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Doctor Who S11.07 Kerblam!
Warning: This is a rant. If you liked Kerblam! just walk on by. This icon gives a good indication of my attitude. >:)
This was written many months ago, back when I was collating my thoughts (or lack thereof) on S11. Am posting it now because![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sea_thoughts asked very nicely indeed, but please be aware that my head is full of Good Omens (it’s like a couple of seasons of Moffat Who crammed into six episodes, and it GLOWS with warmth and happiness and everything is beautiful and there are layeers upon layers and metaphors and mirrors and the fic is as fluffy as clouds...). This episode is the opposite of that and made me very cross. (Hence posting it flocked and it may be a long time before I reply to comments. We’ll see, I just wanted to warn you.)
I know I am generally fandom’s Pollyanna, but when I properly hate something, it turns out that that is something I can write about it in great detail, and all the reasons why. If this episode had just been bad, or a matter of more personal dislike I would happily just have forgotten about it (see Sleep No More in S9, which I tend to forget even exists, or Midnight, which everyone loved, except me and about three other people). But Kerblam! is different. It offended me to a degree where I was literally wondering whether to just stop watching the [new] show [until we got a new show runner], and since this is my favourite show that I have been watching since 2005 (and am now watching through the Classic Show and dipping into Big Finish) I wanted to lay out my reasons. Because this hit me like the Buffy s8 comics, where it’s revealed that Buffy has turned to bank robbing to fund her Slayers. And we were supposed to accept this as the same Buffy we had seen on the show? Readers, I was not amused. (s8 then kept digging, in ways I still haven’t forgiven. I’m hoping Kerblam! was just a fluke…)
Anyway, onto the episode in question.
The set-up of the story is almost standard Doctor Who — we have sinister space!amazon with its unsettling robots and its exploitative working conditions and the workers getting killed and secretive bosses. Thank goodness the Doctor is here to… Oh nevermind, she think Kerblam! is doing just fine.
And as Spike once said (just to jump fandoms): Well, that's the heart of it, isn't it? The crux. The nub.
The Doctor doesn’t have a problem with space!amazon. The Doctor loves the Kerblam!man. And she still does by the end.
So, the world building is as follows:
YASMIN: (being scanned) How's the morale among the workers?
JUDY: I like to think very good. It's my job to make sure that everyone's happy. Not that it's difficult. I mean, we're all so grateful to have a job, right? We all know how hard they are to come by. No, I hope that people feel it's a privilege to work at Kerblam.
KIRA: Kandokan labour laws. Ever since the People Power protests, companies have to make sure a minimum ten percent of the workforce are actual people, at all levels. Like the slogan says, real people need real jobs. Work gives us purpose, right?
YASMIN: It's tough being away from family.
DAN: Well, at least I'm working. Unlike half the galaxy. Suppose we've only got ourselves to blame. Whilst we were busy staring at our phones, technology went and nicked our jobs.
So, automation stole jobs. This is a good and worthwhile subject to tackle. (The episode sadly doesn’t. It raises the issue and then singularly fails to come up with any sort of useful answer.) And people are literally desperate for any kinds of jobs, leading to Charlie taking action:
CHARLIE: Ten percent? They want us to be grateful that ten percent of people get to work? What about the other ninety percent? What about our futures? Because without action, next time it will be seven percent, then five, then one. I am stronger than you. I am not going to stand by and accept it. People like me, my generation, we change things. We make things happen.
Except there are so many, many problems with Charlie’s approach (and the plot in general). He wants to use the delivery robots to blow lots of customers up, so people will think it’s the technology that’s gone haywire and the company will have to hire more human workers. (I think? That seems to be the plan.) Let me make a list:
1) Killing off the customer base is unlikely to enhance the company’s standing.
2) The problem isn’t isolated, the population of half the galaxy is apparently suffering. Targeting one company is attacking the symptoms, not the cause.
3) All Charlie wants is more terrible jobs. He can’t even imagine a better world, instead he turns to mass murder so more people can do repetitive tasks, be yelled at by supervisors and see their family twice a year. It’s painfully stupid.
4) Do people do this? I tend to just refer to Charlie as ‘the Luddite’ as that’s the nearest parallel, but this is generally not how people protest, we are a long way from the industrial revolution. These days they strike. They organise. They create petitions and go on marches and raise awareness. They yell loudly enough for the Powers That Be to listen. (And apparently there *were* protests.) But no, according to this episode, people like that are illogical and selfish and blinkered.
5) The Doctor — very cleverly — changes the delivery destination of all the robots, so they all stay in the warehouse. But then she orders them pop the bubble wrap! There was NO REASON TO DO THIS. None. Zero. Zilch. Unless she quite simply wanted to either a) murder Charlie, presuming him to be stubborn enough to stay with the robots out of spite and get blown up, or b) wanted to somehow help Charlie by destroying the robots. There is of course c) The episode needed a big explosion. There is no indication as to her motivation. Also, the managers don’t seem to blame her for this? At all???
6) Charlie actually succeeds. The managers decide to hire lots more humans, so… he was right? Automation is bad? Terrorism works?? People deserve crappy jobs??? Please note, no one talks about improved working conditions, the one thing real amazon workers are trying to change.
Sidebar: From the ‘Won’t someone please think of the children!’ POV, then the episode tells them quite clearly that any job is better than none, and they should be grateful to be tagged and monitored and paid a pittance. Which to be fair, in a society of unending ‘Austerity’ this is bleak, but accurate. Don’t dream, just be grateful you don’t have it worse:
KIRA: Do you want a tip? If I ever get bored, I imagine customers opening their parcels back on Kandoka. Their big smiles. I only ever got a present the once, but oh, I can never forget how it felt. Like, like a little box of happiness.
RYAN: Just one present in your whole life?
KIRA: My birthday last year. A little box of chocolates from Judy, our Head of People. Oh, it was so amazing.
RYAN: What about your mum and dad? Didn't they ever get you a present?
KIRA: Never knew them. But I can still imagine families opening these packages. We make them happy by doing what we do here.
So I guess, the episode is actually aimed at amazon customers: Don’t feel guilty, don’t worry about the workers striking or demanding better working conditions… They’re happy really. And should be grateful instead of complaining.
The Doctor
Now of course they shouldn’t blow people up either, which seems such a very simple thing and easy to refute. But let’s delve into the Doctor’s speech, because that’s at the heart of all my problems:
CHARLIE: We can't let the systems take control!
DOCTOR: The systems aren't the problem. How people use and exploit the system, that's the problem. People like you.
“The systems aren’t the problem.” <- This may be the single most privileged line I have ever heard. Moreso even than ‘Just walk around like you own the place’. Nevermind that the Doctor’s raison d’être is to destroy [harmful] systems (Eleven hitting the Protest button, Seven taking down a whole society in a night, Four waltzing around Pluto and dismantling The Sun Makers*), that line betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of how the world/systems actually works. And this is where I think a Doylist POV has filtered through completely, straight into words coming from the Doctor’s mouth.
Because if there is anything I have learned it’s that one of the perks of being privileged is that the systems do work (for you). Sidestepping all the other issues for a minute, a lot of the time those with privilege (white, straight, male, cis, able-bodied etc.) tend to say ‘If you have done nothing wrong, surely you have nothing to worry about’, having literally no idea how systems entrench discrimination at every level:
The systems aren’t the problem — Austerity — The systems aren’t the problem — Universal Credit — The systems aren’t the problem — Benefits Sanctions — The systems aren’t the problem — Food Banks — The systems aren’t the problem — Rising homelessness — The systems aren’t the problem — The Windrush Scandal — The systems aren’t the problem — Student Loans — The systems aren’t the problem — The Bedroom Tax — The systems aren’t the problem — Fit for Work Assessments — The systems aren’t the problem — Childhood Poverty…
I could go on and on, these were just the most immediate from the top of my head and very political and Britain-centric. But the fact is that systems *are* the problem. True, even the best system in the world can be abused (and this is the point the Doctor is trying to make), but if the systems are designed to be exploitative and discriminatory — and in this instance can get away with being so, since everyone is desperate for work — then the systems need to change.
Here, allow me to illustrate with a rather uncomfortable juxtaposition:
(I can’t believe we have gone from the former to the latter. It literally breaks my heart.)
What value Kira’s life? Killed by the system, literally. The girl with no family, no friends, who had only received a single present her whole life, and who was still kind and good and not bitter. The very epitome of ‘the good poor’ and yet she was killed for no other reason than ‘the system’ wanted to try to get through to ‘the bad poor’. The Doctor is arguing that the system isn’t the problem — the sentient system that asked for help, sure, but it also just murdered an innocent girl. Because Kira was killed so that Charlie might not kill fifteen thousand other people, that was the aim. Was that okay? The Doctor wouldn’t let not!Trump shoot the dying mother spider which was literally suffocating to death, so if a mercy killing is bad, then what is Kira’s death? And how can the system ‘not be a problem’ when it killed someone?
Because that’s the other part of what gets me so much — the pure stupidity of this episode’s plot. Straightforward, honest evil I could probably have at least respected, even if I disagreed. But the ways the plot of this just refuse to make sense is just an extra level of offensive. (I can forgive plot holes if the emotional/character consequences are worth it. But here there were none.)
But back to my list, and specifically point 6, and that last scene with Team TARDIS and the managers, which is what makes this so impossible to forgive. The Doctor literally says nothing at all, she just smiles and nods and then turns down a job offer. So she thinks everything is hunky-dory?
SLADE: We're suspending all operations for a month, pending review and while the TeamMates are rebuilding Dispatch.
JUDY: All our workers have been given two weeks' paid leave, free return shuttle transport. And I'm going to propose that Kerblam becomes a People-Led Company in future. Majority organics. People, I mean. We're always looking for good workers to join our management team.
DOCTOR: Er, thanks. We're strictly freelance.
Again, from Thin Ice:
DOCTOR: You know what happens if I don't move on? More people die. There are kids living rough near here. They may well be next on the menu. Do you want to help me? Do you want to stand here stamping your foot? Because let me tell you something. I'm two thousand years old, and I have never had the time for the luxury of outrage.
[…]
SUTCLIFFE: Who, who let this creature in here? On your feet, girl, in the presence of your betters.
BILL: No time for outrage. You've never had time for anything else, right?
Where is the Doctor’s outrage? Her anger? A cautionary word here would have made literally all the difference (even with the awful ‘systems’ speech); would have showed that even if she ignored the wider issues of wide-spread unemployment she at least cared enough to make sure this company treated their workers right. But no, nothing.
And that is why this episode bothers me more than anything else. Because the Doctor just walks away, for no apparent reason. Because the Doctor leaves an exploitative, harmful system in place out of choice and seems to have zero problems with this. She isn’t ‘not herself’, she isn’t forced to step away because of any external circumstances, she expresses no regret at being unable to affect change, nothing. She is, apparently, perfectly happy for Kerblam! to carry on exactly as it is. And that’s what I find unforgivable.
People have suggested that she is trying to take a step back and not rearrange societies according to her own wishes, much like she lets not!Trump leave, unchallenged. And I can respect that, the Doctor playing god isn’t a good thing. But. ‘Never cruel or cowardly. Never give up, never give in’. I fully file this under ‘failed to keep the promise of her name’. And that is why it made me angry, why I nearly stopped watching, why I call it ‘the worst episode ever’, or ‘not actually Doctor Who’ — and why it probably has coloured my perception of the whole of Chibnall Who, because if they’re happy with this, if this is how they see the Doctor, if this is where we’re at… Then it’s not really the same show. If the writers choose to tackle a real world problem, but let the Doctor come out on the side of the oppressors — how can we trust them with anything?
Now, if making nice with the managers whilst letting the workers keep suffering under an unjust system will later be revealed to be a deliberate set-up to show how her non-intervention and her determination to be nice is going too far — that she is too exhausted for outrage, so that she just cuts her losses and runs — I take back everything I have said and take my hat off in the process. Even if I think leaving the ending as a 'happy' one is painfully mis-judged. But I have a really very unhappy feeling that the writers didn’t even realise what they were doing… (Useful Guardian article here: How the right tricked people into supporting rampant inequality.)
It’s lucky that the next episode was as standard and solidly decent a Doctor Who episode as could ever be wished for, an episode that could fit into any season, because I was genuinely wondering why I was sticking with a show that was not really doing much for me on one hand, and now being outright offensive on the other.
In conclusion:
'We are not robots': Amazon warehouse employees push to unionize
Workers announced launch of union push in response to working conditions as company says it does not recognize allegations
And now I am going back to my angel and my demon; immortal renegades trying to save the world, even if they're not very good at it. (Really, they just want to have a nice lunch, which is difficult with Armageddon breathing down your neck. Also people dying is bad.)
*I adore The Sun Makers. And what's interesting to note is that the Doctor is 100% a figure of privilege:
DOCTOR: Somehow I have the impression you're thinking of killing yourself.
CORDO: It's the taxes.
DOCTOR: What?
CORDO: It's the taxes. I can't pay the taxes.
DOCTOR: Oh, the taxes. My dear old thing, all you need is a wily accountant. Would you care for a jelly baby? Hmm? Try one.
The way to deal with taxes is a good accountant? It's painfully tone deaf. However, the Doctor goes on to help the oppressed workers overthrow the regime. If you want a satisfying tale about the evils of capitalism, it's a treat (from 42 years ago!):
DOCTOR: You blood-sucking leech! You won't stop until you own the entire galaxy, will you. Don't you think commercial imperialism is as bad as military conquest?
COLLECTOR: We have tried war, but the use of economic power is far more effective.
And there you are. THAT is my show.
This was written many months ago, back when I was collating my thoughts (or lack thereof) on S11. Am posting it now because
sea_thoughts asked very nicely indeed, but please be aware that my head is full of Good Omens (it’s like a couple of seasons of Moffat Who crammed into six episodes, and it GLOWS with warmth and happiness and everything is beautiful and there are layeers upon layers and metaphors and mirrors and the fic is as fluffy as clouds...). This episode is the opposite of that and made me very cross. (Hence posting it flocked and it may be a long time before I reply to comments. We’ll see, I just wanted to warn you.)I know I am generally fandom’s Pollyanna, but when I properly hate something, it turns out that that is something I can write about it in great detail, and all the reasons why. If this episode had just been bad, or a matter of more personal dislike I would happily just have forgotten about it (see Sleep No More in S9, which I tend to forget even exists, or Midnight, which everyone loved, except me and about three other people). But Kerblam! is different. It offended me to a degree where I was literally wondering whether to just stop watching the [new] show [until we got a new show runner], and since this is my favourite show that I have been watching since 2005 (and am now watching through the Classic Show and dipping into Big Finish) I wanted to lay out my reasons. Because this hit me like the Buffy s8 comics, where it’s revealed that Buffy has turned to bank robbing to fund her Slayers. And we were supposed to accept this as the same Buffy we had seen on the show? Readers, I was not amused. (s8 then kept digging, in ways I still haven’t forgiven. I’m hoping Kerblam! was just a fluke…)
Anyway, onto the episode in question.
The set-up of the story is almost standard Doctor Who — we have sinister space!amazon with its unsettling robots and its exploitative working conditions and the workers getting killed and secretive bosses. Thank goodness the Doctor is here to… Oh nevermind, she think Kerblam! is doing just fine.
And as Spike once said (just to jump fandoms): Well, that's the heart of it, isn't it? The crux. The nub.
The Doctor doesn’t have a problem with space!amazon. The Doctor loves the Kerblam!man. And she still does by the end.
So, the world building is as follows:
YASMIN: (being scanned) How's the morale among the workers?
JUDY: I like to think very good. It's my job to make sure that everyone's happy. Not that it's difficult. I mean, we're all so grateful to have a job, right? We all know how hard they are to come by. No, I hope that people feel it's a privilege to work at Kerblam.
KIRA: Kandokan labour laws. Ever since the People Power protests, companies have to make sure a minimum ten percent of the workforce are actual people, at all levels. Like the slogan says, real people need real jobs. Work gives us purpose, right?
YASMIN: It's tough being away from family.
DAN: Well, at least I'm working. Unlike half the galaxy. Suppose we've only got ourselves to blame. Whilst we were busy staring at our phones, technology went and nicked our jobs.
So, automation stole jobs. This is a good and worthwhile subject to tackle. (The episode sadly doesn’t. It raises the issue and then singularly fails to come up with any sort of useful answer.) And people are literally desperate for any kinds of jobs, leading to Charlie taking action:
CHARLIE: Ten percent? They want us to be grateful that ten percent of people get to work? What about the other ninety percent? What about our futures? Because without action, next time it will be seven percent, then five, then one. I am stronger than you. I am not going to stand by and accept it. People like me, my generation, we change things. We make things happen.
Except there are so many, many problems with Charlie’s approach (and the plot in general). He wants to use the delivery robots to blow lots of customers up, so people will think it’s the technology that’s gone haywire and the company will have to hire more human workers. (I think? That seems to be the plan.) Let me make a list:
1) Killing off the customer base is unlikely to enhance the company’s standing.
2) The problem isn’t isolated, the population of half the galaxy is apparently suffering. Targeting one company is attacking the symptoms, not the cause.
3) All Charlie wants is more terrible jobs. He can’t even imagine a better world, instead he turns to mass murder so more people can do repetitive tasks, be yelled at by supervisors and see their family twice a year. It’s painfully stupid.
4) Do people do this? I tend to just refer to Charlie as ‘the Luddite’ as that’s the nearest parallel, but this is generally not how people protest, we are a long way from the industrial revolution. These days they strike. They organise. They create petitions and go on marches and raise awareness. They yell loudly enough for the Powers That Be to listen. (And apparently there *were* protests.) But no, according to this episode, people like that are illogical and selfish and blinkered.
5) The Doctor — very cleverly — changes the delivery destination of all the robots, so they all stay in the warehouse. But then she orders them pop the bubble wrap! There was NO REASON TO DO THIS. None. Zero. Zilch. Unless she quite simply wanted to either a) murder Charlie, presuming him to be stubborn enough to stay with the robots out of spite and get blown up, or b) wanted to somehow help Charlie by destroying the robots. There is of course c) The episode needed a big explosion. There is no indication as to her motivation. Also, the managers don’t seem to blame her for this? At all???
6) Charlie actually succeeds. The managers decide to hire lots more humans, so… he was right? Automation is bad? Terrorism works?? People deserve crappy jobs??? Please note, no one talks about improved working conditions, the one thing real amazon workers are trying to change.
Sidebar: From the ‘Won’t someone please think of the children!’ POV, then the episode tells them quite clearly that any job is better than none, and they should be grateful to be tagged and monitored and paid a pittance. Which to be fair, in a society of unending ‘Austerity’ this is bleak, but accurate. Don’t dream, just be grateful you don’t have it worse:
KIRA: Do you want a tip? If I ever get bored, I imagine customers opening their parcels back on Kandoka. Their big smiles. I only ever got a present the once, but oh, I can never forget how it felt. Like, like a little box of happiness.
RYAN: Just one present in your whole life?
KIRA: My birthday last year. A little box of chocolates from Judy, our Head of People. Oh, it was so amazing.
RYAN: What about your mum and dad? Didn't they ever get you a present?
KIRA: Never knew them. But I can still imagine families opening these packages. We make them happy by doing what we do here.
So I guess, the episode is actually aimed at amazon customers: Don’t feel guilty, don’t worry about the workers striking or demanding better working conditions… They’re happy really. And should be grateful instead of complaining.
The Doctor
Now of course they shouldn’t blow people up either, which seems such a very simple thing and easy to refute. But let’s delve into the Doctor’s speech, because that’s at the heart of all my problems:
CHARLIE: We can't let the systems take control!
DOCTOR: The systems aren't the problem. How people use and exploit the system, that's the problem. People like you.
“The systems aren’t the problem.” <- This may be the single most privileged line I have ever heard. Moreso even than ‘Just walk around like you own the place’. Nevermind that the Doctor’s raison d’être is to destroy [harmful] systems (Eleven hitting the Protest button, Seven taking down a whole society in a night, Four waltzing around Pluto and dismantling The Sun Makers*), that line betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of how the world/systems actually works. And this is where I think a Doylist POV has filtered through completely, straight into words coming from the Doctor’s mouth.
Because if there is anything I have learned it’s that one of the perks of being privileged is that the systems do work (for you). Sidestepping all the other issues for a minute, a lot of the time those with privilege (white, straight, male, cis, able-bodied etc.) tend to say ‘If you have done nothing wrong, surely you have nothing to worry about’, having literally no idea how systems entrench discrimination at every level:
The systems aren’t the problem — Austerity — The systems aren’t the problem — Universal Credit — The systems aren’t the problem — Benefits Sanctions — The systems aren’t the problem — Food Banks — The systems aren’t the problem — Rising homelessness — The systems aren’t the problem — The Windrush Scandal — The systems aren’t the problem — Student Loans — The systems aren’t the problem — The Bedroom Tax — The systems aren’t the problem — Fit for Work Assessments — The systems aren’t the problem — Childhood Poverty…
I could go on and on, these were just the most immediate from the top of my head and very political and Britain-centric. But the fact is that systems *are* the problem. True, even the best system in the world can be abused (and this is the point the Doctor is trying to make), but if the systems are designed to be exploitative and discriminatory — and in this instance can get away with being so, since everyone is desperate for work — then the systems need to change.
Here, allow me to illustrate with a rather uncomfortable juxtaposition:
(I can’t believe we have gone from the former to the latter. It literally breaks my heart.)
What value Kira’s life? Killed by the system, literally. The girl with no family, no friends, who had only received a single present her whole life, and who was still kind and good and not bitter. The very epitome of ‘the good poor’ and yet she was killed for no other reason than ‘the system’ wanted to try to get through to ‘the bad poor’. The Doctor is arguing that the system isn’t the problem — the sentient system that asked for help, sure, but it also just murdered an innocent girl. Because Kira was killed so that Charlie might not kill fifteen thousand other people, that was the aim. Was that okay? The Doctor wouldn’t let not!Trump shoot the dying mother spider which was literally suffocating to death, so if a mercy killing is bad, then what is Kira’s death? And how can the system ‘not be a problem’ when it killed someone?
Because that’s the other part of what gets me so much — the pure stupidity of this episode’s plot. Straightforward, honest evil I could probably have at least respected, even if I disagreed. But the ways the plot of this just refuse to make sense is just an extra level of offensive. (I can forgive plot holes if the emotional/character consequences are worth it. But here there were none.)
But back to my list, and specifically point 6, and that last scene with Team TARDIS and the managers, which is what makes this so impossible to forgive. The Doctor literally says nothing at all, she just smiles and nods and then turns down a job offer. So she thinks everything is hunky-dory?
SLADE: We're suspending all operations for a month, pending review and while the TeamMates are rebuilding Dispatch.
JUDY: All our workers have been given two weeks' paid leave, free return shuttle transport. And I'm going to propose that Kerblam becomes a People-Led Company in future. Majority organics. People, I mean. We're always looking for good workers to join our management team.
DOCTOR: Er, thanks. We're strictly freelance.
Again, from Thin Ice:
DOCTOR: You know what happens if I don't move on? More people die. There are kids living rough near here. They may well be next on the menu. Do you want to help me? Do you want to stand here stamping your foot? Because let me tell you something. I'm two thousand years old, and I have never had the time for the luxury of outrage.
[…]
SUTCLIFFE: Who, who let this creature in here? On your feet, girl, in the presence of your betters.
BILL: No time for outrage. You've never had time for anything else, right?
Where is the Doctor’s outrage? Her anger? A cautionary word here would have made literally all the difference (even with the awful ‘systems’ speech); would have showed that even if she ignored the wider issues of wide-spread unemployment she at least cared enough to make sure this company treated their workers right. But no, nothing.
And that is why this episode bothers me more than anything else. Because the Doctor just walks away, for no apparent reason. Because the Doctor leaves an exploitative, harmful system in place out of choice and seems to have zero problems with this. She isn’t ‘not herself’, she isn’t forced to step away because of any external circumstances, she expresses no regret at being unable to affect change, nothing. She is, apparently, perfectly happy for Kerblam! to carry on exactly as it is. And that’s what I find unforgivable.
People have suggested that she is trying to take a step back and not rearrange societies according to her own wishes, much like she lets not!Trump leave, unchallenged. And I can respect that, the Doctor playing god isn’t a good thing. But. ‘Never cruel or cowardly. Never give up, never give in’. I fully file this under ‘failed to keep the promise of her name’. And that is why it made me angry, why I nearly stopped watching, why I call it ‘the worst episode ever’, or ‘not actually Doctor Who’ — and why it probably has coloured my perception of the whole of Chibnall Who, because if they’re happy with this, if this is how they see the Doctor, if this is where we’re at… Then it’s not really the same show. If the writers choose to tackle a real world problem, but let the Doctor come out on the side of the oppressors — how can we trust them with anything?
Now, if making nice with the managers whilst letting the workers keep suffering under an unjust system will later be revealed to be a deliberate set-up to show how her non-intervention and her determination to be nice is going too far — that she is too exhausted for outrage, so that she just cuts her losses and runs — I take back everything I have said and take my hat off in the process. Even if I think leaving the ending as a 'happy' one is painfully mis-judged. But I have a really very unhappy feeling that the writers didn’t even realise what they were doing… (Useful Guardian article here: How the right tricked people into supporting rampant inequality.)
It’s lucky that the next episode was as standard and solidly decent a Doctor Who episode as could ever be wished for, an episode that could fit into any season, because I was genuinely wondering why I was sticking with a show that was not really doing much for me on one hand, and now being outright offensive on the other.
In conclusion:
'We are not robots': Amazon warehouse employees push to unionize
Workers announced launch of union push in response to working conditions as company says it does not recognize allegations
And now I am going back to my angel and my demon; immortal renegades trying to save the world, even if they're not very good at it. (Really, they just want to have a nice lunch, which is difficult with Armageddon breathing down your neck. Also people dying is bad.)
*I adore The Sun Makers. And what's interesting to note is that the Doctor is 100% a figure of privilege:
DOCTOR: Somehow I have the impression you're thinking of killing yourself.
CORDO: It's the taxes.
DOCTOR: What?
CORDO: It's the taxes. I can't pay the taxes.
DOCTOR: Oh, the taxes. My dear old thing, all you need is a wily accountant. Would you care for a jelly baby? Hmm? Try one.
The way to deal with taxes is a good accountant? It's painfully tone deaf. However, the Doctor goes on to help the oppressed workers overthrow the regime. If you want a satisfying tale about the evils of capitalism, it's a treat (from 42 years ago!):
DOCTOR: You blood-sucking leech! You won't stop until you own the entire galaxy, will you. Don't you think commercial imperialism is as bad as military conquest?
COLLECTOR: We have tried war, but the use of economic power is far more effective.
And there you are. THAT is my show.
no subject
Hey, A+ subverting on the expected narrative. Sad that this meant cheering on the bad guys. (Some people seem to think it's a SJW story about workers' rights? Which... is good, I suppose, even if it means their narrative literacy is zero.)
It's very McCoy except Seven would have fucked their shit up and made people happier.
Go Happiness Patrol! Goodness I love Seven. And Ace could have blown stuff up. But for a good reason.
but elsewhere it's like... dude, what does Chibnall even like about Doctor Who in the first place? His Doctor is so passive (and yes that's not a good look on the only female Doctor) and kind of... useless. She can save a spaceship with about six people on it, but she leaves empires intact and corportations in power. Not fun.
I hope it's a deliberate flaw, but I have a horrible suspicion that they aren't even aware that it's a problem.
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I don't think Thirteen has deliberate flaws, she's so weirdly two-dimensional and lacking the nuances of her predecessors. So weird. I was so ready to love her but she's just kind of... flat. Vague in form and function. I swear most of her dialogue is technobabble or exposition. Does she have feelings about things?
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I was so ready to love her
This. And I saw a bit of Jodie Whittaker on Graham Norton recently and remembered how excited we were and how perfect she seemed. And then... nothing.
but she's just kind of... flat. Vague in form and function. I swear most of her dialogue is technobabble or exposition. Does she have feelings about things?
WHO KNOWS? I certainly don't have feelings about her, which is terribly sad and should be un-possible.
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Thirteen is just sort of *there*.
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(Hence me pulling out The Sun Makers. This is BASIC STUFF. Fuck capitalism.)