Ben Schwartz posted a response/review to the first episode of the new Doctor Who season over on the main tcj.com site. I won’t summarize it in detail ‘cause it’s right here and you can just go read it. (Go read it! Support our host site! Give Ben some hits! He needs your support to counteract all the shit I’m giving him…)
Ben’s (admittedly tongue-in-cheek) thesis is that Eleven (the Doctor’s eleventh regeneration) is a “Tory” doctor – the idea being that this Doctor caves in to authority too quickly. I think this conclusion is wrong: it’s based first on overlooking the ways in which the plot of the first episode coheres internally, then overlooking how it coheres with the theme of the multi-episode story arc – the Doctor must decide whether the good of the many outweighs the good of the one – and then subsequently misreading how both that story arc and this specific story’s plot tie into contemporary British politics.
I’m not sure whether Ben feels like the old episodes are more tightly plotted than the new ones, but in my read, Dr Who has never been particularly about plot. It’s a secular morality play. If you don’t like morality plays, you’re probably not going to like this show (unless, these days, you just have a crush on the cute Doctor). But that doesn’t make it badly written. That’s like saying The Canterbury Tales is badly written because it isn’t The Lord of the Rings.
So although I think Ben is just mistaken about the plot points – something I go into in Ben’s comments section in nauseatingly geeky detail – mostly his post felt worth an argument to me because one of the reasons I do not watch a lot of tv in general is this notion, implicit in Ben’s position, that everything should be clearly spelled out bluntly and explicitly at the level of plot and dialogue, making it easy to get all the pieces on a casual viewing or two. To me, it’s the things that are not spelled out, but that can be reconciled via close reading (or even sometimes only by recourse to extra-diegetic elements) that give writing in any medium texture and life and complexity. I don’t share Ben’s concern with plotholes, but I also don’t agree that the episode actually has plotholes to be concerned about. I think it’s very tightly scripted and very well done.
Now, I’ll accept that the episode’s tightness is pretty subtle and easy to miss on one watching. (I’ve now watched it 6 times, because every time Ben said something I’d go, “Wait, what? Wait! Lemme watch that again!) But that subtlety is a tactic: just because it’s hard to catch precisely how things tie together in a single viewing doesn’t make the subtle bits “plotholes.” Having some things be tricky to figure out – but nonetheless tight – is what makes a video, tv or film or otherwise, worth watching and rewatching, that makes the viewer an active participant and rewards engaging for more than just a couple hours diversion. Dr Who is TV for geeks, which is why we’ve been watching it for 40-odd years.
So Ben and I, I think, disagree on what it means for an episode to be “well-written” because we think about plot in different ways. But that said, we also appear to have watched two very different versions of The Eleventh Hour. Ben argues:
[The Doctor] had direct contact with the Atraxi and then Prisoner Zero and was given the Atraxi message personally.
He points out that he leads the Atraxi to Zero by using his sonic screwdriver because they’re looking for alien technology — so, the Atraxi definitely know our world, that the Doctor’s not part of it, and then ignore this until it becomes a key part of catching Zero.
Ben rightly identifies the kernel of the plot in the second quote, but the details are wrong. The Doctor doesn’t lead the Atraxi to Zero using his sonic screwdriver. It’s actually fairly tricky for them to track something as small as the screwdriver. The Doctor tries to get their attention using it in the town square, and fails, because the screwdriver burns up before the Atraxi can, ahem, zero in on it.
The Atraxi don’t speak directly with him until the end, when he meets them on the roof. Prior to that, they’re just talking to his technology. Ben rightly remembers that in Amelia’s bedroom the Atraxi send their message directly – but it isn’t a personal message. It’s just the same rote “Prisoner Zero has escaped” that they’re broadcasting on every available communications medium, Earth-based and otherwise. They identify the alien technology of the sonic screwdriver and then broadcast their message directly onto the Doctor’s psychic paper.
But they don’t make the connection between the alien technologies and the biological alien. It’s not the Doctor they know; it’s the Doctor’s things. What they have a lock on is the technology they identified in Amelia’s bedroom and yard when the Doctor first arrived: that’s why they followed the Doctor away from Earth. (He says in the town square when he’s explaining why 12 years passed before they came back: “they’re only late ‘cause I am.”)
Tracking the Doctor in the Tardis is different – philosophically and in practice – from tracking the Doctor walking around. Atraxi scanning technology isn’t precise enough to find an individual the size of a human being quickly. Even with the sonic screwdriver going off in the town square and the Atraxi directly overhead, they can’t pinpoint the screwdriver, let alone identify the Doctor and Prisoner Zero, in that few seconds. In fact, although we don’t know it during the scene in the town square, the Atraxi don’t even know that the Doctor is alien until they scan him at the end of the episode on the rooftop – after he actually does succeed in phoning them. They scan him, and then they say “you are not of this world.”
So the Doctor’s being alien in fact isn’t a key part of catching Zero (except insofar as he’s smarter than we are). And the alien-ness of the Doctor’s technology doesn’t play any role either: what the Doctor did, he did entirely using present-day Earth technology: a laptop, a computer virus, and a camera phone. The Atraxi’s ability to scan alien technology in particular ends up being entirely irrelevant. Instead, what’s relevant is the distinction between the technology and the individuals who use it – and the fact that the Atraxi’s technology can’t tell the difference.
Insofar as there is something political in this episode, this is it. The use of earth technology is it. The gap between who a person is and the technology (s)he uses is it. This is well-played technology-as-Panopticon – and there aren’t many places, in the West at least, where the Panopticon has more present-day relevance than in 21st century Britain. According to the BBC, there are 4.2 million CCTV cameras in Britain – about one for every 14 people. That’s almost Orwellian, and it’s a huge issue for British politics.
But Ben gets the wrong party: the surveillance state is even more Labour than it is Tory. Officially the Tories support reductions in the surveillance state – but convicts are an exception to their plan to reduce the reach of their databases. In Britain-as-Panopticon, Labour and Tory are equally implicated. Certainly surveillance is a political issue, but it’s not one that falls out on the reductive liberal/conservative binary so characteristic of American politics.
Surveillance is instead a political issue in the Foucauldian sense. Foucault explained it thus in Discipline and Punish:
Perhaps we should abandon a whole tradition that allows us to imagine that knowledge can exist only where the power relations are suspended and that knowledge can develop only outside its injunctions, its demands, and its interests. Perhaps we should abandon the belief that power makes mad, and by the same token, that the renunciation of power is one of the conditions of knowledge. We should admit rather than power produces knowledge…that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations. These “power-knowledge relations” are to be analysed then, not on the basis of a subject of knowledge who is or is not free in relation to the power system, but, on the contrary, the subject who knows.
Surveillance is about gathering information and turning that information into knowledge about the people under surveillance. What’s at stake in this episode is not the straightforward partisan allegory, but its moral facet: the omniscience of the panopticon, and the limitations of that omniscience.
That gap between the individual and the technology, the gap the Atraxi surveillance cannot bridge, cuts to the moral heart of the very existence of a state: the necessity for individuals to make decisions on behalf of the many that affect each individual one, and the inadequacy of the knowledge we base those decisions on. Where better to explore the relation of surveillance to power than in a story where the hero’s power so explicitly comes from knowledge?
This is why the question (blustering over the Internet on Whovian message boards at the moment) of why the Doctor gives up Prisoner Zero without any evidence of his guilt is missing the point. Foucault’s insight is that the perspective of the Panopticon is not just about monitoring the prisoner – it’s about the way in which the ability to monitor individuals creates a category of citizen subjectivity unique to the modern state: individuals are transformed by surveillance into objects of knowledge.
That’s what Prisoner Zero is to the Atraxi, and by the force and necessity of his power-knowledge and the limitation of Earthly time, to the Doctor as well. The Atraxi mothership is a Panopticon – in concept and in design – but it is the Doctor who is all-seeing. Zero’s body is trapped in a forcefield of power and knowledge articulated by both the Atraxi and the Doctor: a forcefield that renders any sense in which he might be “not guilty” irrelevant – secondary in the face of the need to “govern” and “protect” the rest of the world. The state depends on the prisoner. The sacrifice of the one is necessary for the good of the many. The Doctor, like Foucault, knows this – and it makes him sad.
This is the point Ben misses when he insists that the Doctor jumps when the Atraxi flash their badges. Yes, the Doctor is complicit in the use of surveillance technology against Zero – but when the Atraxi take Zero, the Doctor’s expression is heartbroken. He’s genuinely sorry. It’s not a rote caving to an external authority; it’s recognizing that no individual beings matter in this universal, timeless, always existing field of power-knowledge. The Doctor recognizes his own subjugation to his own power.
But he also recognizes that he is the one individual in a position to determine whether the field of power-knowledge serves good or evil. (I’m wondering whether this will be a theme in the upcoming Churchill/Nazi/Dalek episode.) The Doctor, contra Foucault, turns the surveillance technology back against the Atraxi too. He subverts the Atraxi by turning their attention FROM the technology TO the one individual who does matter in that field, the individual in the Panopticon, the organic, living Doctor – the Doctor who protects the Earth. The Doctor who is our Superhero. The Superhero whose superpowers are his compassion, his mind, and his knowledge.
This is why I just don’t think this episode can be easily reduced to partisan politics, as Ben suggests, or even to simplistic questions of whose authority is most compelling.
Doctor Who doesn’t just have knowledge and a conscience. He has the power to make decisions that challenge and test the limits of his conscience, and that have consequences for individuals – individuals with whom he feels genuine compassion but over whom he nonetheless has power. Ben not only completely diminishes the complexity of this story when he overlooks how much the Doctor struggles with this role; he diminishes – like so much of contemporary politics in the age where the most powerful Panopticon is the eye of the media – the extent to which political good always relies on the ability of those individuals fortunate enough to sit in the panopticon to watch themselves as clearly and as vigilantly as the prisoners below.
Haven’t seen this episode, interest in Dr. Who very limited, but….
I can’t imagine Foucault would be especially pleased with the formulation that the solution to the panopticon is to have wiser/kinder guards who feel bad about wielding their power/knowledge. We need tragic liberal overlords who feel bad about stomping on us rather than evil conservative overlords who stomp on us righteously? Surely Foucault would argue that exercising the power to stomp is the important bit, and that the rhetorical tropes (whether “Sorry about that!” and/or “You deserve this!”) are in aid of that power, not mitigating it.
No, I agree. That’s why the Doctor’s a Superhero, contra Foucault…the episode’s pretty much a Third Way false “solution” to the Panopticon.
But I think that problem vis-a-vis Foucault is generally true of superhero stories. One way they satisfy is by miming a way out of the reality of the field of power-knowledge through the fiction of Absolutely Benevolent Power.
We’ll see whether Moffatt actually gets this and hands Foucault back to Labour as a challenge to the Doctor’s power-knowledge or if they’re actually in favor of the Third Way; not enough information in this episode.
Hey Noah — is there a Foucauldian solution to the Panopticon, actually? Actually in Foucault, I mean? Discipline and Punish is just description, isn’t it?
You’ve probably read more Foucault than me; I can’t remember if I ever read Discipline and Punish, honestly.
Foucaultian solutions in general are tricky, though, you’re right. You don’t ever get out of power/knowledge relations (much like you don’t get away from subconscious power dynamics in Freud.) The Panopticon is a particular, historical way of organizing power/knowledge, though, and one which I think Foucault finds especially troubling. Presumably he’d want to dismantle it to the extent it were possible — fewer video cameras, less observation, more anonymity in general. My impression of his writing in general is that he in general favors anonymity and erasure of knowledge about self (in various senses) as a space for a kind of freedom.
Cultural studies sorts often try to use his discussions of discourse to argue that marginalized groups can have access to power by undermining certain kinds of language or by interacting with symbols and language in various ways (subverting gender paradigms by participating in fan-fiction communities, for example.) Again, Foucault is kind of cited in those discussions, but it really seems like a pretty serious misreading. He’s pretty pessimistic, and his positive vision, such as it is, seems to involve a denial of humanism and self which I don’t think maps comfortably onto anybody’s resistance movement.
I really haven’t read a lot of Foucault: Discipline and Punish, The Order of Things, and that What is an Author? article.
I actually taught The Order of Things in an advanced Freshman composition class one time, in a fit of frustration over how divorced what I got paid for was from what I’d come to grad school to do. It ended up being a class in “how to read hard books” that every single student said was their favorite class of the semester. Weird.
I think you can go from Foucault to Lacan and argue that fantasy formations like superhero comics and sci fi tv shows help resolve anxieties over power-knowledge, but I absolutely agree with your reading of Foucault as not giving us much of a way out. Maybe I’ll read Discipline and Punish again and see if I think differently…
I’m not a gigantic Dr. Who fan but this is actually much more interesting than the episode itself since the series tends to obscure its “message” through its intentionally hokey delivery (I think they haven’t got the balance right just yet). You’ve probably hit the nail on the head with regards this season’s theme since its maintained through the Nazi/Dalek episode last week. Wonder what this week will bring…
” If you don’t like morality plays, you’re probably not going to like this show (unless, these days, you just have a crush on the cute Doctor). ”
Not to mention Karen Gillan and her Scottish accent.
And, yes, I’m sort of amazed that you watch so much Dr. Who. You better get on to Watchmen soon (as Noah suggested in the Swamp Thing thread) since it’s practically fixated on the themes you mention.
I haven’t seen the Nazi/Dalek one yet! I’m stuck on the stupid US two-week-behind broadcast schedule. Tragedy.
I don’t think they’ll ever quite manage to get the balance right in the new series: there’s something about the slower pacing of the old episodes, the longer story arcs, the limitations on action sequences, that makes it a little more sophisticated than the new ones. There was room then to let the grown-up issues surface and play a bit; with the self-contained episodes they have to stay suggested at the thematic level.
But I think I have watched every episode of Dr Who since it started airing on my PBS channel sometime in, I dunno, maybe 1978 or something? So I’m immensely pleased that they keep making it so that I can indulge myself without having to be entirely nostalgic. I don’t remember them all — thatsa lotta episodes — but I do watch an old one every couple of months or so, though, just to remember the difference.
I managed to get through about one issue of Watchmen before the Likewise roundtable derailed me: it’s still sitting on the piano, taunting me, waiting to be picked up again…
Does anybody have a screen capture of the Atraxi ship with the eye? I’d like to put up the image here, but I’m completely failing to find one online, and I was actually watching the program legally on demand so I don’t have anything to take a screenshot from…email to cmsmall at gmail.com if you do, please?
“I’m not sure whether Ben feels like the old episodes are more tightly plotted than the new ones, but in my read, Dr Who has never been particularly about plot. It’s a secular morality play. If you don’t like morality plays, you’re probably not going to like this show (unless, these days, you just have a crush on the cute Doctor). But that doesn’t make it badly written. ”
I wanna say, I sort of got into the character a bit around 2005 with the Eccleston series, but I no longer really like the character because I see him as a bit of an evil jerk.
Since I got into it he:
1) Destroyed the career of the prime minister who was to go down in history as the creator of the golden age of Britain because she threatened him with an offhand comment and killed some rape/ pillaging aliens (The Christmas Invasion) who were going to go off to rape/ pillage some other planet. Mostly his motivation seemed to be pride over her threatening him.
2) Commits genocide on the arachnid aliens, including murdering their babies, to finish a time lord “final solution”. (The Runaway Bride)
3) Tortures a criminal family for all eternity (or something) because they make made him feel sad about being a Timelord (Human
Nature)
4) Treats the Master and the Daleks better than he treats other aliens, refusing to kill them both in Daleks in Manhatten/ The Sound of Drums, even implicitly threatening Jack for wanting to kill the Master to defend the earth, because the Doctor has a history with those particular species/ characters/ they are superior aliens like him.
The writing is completly inconsistent, and I see the doctor as coming off as bi-polar shifting between Jesus/ Buddha mode and wrathful yahwah/ Satan mode.
Moffat doesn’t seem to like putting the Doctor is Satan mode from what I’ve seen of his stuff, so The Doctor might be a bit nicer now, though I’ve only seen the first episode this season.
I’ve only watched a few episodes (well, other than when I saw them as a kid on PBS and they creeped me out with that music and the cheap yet still freaky effects), but I like the way the Doctor seems kind of… amoral? Not immoral necessarily, but like, he doesn’t really fit with any kind of normal sense of morality, cause he is, after all zooming around in time and space and has no (as far as I can tell) society to keep him in check. Without society/culture where are the morals?
I generally think morality in Doctor Who, especially this new Dr Who, is fairly blunt: he’s the Good Guy in the White Hat, the aliens are (usually) the Bad Guys in the Black Hat, and he wins the day by being cleverer and better informed than they are.
Even when he goes to some alien world and gets involved in intra-alien conflicts, he rarely (never?) picks the wrong side. The old show was a little more ambiguous about intra-alien conflicts, (they had twice as much time), but the Doctor still always got it right.
I think that binary between good and evil makes him seem amoral to some extent: he’s outside our conflicts, in that terrain of Absolutely Benevolent Power. The new show has been trying to skirt the line a little bit, give him some flaws and muddy it up, let the companions help out with getting to the good end, but mostly the folks in the Tardis are still the good guys and the creatures are still the bad guys. It’s fiction for children.
Moffatt says so, for what it’s worth, and points out that the English kids’ lit tradition tends to be pretty rife with mortality:
BTW, Derik, the music for the new season is pretty great: it’s not creepy like the old series, but it’s notably more memorable than the Tennant run. Lots of it’s up on youtube; just search for “Eleventh Hour unreleased music.”
Later Foucault (mostly available in interviews, but also, for instance the last two vols. of History of Sexuality)–is all about “maintaining” and “caring for” the self–And in these writings the “self” in some ways takes the place of the “subject” programmed by and interpellated by discourse. These late writings give more space for human agency (and thus resistance to power, presumably). The “middle period” Foucault of Order of Things, D & P, first vol. of Hist. of Sexuality, etc. basically argues that there is no such thing as “man” (end of Order of Things says this explicitly)–or a “self.” Rather, we are (more or less) symptoms of a system of power/knowledge. In weird ways, lack of knowledge (and the lack of the perpetuation of “knowledge”) is much preferable to knowledge–since knowledge is “power”–power is disciplinary, and oppressive, etc. You can’t get outside discourse, so any “resistance” is part of discursive management/production/oppression.
He does seem to prefer a pre-panoptic/disciplinary society, where power is more hierarchical and is asserted from the “top down” as opposed to “from everywhere at once”. This seems largely to be because Marxist models are more apt under a more hierarchical structure. You can “resist” if there’s a clear hierarchy to “resist” (and if you can see it). If the power-structure is largely invisible (in a panoptic society) and comes from “everywhere at once” (even the oppressed are also oppressing nodes in Foucault’s model of power as discourse), you’re really screwed.
He backs away from this a bit in the later writings and interviews (although he usually says that “this is what I meant all along–I was never as pessimistic as all that, etc.”). Then he died.
Yes; the oppressed as oppressing nodes of discourse gets switched in cult studies to say, hey, discourse is power, so the oppressed have power too!
Sort of a classic optimistic anglo-american rejiggering of pessimistic gallicism…