[Spoilers] Once you really start getting into the premises and logical extensions of the episodes (i.e. doing criticism), sometimes things break down. Premises can be disturbing because, if true, they’re scary, or they can be disturbing because they don’t make sense. I’ve ranked them in another post, but here’s what I find scary, odd and/or incomprehensible, broken down by episode:
Episode 1, “Rose”: There’s a few things we could talk about here, including that relatively innocuous structures like the London Eye could be secret transmitters for nefarious parties. Cue the Tinfoil Hat patrol.
Then there’s this elderly professional–and I’m talking about the Doctor here–who goes in for 20-year old shop girls. There’s a lot of #MeToo and Class critiques available here. True, “age is just a number,” and the Doctor’s number is somewhere around 900. The TARDIS is dangled as a panel van containing all the candy in the universe. It’s more than a little creepy, though ultimately platonic.
Episode 2, “The End of the World”: The Earth was in danger of being engulfed by the Sun long before the year five billion, but technology was holding the forces in check–until we stopped paying the bills–then it’s bye-bye Earth. Invite all the wealthy to come watch its demise. So for-profit economies are alive and well in the Universe of the future. As long as you can pay the bills, you can stave off natural disasters, but if you can’t pay, none of your Communist, “All life matters” in this galaxy. In the words of Paul Cicero of Goodfellas, “F— you, pay me.”
Then there’s the idea that humans bred themselves into completely different species (plural)–so, many species are sexually compatible? That’s weird.
Finally, there’s Lady Cassandra O’Brien. Even if we presume her organs are in a jar and connected by tubes, how can a piece of skin, with no muscles, bones, tendons or ligaments move her mouth? She doesn’t even have lungs to move air–how can she speak? The pinnacle of human evolution [in her own mind], she is wildly susceptible to dry skin. It’s a critique of female beauty standards, the desire for women who are incredibly thin–Cassandra’s a two-dimensional sheet of skin. To paraphrase Nigel Tifnul from Spinal Tap, “How much more thin could she be? And the answer is none. None more thin.”
Episode 3, “The Unquiet Dead”: Ok, the dead can be reanimated. That’s revolutionary enough. The argument, “Give us your dead, you aren’t using them!” is frightening. And yet the same force that can animate the dead is soluble in (and drawn to) natural gas. The Gelth can consciously come through the rift, enter the gas lines and then leave them to possess a body, but when gas is in the air, they suddenly must leave the bodies and inhabit the gas? How does that work?
Episodes 4 & 5, “Aliens of London”/”World War Three”: The Slitheen are trying to irradiate and sell off chunks of the planet as spaceship fuel for profit, so we again see Capitalism run amok. The profit of a tech-savvy few outweigh the needs of the indigenous. Here, the Doctor steps in to stop them, so it would appear to be a thwarting of Colonialist and Laissez Faire Capitalism. However, the Doctor HAS to defeat them, which places it in the category of Might Makes Right, which is itself an extension of Capitalism.
Episode 6, “Dalek”: Ok, Aliens exist, so there have to be rich, American a$$holes who collect alien artifacts. Granted. And yes, a Dalek escaped destruction in the Time War; that’s not unusual for a time-traveling species, as we’ll soon come to find out. After all, it would be pretty boring if the Doctor had no nemeses (though that is also an extension of Capitalist thinking: “Without a contest, what’s the point?”).
Rose has to free the Dalek, and the evil American Capitalist who would willingly torture a creature for amusement–and the minor potential for profit–must be punished/killed. Also, in a bit of dramatic irony, Rose pities the Dalek and saves it by imbuing it with her DNA, which both gives it the capacity for sympathy that saves her life, and is the source of its own self-revulsion that causes it to self-destruct. Rose gets to be the universally Good person. the Doctor, on the other hand, is spiteful, ranting at the Dalek and refusing to help. No forgiving. No forgetting. And no pity. This ninth incarnation of the Doctor is DARK! So there’s the final premise of the episode: That the capacity for good is hardwired into our DNA.
Episode 7, “The Long Game”: This one’s close to my heart, but also a disturbing trend since at least 2015. “Ze who controls the media, controls the world.” That’s the whole of the premise of this episode. The Jagrafess controls Satellite 5, which controls all the world’s news feeds, and it transmits messages to instill fear in the population, keeping them in a closed society and stunting our potential for growth. It’s everybody’s worst perception of the media. Fox News as the only station. The Liberal Media drumming up a race war or pandemic threat to keep everyone living in fear. And there’s no trustworthy objective voice to listen to [because that’s what happens when you throw out all the scientists and journalists as biased because you don’t like what they’re telling you: you throw out the baby with the bath water]. The Doctor kills the Jagrafess, but doesn’t actually fix the problem that people get their news from one facility, which allows for a follow up in Episode 12.
Episode 8, “Father’s Day”: We had to get a Time Travel Paradox eventually: Rose Tyler grew up without a dad. So what happens if she goes back in time and saves her dad’s life? Reapers. That’s what happens. Reapers feed off cracks in space-time, and apparently can cross over from the Time Vortex, but once in our world are blocked by physical barriers, and moreso by older buildings. That’s weird in and of itself. Why does the date of construction matter? Shouldn’t a building of old stone be just as effective a barrier, whether it was constructed a century or a year ago? And why can’t they just “cross over” inside the building? But I digress.
What draws the Reapers out to feed is a Blinovitch Limitation Effect, or “crossing your own time line.” Basically, the Doctor (actually #10, David Tennant) describes it later as Back to the Future, if you change your past, your present will be different as well, and you can write yourself right out of existence. Additionally, the timeline can absorb a lot of minor changes, but there are certain “fixed points” that must remain unchanged or the whole of space-time unravels. Apparently, the death of Peter Tyler is one.
This is as opposed to the MCU‘s version of time travel, in which a change to the past creates new timelines, but we can’t travel to the future within those timelines, only back into our own timeline. This is why Cap doesn’t remember fighting himself–he still didn’t. On a side note, in the book, Version Control by Dexter Palmer, we first off have to realize that to travel in time, we also have to travel in space, as the universe is constantly moving; so we’d need a device to measure how much the earth has moved and in which directions, so that we can travel back there, and we can only travel backward or forward (safely) since the invention of that device; second, that we can create a new timeline, and then jump forward into that timeline, but when we enter that timeline we have no memory of our previous timeline–for us, everything is as it always was.
So, those versions of time travel aside, we need the Doctor to parse out which moments need to remain fixed and which can be massaged, without bringing on the Reapers–which, by the way, the Doctor can do nothing about, save ensuring that events unfold as they need to.
Episodes 9 & 10, “The Empty Child”/”The Doctor Dances”: We once again see the splash damage of Laissez Faire Capitalism, as “Time Agent”/con man Captain Jack Harkness brings a “dangerous” cylinder through the Time Vortex and into our world, then attempts to sell it to other “Time Agents” (just how many time travelers are there, anyway?), presumably as a potential weapon, before–“Whoops–a German bomb fell on it. Too bad you already paid,” and you can’t cross your timeline to catch him in the act [Can you? It’s a Time Lord rule, not a law of physics]. “So sad for you.” Once again, the message is that the Capitalists are doing illegal things and harming people, even if unintentionally. But Captain Jack is sorry, (and omnisexual) so he gets invited on the TARDIS.
Episode 11, “Boom Town”: Ok, the Slitheen are back, running Cardiff and trying to destroy the earth by using a nuclear power plant to open the rift. So here we see new dangers for nuclear power–“It can open a rift in space-time and destroy the planet? F@#$ that!”
Episode 12, “Bad Wolf”: We’re back on Satellite 5, but instead of Fake News, now we’re treated to Reality TV Death Matches. It’s an inevitable evolution [is it though?]: We love to hate the characters and vote them off, why not go the extra step and watch them disintegrated? Moreover, you don’t volunteer, you are selected by lottery. All of this is just window-dressing to keep the Earth busy while the Daleks repopulate. As Neil Postman postulated, we are Amusing Ourselves to Death, in both the killing of the contestants and the rising Dalek threat.
Episode 13,”The Parting of the Ways: Further, in the second installment, the Daleks admit to using the cells of human beings to create new Daleks (they weren’t disintegrated, but transported, only to be, well, dis-integrated?). True, unlike Episode 6, where the Dalek is altered/tainted by Rose’s DNA, these Daleks are selecting humans for membership on a cell-by-cell basis [apparently based on our capacity for hate, per episode 6]. Nevertheless, the trend of mixing Dalek with humans continues through the rest of the reboot.
The “Bad Wolf” thing has been popping up time and time again, and now we have the answer: By looking into the heart of the TARDIS, Rose becomes the Bad Wolf, and scatters clues throughout the timeline, so in essence, she crosses her own timeline, creating the means of her own creation (although it’s pretty subtle, pretty “thin”).
So what’s your vote for the most disturbing premise? Did I miss anything? Let me know in the comments, and click here for my picks in Part 2!
