Mindless Ones

So, after a dull opener, we’ve had three pretty decent stories in a row – for all their faults, they’ve been watchable, entertaining, and had some decent ideas and moments in them.

It looks like season 6B might turn out to be the most consistently decent series of Doctor Who since the 2005 return…

Oh wait…

What’s that?

For those of you from America, or otherwise blissfully unaware of his existence, you can think of James Sodding Corden (henceforth JSC) as being a less funny Jack Black (were such a thing not an oxymoron), except on a lower budget, and with sports instead of rock and roll music.

JSC is not actually a terrible actor, and performs his role in this competently enough, but the problem is that he’s one of the most famous men in Britain at the moment, and has that fame almost solely for doing very bad things. You can watch him for maybe thirty seconds and almost be drawn in to the performance, but then the rage takes over and all decent-minded humans start looking for weapons with which to beat him around the face and torso for his role in Lesbian Vampire killers.

It amazes me that people who can see it was a terrible mistake for John Nathan-Turner, in the 80s, to cast well-known figures from light entertainment in the show, no matter how good a job they did, can’t see that it’s exactly as bad an idea when Stephen Moffat does it. And personally I’d take a thousand Ken Dodds, Bonnie Langfords or Beryl Reids over one JSC.

But moving away from He Whose Continued Popularity Is Proof That God Exists And Wants Us To Suffer, what about the script?

Well, it has good moments. The Doctor talking to little baby Stormageddon is amusing, though very derivative, but the good moments are more than swamped by the problems.

First is the running ‘joke’ in the episode that JSC is mistaken for the Doctor’s lover, or the Doctor makes pretend passes at him for no good reason. This is a joke because straight men are, of course, discomfited by the suggestion that they might not be absolutely 100% pure heterosexual. Apparently.

Yes, Gareth Roberts is, I believe, an homosexualist himself. But so is Mark Gatiss, and that didn’t stop him writing (with Moffat) the embarassingly homophobic Sherlock. And while I don’t want to start arguing that straight white men are the most oppressed people of all, I do find it unutterably tedious to see straight men portrayed as uniformly scared by the idea that they might be perceived as one of Those Gayers.

I’m also not at all sure that the Doctor should do quite so much hugging.

And then there’s the Cybermen.

Now, we’ve seen here before exactly what makes the Cybermen scary. And there are other, less-imaginative ways to make them effective, revolving around body horror, or political analogies with Communism, or future shock.

Or you can do what every Cyberman TV story (and the vast majority of non-TV stories, too) since 1975 has done, and have them be generic clompy monsters doing bad things because they’re the baddies. So of course that’s what is done here.

Millennium Elephant’s Daddy Richard has made a reasonable case that by having the Cybermen in this story be a bit crap, Roberts is actually trying to satirise all the other Doctor Who stories which have the Cybermen being a bit crap. But the end result is just a story where the Cybermen are a bit crap.

Nice to see the return of the Cybermats though.

But the worst thing about this story is that it sends out three separate messages, which range from the clichéd to the vile. Firstly, like nearly every single sodding episode since the start of the year, we find out again that the only kind of relationship that really matters is between a father and his son. No-one has ever been roused to heroism by a daughter! That would be sick and wrong. And a mother can never overcome impossible odds for her son – don’t be absurd, she’s a woman! And as for caring about a sister, or a cousin, or an uncle, or a friend, or any of the myriad other kinds of relationships that motivate and enrich the lives of every human being on the planet – don’t be stupid! What kind of drama can you get out of that?

No, the only possible things that can motivate a man are his wife and his son. (Women don’t have motives – they are objects, not subjects, of verbs).

In this case, the power of a man’s love for his son is so huge that it can actually destroy Cybermen. Yes, the climax of this story is actually the monsters being beaten by the power of love. Not metaphorically, but literally. His love is so intense it literally blows the Cybermen’s minds, and they all die.

This brings us to the second of the bad messages this story sends out. JSC only gets the courage to go and fight the Cybermen because he has learned from the Doctor that he can do anything if only he believes in himself.

This is one of the most pernicious ideas that permeates pretty much all of modern culture, and one of the things I liked about the previous episode was the way it so effectively skewered that idea. The fact is, you can’t do anything you believe you can. In fact, it’s vital to know your own limits (as I recently discovered by making myself seriously ill from overwork, even though I believed I could cope).

Some people can do amazing things. But when they can, it’s through some combination of hard work, self-sacrifice, planning and luck. Neil Armstrong didn’t walk on the moon because he had faith in himself no matter what anyone else said, he did it because he was a highly-trained test pilot who’d spent years training for that specific mission, and because of the efforts of thousands of other dedicated professionals. He may have also happened to believe in himself, but that is at best incidental.

I, on the other hand, will never walk on the moon. I’m about JSC’s age and build, and I’m asthmatic and have high blood pressure. Also, there is currently no manned space flight programme. Under those circumstances, believing I can travel to the moon would not be sensible, it would be delusional.

That doesn’t mean that I’m not capable of anything great (though I may not be), but that if I want to achieve greatness I need first to know what I am and am not capable of doing. I might one day write a great book, or a great piece of music. I might perform a great and noble self-sacrifice. But I won’t ever be a great athlete, or a great dancer, and anyone who convinced me I could if I just believed in myself would be playing an extraordinarily cruel trick on me. Yet we let TV get away with giving this message to millions of impressionable people every day. Those people might well be capable of greatness – or they might not – but I can think of very few better ways to stunt someone’s potential than to tell them the secret of success is being delusional.

And finally, the sexual politics of this story are nauseating. JSC’s character, who is meant to be an audience-identification figure, starts out as an imbecilic babyman who is literally not trusted by anyone who knows him to feed or clothe himself for a week, without the aid of a surrogate mother in the form of his wife. However, he goes on his very own heroes journey, and has a ‘character arc’, and by the end he has self-respect, and the respect of his son, because he killed something like proper men are meant to.

This is a lot of bad, disturbing messages to place in a single forty-five minute piece of television – I’d go so far as to call the attitude of this episode pathological, in fact. And the fact that these pathologies are so prevalent in ‘family entertainment’ at the moment that they can seem so normal and unworthy of comment says a lot about modern pop culture, none of it good.

But yeah, the bit where he called the baby Stormaggeddon, that was quite good.