Punching up and punching down

Doctoring the TARDIS

It’s tedious to report, but I’m a middle-aged white man who isn’t particularly impressed by the new series of Doctor Who.

It’s nothing to do with characters’ race or sexuality, despite what people might suggest. I just don’t think it’s very good. I think the problem is that it misunderstands where cultural and social power is positioned these days, and it acts as if society hasn’t changed since the show was launched in 1963.

Take the most recent episode, Boom. (Sorry, extensive spoilers follow). This takes place on a distant planet where space marines are fighting a war against an unseen enemy. There’s a couple of nice aspects to this, one of which I won’t give away (but you may or may not see coming as you watch the episode) but another of which is the role played by AI in the fighting. As a nod to the modern world, it’s not bad: it doesn’t go full Black Mirror, but it at least explores the idea of what might happen if Siri started to develop a mind of her own and started optimising paperclips.

But there were other aspects of the story that kept grating against me. One is the identity of the marines: they are described as Anglicans, their uniform includes a dog collar, and the message “Thoughts and Prayers” keeps flashing up.

My problem is this: I couldn’t really see any point at which the fact that this made any difference to the story. Stephen Moffat, the writer, had replaced standard military ranks by ecclesiastical ones (so we had bishops not generals and so on). But at no stage did he ever really explore why this mattered. How would an army of space marines who are Anglicans behave any differently from the one in Aliens for example? We never really found out. It just felt like sticking Chekhov’s Gun in the middle of the room but never firing it, and as a result the story felt needlessly cluttered.

Worse than that, I felt like choosing to use Anglicans in this way was an example of deliberate cowardice on the writer’s part. Of course, there are many terrible religious wars of conquest being fought all over the world right now. But it’s honestly hard to think of a single religious group less likely to be involved in them than the 21st Century Church of England. We’re talking about a group whose modern politics are manifested in ways that are hard to distinguish from the Doctor Who team’s own. And that’s fine, it’s good and important to examine our past and think about the legacy of slavery, but it’s just silly to act like Justin Welby is out there right now conquering new colonies with the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch.

I’ve got a horrible feeling that by using Anglicans in this way, Moffat thought he was somehow being transgressive and satirical, and punching up against the establishment. But in the 21st Century, where someone like Kate Forbes or Tim Farron’s sincerely-held religious views have made them less likely to be elected, it’s hard to argue that the Church holds any kind of dominant position in UK life in maintaining conservative viewpoints.¹

I’m not necessarily saying that Moffat should have gone full Dune and had his fighting marines shouting about Jihad. But if you’re talking about a group of religious people with guns who keep talking about Thoughts and Prayers after people have been shot, why choose the Anglicans and not American churches, unless you’re worried about your bottom line of a new deal with the US market? It just felt like punching down while pretending to be punching up.

In a similar way, part of the storyline was meant to be a critique of capitalism. The Doctor spends nearly the entire episode standing on an as-yet unexploded landmine. In order to bring dramatic tension, this has bright green lights on the side of it, representing how close it is to detonating.

But again, this makes no sense! If you are placing landmines, the last thing you want to do is make them visible! So, in order to fit this dramatic point with the actual story, Moffat adds in some vague wibbling about how this is all capitalism’s fault, that putting bright LED lights on a landmine makes it more likely to sell in a showroom. (And let’s face it, we’ve all been shopping for weaponry and been swayed like considerations like this).

Once more, I’ve got a horrible feeling that we are meant to feel like “capitalism bad” is some kind of transgressive thing that nobody else dare say. In fact, it just feels kind of boring. At a time when for example people are seriously arguing that whether food with identical ingredients is bad for you depends on whether it is produced in a factory or not, when you can’t move for distrust of capitalism being expressed all over the media by the Monbiots, Thunbergs, Packhams and the rest of them, it’s hardly an under-represented viewpoint.

In fact, if Moffat wanted to really push the boundaries in an interesting direction, he could come up with a story where capitalism develops new crops that can save children from blindness, only to be opposed by environmental activists. Or he could write a story where companies compete to develop technology that can slash carbon emissions, but this is a solution fought against by the Greens. That would show a degree of thinking outside the blue box at least, even if nobody would ever believe it. And it might at least show some recognition that the world has changed in the sixty years that Doctor Who has been on air.

Like I say, I don’t think the show is terrible. I’m not calling for a boycott or anything. I just think it’s become a bit lazy and complacent, and is a solid 6/10 when it could be something much better. It’s just a shame.

1. Yes, I know about Bishops in the House of Lords. I’m struggling to think of recent occasions when they made a difference in a more conservative direction to the outcome of votes. Most recently, they were very involved in the fight against the Rwanda Bill for example.