character.

There's no more epic, intense moment in Doctor Who like a regeneration
story. It's when the entire show literally transforms.

There’ll be some moment in the story where the Doctor or some other character will make a big, powerful statement, highlighted by the narrative and the cinematic emphasis,** about why the Doctor does what he does.

** Big, rousing theme music. An arresting change in camera technique, often focussing more on close-ups to showcase emotionally evocative and powerful performances. Usually occurs at a turning point or a climax in the narrative.

This statement may be in the form of a speech, or an event. Here, it reiterates the point that Moffat made in “Time of the Doctor,” that you take a stand to protect people because the gesture of kindness itself justifies who you are. To be fundamentally kind is to put yourself entirely on the line to protect innocent people under siege.

An Improved Second Draft

Matt Smith’s regeneration story was a wonderfully epic statement of that theme, though the experimental format of “Time of the Doctor” kind of obscured the statement itself.

The extended time frame of that story – an entire community of people growing around the Doctor for centuries as he protected them from an intergalactic siege – kept us from building an emotional connection with any characters.

“The Doctor Falls,” makes, as well as excellent

SPOILERS!!

I loved the madness of the structural complexity that Steven Moffat
achieved in "Time of the Doctor," but I did find that it made the
Doctor into more of a fairy-tale himself than a character. That
fit the imagery Moffat was bringing to the Matt Smith era, but
it also showed a limit of where those images could work.

an excellent contrast. Where “Time of the Doctor” revelled in its jerking, piecemeal, patchwork of a narrative, “The Doctor Falls” keeps things simple. There’s one community, and we’re in it for a mere few weeks. We’re introduced to this community first, a whimsical solar farm under regular siege from the primitive Cyber army.

The cast from “World Enough and Time” breaks into this story and change everything. It’s an excellent example of one type of story – a rural horror story with a few BBC-copyright elements – being smashed into by a crew of sci-fi immortals.

We’re allowed to focus on a few key characters of this rural horror story, the girl Alit and the community matriarch Hazran. We get to know them well enough as an hour-long story can for a couple of supporting characters.

But they carry through to the end of the story, and provide a grace point for Nardole leaving the TARDIS crew. It’s a nice return to the old Doctor Who tradition of companions leaving for a new home, as does Bill.

We follow the same five main characters through the episode. Nardole grows closer to the community. Bill comes to grips with her cybernetic zombification. The Doctor and the Masters battle over whether the villain will ultimately turn.

What I loved best about Michelle Gomez's Master was the stealthy
coldness she kept under her quirky, smirking social personality.

Master of Her Domain

I saw some initial reviews of the episode that called it, “the battle for Missy’s soul.” I mean, that rather missed the point of who Missy actually is. Michelle Gomez and John Simm aren’t playing different characters – they are both the same person.

This is why I think it was a mistake to keep referring to Gomez’s Master as Missy. It implies that she’s actually someone other than the Master. It was brilliant move introduce so casually transgender regeneration.*** It was typical to undercut it with the irreverent playfulness of a Steven Moffat who’s so overjoyed with his own jokes that he’ll throw out exactly the wrong number too many.

*** And tease it in a so-not-really-a-throwaway line.

Understanding the true nature of the Master’s storyline in this episode means knowing all the way through that John Simm is Michelle Gomez for the same reason David Bradley is Peter Capaldi. Gomez and Simm are the Master.

This is a battle, of sorts, between the Doctor and the Master over what kind of person the Master will eventually be. It’s the story of a man seeing his own future and doing everything he can to reject it, and the older one has a few last doubts that this change in life is the right one.

John Simm's Master was – aside from being the only credible one
available – the best contrast for Gomez's most empathetic Master
ever. He was, of all of the major Masters, the one more thoroughly
consumed with hate and rage.

It’s an absolutely beautiful Time Lord story to tell, but one that you could never play with the Doctor. There’s been a constancy to the Doctor pretty much since the Daleks, which prevents you from thinking about the character like this.

For one thing, we see so much of the Doctor as a character – it’s their show, after all – that you don’t really get a big enough gap in our knowledge of him to get such a radical break as Simm to Gomez. Simm’s Master is literally from a totally different era – the Davies era.

Simm’s Master is solidly a Davies creation as well. That frenetic, feverish energy – the sheer giddy delight in the possibilities of the universe.**** Gomez’s Master is speaking of Davies just as much as she is of Simm when she whispers how she so loved the flaming power of being him.*****

**** Contrasting Moffat’s era to Davies’, especially being able to take in the entire Moffat era in memory, truly does show how very rooted in the theatrical gay aesthetic the previous era was.

*****Clearly, Moffat also knows that theatrical aesthetic just as well as Davies. He can see it – he just can’t write it.

This is a fitting end to Gomez's Master. Of course, as soon as two
Masters got together, it could only end with the two betraying
each other at the same moment. Betraying their ostensible allies
is an essential part of the Master's character. But maybe not
anymore.

Gomez’s Master is a cerebral eccentric, a seether. The differences between Gomez and Simm as characters power their story. It’s a story that still, despite the younger man’s intentions, profoundly transformed the Master as a character.

Don’t think that “You won’t regenerate” line is at all sincere. Doctor Who will technobabble its way to a new Master in a few years, whenever Chibnall or some future writer thinks of a good story for her. No, this is the end of Gomez’s Master, and Moffat has given the next writers of Doctor Who a wonderful gift.

What Is a Hero?

Gomez’s Master ended in a moment of genuine goodness – she was at the beginning of an act of kindness, of becoming genuinely heroic. She was already there, and it was utterly justified because she did do it without recognition, as the ethical standard of her season arc said.

To be good without any prospect of recognition or reward is an act of the supreme virtue – kindness. That’s exactly what the Doctor says as the two Masters are leaving the village. Kindness is a good life in itself because of the nobility of kindness – it’s a life without ulterior motive, at its most profound.

You can tell lies, have some hidden motives, because these are petty hypocrisies. It is most profoundly noble to do what you can for others in need with no expectation of your own aggrandizement because you don’t need reputation for the sake of your own self-worth.

The Xmas Special is clearly going to be extremely entertaining, and
the collision of these two Doctors will make for remarkable new
story possibilities. It'll probably be the happiest regeneration
story that we've ever gotten since at least John Hurt's Doctor.

The Doctor has always been this kind of character – pretty much since the second-last episode of “The Daleks.” That’s why such a complex multiple-Doctor story as what the Master went through here ever happen? No matter what can happen with a multiple-Doctor story, the Doctor never stops being a decent person.

The Master has chosen that kind of nobility. From now on, she can no longer be a villain because she has been kind. The Master always had kind of a limited act before now – the same kind of cartoonish villainy Terrance Dicks and Barry Letts thought of. Doctor Who’s very own scenery-chewing Snidely Whiplash.

Overcomplicated evil schemes, the quest for power over the universe, the ruthless embrace of destruction, the gloating obsession with the Doctor. It was as reliable as Daleks shouting “Exterminate!” while they conquer and destroy.

The Master is something different now. An ex-villain in Doctor Who. Someone who has the capacity to commit horrifying acts, who has a history of doing so, but has now turned against it.

The next Master doesn’t have to be a villain. She can be a chaotic, devious sage. A demented and depressed blend of Kali and St. Francis of Assisi. A mad inventor tearing worlds apart in absent-minded enthusiasm. A dedicated revolutionary in too much love with her own violent zealotry.

Michelle Gomez is probably the most significant actor to play the
Master in the character's entire history, simply for incubating so much
more possibility for the character than has ever existed before.

All those are possible directions for the Master’s character that I could think of in a minute’s thinking three hours after seeing where Moffat’s story and Gomez’s performance took her in “The Doctor Falls.” Chris Chibnall is being handed a beautiful present to play with in his era – a Master with more potential than the character’s ever had!

The Weight of the World

Season finales, companion departures, and regenerations are stories that, in the 21st century era of Doctor Who, are moments where the entire ethic of Doctor Who as a show and the Doctor as a character are summed up.

That format gets a slightly different mix every time, depending on what kind of event is the primary reason to maximize symbolic weight. Most sensibly, symbolic power gets its maximum hit from regenerations or companion departures.

The entire show has anchored itself around these characters, so the departure of a lead actor requires a moment of thematic summation. Their story climaxes, giving us the perfect moment to hear what Doctor Who is for this moment, for this companion, for this Doctor.

I could say many wonderful things about Bill. Pearl Mackie is
brilliant when she plays maximum soul-shattering emotional
intensity. Those moments were essential to Bill's story arc
throughout the season. Her transformation into an interstellar
proteus alongside a same-sex life partner already sounds like
the most awesome ending for a companion in the history of
Doctor Who. More about this arc in the book version, I think.
Bill's transformations will be the focus of my "World Enough
and Time" essay.

It wasn’t always this way. But our era of television has viewers that watch it with a special eye toward thematic resonance and meaning. Television literacy understands ideas and symbols with the same ease as plot, performance, and music. We’re pretty much all critics now, in the very good sense of the term.

What does the Doctor say? Not just those words about kindness, but a very existentialist version of them. Where you stand is also where you fall. Stake the possibility of your life or death on one moment.

What kind of person will you be in that moment when you face the possibility of death? That’s the core question of nobility. What is the most impressive and awesome character to embrace at such a critical moment?

Such a character is most inspirational to us ethically – in terms of our virtues – what makes us the best kind of people we can be. What kind of character uses all of humanity’s capacities in their optimal arrangement?

The kind person. That’s the entire ethical message of Doctor Who.
• • •
Read the full set of essays on this year's season of Doctor Who.
The Pilot / The Girl With the Star in Her Eye
Smile
Thin Ice
Knock Knock
Oxygen
Extremis
The Pyramid at the End of the World (1)
The Pyramid at the End of the World (2)
The Lie of the Land
The Monks Trilogy
Empress of Mars
Eaters of Light

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.

A Disturbing Example of Eternal Recurrence, Research Time, 28/06/2017

I’m making a joke with this title, but it does genuinely allude to a curious feeling I kept getting as I read The Federalist Papers. Alexander Hamilton will describe a major national debate that was gripping the country in the 1780s.

And it will be pretty much the same ideas tearing at the country as Americans face today. I have a feeling this idea will appear somewhere in the Utopias manuscript – How can we believe in progress if we can’t even solve problems with literally centuries of effort?

Mike Pence is experiencing an odd recurrence of his own. I don't
know how meaningful this coincidence is, but I find it funny. Pence
once represented Indiana's 2nd Congressional district, the same as
Earl Landgrebe in the early 1970s, one of the most dedicated and
slavish Nixon loyalists.

I don't want to lean too much on the old idea that eternal recurrence is a straight-ahead ontological principle either. There’s too much about what we know of reality itself – I’m talking actual cosmological and physical knowledge – for me to say that cyclical time is the truth.

I don’t mean the idea that cyclical time is true, like a fact. I mean, the idea of cyclical time being the truth, a fundamental definitive aspect of a whole way of understanding the world. Let’s leave that stuff.

If Nietzsche is an inspiration for Utopias, it’s in how he tells us what real social progress amounts to. His story of the donkey, lion, and child is the model. A donkey accepts his lot and lumbers along though life. A lion throws off his shackles in rage. A child looks around those ruins and builds a new world.

We want to recognize that we can fix the injustice in our world, not just labour under it in hopelessness. You have the power to overthrow an unjust culture and society, but to lock down your victory, you need to build a new culture together.

American history can make you seriously pessimistic about this power. Despite centuries of activism, no one can even manage to throw off the shackles of racism. They only overthrow one version to see it replaced. America isn’t a slave society, but they went through nearly a century of Jim Crow and instituted mass incarceration.

Can we imagine for ourselves a force so
powerful in our souls that we can throw off
the burdens of the cosmos itself? Must we
always be donkeys before the cosmic
insignificance of humanity?

The return of injustice happens when people can’t or won’t build a culture of justice.

Specifically, what freaks me out in this instance of Hamilton’s wisdom? He describes the argument, as Americans were fighting over the country’s new constitution, against the federal government having strong taxation powers. It’s the same libertarian argument I hear so often today against government taxation powers.

Not the consistent, nuanced, and complex libertarian argument you’ll see coming from think tank philosophers. I’m talking about the mass media talking point – which drives so many ordinary folks to the voting booth and the public squares – that the federal government must be starved of taxes.

The argument: Federal government powers will inevitably be abused, used to oppress people instead of set them free. Even if the federal government avoids corruption by authoritarians or thieves, it will still oppress people by crushing local cultures and individual citizens under a single ideology and identity for all Americans.

In the 1780s, opponents of a strong federal government made an argument of cultural diversity. Not cultural diversity with our divisions today – differences of religion, ethnicity, sexuality, gender. Back then, it was the cultural diversity of the peoples who composed the Thirteen.

Rhode Island, Maryland, New Jersey, and all the others. These were each distinct societies, deserving of their independence from the homogenizing identity of “America.”

Today, we call it state’s rights. Am I onto something?