We’re back with a landmine of an episode! (Get it? No, you’re right, it was bad. I feel bad.)
Recap
A man named John Francis Vater (Joe Anderson) is making his way home out of a war zone to see his daughter Splice (Caoilinn Springhall), but the ambulance (Susan Twist) in the area notices that he’s temporarily blinded and determines that his recovery rate is too slow—it terminates and compresses his body into a cylinder. The Doctor and Ruby land on this world, called Kastarion 3, and the Doctor wanders out first, accidentally stepping on a landmine. He cannot move, lest he set the thing off, and Ruby has to help him shift his weight by handing him Vater’s cylinder. They sing to one another to distract from how terrifying the ordeal is, and the Doctor manages to shift his weight a little with the cylinder in hand.
Back at the camp, Mundy Flynn (Varada Sethu) is helping to look after Splice, one of the medics in the army. She asks Canterbury James Olliphant (Bhav Joshi) to switch shifts with her—Olliphant clearly has a crush on her and Mundy hasn’t entirely figured that out. When Splice runs out to look for her father, she hears his voice, generated by an AI projection of her father connected to the cylinder that the Doctor is holding, and almost sets off the mine. Mundy arrives and the Doctor begins to put together what’s going on here. The equipment for the war is manufactured by Villengard, the biggest supplier of arms in the universe, and the company has parameters in place that ensure enough casualties to continue conflicts so they keep making money. He asks Mundy who they’re fighting and she tells him there are creatures in the mud or the fog, that they’ve been attacking since the Anglican soldiers landed. The Doctor informs her that there is no war, and her people are fighting shadows, which is exactly what the Villengard algorithm wants them to do.
The ambulance arrives and wants to treat the Doctor, meaning it will likely set off the mine, but the Doctor tells Mundy to scan him—if he dies in this explosion there will be enough energy to take half the planet with it. In order to stop the ambulance, Mundy tells Ruby to shoot her. While they’re busy arguing over logistics, Olliphant shoots Ruby, believing her to be a threat to Mundy. The ambulance scans Ruby, finding all sorts of information on her, but it cannot tell them who her parents are. It also won’t treat her because she isn’t insured. In the panic to try and stop the system Munday and Olliphant start talking about their feeling for each other, but Olliphant is killed by the ambulance—his AI has a message for Mundy that it’s okay that she didn’t love him, even though he loved her.
The Doctor tells the AI version of Vater to remember the part of him that’s a dad, and to go into the system to stop all of this. The ambulance claims to have deleted him, but Vater resurges, becoming a virus that destroys the algorithm, saving the planet. After a moment looking out at the planet, the Doctor tells Ruby it’s time to go because they’ve seen enough and human lifespans are too short to stand around.
Commentary
For some folks, I’m sure that this is the breath of seriousness they were hoping for in the wake of two very goofy opening episodes. But when I’m watching, what I see is a redux of Davies’ favorite mechanisms and tropes followed by a redux of Steven Moffat’s favorites. And I’m a little worried for it, knowing that we’re only getting one episode written by new writers (that’s episode six, a few weeks off yet).
That doesn’t mean there’s nothing good in this episode because Moffat’s strengths on encapsulated Who stories have created some of the best the show has ever seen: “Blink,” “Silence in the Library/Forests of the Dead,” “The Girl in the Fireplace”… There are things that make these entries sharp, snappy, and plain good television—tense plot mechanics, high key emotions, occasionally gorgeous use of repetition (I did punch the air at the reuse of “everywhere’s a beach eventually”).
One of those strengths is giving the lead actor(s) a chance to showcase their extreme talent, and Ncuti Gatwa took that opportunity with both hands and wrestled it into a marble flipping sculpture with this episode. It’s a great challenge for an actor, having to showcase all that visceral emotion while rooted to the spot, and he was ready for it. Absolutely gorgeous.
Having said that, this is literally the “The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances” condensed into a shorter format. It’s using the story to highlight different things, which I appreciate—war profiteering, blind religious obedience, capitalism run wild, the myriad problems around medical care, problems with AI—but the beats are the same. The ambulance is messing with people in a war zone; there’s an eerie child, this time looking for daddy instead of mommy (Splice isn’t a gas mask zombie, but she might as well be for how oddly her dialogue is written); the power of being a parent solves the problem and saves the day. They’re good beats, of course, and they still worked on me emotionally, but the recycling is a bit too obvious to miss.
There’s also Moffat’s endless well of romances where a man is sad that a woman doesn’t love him as well or much as he loves her. Which annoyed me enough with Amy and Rory—either leave or ask for what you’re worth, guy, you’ve had years to figure this out—but here it’s particularly egregious and bogged down in TV Problems that should not be an issue in this, the year of our Time Lord 2024.
It’s clear that we’re supposed to feel heartbroken over Olliphant’s message for Mundy because we know that she did care for him: that’s the TV drama plight here. But whether or not you care about that context, it doesn’t change the fact that this man recorded a post-death message to let a woman he loved know that it was okay that he died without her loving him in return—which is massively manipulative and utterly fucked as a choice for a person to make. Why would you leave this weird guilt-trippy aside for her, dude? Suck it up and tell this to her face in life; you don’t wait until after you’re dead to leave this little video note, the universe’s most passive-aggressive Nice Guy epitaph, and get kind thoughts for it.
And it’s extra upsetting because up until then, the romance had been kinda cute? So there’s that ruined by an afterlife WhatsApp message.
These points are a true shame, because when the episode is on, it is gorgeous. The growing bond between the Doctor and Ruby is good stuff, and it’s exciting to see the Doctor be more forthcoming with a companion, not only about history, but about his feelings. The transition from Thirteen to Fourteen to Fifteen can be felt keenly here, this sudden bend toward emotional honesty and a desire to be known now that the Doctor realizes they don’t fully know themselves. That’s where the heart is, and it hits just right every time they find it. More of this, please.
The mystery around Ruby also works better in this episode, I think, because it’s just the right amount of distraction without feeling overwrought and shaping too much of the episode itself. And the little bits and pieces of the Doctor’s past that keep barging in are so moving and also get the mystery balance just right: We’ve had the Doctor talk specifically about being a dad before, but the moment where he talks to Vater’s hologram about what that means, what being a father is, it’s the very first time we’ve seen how much it mattered to him. We have no details and I genuinely hope we never will on that, but we don’t need them—we can find what we need to know in Gatwa’s face.
Also, I love a sci-fi mechanism that requires a character to stay calm—that should get used way more often. Just a note from me, personally.
All of which is to say that there was so much to love about this episode and so much to deride that I’m feeling thoroughly whiplashed. Which generally describes my feelings about most of what Steven Moffat writes, so at least you can say he’s consistent.
Time and Space and Sundry
- The song that the Doctor is singing to calm himself down once he’s stepped on the mine is “The Skye Boat Song,” which was actually rewritten in the 19th century to be about Bonnie Prince Charlie, not originally about him. But the real deep cut of this is that the Second Doctor played this song on his recorder in the serial “The Web of Fear” back in 1968. I am loving the throughline we’re getting now of different Doctors preferring different instruments—Two had the recorder, Twelve had the guitar, Fifteen prefers to use his voice (and a gorgeous one it is, too).
- Vater is German for father, of course. That’s why Darth Vader is kind of a give away.
- Yes, Mundy is played by Varada Sethu, who is playing the new companion next season. And she said via a PR statement that this is the end of Mundy Flynn’s journey, so the question of how she gets onto the TARDIS is still up in the air. We don’t know if she was cast in this episode before or after the choice to bring her on as a companion, and it certainly wouldn’t be the first time someone guest-starred as a different character before starring on the show: Colin Baker was a guard on Gallifrey before he became the Sixth Doctor; Martha Jones made a comment about her cousin dying at the Battle of Canary Wharf to make sense of Freema Agyeman’s first appearance on the show; Peter Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor had an entire lesson attached to bringing back the face of a man from Pompeii that he played in 2008; Karen Gillan was thankfully behind facepaint in that same Pompeii episode, so no one was the wiser when she got cast as Amy Pond.
- The ambulance being played by Susan Twist plays into an unfortunate tendency in Doctor Who to vilify middle-aged and elderly women as nameless figures of menace, and it would be nice if that could lay off for a bit? At least this one wasn’t in Moffat’s usual dressing, a fancy updo and blood red lipstick. (I only accept Missy in that pantheon, the rest can go home.)
- There are moments when the show is so aggressively British that you have to laugh, and Mundy Flynn saying “I’m Anglican,” like it’s this upsetting, powerful thing is definitely one of them. That’s not really going to read the same to anyone outside of the U.K., methinks.
See you next week!
“Vater is German for father, of course. That’s why Darth Vader is kind of a give away.”
Except Lucas didn’t decide to make Vader Luke’s father until after the original movie was made, despite his later revisionist claims. “Darth Vader” was coined as a play on “Dark Invader,” I believe.
I thought this one was amazing, one of Moffat’s best. It’s definitely refreshing after three wacky fairy-tale romps in a row. Given the much-touted budget increase allowing more spectacle and action, it’s a delightful surprise to see an episode taken in a downright minimalist direction (aside from the AR wall projecting the battlefield background), a story designed to compel the hyperactive Doctor to stand absolutely still in one place for half an hour or more, with nearly the entire story taking place in and around that one crater. It’s almost like Moffat wrote this one as a stage play. And it’s a fantastic showcase for Gatwa as an actor.
It’s notable that Susan Twist has had a guest role in almost every episode since “Wild Blue Yonder,” this being her biggest one yet. I’m hearing all sorts of fan speculation that the “twist at the end” alluded to last week is that Susan Twist is playing Susan, the Doctor’s granddaughter, in some capacity. I’m starting to think that RTD decided to cast Susan Twist over and over as a red herring, to make fans speculate about a “Susan twist,” and thus overlook whatever the real mystery is about Ruby and the snow and Mrs. Flood (who was Anita Dobson, not Susan Twist) and all that.
Yes, Moffat does recycle some of his greatest hits — that basically defined his tenure as showrunner — but it’s not really a rehash of “Empty/Dances,” more an inversion of it, because there the nanobots seemed malevolent and the twist was that they were actually from a benevolent, malfunctioning AI ambulance that just needed fixing, whereas here the AI ambulances were genuinely malevolent by design.
That minimalist approach is one of the reasons I really enjoyed this one. It was mostly just a handful of people standing in a crater talking, and I love talky sci-fi.
I have seen this said about Darth Vader several places that I tend to trust but no sources that seem credible…do you have any? I ask as one genuinely curious who has come in the short time I have been here the things you say. That he had six movies dreamed up and loosely planned is what I always thought.
No, that’s revisionist history. The original film was called Episode 1 in early script drafts. It wasn’t until years after its release that Lucas came up with the idea for three prequels and had it retroactively subtitled Episode IV: A New Hope in its theatrical re-release. Also, the plan he eventually formulated called for nine movies, but he waited to do the prequels until the FX tech was up to what he envisioned, and that meant that he retired before he got around to his planned sequel trilogy.
Marvel Comics’s first Star Wars annual had a flashback to a mission that Obi-Wan Kenobi went on with his apprentice Darth Vader and Luke’s father, clearly depicted as two separate people. Lucasfilm approved that story for publication, since at the time, the idea that Vader was the same person as Luke’s father hadn’t been created yet.
hmm see can you give me a reference to the script stuff? Lucas certainly has always said he had the whole saga in his head from the beginning. Also every version of it I saw from childhood on (born 1978) had it labeled episode 4. I would say the comic isn’t great proof as it could have been misdirection.
“Lucas certainly has always said he had the whole saga in his head from the beginning.”
He made that claim in later years, but there is abundant proof to the contrary. Or at least, while he envisioned some form of multi-part series from the beginning, his ideas for its specific story points and characters changed enormously from the original version. https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/The_Star_Wars:_Rough_Draft
“Also every version of it I saw from childhood on (born 1978) had it labeled episode 4.”
It is common knowledge that the “Episode IV: A New Hope” subtitle was only added on its 1981 re-release. The version I saw in its original 1977-8 release was just Star Wars, period.
it is amusing to listen to folks complain about retconning the Star Wars universe, but Lucas did that continuously from birth. but that’s the creative process in a lot of ways, right??
There’s nothing wrong with a creator revising their own work. All creation is a process of trial, error, revision, and refinement that only ends when the work is published, and even then, lots of creators make further changes afterward when they get the chance. (For instance, I’m currently revising the contents of an upcoming collection of my previously published stories, with significant modifications to some of them.)
The problem is only when a creator like George Lucas claims that the revised version of his work is what he intended it to be all along, especially when there’s abundant documentary proof to the contrary.
If the soldiers weren’t fighting anything, how did they get injured? Friendly fire?
Land mines was one way, as we saw. Other than that, drones, and yes friendly fire. I think we were supposed to see that shooting as a “we are here in peace” gesture started the algorithm which started bringing in weapons and then started firing. Once it go going the whole system was self maintaining.
As someone who came in to Dr. Who with it being on Disney plus the retreads didn’t bother me (don’t have access to British television). This was a good episode for reasons above though as an American moderate some of the obvious capitalism is evil stuff rubbed me a little the wrong way. As someone whose bench mark for good WHO is I think the fourth doctor (multicolored scarf) which I remember being high on camp and silly but also interesting and sometimes though provoking – which of the previous seasons would interest me the most?
Honestly, the first season of “New Who”, from 2005, with the 9th Doctor is a good place to start. There were, IIRC, 10 or so episodes, or maybe stories.
“though as an American moderate some of the obvious capitalism is evil stuff rubbed me a little the wrong way.”
Why? Just because capitalism can be used in an evil way (and you can’t deny that it often has been) doesn’t mean it invariably has to be. Indicting the abuse of a thing does not equal indicting the thing itself. And war profiteering has been a fact of history for millennia; it’s disingenuous to believe it wouldn’t continue to exist in the future.
hmm ok good point – except that the lovers of these type of stories and the writers always seem to come off as saying capitalism = evil in these situations. Who is not nuanced in the few I have seen – certainly not the ones I saw on PBS.
Incidentally, one thought that occurred to me repeatedly while watching this was, was there any way the Doctor could’ve been saved by materializing the TARDIS around him but not around the mine? I suppose the problems with that idea are prohibitive. He would’ve had to remotely instruct Ruby in TARDIS operation, and she wouldn’t have the experience to target it precisely enough. And the materialization is probably too slow to outrace the explosion.
Not to mention that the mine turns the victim into the explosive, so if the process started and then the TARDIS materialized around the Doctor, it might be too late to reverse the process and the Doctor would explode and wreck the TARDIS interior, killing Ruby into the bargain.
I suppose that also definitively rules out the possibility of the Doctor surviving by regenerating. Of course, regeneration isn’t magic; it only works if it has time to kick in, so being blown up in an instant would be a sure death for a Time Lord (except the Master, who somehow came back to life after being literally vaporized on-camera in “Planet of Fire” and then being liquefied in the TV movie — but I always figured that was the power of the Source of Traken). But if the Time Lord himself becomes the bomb, that would make it even more of a sure thing.
In Turn Left, the Doctor couldn’t regenerate because he got caught in the fire that killed the Racnoss and either his body was destroyed too badly, or was burned mid-regeneration, I can’t remember which, because Donna wasn’t with him to pull him out and that set off the alternate timeline. So, it certainly has been stated that Time Lords can be destroyed so badly that regeneration is impossible, except if you are The Master, I guess.
I enjoyed it, I liked some of the commentary layered in, but yes I found that Moffatt’s usual issues around men and women got in the way a bit, also it was another love conquers all ending and we had to have the ambulance doing its singsong repetition of something which seems to be another Moffatt thing that I just find irritating. It was creepy in the Empty Child but in Silence in the Library and the many other times it just becomes a noise. (And I hate fish fingers and custard because it marked the point where the show which had always been for children, was actually written childishly, but also because the point of that too long scene was to show the Doctor had changed and had new tastebuds, but now he carries this stuff around with him like a long tail.)
But, it was quite tense, and I loved the idea that the Doctor’s high dimensional status would cause a much bigger bang was a brilliant way to make the Doctor’s presence important to the story. Gatwa and Gibson are fantastic. Everyone seemed to be able to handle Moffatt’s voice in the script so that it didn’t overcome their performances, which happened a lot during the Eleventh Doctor era. You could hear Moffatt’s usual structures in there, but the way they were delivered made it feel like the characters were saying the words as they broke the usual rhythms. Moffatt always does well with a high concept story, it tends to be the meat and potatoes stories that he struggles with, so having him drop in is nice even if it is a rerun of greatest hits. When RTD and Moffatt say this is the same show it always was, they aren’t kidding.
I like the general message and it’s a fun fifty minutes but like many Moffatt plots it does fall apart a bit if you think too hard about the logic of it – we’re supposed to assume I guess that the army does not have anyone capable of running instrumentation themselves, so they rely on Villengard’s equipment which is why they don’t pick up on there being no lifeforms (and yet they have a name for the lifeforms there’s no evidence for)? Who put out the landmines? Why wouldn’t the Anglicans have a map of where they were? All questions that don’t matter in the moment, but do nag when you digest the story.
On the downside, I also felt like Ruby and the Doctor come across as fairly generic takes on the characters beyond throwing in a bit of music which seems to be the big thread, so I take back what I said in another post about Wild Blue Yonder not connecting up to this new series. Amy or Rose could just as easily have been delivering Ruby’s lines, with the exception of “babes”, and there was no inflection that told us this is the Fifteenth Doctor, not the Ninth, Tenth or Twelfth.
Early stories with a new Doctor are often fairly “generic,” since they were often written for the previous Doctor, and it’s only the new actor’s personality that distinguishes it. That’s really kind of the point of Doctor Who — the Doctor is a showcase for charismatic actors, putting their own individual stamps on a role whose fundamentals are consistent. Not unlike how great stage actors seek to show the world their individual interpretations of Hamlet.
“(and yet they have a name for the lifeforms there’s no evidence for)?”
They’re on the planet Kastarion 3 and they call their alleged enemy the Kastarions. Seems self-explanatory.
If they have drone ambulances and drones that clear the smoke, presumably they have drone minelayers, surveyors, etc., all run by the Villengard Battle Computer. The soldiers are just cogs in the machine, playing their part like all the other drones.
Another example of this are Martians. There is no evidence they exist but we have decided that is what creatures from Mars should be called.
I guess you’re right (and I guess I didn’t pay much heed to the planet’s name), but the name Martian is a speculation from a non-space faring race. Wouldn’t culture have shifted in the millennia that have passed and multiple alien contacts we’ve had in this era? It feels a very twentieth century response.
No, it seems like a natural default to refer to the natives of “Place” as “Placeans” if you don’t have anything else to call them. People from Libya are Libyans, people from California are Californians, etc. Why not? It’s also common enough in Doctor Who — people from Gallifrey are Gallifreyans, people from Sontar are Sontarans, people from Draconia are Draconians, etc.
Besides, if you’ve never met the (presumed) natives of a planet and don’t know their own name for themselves (or if you have met them but can’t pronounce their language), you have to call them something, so it only makes sense to refer to them by the name you’ve given their planet, so that listeners will know what you’re talking about.
I think that whatever our opinions on the episode – one enjoyed it, would have enjoyed it more if the Grand Moff’s attempt at a meditation on Faith had been given more than a minute’s thought (“Faith is foolish!” sayeth The Doctor … right before placing complete reliance on the recorded echo of a Dead Man to become this episode’s Deus ex Machina).
I’m also less than impressed that Mr Moffat seems to have assumed that a child being raised in a War Zone would NOT have been very, very carefully educated in how NOT to get herself (or anyone else) killed: if nothing else, showing the young lady’s training falter in the face of harsh reality (Especially such a major personal loss would have been much more compelling than depicting what would appear to be Complete Ignorance.
Having said that, I did actually like this episode – in some ways it comes close to being a DOCTOR WHO Vs WARHAMMER 40,000 episode, which is something I would dearly like to see (Almost as much as that STAR TREK/DOCTOR WHO crossover The Doctor himself briefly fantasised about an episode or two ago*).
I also feel that, at least in this episode, it made perfect sense for the Evil Ambulance to project the face of an older lady – because we can be reasonably certain that, absent the Florence Nightingale Effect, somebody would have taken a rock to that thing long since (An approach I may have advocated quite loudly during the episode itself).
If nothing else, I think we can safely say that the Armaments Megacorporation introduced in this episode makes a compelling villain: I look forward to their eventually being given an opportunity to take up banana-culture (Although it’s possible that
*It just struck me today that (A) The sixtieth anniversary of STAR TREK is only two years away (B) The most entertaining setup for this crossover might be for The Doctor to pay a visit to the sets of various TREK productions, rather than the Final Frontier itself (If only because this would allow us to begin with a scene where The Doctor pops up on the bridge of at least one actual Federation Starship or better yet two – “Wrong starship, sorry!” “Whoops, wrong Enterprise” – before finally arriving on Earth AD 1966 in the exact place where Earth 1966 has produced the original Starship Enterprise (“We’re here! At last we’re here!”).
Bonus points if, at one point during this episode, The Doctor realises that one of those Federation Staships could use a helping hand and briefly pops back to lend that hand (Extra bonus points if any Enterprise bridge crew involved react to this Extraterrestrial Gadabout with a practiced routine suggesting that flying visits from a TARDIS are something the Federation has some experience of – “Just another code Bravo-Bravo-Charlie one-nine-six-three, Mr Spock” “Indeed, Captain.”
The Villengard Corporation wasn’t introduced here; it was introduced way back in “The Doctor Dances” as the makers of Captain Jack’s sonic blaster. There, the Doctor took credit for destroying the Weapon Factories of Villengard, and in “Twice Upon a Time,” the sequence with the Daleks took place in the ruins of the slightly renamed Weapon Forges of Villengard. So Moffat referenced them in his first storyline for DW and his last episode as showrunner, so it’s kind of fitting that he brings them back in his first return visit.
There was a Trek:TOS/Who:4th Doctor crossover comic back in the 1980’s.
The Doctor and the Enterprise from 1981 was an unauthorized fan-fiction crossover by Jean Airey, edited in its 1989 re-release to remove all references to copyrighted characters. However, in 2012, IDW, which had the licenses to both Trek and Who, did an authorized 8-issue crossover miniseries called Assimilation² which teamed up the TNG crew and the Eleventh Doctor against the Borg and the Cybermen, albeit with a TOS/Fourth Doctor flashback in one issue.
Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson have absolutely mad chemistry.
Generally liked the episode though one part really rubbed me the wrong way. As soon as the crisis was averted, the Doctor is crowing with the success, and if my memory is correct, still holding the thermos of the deceased father. Not just any old celebration, he’s absolutely beside himself in relief and cleverness and general Doctorishness
… right in front of dead dad’s daughter … who apparently has no reaction and everything is just fine with this.
That pretty promptly threw me out of the episode that otherwise was interesting. I know the Doctor in general is often completely blind to emotional tenor, though I thought that was more of 12 and 13’s shtick. This Doctor seemed to be somewhat more emotionally together from the start and I just don’t see him not realizing the daughter has just in the last 20 minutes discovered her dad is dead — despite holograms and such, I don’t think it’s exactly a replacement for a parent.
And in the final scenes, she’s just holding Mundy’s hand and looking somewhat hopeful into the sunset. This suggests that it wasn’t Doctor’s callousness, but Moffat had zero thought about what that might be like from her perspective and hadn’t bothered. It wasn’t even played for a dark chuckle (a la Time Bandits).
Anyhow, that moment did not work for me, tarnishing an otherwise nice episode.
It’s a religion thing she called out explicitly. IIRC, “He’s with mummy now, I’ll see them again.”
Didn’t Splice say “He’s not gone, he’s just dead?” I think the idea was that, as someone raised in a wartorn culture, she’s probably inured to the idea of someone’s physical death and raised to take comfort in the persistence of their memory, as well as their virtual AI embodiments.
I found the first 18 minutes of this one to be absolutely riveting. Gatwa and Gibson continue to be terrific together, and they were both acting their hearts out here. I especially adored that Fifteen sang the Skye Boat Song. It felt like a tribute both to Gatwa’s Scottish identity and the Doctor’s Jacobite former companion. Once Splice showed up, it got a bit messier. It felt like she was written to be much younger than the actor who ended up being cast in the role, which made everything she said feel off. Still, I really enjoyed the story itself.
I agree about the daughter. I thought she looked maybe 10-11, but her dialogue was more suited to a six-year-old.
One wonders why so many people keep buying from them, when they treat their customers so badly.
Similar issues apply to the ambulances – if your own soldiers are evading your own ambulances, things are going badly wrong in a way likely to end in mutiny by the people who control all your guns. It is one thing to maltreat the people who pick your cotton – quite another to maltreat the people who fight your battles.
“One wonders why so many people keep buying from them, when they treat their customers so badly.”
Is that so different from how things are for Americans now? When there’s a monopoly, you just have to put up with it.
“Similar issues apply to the ambulances – if your own soldiers are evading your own ambulances, things are going badly wrong in a way likely to end in mutiny by the people who control all your guns.”
Except the computer probably controls the biggest guns. Presumably there are armed drones as well as ambulance and vacuum drones.
“It is one thing to maltreat the people who pick your cotton – quite another to maltreat the people who fight your battles.”
Not really. Throughout history, empires have used slaves and subjugated peoples as cannon fodder in their militaries. Yes, that means arming their slaves, and that has often led to revolts, but they’ve been put down by superior force and by the sheer immovable scale of the institutions they rebelled against.
Actually, I’m having trouble thinking of many true monopolies in the US today. Perhaps you can suggest some?
True monopolies are generally maintained by by the government, which can punish people for selling something against its will. It’s not the kind of thing you can maintain when either the rival sellers or the buyers have their own army. Try to think of examples of a weapons company maintaining a monopoly against an army. It’s not easy.
Forces such as the Janissaries or the Mumlaks or the West India Regiments might have been legally slaves, or recruited from slaves, but they had to have some mutual loyalty if they were going to stick together in the face of the enemy, and they have to get something from you in exchange for their service. Otherwise, they would stick together against the king.
Field slaves could be freely oppressed if they lacked the weapons and organisation and mutual loyalty to fight back with. An army must have those or it would be useless. Consequently, they have to be given some reason to fight for you rather than the other lot, or themselves. (Same issue with mercenaries – if they just want your money, why don’t they just steal it from you?)
Revolts can be put down with superior force – but the army IS your superior force. Try to give examples of people violently supressing a revolt BY THE ARMY. It’s not easy. It can happen only if most of the army remains loyal – which means the army as a whole has not rebelled, just a small part of it.
Worse – you depend on them to fight for you against the most superior force the enemy can bring to bear. What happens if, in the face of the shot and shell of the enemy, they decide not to?
If the field slaves run away, you can hunt them down. If the field army runs away, your enemy hunts you down.
Short version: The most oppressed people in the country are never the people with the guns, or with their own army. Generally, those people do more oppressing than they suffer. A society in which they are not doing any oppressing is not one in which they are suffering any.
There aren’t any absolute monopolies, no, but there are certainly fewer competing companies in any given field than there used to be — fewer separate film/TV studios, fewer major publishing houses, etc., which reduces competition and choice for both consumers and creators. And there are companies like Amazon and Google that are virtual monopolies in their fields. Monopolies don’t have to be absolute to be a problem.
As for the question of slave armies, you’re not arguing with me, you’re arguing with millennia of historical fact. Slaves and oppressed peoples have always been used as cannon fodder in militaries. Yes, they have often revolted, but that hasn’t prevented it from happening. So whatever logical rationales you construct for doubting the idea, actual reality is the counterargument, and thus I don’t have to counter other than to suggest you study more history.
There was another example of recycling in this episode, this one from classic Doctor Who. The Doctor stepping on a mine and not being able to move was done in Genesis of the Daleks. This is actually the second example of recycling classic Who in as many episodes. In The Devil’s Chord when the Doctor takes Ruby forward in time to show her the devastated future Earth if they don’t deal with the problem in the past it was an exact echo of something the Fourth Doctor did with Sarah Jane in Pyramids of Mars. If there was a similar callback in Space Babies I missed it. It makes me wonder if there is any significance to both of these callbacks involving the Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith.
I think it’s a bit of a stretch to call that recycling. I mean, a character stepping on a mine and having to disarm it is a trope that crops up in many stories about minefields, so it’s way too generic to be presumed to be a Whovian reference. And the mine-defusing bit in “Genesis” was just a single obstacle resolved in a minute or so, while here it was central to the story.
Also, it was Harry Sullivan who defused the mine; Sarah Jane only had one line in that sequence, and it was advising Harry to do what he was already doing anyway. So it wasn’t really a Doctor-Sarah scene, it was a Doctor-Harry scene.
I agree about the “Pyramids of Mars” callback, though. Yet I don’t think it’s part of any larger pattern except the show acknowledging its past in general more than it used to (note the reference to living in Shoreditch with Susan in the same episode). Also, conversely, this season is being treated as a jumping-on point for new viewers, learning about the ground rules at the same time as the companion. Since “The Devil’s Chord” was Ruby’s first trip to the past, it was logical to have her raise the question of its effect on the future, and an homage to the “Pyramids” sequence was an effective way to do that.
The stepping-on-a-land-mine plot device is so common that it’s got its own looong page on TV Tropes (titled ‘Land Mine Goes “Click!”‘). So I don’t think we can infer much from its use twice, decades apart, in a long-running series like Doctor Who. They probably just (gasp!) forgot.
No reason to assume they forgot. It’s hardly the only trope that’s been reused over the 60-plus-year history of the franchise. It’s the nature of tropes to be reused. What matters is how they’re used, and there’s a vast difference between using something as a brief, one- or two-minute obstacle in a 6-part serial and building an entire episode around it.
Another good episode. Some of the moralizing was a bit heavy-handed, but the actors, especially Gatwa, sold it brilliantly. The episode was pure, unadulterated Moffat, compressed the way the ambulances crushed the corpses in the story.
Oh you put your finger on so much! Thank you. I was really frustrated with how forced this felt, and it all fell apart for me when they said the mine was determining if it had a legitimate target, and then they said it would go off anyway if it was not sure. So, why check? To given time to have a story.
I’ll say it. I’m tired of Steven Moffat and I wish there were a lot of new writers. I loved Moffat classics – his style is phenomenal. but it is somewhat one-note and repetitive. move over, mate!!
You’re right, but maybe not for the reason you think. There’s a very old joke in Britain that goes “Are you religious?” “No, I’m Church of England.” The Anglican church has long been seen as a quiet, polite organisation that’s always a little bit embarrassed talking about religion. More tea and cake at the parish hall jumble sale than evangelistic hectoring at the pulpit. So the idea of it turning into a military force is especially whacky for English viewers in particular.
Having said that, you could see this as a commentary on the modern Anglican church, which is becoming a lot more strident and aggressive in its beliefs and attitudes, at least in some of its communities. Maybe Moffat was trying to highlight where that might end up, in a classic SF “If this goes on…” kind of way.
Or maybe Moffat was just nicking ideas from His Dark Materials and thought it would be funnier to put Anglicans in the frame for the “religious army” trope.
New Who
review
today on Tue?
Say it’s true!
It’s true, it’s true!
Today at 2 :)
Insightful review! The show wasn’t enjoyable for me and I didn’t realize it was Moffat until the end and then I thought, of course it is. We’ve made a silly (though seemingly intense) puzzle box with the Doctor unable to take any action. The “Teach me the Torah while standing on one foot” approach was interesting for new viewers I suppose. I am totally sick of the “unfortunate tendency in Doctor Who to vilify middle-aged and elderly women as nameless figures of menace.” Thank you for calling it out. What’s scarier than a Dalek? An older woman’s face on a Dalek!