James Wylder, Writer

Aya Rodriguez is having a terrible day.
It’s not that anything particular has happened to make it terrible. It’s a day like any other, but when you live on the Magellan, better known as the Rat Maze – that wretched hive of scum and villainy – every day by default is terrible.
“I’m just saying,” Aya complains. “I thought our first paying job would be a bit more, y’know…glamorous.”
“Glamor doesn’t pay the bills,” Josie remarks mildly from next to her. The two of them are perched on a catwalk across from a bar they’ve been scoping out for a while now. Josie’s got a pair of binoculars pressed firmly to her face, peering intently through the bar’s windows. The binoculars are the old-fashioned type, like the kind you’d see on Earth in the 21st century. Josie claimed she’d swiped them from a traveling history exhibit, and Aya’s inclined to believe her. Josie might look sweet and innocent, but she’s and incorrigible filch. Not that she’s one to talk, she supposes – Aya’s own specialty is breaking into places she’s definitely not supposed to be breaking into.
“Anything interesting yet?” Aya watches a group of scruffy men enter the bar, trying to stave off her mounting boredom. One of the men has three arms, which is the most exciting thing she’s seen in hours.
“She’s still at the bar. Looks like she’s waiting for someone, maybe? Oh, wait.” Josie lowers the binoculars a bit and pulls a face. “She’s on her fifth root beer.”
“Five?” Aya asks incredulously. “How is she affording that? Lemme have a look.” She holds out her hand for the binoculars and Josie pulls away with low whine. “Oh, c’mon. You’ve been hogging those things for ages.”
“Oh, fine.” Josie hands them over, a bit unwillingly.
“You’re cute when you pout.” Aya raises the binoculars to her own face. It takes her a bit to refocus them on their targets and for a moment she panics, thinking she’s lost them. Then the face of the women they’re after fills the lenses and she relaxes. She’s a strange one, that’s for sure. Dark skin, dark hair, bright green eyes. She’s wearing a scarf with little horned animals Aya doesn’t recognize on it and a tall conical hat with a pompom on the end of it. According to Josie, she’s been pulling various objects that couldn’t have possibly fit out of her coat pockets all night. Aya watches as she proceeds to just that, offering what looks to be like a long string of tinsel to the woman sitting next to her, who shakes her head. This one looks a lot more like the typical Rat Maze denizen. She’s wearing beat up black combat armor, her white hair cropped short. She’s glancing around the bar, seemingly casual, but Aya recognizes the look in her eyes. Cold, practical. It’s the look of someone always on edge. The woman turns her head, and for a moment it seems like she’s looking directly at her. Aya jerks back, startled.
There’s a sudden ping! and Aya glances at Josie. “Your butt’s beeping,” she says with half a smirk.
“It’s probably Ze.” Josie scrambles to pull her communicator out of her back pocket. “She’s been sending me pictures.” She presses a button and a grainy, glitchy holophoto of their friend posing in from of a menorah flickers into life in the air. The text below the holo reads MISS YOU GUYS with multiple exclamation points.
“At least someone’s having fun.” Aya raises the binoculars again, a fond smile playing on her lips. A flash of movement catches her eye and she swings them over to the bar’s back exit just in time to see three men dressed in black enter. A sudden wave of pure ice sweeps over her, dread filling her stomach. “Oh, hell.”
“What?” Josie reaches out for the binoculars and Aya hands them over wordlessly, hands shaking. She feels sick. Josie takes a look, and Aya can hear her breath hitch. “Oh no. Oh no, no, what are they doing here?” “I don’t know! I don’t-“ Aya can feel herself start to panic and she sucks in a huge breath. “Okay. Okay, let’s just keep calm. We don’t know what they’re here for, right? It doesn’t involve us.”
“I think it does,” Josie says grimly, handing the binoculars back over. “Wha-“ Aya shoves them to her face so fast she’s surprised she doesn’t give herself a black eye. She sees the white-haired woman lean over to her companion, gesturing to the Men in Black. They’re just standing in the corner, staring, and Aya has to suppress a shudder. The woman in the hat nods, shoves the tinsel back into her pocket, stands up, and the pair head to the back exit. The Men in Black follow after them.
Aya sits back, a little stunned. Josie takes the binoculars back from her and slips them into her coat pocket. “Guess we found out who they were waiting for.” She chews on her lip for a moment. “I think we should go warn them. The ones we were watching, I mean.”
“Are you nuts?” Aya hisses. “Do you remember what happened last time we ran into one of those guys? We almost died!” “Yeah, which is why I think we should warn them! I don’t want any innocent people getting killed!”
“We don’t know they’re innocent,” Aya mutters, and Josie shoots her a look. Aya lets out a long, exasperated sigh, fighting the urge to scream. “Okay, fine. What do we got, weapon-wise?” She reaches into her own pocket as she asks, fingers closing around her raygun. It’s small, and it jams half the time, and it took her entire savings to get it, but it’s better than nothing. “I’ve got…” Josie rummages for a bit. “A couple of smoke bombs and – oh hey! Stun grenade!” She pulls it out. “Forgot I had that. Dunno if it still works, though.”
“Great,” Aya says glumly. “A bunch of prank toys and two weapons that might not even work against three genetically-altered super soldiers.” She takes another deep breath. “Well, let’s get going if we’re going.” Josie nods and puts the grenade back into her pocket carefully. “If we go that way,” she points at a catwalk above their heads, “we can get around to the alley behind the bar.”
“Super. Gimme a lift.” Josie does and Aya squirms onto the catwalk, them metal creaking ominously beneath her. “This thing’s rusted all to hell,” she puffs as she hauls Josie up beside her.
“What else is new,” Josie says, and Aya lets out a small laugh as they edge their way along the catwalk. She can hear voices up ahead, but they’re still too far away yet for her to make out the words. “I’m sure we can sort this all out peacefully, don’t you think?” Someone says as they come to the end of the catwalk. Aya drops flat and pulls Josie down beside her, peering out at the alley some thirty feet below. The woman in the hat is holding her hands up in a calming matter, one of them hovering in front of her companion, who has a gun trained on the men in black. The men in black are for their part standing completely still. Aya doesn’t think they’re even breathing.
“I don’t think peace talks are on the table here,” the white-haired woman says, and the other woman frowns at her.
“Don’t be silly, Blanche. Peace talks are always on my table, along with toast, popcorn, jellybeans…” She trails off. “Now I’m hungry. Give me the gun, Blanche.” She holds out her hand. Blanche hesitates, and she raises an eyebrow.
“Oh, alright. You better know what you’re doing.” Blanche mutters as she relinquishes the weapon.
“I almost never know what I’m doing,” the woman in the hat says confidently, and turns to face the Men in Black. Aya can barely believe what’s happening. This woman has to be either crazy, or suicidal, or both.
“What is she doing?” Josie hisses in her ear.
“I don’t know. You think we should step in?”
“Let’s see how this plays out,” Josie responds, and Aya nods.
The Men in Black all extend their right hand in unison, and she tenses. “The Factory,” they say, voices filtered and distorted. “Give it to us.” The woman in the hat pulls a face. “I don’t think so.”
“We are not asking.” The Men in Black take a step forward, and then several things happen all in a jumble.
First, Blanche pulls another gun from seemingly out of nowhere. Second, Aya finds herself yelling something that sounds like AIM FOR THEIR HEADS, which causes Blanche to startle and instead aim the gun at her and Josie. Three, Aya shifts her weight backward to get out of the scope of the gun and the catwalk chooses that exact moment to crumble in a scream of twisted metal, sending her and Josie plummeting to the hard ground below. And four, the woman in the hat pulls something out of her pocket and tosses it in the air, and everything goes white.
Aya finds herself facedown on a hard surface and groans, doing a mental inspection of her body. First, she’s alive, which is always a good thing, and second, she doesn’t appear to have any broken bones. Or any injuries at all, really, which is odd considering she’d been heading for the floor of the Rat Maze at top speed.
She sits up with a groan and freezes when she finds herself staring down the barrel of a gun.
“Blanche. None of that.” Aya spots the woman in the hat out of the corner of her eye, her tone disapproving. “Where’d you even get that gun from anyway? I thought I took it.”
“These are the girls that were following us, Aesc,” Blanche says, ignoring the question.
“Yes, I know.”
“Who are you?” Aya blurts out suddenly. She’s feeling reasonably confident that Blance won’t shoot her. Hopefully. “Lady Aesculapius.” She gives Aya a wink. “My friends – like Blanche here, who is going to put down that gun, thank you Blanche – call me Aesc.” She holds out a hand and when Aya takes it, hauls her to her feet with so much force Aya almost goes flying. She then does the same to Josie. Aya takes a moment to look around. They’re standing on a flat surface made out of what looks like blue crystal, stretching as far she can see. In the distance there are what looks like buildings and cities, made out of the same material. Aya’s never been anywhere like this before. She was born surrounded by metal, and she’s spent her entire life surrounded by metal. This is the first time she’s ever seen anything else.
She turns her attention back to Lady Aesc when the woman claps her hands suddenly. “Well!” She says cheerfully. “That was quite a pickle we got ourselves out of, don’t you think?” Lady Aesc then proceeds to take the hat off her head, fold it up, stick it in her pocket, and pull out a different hat, putting the new one back on. Aya watches, a bit stupefied.
“Hold it!” She says, shaking her head to clear her thoughts. “I have questions I need answered.”
“Me too,” Josie says from where she’s hunched over on the ground, busy trying to pry a bit of crystal free.
“Well, naturally!” Lady Aesc folds her hands in front of her. “Just answer me one first. Why were you following us?”
Aya and Josie exchange glances. “Well,” Aya starts awkwardly, suddenly feeling embarrassed. “Me and are bounty hunters. Or trying to be, anyway. We just started. Our first job was to track you down.”
“Me?” Lady Aesc looks confused. “Who would possibly want to track me?” Blanche snorts, and Lady Aesc shoots her a hurt look. “Lots of people,” Blanche says. “Those Men in Black, for one.”
“That’s an entirely different kettle of worms.” Lady Aesc waves her hand dismissively.
“Fish.”
“No Blanche, they definitely were not fish. Genetically-enhanced super soldiers, if I had to guess.
“No, I-“ Blanche snaps her mouth shut, obviously deciding it wasn’t worth the effort.
“So tell me, who wanted you to find me?” Lady Aesc fixes her eye on them.
“Local trader,” Josie cuts in. She does finger quotes. He said, and I quote, ‘this weird lookin’ woman and her bloomin’ great big ship came outta nowhere and squashed my trade stall, that’s my entire livelihood, y’know, and I want her to apologize!’” She shrugs. “So I told him we’d find you and try to get you to fix it.”
“Oops.” Lady Aesc looks guilty.
“I told you you hit something,” Blanche says. Lady Aesc just elbows her in the ribs.
“This is the ship he was talking about, isn’t it.” Josie says suddenly. Aya notices she’s managed to free the crystal she was working on and watches her sneak it into a pocket. “You pulled something out of your pocket before we fell, and now we’re here. It’s gotta be size-shifting. That’s high tech.”
“Nailed it.” Lady Aesc shoots Josie a delighted grin. “It’s a Factory of Crystal. The Firmament makes them.”
“The what-ament?” Aya furrows her brow. This is all getting to be a bit much for her. Scrapping and fighting in order to survive, she understands. Size-shifting crystal ships and their weird pilots she doesn’t quite get.
“Firmament. They’re kind of like my…” Lady Aesc scrounges for a word. “Family, I suppose. They’re the ones who sent me to the Magellan.”
“Not a great family if they send you to the Rat Maze.” Aya raises an eyebrow. “What were you even doing there?”
“Spreading holiday cheer, of course!” She spreads her arms with a big grin, dropping both when she’s met with a trio of stony faces. “Okay, well, that was secondary. Those Men in Black have been sniffing around other Firmament members, and they wanted me to see what they’re up to. I don’t know what they want with the Factories, but it can’t be anything good.” Lady Aesc makes a face, sticking her tongue out a bit, then shrugs. “Anyway, I’ll get back to that after I drop you two off back home.”
“Home?” It feels like a stone’s been dropped into Aya’s stomach, and she suddenly realizes how much she does not want to go back to the Rat Maze. “No, wait – you said this was a ship, right? So you can take us somewhere else!” She knows she’s starting to babble, but she can’t stop it. She needs off that godforsaken hellhole. Josie’s eying her strangely, and Aya shoots her a look that says ‘roll with it’.
“Yes, I could.” Lady Aesc says slowly – dubiously? Aya can’t tell.
“We know about the Men in Black,” Aya says desperately. “We’ve run into them before. We can tell you all about them in exchange!”
“Woah, calm down!” Lady Aesc raises her hands.
“I think she’s telling the truth.” Blanche leans over. “She said to aim for their heads, earlier.”
“Hm.” Lady Aesc looks at Aya with her sharp green eyes and Aya resists the urge to squirm under her gaze. “I think there’s more to you than it appears. Oh!” She suddenly slaps her forehead. “I just remembered, I never got your name.”
“I’m Aya.” She holds out her hand and Lady Aesc shakes it so heartily her hat threatens to fall off.
“I’m Josie,” Josie says. She doesn’t hold out her hand but Lady Aesc takes it anyway, then pulls the crystal Josie had squirreled away earlier out of her pocket and sticks it behind her own ear. Josie looks nonplussed, but Aya can tell she’s a bit disappointed at losing her treasure.
“Pleased to meet you both. And yes, I’ll fly you somewhere else. In exchange for one thing.”
“What?” Aya asks a bit nervously. She hopes it’s not money; she and Josie barely have two cents to rub together.
“I want…” Lady Aesc starts ominously, pointing at Aya. “…you to smile,” she finishes.
“Excuse me?” Aya sputters. She definitely hadn’t been expecting that.
“Smile! You’ve done nothing but look miserably this entire time, and it’s the holidays!” “I don’t do…holidays.” She says with difficulty. Josie gives her hand a sympathetic squeeze. She knows.
“Seriously? Not even one of them?” Lady Aesc’s eyebrows shoot up.
“No, I-“ Why is her throat burning so bad all of a sudden. “My sister died, last year. My twin.” Aya blinks quickly and gives Lady Aesc, who’s looking stricken, a weak smile. “It doesn’t feel right to celebrate without her.”
“Oh.” Lady Aesc goes quiet, and Blanche is giving Aya a look she doesn’t think she likes. “I’m sorry. I know…I know how much losing people hurts.”
“Yeah.” Aya gives another weak smile, smaller this time. “Well.”
“Well.” Lady Aesc shuffles a bit, then brightens. “Guess I’ll just have to deal with my own Grinch.” She throws an arm around Blanche.
“I am not…I don’t even know what a Grinch is.” Blanche says, deadpan. Lady Aesc pulls what looks like mistletoe out of her pocket and dangles it over her head, grinning. Blanche rolls her eyes and turns away, her face slightly pink. Lady Aesc shrugs, then crams the mistletoe into her mouth. Josie makes a yuck! sound.
“Okay, then.” Lady Aesc says after she’s finished munching. “How about I take you somewhere in exchange for you two telling me your story? I do love a good story.”
“Sounds good to me,” Josie says, and Aya nods.
“Great!” Lady Aesc claps. “I’ll whip us up some tea. Just gotta build the tearoom first. By the way – where do you want to go?”
Aya and Josie look at each other. The entire universe was out there for them. They could go anywhere, absolutely anywhere, and the prospect, was dizzying.
“You pick,” Josie says. “I’m happy anywhere as long as I’m with you.”
Aya smiles and resists the urge to bounce on her toes like a child. She wants to go somewhere where she’s free of having to sleep with one eye open, where she can breathe fresh air, where she can explore a million different possibilities.
“Let’s go to Mars.”

This story is part of a 10,000 Dawns Christmas. You can read the other stories and fine more about this author by clicking HERE.

Twas the Dawn before Christmas, when all throughout mars,
Not a Martian was fretting, they dreamt of the stars.
Their rifles were cleaned and racked with such care,
In hopes that their freedom soon would be there.
The rebels were nestled all snug in their beds;
While visions of democracy danced in their heads;
And Zhang in her study, report on her desk
Had just settled her brain for a long winter's rest
When out on the street there arose such a clatter,
she sprang from her chair to see what was the matter.
Away to the window she flew like a flash,
Tore open the curtains and threw up the sash.
The moons’ light on the glass dome aglow
Gave a lustre of midday to objects below,
When what to her wondering eyes did appear,
but a small crowd of people spreading holiday cheer,
they all carried candles, lit at the wick,
Voices raised in song, the melody thick
Sonorous as angels, the carolers came,
young and old ran out laughing, and joined just the same.
“Tomorrow for freedom, we might march for our home,
but tonight  sing together under the dome.
From Titan to Venus to the planets all,
We raise our voices so they'll hear our call!"
Like a herd of great beasts the carolers went,
Left Zhang all alone, her mood malcontent.
So off to the doorway, Zhang almost flew
As she struggled with haste to put on her shoe.
The building was silent, its walls all aloof
not knowing the joy of which the singing was proof.
As she opened the door and turned to the sound
of the carolers’ voices and their feet on the ground.
She made off in haste to catch up to the crowd,
she would march with her people, their heads all unbowed.
She joined in the chorus, she did not look back
they welcomed her in to become one of the pack..
Their eyes—how they twinkled! Their smiles, how merry!
Not one face concerned, not even one wary.
Zhang sang along and let her worries all go
she knew that soon enough they would only grow;
This one night at least, she would share in the peace,
she wouldn’t let worry put her brow in a crease.
They walked on for hours until their voices were sore
they walked on until they could not sing any more.
as Zhang looked on to their numbers quite ample
the last of her sadness she was able to trample.
With a smile on her lips, and a glint in her eye
she looked to the heavens and took in the sky.
She thought of her office, what was left of her work,
she thought of responsibilities she just could not shirk.
Thinking all this finally she knew,
tonight there was only one thing to do.
she climbed up a pole and gave a great shout,
to all those who were still there milling about
because working any more this day would not be right--
“Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!”

​

The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos
by James Wylder

​So, here we are, the end of one road, the start of another. The Chibnall era of Doctor Who has seen it’s first season finale, and we’ve reached the culmination of everything we’ve been building to. This year of Doctor Who was very different in that there wasn’t a story arc, there weren’t narrative elements that built from episode to episode, but instead we got arcs of themes. The repetition of themes over the course of these blogs got to the point where I basically skimmed them, but they were the point, they were what we were building towards in this finale. Interestingly, not all of these themes paid off the way I was expecting, but were still paid off. Of course, this also means this season of Doctor who was a strange one in that what it communicated to the audience from episode to episode was more subtle than we’re used to. There was no “Bad Wolf” or “Hybrid”, but there were things that came up again and again, and they came together in this episode.


I won’t give myself total credit though, I missed a few things repeated throughout the series that were built out to here. But let’s start with the biggest thing that returns from the past: Tim Shaw.



One of the most surprising things in this episode is the way that Tim Shaw is paralleled with the Doctor. In fact, we’re given a cracked mirror of the “The Woman who fell to Earth” over this whole episode. But Tim is the biggest parallel. Just like in “Woman”, we open without the Doctor, with an older person trying to help a younger person learn a skill. These are the Ux, and the Ux are our dark mirrors of Graham and Ryan. In the middle of their magic, the Ux are interrupted by a powerful magical being coming down to Earth, (er, coming down to Ranskoor Av Kolos?)--Tim Shaw, injured and without his transport off world. Just like the Doctor arrived, crashing down to Earth injurred and without her TARDIS.
Tim Shaw then builds a strange parody of the Doctor’s world: he lives in a magical structure that floats and does wonders, but its at it’s heart a weapon. He sits on a dias, upraised like the 13th Doctor’s TARDIS console. Indeed, the first shot we see of him, he’s framed in the center like the TARDIS’ central column in shot, a pair of panels behind him framing him as visual pairs to the crystal columns of the TARDIS. Tim has adopted a long cloak, visually mirroring him with 13 more as well. Tim has companions, the Ux, only instead of being his friends he’s made them into his cultish worshipers. Where 13 tries to make her companions not hurt people, Tim makes his hurt each other, and the universe.
We also have anther parallel: Tim Shaw and the Doctor are both styled within the episode as being something like gods, or perhaps wizards. Tim becomes a tinkerer, living in a workshop, building robots and war machines and machines to fix his breaking body. Tim lays claim to scientific ingenuity and knowledge as the means to his power, mirroring the “make it yourself attitude” the 13th Doctor has. Throughout the season we’ve seen the Doctor’s sonic called a wand, seen her travel into a magic mirror through fairy land, and Frog princess turn out to not be a real girl after all. Here, she encounters the dark wizard in his laboratory, doing arcane blood rituals to defy the laws of creation.
Ironically, though, Tim Shaw’s parallels to the Doctor aren’t entirely kind ones, and the juxtaposition is so pointed as it must be a feature, not a bug. We learn early on in the episode that the Doctor breaks her own rules, and admits she held Ryan to standards earlier in the season about using weapons she had no intention of keeping herself. We’re back to the old adage here: the Doctor lies. 13 is nice, and sweet, but she’s still manipulative. She still wants her companions to behave the way she wants, and deems correct. The way Tim Shaw lies to the Ux isn’t different in practice, only in content. And obviously the content matters, but the point is the episode is paralleling them, and putting the comparison in our head, not that it’s seriously asking a question of who is better. I mean, one of them committed genocide. We know.
` But this is what’s interesting about Tim Shaw as a villain: he isn’t creative, only imitative. He’s not the Master, in that he really is the Doctor reflected. He’s like the Doctor reflected because he is trying so so hard to be. Because he’s a Stenza.
We learn early on that the Stenza take a tooth from their victims, and put it into their skin. For them, victory isn’t just winning, it’s assimilating your victims into yourself. It’s not a long reach to imagine that this attitude in his culture would make Tim Shaw wish to mimic the Doctor’s power however he could making this pale and strange imitation.
Even so, in his imitation, he like the Doctor has become an exile from his own people, a renegade.


The desolation of the battle on Ranskoor Av Kolos bring an old episode to mind: Twice Upon a Time. There we were shown Rusty the Dalek, who learned the wrong lessons from the Doctor and wound up killing other Daleks for eternity, holed up in a fortress. With how much “Woman” followed TUAT, that this episode mirrors that isn’t too far a stretch, though it could be a neat co-incidence.
Outside of Tim Shaw though, we have other mirrors to the premiere: an amnesiac general who can only remember tasks as he begins doing them, ala the Doctor’s amnesia. We have a person out for revenge on Tim Shaw, before the brother of the last target of the Stenza leader hunt, this time Graham the husband of Grace who died during the fight against Tim Shaw on Earth. We have a mysterious object the characters don’t know the purpose of, which turns out to be a container. We have pieces of technology attached to the protagonists, which are turned against the antagonists in the finale.
We have so many mirrors, it’s some sort of sick funhouse.
But this has been a season of mirrors, nothing has been singular. While going through the repeated themes and elements this season, it got almost silly at times how the elements cropped up in each episode. Here they pay off.


The biggest theme, bodily autonomy paid off in a big way. In my opening essay this year, I compared Tim Shaw to a sexual predator in the way he violated the bodies of his victims, and here his abusive streak continues, only tied into another theme that I should have picked up on stronger, but big missed note in these episodes: the recurring religious elements. From a prayer at the end of Tsuranga, to the religious zealotry of the Witchfinders, to the religious division on Demons of the Punjab, we’ve seen it all over the place. Of course it was coming back. Only, I uh, didn’t note it.
Whoops.
Here, Tim’s abuse of other’s bodies is linked into his abuse of religion. One of the Ux is literally having his body violated on a crucifix under Tim’s orders. The Ux’s religion is corrupted by Tim to enable his abuse, his violence, and his lust for power. You can draw your own parallels to our own world if you want, but I’ll just leave the implications there on the table. Regardless, the older Ux looks on as Tim commits atrocities, because of her faith. She helps him, even. Becomes complicit.
This violation of the Ux becomes Tim’s ultimate weapon, through these smaller violations, comes the destruction of worlds. Through allowing these small atrocities, the bigger ones are birthed.

But this raises a question: how complicit is the Doctor in allowing these villains to escape? We reach the consequences, the Doctor being forced to confront this, and we’re not given an easy answer. Indeed, to the frustration of many, it looks like this will be one of the defining questions of this era of the show: how far is the correct amount to go for justice? Throughout this season, villains have escaped, and here the consequences were genocidal. The Doctor’s companions have trusted her to make the right calls, after all they are in awe of her, like the Ux are to Tim. She’s a wizard, a god, a wonder. There has been push-back before, but never a revolt. Till Graham.
In what is sort of a surprise, Graham got the biggest character arc this season. He got a huge development from his beginning in episode 1, not quite respecting Ryan and blaming his disability as just an excuse for his personal failings, to the last two episodes, where he was forced to choose between his own happiness last week, and his own pride and wrath this week, and Ryan. Graham defies the Doctor, and goes to kill Tim Shaw. Graham thankfully choses against revenge, and he and Ryan decide to imprison Tim in one of his own prisons. This solution, not quite the Doctor’s, and not the bloody solution Graham planned, finds its own path. Tim Shaw gets no glorious death, instead suffering the fate he put so many others through.
The false god is imprisoned, and in a show all about change, he becomes stagnation. Really, it’s all he was anyway.
The Doctor is also challenged by Tim, to kill the Ux or let planets die. The Doctor finds a solution here, using the tech they placed on their bodies as a solution. But the question hangs in the air.
I suspect this won’t be the last challenge. We’re only at the start of an era.
We know the questions now, and now there is only future.
End of the first act. We’ll see where the play goes from here on New Years eve.

What surprises will wait in store? What is that in the trailer? What mysterious creature is that?

...Its a dalek, but look, that’s still exciting.

See you on New Years eve!

Oh, and check back here on Christmas. There will be a big surprise for you who fans...but not an essay :).

What exactly is Doctor Who? Why is this a show we keep coming back to after decades? There are a lot of answers one can give, and a lot of different reasons, but the biggest one can be boiled down to one moment in “It Takes You Away”, where the Doctor has a conversation with a talking frog who is a sentient alternate reality that’s chilling out on a white chair where she basically has to break up with the frog with “it’s not you, it’s me”. It’s absolutely bonkers, played straight, and is exactly why Doctor Who exists as a program. There are other reasons, but this is the big one: it gives us something that absolutely nothing else on television is even thinking of doing.

This is an episode that gives us not only a magic mirror that leads into faerie land, and then into an alternate mirror universe, an orc with a magic light up balloon that attracts giant flesh-eating moths, monsters in the woods that turn out to be an illusory trick, stories of plotting sheep from dreams or nightmares, dopplegangers of dead loved ones whispering lies, and finally a frickin’ frog on a chair. This is a veritable treasure trove of wonderful, wondrous images, and we’re lucky to have each of them. There have been massive effects-laden blockbusters with hundreds of millions of dollars in budget that don’t even get close to the number of memorable images we’re treated to in “It Takes You Away”.

But the images aren’t hollow, luckily, and each supports the structure on what is unquestionably the most “Doctor-Who-y” episode we’ve had so far this year, and the episode that really clearly states what this season was about. I’ve written about the recurring themes of the series, but I’m now confident I know what it’s about, and so before we move on to picking things apart, let’s just get it out there:

Over all, this series of Doctor Who is about failed standards of masculinity.

From the toxic “you have to kill someone to be a man” of the Stenza, to Epzo forgoing teamwork for self-interest in “The Ghost Monument”, to the stoic-handsome-authoritative evil racist in Rosa, to the cowardly but power hungry Trump-stand-in in “Arachnids in the UK”, to—okay I don’t have to list everything, do I? The other themes lay into this, support it. The infringements on bodily autonomy. The need to combine organic life with technology to support power structures—we’re inhabiting a world this season where the failures of masculinity have been laid bare. It’s why Graham has been our point character, he’s not perfect, but he’s a model of a strong but caring kind of masculinity, an alternate to the ones the characters run into, while Ryan has been damaged by the same kind of toxic masculinity that’s destroying the family in this episode.

Throughout the season, we’ve been shown lots of bad parents, and in “It Takes You Away” we reach a climax on that. Ryan’s father left, and couldn’t even bother to show up for his own mother’s funeral. Epzo’s mother abused him. King James I’s mother abandoned him. All of these bad parents have left damage, and here is the challenge: we meet a man who is a bad father.

Erik is so caught up in his own wants and desires, he has boiled his brain into excusing his own selfishness. His daughter Hanne can take care of herself, after all. Or so he says. So he makes her afraid, for her own good. Or so he says. But really, he has abandoned his daughter because he’s selfish: he has the woman he loves, or so he thinks. He is blinded by his own importance. Unfortunately, this is all foreseen by Ryan. Early in the episode, Ryan says exactly what her dad has done: run off and left her. Everyone else assumes that there’s a Doctor Who monster afoot. Some menacing beastie in the woods that is hunting Hanne. Hanne wants to get her father back, she loves her father, but Ryan has been right this whole time. He lived through it before, and his experience is the most valuable here, but no one knows it.

In contrast, we have Graham. Both Graham and Erik have lost their wives, but Graham recognizes that the chance to live alone with Grace is wrong, because it means that Ryan will be alone. Graham realizes this when confronted with the reality that Ryan will be alone, while Erik only realizes it when his wife turns him down for the Doctor. For Erik, this was always selfish. It wasn’t about his wife being alive, really. It wasn’t about Hanne. It was about his own loss and longing for his wife.

The only way to end this is for the Doctor break his entire illusory mess, and she only can do this by playing against the forces of his toxic masculinity. She steals his girl. When he realizes he’s not wanted, that this wasn’t really his wife, the spell is broken. Hocus Pocus.

Because, this was all magic tricks. The fake sounds are our first clue, that this is an illusory game. The Solitract makes a world, just as Erik made a world. The Doctor constructs a lie for Hanne on the wall that she cannot see. Ryan tries his best to follow the Doctor’s lie. But all of these lies have holes: Hanne can hear that the chalk is writing, not drawing. Ryan can see the wires to the speakers, and see that Hanne’s dad has abandoned her. The Doctor can see that the Solitract isn’t really dead loved ones. On their own, each person would be trapped, but together they can see through the lies. There is strength in togetherness, something the Solitract longs for but can never find.

That togetherness brings back Father and Daughter, the Father has failed her, but he is back, and hopefully learned something from it. And Graham and Ryan are together, and family. He’s a grandfather now, after all this time. Even in our imperfections, together, humans can be amazing.

Which leads to the greatest scenes we get: the Frog on the chair. The Doctor has to convince the Solitract to let them go, and appeals to it’s better nature to do so. We have seen the tricks, but this is real magic, faerie land. The unknown too strange to be faked. The frog on the chair is the same as the orc and his light up balloons, but brighter. She is something beyond, revealing herself in her favorite form. Not death, or an illusion, but a form she trusts the Doctor to see, letting her in without the pretense of fakery. It’s a world of dreams. Mentioning the sheep at the start wasn’t just kidding around.

And of course it’s weird, anything beyond our little lives is. The Earth is just a tiny speck compared to the great celestial bodies in our universe, so small it can barely be seen next to them. And if you go in closer, there’s a girl in her bed in Norway. What does she dream of? Sheep? And in her dream, there is a frog, and in the frog’s dream, there is a world, in that world, if we zoom down, there is a girl in a bed in Norway.

We always wake up, but for that little moment, we’re in Faerie Land. Maybe there’s a frog there to. And maybe, if we’re really really lucky, someone will put that dream on our television sets, laptops, and phones. How lucky would we be then? 

It could take us away.

The Witchfinders (wear masks)
​by James Wylder

There’s a certain type of Doctor Who story we’re all familiar with called the Celebrity Historical. You know, Team TARDIS meets this famous person or another: Rosa Parks, Vincent VanGogh, Shakespeare…it’s a staple of the show in it’s modern form. Usually, the episode is something of a beatification. The historical figure is shown as a hero in some way, their accomplishments lauded. In the last few years though, there’s been a few episodes that subverted this. Matt Smith had episodes where the historical figure was a rather nasty person like Richard Nixon or Hitler, and Peter Capaldi had no episodes with famous historical figures, only mythical ones like Robin Hood or Santa Claus. But what we hadn’t had was a sort of middle ground: a historical figure who is painted in shades of gray, with the episode coming down neither in favor of them, nor against them (the closest we got to this was Nixon meeting the Doctor, but the last moments we have with Nixon come down fairly on “he’s a bigot”).

That was until King James I showed up.

Making King James I purely a villain or purely admirable would be the obvious choices here, he’s leading Witchhunts throughout England after all. But then again, he assembled the King James Bible, a lot of people still like that too. He’s also pretty definitely gay or bisexual, unless you want to duck tape your eyes closed to the massive pile of historical evidence that yes, he was. So what to make of him? Maybe, instead of a saint of a villain, he’s just a really flawed person. And as it turns out, that’s a way more interesting take.

James I does a lot of bad things during “The Witchfinders”, and those things are never excused. We as the audience aren’t told, “Well, this is alright because...” he does wrong things, and they are wrong. But, at the same time we’re asked to empathize with James. He’s a man wearing a mask in order to travel about and not be accosted, followed by sycophants who butter him up that he knows he can’t trust. People try to kill him. He was abandoned by his mother, and still reeling with the loneliness of his life. And he has let bad things happen because of that. But the Doctor doesn’t think he’s irredeemable. She gives him a chance. And he still let’s her down in the end, but he’s not ungrateful. Unlike Jack Robinson, he doesn’t walk away from the Doctor cocky and vile. He says he owes her his life.

This mirrors, in many ways, the real man. James I did over see the torture of Witches, but over time grew to doubt that they were really finding witches at all.

It’s a complex look at a complex person, and even if there are some kinks to work out, this is a fascinating path for Doctor Who to take for how it looks at historical figures. More, please.

Also, more Alan Cumming please. If anyone comes back from Series 11’s guest stars, can we please have a sequel to this absolutely delightful performance? Watching James I hit on Ryan Sinclair was great, and watching Cumming seamlessly move between comedy and honest drama was fantastic. He was perfect casting, and I really would love to see more of his take on this character. He’s a pure delight.

Another thing this episode does well is allowing us the small pleasures we’d like: the Doctor and Graham wearing the big Witchfinder hat, for instance. Of course we want to see the Doctor wearing a big silly hat, and it gives us that.

It shouldn’t be understated also, that this episode handling the Witchhunts themselves so deftly is a coup for scriptwriter Joy Wilkinson. We’ve had some very difficult historical subject matter being dealt with this series, and Wilkinson did it well. Hopefully we see more from her too.

The running theme of bodily autonomy this series is key in Wilkinson’s script as well, our villains not only go inside human bodies to use them as macabre puppets, but our conflict stems around a healer being uncomfortable performing a medical proceedure on a patient. Every antagonist in this episode, from James I, to the town’s landholder, to the alien threat, wish to take people’s bodily autonomy. To bind them and torture them. To bind them and dunk them under water. To fill their bodies up. None of them respect other people’s rights to exist as bodies freely. To control other’s physical bodies is power, and it’s how they deal with their problems. How the landholder deal with being unable to cure her illness, how King James I deals with his sad life, and how the aliens deal with their imprisonment: they destroy other’s bodily autonomy to feel some sense of control.

The reveal that the aliens were imprisoned for War Crimes fits with this running theme perfectly: their lack of respect for autonomy is cosmic. They parallel the Stenza in this way. The names are different, but it rhymes.

How fitting then, that amidst these Witchhunts, the Doctor becomes the hero of bodily autonomy? She once called herself a Doctor of Hope, but maybe she is a Doctor in a physical sense, yet not only as a physician. A Doctor that knows that it’s not just our souls that need saving, but our flesh too. A Doctor who defends our right to live inside our own skin unmolested.

A Doctor I’d be happy to call for an appointment.

* * *

But oh yes, let’s check in on our running themes, shall we? We have all the usual ones, and the repetition of them is becoming pretty in our faces. So there’s something going on with these. With the reveal of the finale’s title and synopsis, I’m fairly certain that how the elements of this season come together isn’t going to be in a direct way, but in a thematic way. We’ve had these recurring elements of bodily autonomy (this week, that theme was your face...literally!), living beings with something else inside them, bad guys getting away, etc. Plus one new one I should have listed before in these essays: the Doctor doesn’t kill something, but someone else in the episode tries to or does it for her (Jack Robinson shooting the spider, Kevin shoving the Stenza off, James I shoving his torch into the bog zombie, etc). We’re leading to something in the finale, and I’m getting more and more certain that something is going to do with the Doctor facing a scenario where these repeated narrative elements come together in a way that she cannot walk away from, or not interfere with. Perhaps the Stenza will still return, but I don’t think it will be the Monster Mash some predicted or would like.

But time will tell. Let’s see then.
​

Doctor Who: Kerblam! (...azon)

I woke up this morning, stressed about money. Being a freelance writer isn’t easy, and gets more difficult when you’ve had a few health crisises in one year. Pulling up my feed from Kindle Digital Press, an Amazon Company (TM), I looked through the stark last few days of book sales. Book launches always peter out, that’s in their nature, but it still always sucks to reach the point where the luster has rubbed off for readers. My anthology is in the slow burn phase of it’s life, where it will remain. I remember that I need to continue the work of getting my books onto Audible, an Amazon Company (TM). I have a lot of work to do. I always do. I feel guilty for taking care of myself, after all, I have no salary. My time is mine for work.

If someone orders one of my books, they’ll roll off the printers, and an Amazon employee will package that book and send it out. Dropped on a doorstep, kerblam.

Meanwhile, in space, the same thing. But a different company name. Space Amazon… Spamazon… Kerblam!, that’s it, yes, Kerblam! is the biggest mailing retailer in the galaxy. They send antique lamps! And Fezzes! And their workers only get to see their own kids twice a year! They’re not allowed to talk or robots will come up and very politely threaten them! A big old happy place. We shouldn’t question it, not when our lives depend on it, our livlihoods. Even if our jobs are terrible, even if they disrespect our dignity, or reduce us to things machines could do, or give us little indignities that sting up our arms bit by bit till it sneaks up on us we have sores, its okay!

Kerblam! Is nice. They’re looking out for us. Sure, the manager is a brute who insults the nicest person alive, and sure they’re an autonomous entity that answers to no authority when people are dying, But that’s okay.

After all, at the end of the episode, the system at Kerblam murders an innocent girl, Kira, the nicest person alive, to try to show another one of it’s employees that he shouldn’t murder people. It’s not a fake out, they really murder her. But that’s okay. The Doctor even says that the system murdering her was because it was being kind and trying to save the guy who is going to kill a lot of people! How nice. We all know Kerblam is kind now, and that the Doctor did nothing about it’s murder of an innocent person and lets it walk away as though it was pure is because...it must actually be pure! It isn’t an indictment of the Doctor’s morals that she’d let that happen. Kerblam had our best interests at heart after all.

Which is why we should be so angry about Charlie, the terrorist who wants to kill people so more people get jobs. Charlie after all, wants to kill people, which is wrong (it’s not wrong when Kerblam does it though! Don’t misunderstand me! Bless Kerblam). The Doctor and friends stop him from murdering people which is good.

Kerblam then, in all it’s wisdom, closes the facility for a month while they get things together again. They give their employees two weeks pay (not pay for the full month though, let’s not be unreasonable), and the Doctor and co leave to deliver a necklace to the daughter of a nice man Charlie reprogrammed some of the adorable robots in Kerblam to murder.

The end of the episode seems strange. You have expect the Doctor to hang out of the TARDIS and yell, “Wait, what?”. Was this episode pro Kerblam? By the end, Kerblam is the good guys, the guy asking for more rights as a worker is evil and dead, and the middle managers promise change. The middle managers had been searching out the deaths all along?

Was this episode braver once, and did it get toned down somewhere in it’s process? Was it always just a subversion of Doctor Who tropes? Or does it really think that the endless stress of young people in our economy is a selfish cry that will lead to bombs and we shouldn’t ask for a better world?

Kerblam is, from a craft perspective, the best episode of this series of Doctor Who. The pacing is fantastic. The dialogue sings off the page, naturalistic but witty. There is the best action sequence we’ve had yet (with the chute!). The music is, once again, fantastic. The fake company looks like a real fake company! But the episode’s ending, with the murder of an innocent girl, with it glossing that over, with the demonizing of the person asking for change…it leaves a confusing sour note. Sweet and sour, mixed together. Results may vary on how it will sit in your stomach. If morality bothers you, you’ll probably be left uncomfortable. If not, I suppose it’s just fun! Kerblam is great! Smile!

There is a discord there. Did the writer miss the dissonance, or was the dissonance intentional? Is this a black comedy, or a defense of mega corporations? If you owed your income to a company, would you be brave enough to speak out against it? Or would you muddle that message? Would it come out whole, or in pieces.

I guess we’ll never know exactly what Kerblam meant to say.

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[This contains spoilers for: the original and new Halloween - pretty much the entire franchise in fact - and Dario Argento’s 1982 movie Tenebrae. Also, CW – discussion of violence, rape, PTSD and female suffering in the context of exploitation cinema.]


Thesis statement : Halloween, 2018 edition, is one of the best movies of the decade, and the product of the perfect hybridation of the classic slasher with the current trend of modern, deconstructive, socially conscious horror movies a la Get Out or It Follows.

That may not appear obvious. Blame the misleading trailers, maybe, but to the untrained eye, probably quite legitimately pissed off about the less pleasing tropes of the genre, it looks like another of these interchangeable pieces where some masked killer, to quote Halloween scholar and video essayist May Leitz, “do a stab” (1) on some (probably female and scantily clad) passer-bys.  And you can’t blame whoever thought that – with horror as a cheap-to-make, potentially very lucrative cash-in to throw at audiences during the dump months of the winter (2), toxic tropes accumulate very, very fast in loving and festering little piles spread around the popular consciousness.  With the old chestnuts, always - fetishisation of violence, and, of course, its treatment of women, which, if it shows a certain level of complexity – studied for instance by Carol Clover (3) - has steadily gotten worse since the codification of the modern slasher.

A downwards trend which is perfectly embodied by the Halloween franchise itself. History time! –

1. The Long and Painful Story of how slashers got misogynist-er

It doesn’t start with Halloween. It starts, mostly, with the Italian giallo – a singular genre mixing erotic pulp, murder mystery, and gory thriller, who had its turn in the limelight during the 1960s and 1970s, mostly at the end of the three big names of the underground South European horror cinema at the time, Mario Bava, Lucio Fulci, and of course, Dario Argento. A lot of the very specific stylistic trappings of these, like their surrealist hyperaestheticism, were eventually discarded in the conversion to American, more naturalistic norms that gave us the slasher. But quite a few survived: murders as setpieces giving the action its rhythm, and an Iconisation of the figure of the masked killer, often present throughout the narrative by synecdoche, close-ups on hands or hidden face. And, of course, the problem of the representation of female bodies and female suffering – note the “problem”. Because yes, while gialli were definitely an exploitative genre, they also are marked with a deep fascination with femininity and LGBT cultures – the hero is often a perfectly mediocre white dude, who ends up, somehow, plunged into a dangerous, confusing, secret world of queer and female mysteries. These freaks, these outsiders, might be alienated by the gaze of the filmmaker, but they are also celebrated, and shown as sexual, complex human beings in a way a lot of more mainstream, more respectable movies wouldn’t allow – Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971) and Deep Red (1975), both Argento’s, show very sympathetic gay characters, for instance. Also, the mysterious killer turns out to be, in more than a few of these, a woman taking her revenge on the forces of patriarchy  - once again, monstrous but sympathetic: while the grey, dull heroes might be more socially acceptable protagonists for a movie, they carry a responsibility in the death and destruction that befalls them and their entourage. That complex dynamic is one Argento especially would explore in more depth in the later parts of his filmography, with the way he represents the mystique of female power and sexuality in the Three Mothers trilogy (4) - and especially with the flawed and fascinating Tenebrae (1982), in which a metatextual stand-in for Argento makes a case for why horror should be exploitative … before being revealed as the killer who exploits and tortures female bodies. Self-loathing much?

This trend was, if anything, amplified in the primeval slasher that is Bob Clarke’s 1974 Black Christmas – a movie whose “final girl” is a pregnant student hell bent on aborting, no matter what her controlling boyfriend or society might tell her, and who is never judged or looked down for it. To quote film critic Jourdain Searles – “In a way, the unseen killer in Black Christmas, and Peter, the male villain we do see, are a biting critique of the more toxic forms of masculinity. The killer alternates between childish tantrums and extreme brutality, as if just being in the presence of women throws him into a mental frenzy. Once he kills Clare by suffocating her with plastic wrap, he puts her in a rocking chair, and later we see he's placed a baby doll in her lap. He hides from women until he kills them, and upon their death enjoys having full control of their bodies.” (5)  And the original Halloween follows that, to an extent – there is a sick element of twisted voyeurism to the violence, yes, but it’s never coded along the moral lines that would develop as slashers became a solidified genre with affirmed conventions. The killings don’t have some kind of retributive quality to them; the killer doesn’t specifically target those who break some kind of moral taboo regarding drugs, or sex, or whatever – and while Laurie Strode is probably the “purest” character of the movie following these arbitrary lines, she still is shown smoking pot with a friend, and enables her fellow students to go and bone freely (her own lack of a sex life is really portrayed as her just not having the opportunity, not some kind of moral imperative). It avoids the clichés – while, paradoxically, codifying them.

That’s the paradox of the Halloween franchise, really. You can certainly fault the original on some respects, but you can’t accuse John Carpenter of not being a political artist, someone with radical ideas and a keen flair for provocation. His breakthrough movie is a condemnation of the American lifestyle – a look at the repressed evil which lurks beyond the white picket fences of US neighborhoods, ready to strike. Nobody has told Laurie or her friends about the fact a very real murder took place in their town a few years ago; in the end run, no one moves a finger to help her as she’s running, bloody and screaming, through the streets. (6) It’s everything but morally black and white or comforting – Carpenter, really, has always been fascinated by evil as a structure. Evil as the very narrative structure of cinema (Cigarette Burns). Evil as a physical constant, a law of physics (Prince of Darkness). Evil as unseen societal oppression (They Live). Halloween is not different – Michael Myers is not a person, he is The Shape, the hungry void that’s let into the world by a certain social context. Impossible to destroy, and still haunting the suburbia as an all-powerful Boogeyman, as the final shots of the movie – a series of empty rooms where his heavy breathing his heard, showcase.

And then … The sequels.

Halloween is a very bad slasher franchise, truth be told. If you binge a few of these movies, that’s going to be very obvious really quickly. And let’s forget all moral considerations there: talking just in terms of spectacle, there’s just … not much there. Franchises like Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street understand the appeal of the genre a lot better – as bad as their entries often get (especially when Jason is concerned), you still do come away with a sense that some fun was had. There’s some gore pageantry at work, increasingly convoluted, if not outright comical, murder sequences that have to at least make you pay attention to the movie a bit: party horns shoved into eye sockets, people turned into cockroaches and then smashed, a machete to the face prompting someone to comically fall down two flights of stairs that weren’t there two shots before … The slasher scene, for all its flaws, has a sense of craftsmanship and naughty fun that’s at least slightly endearing, and which proved extremely formative to some of the people working there: that’s how we got Rachel Talalay, after all.

Halloween doesn’t go that way at all. Its wildest flight of fancy, in ten movies, is either a weird visual leitmotif involving a white horse, or Busta Rhymes trying to karate kick Myers (yes, that really did happen). Michael Meyers is, after all, essentially a thematic shorthand in Carpenter’s movie, not an actual character or someone who’s supposed to be fun to watch. He just, well, do a stab. And there’s only so much ways you can film people getting stabbed. It’s not especially gory, nor especially fun. It just kind of happens: here’s a movie, here are victims, here is violence, and it plays in the same rhythmic pattern, movie after movie, time after time. Like a grey and dour ritual, scored by the same Carpenter synth track whose magic is irredeemably drained around the tenth time you hear it playing – because these are still movies which take themselves largely seriously, with Donald Pleasance going all Shakespearean in the background. And without the element of fun and playfulness, well, what you do end up is a pretty rancid process of fetishized violence, as described by Siskel and Ebert, with their characteristic nuance regarding horror movies:  “These films hate women, and, unfortunately, the audiences that go to them, don’t seem to like women much either…To sit there [in the theater] surrounded by people who are identifying, not with the victim but with the attacker, the killer – cheering these killers on, it’s a very scary experience.” (7)

Michael Meyers is a non-character, a non-entity. He is literally defined by absence: the absence of good, of a motive. A “pale, blank, emotionless” face. And yet, he ended up pretty much becoming the main character of the franchise, resisting an attempt by Carpenter to reboot the franchise as an anthology series with the very commendable Season of the Witch (1982). The female heroines can triumph and win, but never in a really meaningful way. See Laurie Strode: in the original continuity (movies one through six), she dies off-screen in a car crash. Her trauma, and pain, and character? Irrelevant, we’re here to see the bad man stab people. In the second one (H20 and Resurrection), she initially triumphs and kills the boogeyman, only for the following movie to reveal in a truly astoundingly stupid twist that it was actually someone else wearing the mask, leading her to be held in an asylum, and then killed unceremoniously in the pre-credits when Michael returns. Maybe Rob Zombie did better? Of course not. She ends up insane and potentially murderous, locked up in the same asylum as Michael (or maybe that’s just a hallucination as she is dying, depending on which cut you’re watching, but neither feel especially empowering). And she’s not even the character who gets the worst deal out of the franchise! That’s probably Jamie Lloyd, the cute child protagonist of episodes four and five, and daughter of the deceased (in that continuity – yes, this franchise is a nightmare to follow) Laurie. Two whole movies of struggling against the boogeyman, including one where trauma has rendered her incapable of speaking, and what happens to her in movie six? Well, she’s been kidnapped by a doomsday cult for a good fifteen years, probably raped by Michael Meyers (once again, it depends of the version you’re watching, but is “forced impregnation with artificially created fetus” such a better alternative?), and then gets killed through impalement on farming equipment.

So. There we have it: Halloween is both the direct heir of a tradition centered around a layered, if problematic, representation of women and femininity; and also one of the franchises that have most shamelessly profiteered from female suffering and exploitation, ritualized on screen, to get some big bucks.

Where do we go now, in a context where horror is getting a lot more overtly political – or at least, better at getting recognition for it –, and where the social tensions have reached a boiling point in our world? How do we make Halloween relevant again? Can we transcend that legacy and even try to aim for “empowering”?

Well. That’s where the 2018 version comes in, doesn’t it.

1. The Shape Burns

Here sounds like the right time for a confession: I don’t especially care for Carpenter’s Halloween. It’s a good movie – a masterpiece, even –, but not one that especially resonates with me: maybe it’s because it’s rooted in the very specific experience of American suburbia; but I think the issue I have with it is in the very nature of the film: it’s a very cold, almost experimental piece, when you get down to it, a clinical, scientifical look at the effects of evil on ordinary people, where the structure, and the mise en scène, in a very Hitchcockian way, matter more than characters and their emotional journeys.

That’s what’s so fascinating about Halloween 2018 – it’s not so much a sequel as the second part of a diptych. A radically different take on the same concept, which questions and completes its sister-film. An inverted, twisted mirror. Whereas the original was clinical and structuralist, this new iteration very much puts the emphasis on heat instead of cold, down to its choice of final setpiece – it’s a deeply emotional character-driven narrative, yes, but more than that, instead of being calm and distant, it’s a fucking angry movie.

It takes a look at the long and annoying history of the franchise, and decides that, no, this is not going to be swept under the rug – we are going to talk about this shit, and we’re going to talk about it now.

So, what does it have to say? What is it about? There are many ways to articulate the points the story is trying to make, but I think the best way to sum it up is to describe it as a narrative about the evils of centrism.

One of the best lines in the movie is uttered by Laurie’s daughter, tired to see her disheveled hysterical mum barging in her living room – “the world is not a dark and frightening place!” And, for a good hour, the movie wanders about that narrative, that artificial world which makes sense and feels safe. It’s not naïve – it’s never showing it as anything but an illusion: but it also explores it, peels back its layers slowly, and venomously pokes at the people who are interested in maintaining it.

Michael Meyers is still a black hole of a character: he doesn’t do anything but kill and be evil. And in a way, that could be perceived as a flow – Jourdain Searles, quoted earlier in this, complained that the movie misses an opportunity to explicitly condemn and explore the misogyny underneath his murders. But, by still presenting the Shape as an unknowable, quasi-Lovecraftian evil, it manages to tackle how society itself actively puts these women, and other minorities, in the way of evil: how it undermines them, belittles them, and essentially grooms them into victims. No one cares about the women, about Laurie and her family – when journalists go to find her, it’s only to ask questions about the killer who has haunted her life: he is the one who’s important, the iconic monster, the one audiences want to see. In an especially potent moment of screenwriting, they pretty much “both sides” the Laurie/Michael dynamic: sure, he tried to kill her, but hasn’t she done some bad things in her life, too? Surely he deserves some pity, people need to try and understand him. It would be laughable if it weren’t something happening every week in the real world, where every young man who decides to grab an assault rifle and shoot minorities is presented as a “deeply flawed” human being whose motives have to be more complex than simple racial hatred, who deserves understanding and patience. A man can kill and murder, and he’ll become a celebrity, even in prison; a woman has a life that’s less than perfectly immaculate, and she’s a witch, an outcast, a dangerous madwoman hanging about in the woods.

That, especially if you add to it the scene where Allyson, Laurie’s granddaughter, dismisses the old “Michael is Laurie’s brother” plot arc (which really, downgrades the series from quasi-cosmic societal horror to “one fucked up family”) as a story people tell themselves to make sense of the ugliness of the confusing reality, is remarkable in its own right. But the movie doesn’t stop there: it actually offers an answer as to “why” people conjure up these narratives. The answer? They just like to see people suffer.

The character of Doctor Sartain, Michael’s therapist, is wonderful that way: he pleads for his charge, over and over, despite all the horrors he has committed. And when he gets the chance to do it, he commits a murder of his own, wearing the iconic mask, and exclaiming – “so this is what it feels like!” The pen with whom he wrote about Michael, pleading pity for him, turns into a knife, in a great bit of visual symbolism. And the worst thing is, the movie is right about that. Centrism, the cult of civility, and politeness, of giving everyone a voice, is just a smokescreen, one that conceals the suffering of the oppressed and turns the spotlight on the woes of the oppressors. And its propellants are indulging in it because at best, they’re indifferent to the pain of minorities; and, at worst, because it serves their interests and/or their pleasure. Sartain throws Michael at the Strodes because, essentially, he thinks it’s fun. Because it satisfies his male, privileged curiosity, because it’s a nice little spectacle – just like generations of male writers, directors and spectators have found fun and entertainment in the reification of female bodies as slabs of meat to be carved up on the big screen. The Michael Meyers of this movie is Siskel and Ebert’s warning come true: his empty Shape is the vessel for the unsayable male pulsions bubbling under the surface of our society; under the anonymity of his mask, it could be any random white dude you encounter in the street. It could even be you - the movie forcing you to adopt, for a couple of scenes, the point of view of Michael, following him in long, carefully constructed shots, like if you were playing him in Third Person Shooter game.

Because really, in the world of Halloween 2018, no man gets spared by the script. The condemnations can be subtle, but they’re definitely there: Ray, Laurie’s son-in-law, is probably nice enough, but spends the movie in a state of empathy-less meatheadedness; Allyson has to deal with a boyfriend who, despite adorning himself in the woke trappings of gender-nonconformity, still tries to fuck other girls when she disappears for twenty seconds in order to have a phone call, and a typical Nice Guy ™ who assumes he’s entitled to bone her just because he’s nice and not-a-cheating-asshole. An especially good example is this scene where the true crime podcaster we spend a lot of the first act following, is reading the case files on the murder of Judith Myers over her grave, intercut with footage from the original movie’s opening – the almost lurid tone with which he describes the killings, intercut with the cult PoV shots, very much makes you feel as if he’s projecting himself in that scenario, becoming the murderer and enjoying the benefits of female pain. It’s especially interesting to note that this flash-back is the only point of the movie where explicit female nudity is shown: it’s very much a thesis, and the rest of the movie is going to be an antithesis. Its use of gore strikes a fascinating balance that way: acts of extreme violence are committed, yes, but the camera never really dwells on them, showing short flashes of some truly baroque murders, but never relishing in them; moreover, none of the female characters actually die on-camera, the movie relying on sound, synecdoches and out-of-frame murders to both raise the stakes and avoid any kind of lurid voyeurism.

There’s a desperation to the whole movie – this is not something that could really have happened in a pre-2016 world: it’s very much poking in the wasps’ nest which has been revealed by the fall of increasingly large portions of the world into savage conservatism. It feels like a slasher written by El Sandifer, with, as a motto “let us assume that we are fucked”. Just look at the murder of Vicky’s, Allyson best friend: she is dragged away and stabbed in front of the very kid she’s babysitting. Who, in another subtle screenwriting touch, happens to be black. The movie is very clearly implying that trauma, PTSD and the spectre of the Shape and the structural evil contained therein will pass on to another generation – that everything that plays out now will play out again, just like the holiday of Halloween comes back every year, just like this pumpkin in the opening credits, which reconstructs itself in slow-motion. In a way, it has resigned to the fact that it will, inevitably, be overwritten and cancelled out by some trashy sequel ignoring all the points it has just made – and you better believe it’s not please about it.

And yet, surprisingly, it avoids nihilism.

It’s thanks to Laurie Strode, really. Who is the emotional core of the movie, thanks in no small part to a frankly breathtaking performance by Jamie Lee Curtis, in what’s arguably her best role ever. It’s a painful thing to watch, it really is – someone doubting her own sanity, alone in a world that consistently belittles her, diminishes her, makes her feel like a freak and an outcast for daring to be a man’s victim who won’t shut up and pretend that “the world is not an evil place”. But, there’s the thing – she is allowed to be right. The movie validates her, at every single turn, and, in maybe its biggest twist, has her win in the end. She defeats Michael Meyers. Oh, maybe he’ll be back in another sequel, in fact that’s pretty much guaranteed by now. But here – she does more than just killing him, she robs him of his power. She literally invades the narrative of the original Halloween movie, stealing Michael’s place in iconic Carpenter shots: she forces the movie to iconize her and her struggle instead of the killer’s. Her fight isn’t just happening within the movie: it’s a metanarrative one, and she absolutely shreds her opponent. That’s what the final setpiece is all about, really: beyond a bunch of Home Alone traps, what really happens is a bunch of women banding together and taking back control of the narrative. They pose as helpless victims, only to then gang up on the man who ruined their lives and beat the shit out of him – they master the conventions of slasher movies and use them as tools to assert their agency and power.

That’s all the ambiguity of the final few shots, really. Michael disappearing from the burning cellar can be seen as sequel bait, sure – but it’s also a sign of his ultimate defeat. Without the fear of others, without the exploitation of female pain, he is nothing – sure, the evil he embodied is still out there, hence the breathing sound on the soundtrack, but The Shape is destroyed, because people have stopped believing in him. They’ve stopped letting the Shape shape their lives, and it burns away into sighs. The knife in Allyson’s hands, with which she stabbed Michael in a lovely bit of reversal of the classic phallic symbolism inherent to the slasher, becomes a trophy. A mark of female solidarity – a proof that some can indeed escape Halloween, triumphant.

And they need this solidarity. Because, as the movie showcased, the world is, indeed, a dark and evil place.

Happy Halloween …?


​

Sources and footnotes:

1. LEITZ, May, “Local Trans Talks About The Movie Where He Do A Stab”, YouTube,  24/10/2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuiFY0gpR5g&t=31s

2. RAYMOND, Adam K., “Just How Bad of a Movie Month Is January?”, 1/7/2013, Vulture: https://web.archive.org/web/20150127031450/http://www.vulture.com/2013/01/january-worst-movie-release-month.html

3. Men, Women & Chainsaws : Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992)

4. But mostly just Suspiria (1977) and Inferno (1980). People tend to try and forget Mother of Tears (2007) ever happened, and they’re right.

5. SEARLES, Jourdain, “The Low-Budget Canadian Film That Inspired 'Halloween' and Launched an Entire Horror Genre”, Thrillist, 30/10/2018: https://www.thrillist.com/entertainment/nation/black-christmas-review-first-slasher-film-genre

6. LEITZ, May, “Halloween and the Suburban Nightmare”, YouTube, 29/09/2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwv3FsFj3_M&t=1s
 
7. EBERT, Roger, Siskel & Ebert at the Movies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8hj66FIFmw

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The art for this post is by the amazing Anne-Laure Tuduri, you can see more of her art at: ​http://liria10.tumblr.com

Demons of the Punjab

No one is who we think we are, and most of the time, that’s okay.
Most of the time.
We can live our lives with the people we love content with a layer of secrets over it. Love is, sometimes knowing not to ask. But those secrets form something deep about us, something important. And it’s hard to think we really know someone till we know those secrets, and maybe we don’t.

Demons of the Punjab is a lot of things. It’s a reflection of family secrets, a continuation of the running themes of this series of Doctor Who, a history lesson into an awful and often untouched period in the history of colonialism in India and Pakistan, and a damn fine character study to boot.

Yaz gets to take center stage this week, and even more than during Arachnids in the UK, we get to take a delve into who she is as a person. That the episode is framed around the companion making a request of the Doctor is nice, its cute, and the Doc’s reluctance is a fairly nice subtle callback to her past experiences in “Fathers Day” and “Dark Water/Death in Heaven”. In a lot of ways, this is the episode that most feels like our characters have settled in as Team TARDIS. The first five episodes established our new era, and now we get to just fly around and have adventures, which is nice. That it took us so long (episode 6 of a 10 episode season) to get this far is different though, it’s a big change from the traditions of the past. It’s been common to want to get right into blazing into adventures, and there’s been a tried and true format for each re-introduction of the show: you do one episode in the past, present, and future (being in space counts as future) and then after you’ve established all that, you can blaze onto into whatever adventures you want. Here our pacing has been slower, more careful. We’re just now getting out of the wilderness.


And what a clearing it is. This episode focuses on death, and how those who survive death deal with it living on into the future. The episode is framed around Yaz’s grandmother, and so we know she lives, but knowing she lives doesn’t take away from any of the tension or drama. We know from the start that she’s carried these memories with her throughout her entire life. We know if things go badly, and they do, that this has been a burden on her. It’s a different way of carrying tension then we’ve been given, and it works.

While talking about an episode’s quality isn’t something I’m super interested in (something that lead to some problems with my Tsurunga Conundrum essay) I’m going to note that this is, in my humble opinion, the strongest episode we’ve gotten so far in the Chibnall era of Doctor Who. Indeed, the biggest flaw I can throw at it is we already saw the episode’s big twist about the monsters 7 episodes ago in “Twice Upon a Time” where the malevalent aliens turned out to be actually be kind fellows who were going around to see people before they died. That we just saw this plot not too long ago is…really my only complaint, and in a season where last week we saw one of the most common repeated Doctor Who plots done once again, that’s barely a complaint at all. Demon’s of the Punjab is moving, original, and like nothing we’ve seen before in Doctor who largely. We haven’t had something like the Partition of India on Doctor Who before. The last time we had an episode with the main plot taking place in asia was in the 1960's, with the Abominable Snowman, and it wasn't primarily concerned with the lives of everyday Tibetans.


The Thijarians, our “demons”, mirror the Doctor not just in how they mirror the end of Twice Upon a Time, but in how their planet was destroyed, and now they live on trying to be kind after the fact. It’s a nice parallel, though it does make me wonder if we’ll get a reveal the Stenza killed their planet off.

But the Thigarians aren’t the real demons, rather, that’s colonialism. This episode is unrelenting in showing the damage caused by the hasty and ill-planned partition of India, and does an amazing job of balancing thing so that no religion or ethnic group is entirely to blame for what happens. The blame falls on the people who were supposed to care for this area, and who let it down, giving excuse for violence and hatred and lust for power to spill over into bloodshed. This is an episode that ends with one of our favorite people being shot and murdered in cold blood. It’s not messing around. As it shouldn’t.

The Doctor and friends once again can only watch, letting events unfold as they are supposed to and not interfering. We’ve seen a lot of that this series, but it is a different turn for the show as a whole. The bad guys have gotten away.

One smaller parallel is the breaking up of the team into gendered groups, something we’ve seen a few times through the series now. Graham and Ryan get a scene with the groom, while Yaz and the Doctor get one with the bride. The team being split this way allows the Doctor who explore her new role as a woman, and her joy in being in female spaces, but also allows for Graham to show us a kinder form of masculinity.

Throughout this series, we’ve seen lots of nasty men. Plenty of examples of men who are so caught up in the petty way they want to see themselves that they miss the reality in front of them. Graham has grown to be a beautiful character, because though he’s flawed, he represents an alternate route of masculinity in the story. You don’t have to be violent and power hungry to be a man. You can be a good man, and be kind, and that’s a message I’m absolutely here for.

* * *

Let’s take a moment to try and look into our crystal ball at the end of the series, shall we? We’re now six for six on:
1. Villains getting away.
2. Someone having something in their body they don’t want (this time, the Doctor getting visions forced into her).
3. Synthetic/Organic blends (the alien goo in the jar, this time).
And we’re NEARLY six for six on things getting teleported in each episode (I can’t recall anything getting teleported in “Arachnids” but let me know if I forgot something in the comments).

So I think it’s fair to say that either these are all intentional things being played out for us to notice, building to something in the series finale in episode 10, or these are just weird co-incidences built in from the series being written with a writers room and they mean nothing. So, let’s assume they do mean something. This doesn’t mean they’re going to come together in some carefully woven and intricate plot, but it does mean I think these things are going to play out in the finale in a big way. So, here are the four ways I think the series could go for the finale:

1. The Evil League of Evil
Most/Some/All of the baddies we’ve let go during the series come back for the finale. Maybe only in a cameo, but a few of them form a core of badness and the Doctor has to defeat them.
This could also JUST mean cameos from the villains, tying things together.
Whatever their plot is, it will involve 1. bodily autonomy, 2. synthetic/organic combination, and 3 probably teleporting some how.

2. Consequences
Alternately, if they don’t come back, the way they’ve all gotten away screamed intentionality. In this scenario, the plot isn’t so much about every villain who was let go coming back as about putting the Doctor in a position where letting the villain go like she’s done is an option she can’t abide. Here the conflict isn’t direct, it’s an internal emotional one, with the villains being let go building up an internal conflict for the Doctor.

3. Return of the Stenza
The Stenza come back, and the focus is simply on them as a villain. If this is the route, I predict a very heavy lean in to the bodily autonomy angle. Maybe the Stenza are teleporting in beings and kidnapping them, using them for experiments, and the Doc has to stop them, for example.

4. Stenza of the Daleks
The Stenza come back, but it’s all just a built up to us meeting a Dalek for the first time. The Dalek would be the ultimate in a synthetic/organic hybrid, and a villain that keeps getting away.

So, there are my predictions. Let’s see if I fall flat on my face or not with this. What do you think of them?