science fiction – The Implausi.blog

Appendix W 04: Dune

(this was originally released as Implausipod episode 30 on March 11, 2024)

https://www.implausipod.com/1935232/episodes/14666807-e0030-appendix-w-04-dune

With the release of Dune part 2 in cinemas, we return to Appendix W with a look at Frank Herbert’s original novel from 1965. Dune has had a massive influence on the Warhammer 40000 universe in many ways, especially when looking at the original release of the Rogue Trader game in 1987, in everything from the weapons and wargear, to space travel and technology, to the organization of the Imperium itself. Join us as we look at some of those connections.

Since its release in 1965, the impact of Dune has been long and far reaching on popular culture, inspiring science fiction of all kinds, including direct adaptations for film and television, and perhaps a non zero amount of inspiration for the first Star Wars film as well. But one of its biggest impacts has been in the development of the Warhammer 40, 000 universe.

So with the release of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune part two in cinemas on March 1st, 2024, I’d like to return to a series on the podcast we call Appendix W and look at Frank Herbert’s original novel Dune from 1965 in this episode of the ImplausiPod.

Welcome to the Implauosipod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. So when we first started talking about Appendix W in the early days of the podcast back in September 2022, I had posted that based on a list I had put up on the blog a year prior about what some of the foundational titles for the Warhammer 40, 000 universe is.

Now, Warhammer 40, 000 is the grimdark gothic sci fi series published by Games Workshop. The Warhammer 40, 000 universe was originally introduced in 1987 with a version they called Rogue Trader, which has become affectionately known as the Blue Book, and I think I still have my rather well used and worn copy that I picked up in the summer of 1988 on a band trip.

For the most part, Warhammer 40, 000 is a miniatures war game, though the Rogue Trader version had a lot more in common with Dungeons and Dragons, and there’s some roleplay elements in there. The intellectual property now appears in everything from video games, to action figures, to merchandise of all sorts, to web shorts, and a massive amount of fiction set in that universe.

As primarily a miniatures war game, it sits as a niche of a niche with respect to the various nerd fandoms operating at a level far below Star Wars or Star Trek, but you might’ve heard more about it recently with rumors of an Amazon Prime series and Henry Cavill, the former Superman and Witcher himself being behind the scenes on that one, or just talking about it positively on various talk shows that he’s appeared on. Other fans include people like Ed Sheeran, who’s been spotted building Warhammer model kits backstage at his concerts. By and large, despite its popularity, it’s managed to stay relatively under the radar compared to some of the other series that are out there with respect to mainstream attention, knowledge.

It is what it is. Now, the material isn’t necessarily something that’s gotten a lot of scrutiny in the past, but that’s pretty much it. Part of what we’re doing here on the Implausipod, especially with the Appendix W series, and the goal of the Appendix W series is to look at some of those sources of inspiration that got folded into the development of Warhammer 40, 000.

And for those unfamiliar, what is Warhammer 40, 000? Well, it’s a nightmare Gothic future where humanity is fallen, basically. They’re still living with high technology that they no longer totally realize how to build and maintain. They are living in the shadows of their ancestors. Humanity spread across the galaxy, across untold millions of planets, united under an emperor in the imperium of man, beset by a civil war nearly 10, 000 years in the past that tore the empire apart, and now facing foes on all sides with alien races, both ancient and new, vying with humanity for control of the galaxy.

Humanity is maintained in this universe by a massive interstellar bureaucracy that redefines the word Byzantine. And much of humanity lives in massive hive worlds where massive cities cover the entire surface of a planet.

Ultimately, life for most of humanity in the Warhammer 40, 000 is what Hobbes would call poor, nasty, brutish, and short. It’s not solitary by any means, there’s way too many people around for that to be the case, but still. Now, as we covered earlier in our previous episodes on Appendix W, obviously Games Workshop is a British company, and there is a particular British flavor to a lot of these sources that Warhammer 40, 000 drew inspiration from.

And we’ve seen that in some of the sources that we’ve already looked at, like Space 1999. But even though Frank Herbert is an American author, Dune has had such an impact on the development of sci fi since its release, it definitely shows up as interesting an impact on Warhammer 40, 000. Now I’m going to lay out the evidence here throughout the rest of this episode.

You can take it or leave it as you see fit, but in terms of structure, what I like to lay out here is what we’ve done in previous episodes, looking at Appendix W and look at it in terms of things like the military examples within the book. Now, not all the sci fi influences that we list in Appendix W are military ones, of course, but as it’s a military war game, that’s a big part of it.

Then we’ll look at other elements of technology. And then cultural elements as well. A lot of Dune’s impact on the Warhammer 40, 000 universe expands outside of the miniatures war game itself into the larger structure of the setting. So we’ll take a brief look at those too, even though that isn’t our focus.

And then even a work like Dune didn’t appear out of nothing, ex nihilo, so we’ll look at some of the other sources that were out there that inspired Dune itself. And then I’ll wrap up the episode with a brief discussion of the future of Appendix W, so stay tuned.

Now looking at a work like Dune, you might think that the main source of inspiration is the planet Arrakis itself, with the hostile environment and the giant worms and everything. That’s actually one of the least influential elements. We do see the appearance of various, what Warhammer 40, 000 calls death worlds, planets that are very hostile to life, that as serve as recruiting grounds for various troops within the setting, including various Imperial Guard, sorry, Astra Militarum regiments, including the Talarn Desert Raiders.

But the biggest influence from Dune is the existence of the Empire and the Emperor. Within the book, the emperor is an active participant in the machinations that are taking place in the empire that they control. Whereas in Warhammer 40, 000, the Emperor is a near godlike figure that’s barely kept alive by the arcane technology of a golden throne where they’ve been placed for the last 10, 000 years since suffering a near mortal wound in combat.

In Warhammer 40, 000, the Emperor is not well, but their psychic power serves as a beacon that allows navigation throughout the rest of the galaxy for those who are attuned to it. But despite that difference, the other main takeaway from Dune is the Emperor uses his legions in order to maintain control.

Within Dune, the Emperor lends out his personal guard, the Sardaukar, to engage in the combat on behalf of the Harkonnens against the Atreides. Quoting from the glossary included at the back of the original Dune novel, the Sardaukar are, quote, the soldier fanatics of the Padishah Emperor. They were men from an environmental background of such ferocity that it killed six out of thirteen persons before the age of eleven.

Their military training emphasized ruthlessness and a near suicidal disregard for personal safety. They were taught from infancy to use cruelty as a standard weapon, weakening opponents with terror. Within Warhammer 40, 000, when the Emperor was still active, he had, of course, 20 legions of his space marines, the Adeptus Astartes, who were loyal to him.

Two of those legions became excommunicado and stricken from the records, and another nine ended up turning traitor in a civil war known as the Horus Heresy. But the tie is very deep. I mean, both of these draw on some Roman influence, obviously, but still, the linkage directly from Dune to Warhammer 40, 000 is strong, and much like the Roman Empire, both of these have the vast bureaucracy that I mentioned earlier.

Within Dune, of course, there’s the various noble houses that the Emperor is playing off against each other, like the Harkonnens and the Atreides, but there’s many more besides that. Within Warhammer 40, 000 can often be seen within the various Governors of various planets or systems who are given a large amount of latitude due to the nature of space travel and sometimes the chance that systems could go without without communications for Hundreds or thousands of years and the final major linkage would most likely be the religious one within dune It’s the role that the bene gesserit have behind the scenes with their machinations taking place over decades thousands of years.

Within Warhammer 40, 000, it’s the role of the ecclesiarchy, the imperial cult, that reveres the emperor as godlike. And as I’m saying this, I realize I’m only talking about the impact of the first Dune novel on Warhammer 40, 000, and not the series as a whole. So as we look at later books, later on, as part of Appendix W, we’ll see how some of those other linkages come into play into how Warhammer 40, 000 looked at launch and how it’s developed subsequently.

But for right now, we’ll just look at the impact that the Bene Gesserit have on the storyline within the novel. Now, despite all these deep linkages that really inform the setting, it’s with respect to the military technology that we see the influence that Dune really had on Warhammer 40, 000. Despite all the advanced technology in the book, oddly enough it’s a defensive item that comes to the forefront.

One of the conceits that we see with Dune is that a lot of the combat takes place with the Melee weapons with swords and knives. The reason for that is because of the shields. Reading again from the appendix in the back of the original Dune novel, it describes the defensive shields as, quote, The protective field produced by a Holtzman generator.

This field derives from phase one of the suspensor nullification effect. A shield will permit entry only to objects moving at slow speeds. Depending on setting, this speed ranges from six to nine centimeters per second, and can be shorted out only by a Shire sized electric field.

These are the shields that were visible in both movie adaptations early on, with the fight training between Gurney Halleck and Paul Atreides, the ones that made them both look like fighting Roblox characters in David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation. Within Warhammer 40, 000, we can see evidence of those with refractor fields that are widely available to various members of the Imperial forces.

These are fields that distort the image of the wearer and then bounce any of those incoming attacks into a flash of light. Within the Dune Universe these are so widely available that even common soldiery will have them, though in Warhammer 40, 000 they’re a little bit more rare, but as we said, it’s a fallen empire.

The other commonly available tool to the soldiery is that lasgun, which is described again in the appendix as a continuous wave laser projector. It’s use as a weapon is limited in a field generator shield culture because of the explosive pyrotechnics, technically subatomic fusion, created when its beam intersects a shield.

So even though they’re commonly available, they’re not widely used because hitting somebody who has wearing a shield with it is like setting off a small nuke. And within Dune, those Nukes, or atomics, remain one of the most powerful weapons available to the various houses and factions, to the extent that they’re kept under strong guard and rarely if ever used.

In fact, there’s a prescription on their use against human combatants. This is why Paul’s use of the nukes against the Mountain Range during their final assault doesn’t provoke sanctions from the other houses. Those sanctions could be as severe as planetary destruction, which in Warhammer 40, 000 would be called exterminatus, even though they’re not typically called that framed as being done by nukes. There’s a number of other weapons that show up in various ways in Dune that also make their way into the Warhammer 40, 000 universe. Everything from the sonic attacks, from the weirding modules, to the Kriss knives that are used in ritual combat. And we can see other technological elements as well, like the Fremen stillsuits, elements of that showing up in the Space Marines power armor in 40k, the look and feel of The mining machines showing up in the massive war machines of the 41st millennium, like the Baneblade or Leviathan or Capitol of Imperialis and even the Ornithopters themselves, the flapping wing flying machines that show up so prevalent in every adaptation of Dune.

All of these will appear at some point within the 41st millennium, even if they’re not present within Rogue Trader at launch in 1987. But It’s more than just the technology. It’s more than just the emperor and his legions. It’s more than just the psychic abilities, which we barely even touched on. There are two essential elements that deeply tie the Warhammer 40, 000 universe to Dune.

And those two elements are two groups of individuals with very specific sets of skills, the Mentats and the Navigators of the Spacing Guild. Now, the Mentats are basically humans trained as computers to replace the technology that was wiped out in the Butlerian Jihad in the prehistory of the Dune universe.

For those just joining us here in this episode, we covered the Butlerian Jihad in depth in depth. in the previous episode in episode 29. It was basically a pogrom against thinking machines that resulted in the destruction of all artificial intelligence, robotics, or even simple computers. Within Warhammer 40, 000, the Butlerian Jihad can be seen in the war that took place against the Men of Iron and led to the Dark Age of Technology, again in the Prehistory of that universe and while the mentats themselves aren’t as directly prevalent because obviously machines still exist. The attitude towards technology that it’s treated as a Religious element and something that’s known and understood is widely prevalent throughout the universe The final element is the Spacing Guild. Within the Dune universe the spice that’s only available on Dune – the melange – that allows for the navigators to gain prescience and to steer the ships as the Holtzman drives allow them to fold space and move them rapidly through the stars.

Over time, through their exposure to the melange, the navigators become something altogether no longer human. Whereas in the 41st millennium, the navigators are outright mutants to begin with, whose psychic abilities allow them to see the light cast by the Emperor on Terra, the Astronomicon that serves as a lighthouse to guide everybody through the shadows of the warp.

Now, both of these are mentioned in Rogue Trader in 1987, but they show up much more commonly outside the confines of the miniatures board game where much of the action takes place. They’re prevalent in the fiction and a lot of the lore surrounding the game, even though they rarely function within it, at least within the confines of the Warhammer 40, 000 game proper.

Now, the Games Workshop has leveraged the IP into a number of different realms, including the game systems like Necromunda, Battlefleet Gothic, and their various epic scale war games. So some of those elements are more common in certain other situations, but the linkage between the two, between Dune and 40k, is absolutely clear.

Now, as I said at the outset, dune had a massive influence on not just war hundred 40,000, but basically Sci-Fi in general. Since its release, it was, it spawned five sequels by Frank Herbert himself, which extended the stories and then. Brian Herbert, Frank Herbert’s son, and Kevin Anderson have done subsequent stories within the same universe.

Galactic Empire has been common throughout science fiction, especially since then, though most notably within the works of George Lucas, the Star Wars series. I believe Lucas has stated at least someplace that Dune was a partial source of inspiration, though some contest that it’s a much more than partial, and that there’s 16 points of similarity between the Dune novels and the original Star Wars film.

I think anybody reading the original novel and then watching the film may draw similar conclusions. But influence is a funny thing, and it works both ways, because just as Dune inspired numbers of works, including massive franchises like Star Wars and Forever 40, 000, Dune was in turn inspired by a number of sci fi works that were written well in advance of its publication.

There’s at least five works or series that were published before Dune came out that had elements that appear within the Dune stories. For the record, Dune was published as serials in 63 and 64, and came out as the full novel in 1965. Now, the first link, obviously, is Asimov’s Foundation, published as short stories in the 1940s, and then as novels in the early 1950s.

Here we’re dealing with the decay of an already existing galactic empire, and by using math and sociology as a form of Prescience, which is the same ability that Paul and the Bene Gesserit have, they’re able to predict the future and able to steer the outcome into a more desirable form. Does that sound familiar?

Asimov calls this psychohistory, and I’m sure if you’re watching the current TV series you’re well aware of that, but wait, there’s more. Next up is the Lensman series, written by E. E. Doc Smith, starting with Triplanetary, which was published in 1948. I mean, there’s aliens and stuff in it, but there’s a long range breathing program on certain human bloodlines in order to bring about their latent psychic abilities.

And then they’re tested, with a device called the Lens, which can cause pain to people that aren’t psychically attuned to it, which, again, sounds familiar. The third up would be the Instrumentality series, by Cordwainer Smith. Now, there’s a novel, Nostrilia, which was originally published after Dune came out, but the short stories from the series came out starting in 1955 and through the early 1960s.

In it, space travel is only made possible by a drive that can warp space, and a guild of mutated humans that are able to see the path between the stars to get humanity to where they need to be. In addition to that, the rulers of Earth are a number of noble houses. that are continually feuding amongst themselves and through various technologies are extremely long lived, almost effectively immortal.

Now we’ve touched on some of that with the instrumentality before, back in episode 18, and we will be visiting the instrumentality again, at least twice more, in Appendix W, with a look at Scanners Live in Vain and then the Instrumentality series as a whole. So if you’re interested in more on that, go check out that episode and stay tuned for more.

Now, even the fighting around the giant space harvesters has some precedent. In 1960, Keith Laumer published the first Bolo short story. In it, 300 ton tanks are controlled by sentient AIs. And the story’s about how the fighting in and around those tanks go. But of course, we know that there’s no AI in the Dune universe because of the Butlerian Jihad.

Which Herbert got from Samuel Butler, who wrote it in 1869, and then published it as a novel in 1872, which we talked about last episode and mentioned earlier. So, of course, this influences almost 90 years before Dune came out. And, of course, the granddaddy of them all is probably Edgar Rice Burroughs, Warlord of Mars.

Now apparently, according to an interview with Brian Herbert, the Dune series was originally proposed to take place on Mars, but it was decided against it because of our cultural associations that we have with the red planet. And some of this obviously comes, takes place from the tales that came before it.

Now, in addition to the sci fi influences, there’s other real world influences like the The stories of Lawrence of Arabia, as well as Frank Herbert’s own observations that he took in the sand dunes in northern Oregon, and the reclamation project that was taking place there to bring back some of the land from the desert.

So all of these and more went into the creation of Dune. Now, don’t get me wrong, Dune is an amazing creative work, and it draws all these elements and other ones together more than we mentioned. It’s unique and interesting, and that’s why it’s timeless as it is. But everybody draws influences from multiple places.

The creativity is in how it gets put together. So we will continue exploring that creativity of both the Dune series, And the Warhammer 40, 000 series in episodes to come.

Once again, thank you for joining us on the ImplausiPod. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. You can reach me at drimplausible at implausiblepod. com, which is also where you can find the show archives and transcripts of all our previous shows. I’m responsible for all elements of the show, including research, writing, mixing, mastering, and music, and the show is licensed under a Creative Commons 4. 0 share-alike license. You may notice that there was no advertising during the program, and there’s no cost associated with the show, but it does grow through the word of mouth of the community. So if you enjoy the show, please share it with a friend or two and pass it along.

If you visit us on implausopod. com, you may notice that there’s a buy me a coffee link on each and every episode. This would just go to any hosting costs associated with the show. If you’re interested in more information on Appendix W, you can find those on the Appendix W YouTube channel. Just go to YouTube and type in Appendix W, and I’ll make sure that those are visible.

And if you’d like to follow along with us on the Appendix W reading list, I’ll leave a link to the blog post in the show notes. And join us in a month’s time as we look at Joe Haldeman’s Forever War. And between now and then, I’ll try and get the AppendixW. com website launched. And for the mainline podcast here on the ImplausiPod, please join us in a week or so for our next episode, where we have another Warhammer 40, 000 tie in.

You see, Warhammer 40, 000 is a little lost with respect to technology, and they’ll spend a lot of time looking for some elements from the dark age of technology. The STCs are standard template constructs. The plans that they put in their fabricators to chew out the advanced material of the Imperium. You could almost say that these are general purpose technologies, or GPTs.

And a different kind of GPT has been in the news a lot in the last year. So we’ll investigate this in something we call GPT squared. I hope you join us for it, I think it’ll be fantastic. Until then, take care, and have fun.

The Old Man and The River

(This was originally released as Implausipod Episode 27, on February 12, 2024)

https://www.implausipod.com/1935232/episodes/14446788-e0027-the-old-man-and-the-river

The parable of the Old Man and the River tells us it isn’t now deep the water is, but how swift the water flows when it comes to looking at pop culture. There’s magic in how crystal clear those swift waters flow. Join us for a review of the theories underpining the value of studying pop culture for academic analysis, what that means for the future of the Implausipod, and hints at who the old man might be.

The word’s gold rush conjures a particular image in everyone’s mind’s
eye. Images of the old west, and boomtowns where dusty prospectors would
stake a claim and take their chances. Near where I grew up, the heyday
was 1895, where dredges funded by Europeans and Americans would lift up
the riverbed by the bucketful, trying to sift up that glittering metal,
but by 1907 they were mostly gone.Abandoning their tools on the
riverbed to rust away, but that didn’t stop the smaller prospectors.
They continued on. Legend tells of one prospector who’s still tending
his claim to this very day. Every morning he gets up and tends the
hearth in his tiny cabin, makes himself some coffee and porridge, maybe
adds a little salt pork and a biscuit if it’s been a good month, and
then packs up his gear and heads up the mountain.It’s a two hour
hike to get to where the waters run clear. And you gotta get there for
dawn, so that when you reach down with your pan and give it a shake in
the stream, you can hold it up just right against the morning light, and
if you’re lucky, real lucky, you’ll see that glittering gold sparkling
in the pan.You see, the secret that the prospector knows is it isn’t
how deep the water is, it’s how fast it’s going. And those mountain
streams are very fast indeed.

No one knows exactly what keeps that Prospector going, as I’m sure you can do the math and you can tell he’s been at it for over a century. Some say he’s a ghost, or maybe a revenant. They seem to be popular around these parts. Maybe it’s a
curse, and whenever he finds what he seeks, his soul will be released.

I’ve got an inkling, but I’ll keep my hunch to myself a little bit
longer, and maybe Tell you at the end of this episode of The Implausipod,
while we explore the old man and the river.

Welcome to The Implausipod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and
popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible, and this episode we’ll
pick up almost directly where our last episode left off, where as
Silicon Dreams talked about how literature inspired the mythic
imagination that led to the development of virtual reality and our new
AI tools, here we’re going to talk about pop culture more generally.

At the beginning of every episode, I talk about how this podcast sits at
the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture, but maybe it’s
not so clear as we’ve bounced around a whole lot. We’ve talked about
television shows and cyberpunk novels, we’ve talked about Doctor Who
episodes, ancient science fiction, Warhammer 40, 000, and a few episodes
on some technology too, and it might not seem how they’re connected,
but I assure you they’re all interrelated.

So, in order to lay that all out, I’m going to break this episode into a couple chunks. We’re going to look at the philosophical background, and then we’re going to
look at some of the theoretical approaches about how this is actually
happening. So yeah, philosophy and theory. Exciting. Before we really
get started, I want to take a moment to pique your interest and discuss
why we want to look at philosophy.

Outwardly, it may not make sense to analyze the lyrical content of Taylor Swift’s songs, or look at the political economy of video games, or what they represent, to look at the commercials that air during the Super Bowl and not just the Super Bowl
itself, to take a recent example. But that’s exactly why we need to look
at it, because all those elements that are there in our pop culture are
those elements that reflect and represent So if we want to know what’s
really going on in our culture, it makes sense to look at what we’re
making and sharing with each other, as we talked about in our spreadable
media episode.

Because it turns out, once you get skilled at looking at pop culture, it’s really good at reflecting what our motivations are. That pan that our old man is holding. And let me share with you my favorite quote on it. Quote,

The most fertile ground for analyzing motives is pop culture. Not because pop culture is deep, but because it’s so shallow.It’s where those wishes and longings are most nakedly evident. End quote.

This is from the science fiction author Bruce Sterling in 2002, and I’ve I’ve used it as a touchstone ever since, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s pro wrestling or superhero
movies or stand up comedy or miniature games, I’ve found it to hold
true.So let’s get into the philosophy of why we’re doing this, and
for that we’re going to have to take a trip down the mountain.

Now,depending on your academic background, you may have heard of the Frankfurt School before. It was founded at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Natch. It was
called the Institute for Social Research, and they critiqued society
from a Marxist lens and founded what is now called Critical Theory.
Prior to World War II, the director was Max Horkheimer, who wrote some
of the foundational documents and worked with Theodor Adorno and also
Herbert Marcuse.

Also associated with the school was Walter Benjamin, who we’ll get to in a bit. They were critical of the cultural industry, as tools used to promote, repeat, and sustain capitalism, but also like, just power imbalances of the dominant ideology. The Frankfurt School coined the term the cultural industry, and this included film,
television, radio, music, print media, and By modern extension, video
games and social media would count too, and where Marx was focused on
the means of production, the Frankfurt School extended that to mean the
means of production of culture, as they observed that those who owned
those cultural forms were able to have an outsized say in the political
discourse.

They were able to reproduce the ideology.

And for the Frankfurt School, we can see this in the ownership of media in their
time, with the William Randolph Hearst’s of the world, and in ours with,
say, Jeff Bezos’s purchase of the Washington Post, and Elon Musk’s
purchase of Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg and his advertising company
Facebook, building media outlets for their customers, and the purchase
of Instagram, WhatsApp, and the like.And while the Frankfurt School
were some of our first explorers who identified that river, the flood of
material that we get from the cultural industries, they also had some
rather negative thoughts about it as well.

I’m referring here mostly to Theodore Adorno, who was a musicologist and was critical of Popular music, and in his time that included jazz, but for him popular culture was something that rationalized the arts, that took off all the rough
edges to make it palatable for consumption.And by that it made the
consumers, the listeners or viewers or readers, that much more passive
and just accepting of the information that they were getting. If the art
doesn’t challenge you, it doesn’t make you think. But here I think we
need to make a bit of a distinction between mass culture and popular
culture.If mass culture is a big lake or the ocean that’s available
to everybody, then popular culture is that fast flowing river that joins
the sea at some point.

The critical point here is that only some material from mass culture enters the popular culture. to quote John Fiske. But if we want to understand how that happens, we need to start moving on from the Frankfurt School to one of their associates, Walter Benjamin.

Now, he’s perhaps best known for his writing on art and
aesthetics, but for us, the work that’s most relevant is the work of art
in the age of its technological reproducibility. This is a foundational
text about how the very nature of art changes when you no longer need
an artist doing each and every piece, and it can be mass copied and
reproduced.And it’s even more relevant now in the age of AI tools,
so we’ll have to return to this in a few weeks. Now, Benjamin, writing
in 1935, is talking a lot about film at this point in time, as different
from painting and other composition, and being something much more than
just photography itself, and it’s the unfinished nature of it that it
cannot be completed with a single stroke, but rather requires much in
the way of what we now call post production, the work of editors and
colorists and visual effects and sound design, and all these things
together.

Film has a capacity for improvement, end quote, in that all
these things can be done after the shot, and these are One of the
things that make film so magical, that capacity in turn is what Benjamin
quotes from Franz Werfel, quote Film has not yet realized its true
purpose, its real possibilities. These consist in its unique ability to
use natural means to give incomparably convincing expression to the
fairy like, the marvelous.

The supernatural. Of course here Werfel, and Benjamin, is talking about A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but we can see how film can be used to create and develop the mythic imagination in its audience as well, as we discussed last episode. So film is about getting us used to new ideas. Also, propaganda, he’s still affiliated
with the Frankfurt School.But the idea of new ideas more generally.

Earlier in the text, Benjamin writes, the function of film is to train
human beings in the appreciation and reactions needed to deal with the
vast apparatus whose role in their lives is expanding almost daily, end
quote. This is using film as a referent, well before television and the
role that advertising on television would come to play.and is so
much more prophetic for that. We can see here the threads of the
development of the idea of the audience as being there for reception of
ideas. And these ideas can also be seen in the work of McLuhan.

Now, we’ve mentioned Marshall McLuhan in earlier episodes, and we will be
returning to him again.McLuhan talked about a lot of things when it
comes to media, but his biggest idea relative to what we’re talking
about here is the idea of content, for if the medium is the message,
this means that the way in which radios, TVs, or phones address us is
more important than what they say when they do. End quote.That was
from Adrian Daub’s Critical Review of Silicon Valley Thought. Daub goes
into depth on how McLuhan was the media theorist beloved by the 60s
counterculture, which ended up turning into the Silicon Valley culture
during the 70s, 80s, and beyond. And for them, McLuhan was all about the
vibe. He passed the vibe check: if you were hip,you got it.

McLuhan’s idea of media, content, and audience became pervasive in the Silicon Valley. And we’ll come back to both him and Daub’s book in a
future episode. But then, as per the old Heritage Minute that aired on
Canadian television, the content is the audience. We’ve gone into depth
about how the cultural industries commodify audiences and sell them back
to companies, whether they are advertisers, direct marketers, or
through other means.From McLuhan, each successive medium was built
on the material output of another, older medium. Television would
incorporate film, and theatre, and radio, and In that way surpassed them
all, and we saw again similar effects with what social media like
TikTok or YouTube Shorts now does.

The contrast to McLuhan of course is the British critic Raymond Williams.He rejected McLuhan’s more technologically deterministic leanings and focused on the cultural form of television by looking at what was actually reproduced and shown on
it. In his 1974 book, Television, Williams looked at how earlier forms
like the News Bulletin or the Roundtable Discussion were presented on
television.

And there’s always a much more direct, personal,
immediate, intimate relationship that the television broadcast had with
its audience. We can see here that the stream is flowing much faster,
becoming closer, more personal as we skip through the decades to what we
have now. And as we glance back into those waters and see how it
reflects our society around us, we realize that television is really
about perception.

And this is what Pierre Bourdieu notices as well.
Bourdieu is not really big on television. He says that the invisible
structures therein, the ones that operate around and behind it,
determine what appears on screen. These are all driven by ratings, and
what they end up Doing is perpetuating symbolic violence.Now, that
violence was the focus of much research. And we’ll look at the theories
behind that research in the second half of our episode, next.

So, up till now, we’ve been looking at some of the philosophy about why we need
to peer deep into the river. But let’s see if we can learn a little
something by taking a look at the way that that research has been
operationalized, the techniques for panning for gold in that stream. And
as we saw with Bourdieu, one of the main concerns was the violence,
symbolic or otherwise, that was shown.But that actually goes back
further. Quoting Em Griffin, he noted that one of the early theories
that TV’s powers comes from the symbolic content of the real life drama
shown hour after hour.

And this comes from Cultivation Theory, proposed by George Gerbner in 1973. Now, as Griffin notes, television’s function was as society’s institutional storyteller.lines up with what we’ve discussed earlier, but for Gerbner, the story being told was violence.
As part of his 20 years cultural indicators project, there was a lot of
research done into the amount of television violence that was being
shown. And it was more than just the overt acts of violence, it was also
who the violence was directed to, often minorities or marginal
populations.

There was a lot of symbolic vulnerability that was
displayed on television. And this continual repetition of violence
contributed a lot to what people call the Mean World Syndrome. The
people thought the world was a lot more violent and scary than it
actually might be. That there was a high chance of involvement within
violence, there was a fear of walking alone at night.the perceived
activity of police, what they were actually doing, and a general
mistrust of people all kind of came out of this.

For Gerbner, this all
is encapsulated in what he calls cultivation theory, where he studies
the differential between light and heavy TV viewers and sees the
difference in their opinions.Cultivation theory differs from other
things like media effects because in the modern landscape, there is no
non TV environment, no anti environment to it, as we discussed with
McLuhan in our Dumpshock episode back in episode number 14. MediaEffects
is predicated on the idea that there’s a before and after exposure to
measure, but because television exposure happens at such a young age,
there’s no meaningful way to test it.

So Gerbner and others who use it are trying to figure out if the damage is in the dosage. When viewers see repeated instances of violence, they may find that it resonates with their own experiences. People relate the constant portrayal on
television, what they see, to their own experience, even if it only
happened once.But if you’re seeing constant acts of violence,
mugging, robbery, etc, and it happens to you on one occasion, you’re
going to think, that yeah this is what’s happening all the time. But the
constantly flowing river doesn’t just have violence in it. Obviously
that’s one thing that’s there, that’s observable, that’s testable, that
you can get grant money for for a 20 year study.

But there’s other things going on flowing through the river. The question is, how does it all get there? This is where the agenda setting function of the media
comes in. Recognized by Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw in 1972, they
state that we look to news professionals for cues on where to focus our
attention.Paraphrasing Bernard Cohen, they note that the media might
not be successful in telling the audience what to think, but they are
very successful in telling the audience what to think about. about.

The challenge is that, as oft repeated, correlation is not causation. Maybe
the audience is driving the agenda.In some instances, this may
definitely happen, as with modern news organizations hopping on TikTok
trends or whatever. But on substantive matters, the media drives the
agenda. And Em Griffin points out that several studies have confirmed
McCombs and Shaw’s hypothesis since it was originally published. So, who
sets the media’s agenda?

Ownership, gatekeepers, PR firms, interest aggregations, and lobbyists, the invisible structures that Bourdieu talked about earlier, and this dovetails all the way back to the Frankfurt School when they’re talking about the ownership of the means
of the production of culture. And I want to be clear here that not
everybody reciting here is like a Marxist or a left wing academic.This
is just from observing what’s going on.

So, if these invisible structures are setting the agenda, are deciding which rivers flow into the lake of mass culture, what’s the role of the audience? Well, people
are not mindless in this, they have agency. They can choose what they
like and what they want.And as we follow that stream back into the
mountains, we’re getting a little bit closer to the source. And we find
ourselves ultimately asking, what does the Audience use media for this
is probably best addressed by the field of study that looks at uses and
gratifications. The primary source we’re using here is the work of Elihu
Katz in 1973.Although we notes the idea of studying the audiences
gratification goes back to Cantrel in 1942.

What Katz and his collaborators were arguing is that quote, people bend the media to their needs more readily than the media overpower them. The media gratify
individuals by satisfying those needs, whether these are social, like in
the terms of connection or standing, or psychological, like in terms of
belonging or reinforcement.And it’s these needs to which media is
most often used for, that use as part of the equation. These needs can
be about knowledge, emotional experience, credibility, or simply
connection. And there’s a whole host more. They did come up with quite a
large matrix to populate their survey with. But the point is, is that
the audience is not a monolith.

They have agency and there’s a wide degree of different uses that they might put the media towards. And some of those may aligned with the agenda setting that’s set in place by the major media companies, but some of it may not. It would be used for
more. Personal purposes. And there’s a continual cybernetic feedback
loop going back and forth between the agenda setting and the uses of the
audience themselves.And somehow the audience always find new things
that they end up using the media for. Which brings us back to where we
started. That high mountain stream running so very, very fast indeed.
You see, it’s in our imagination, both individual and collective, where
we get those ideas from. The jokes we tell with our friends, the wild
stories that we might come up with, and as those get repeated and
shared, they take on a life of their own.

And sometimes when they’re laid down in a book or a movie, comic book, video game, wherever, they become aspirational. And it’s something we can set our goals towards. It’s like, hey, check out that moon up there, do you think we can get
there? And a hundred years later, maybe it’ll just happen. And I think
that brings us full circle with our Silicon Dreams of last episode as
well.

As we look back over a hundred years of communication, media,
psychology studies, audience research, and the hundred years of
development that have happened while that old man has been up that
mountain, I think you understand now that Perhaps that old man is me.
This has been a bit of a summary of the academic upbringing that I’ve
had over the last 30 years.The stuff that I was exposed to and how I
learned to formulate some of the questions that I did. in my research.
But I have one more secret to tell you about the stream, too. Because,
while I might look and sound the part of the old man, there’s a secret
hidden within those swiftly flowing waters. It keeps you young.

Or young at heart, at least. It might not be comfortable, and it continually forces you to re examine the world around you. You have to climb back up that mountain every day. The water can be cold and uncomfortable, but if you peer within it, you can see what’s going on. So, by engaging where the waters run swift and deep, wherever they’re fresh and clear, whether it’s a TikTok or Mastodon or Snapchat, wherever
the youth might be gathering, that’s where you’ll find a good look at
what the future might hold.

Thanks for joining us here on the Implausipod. In the next episode, we might find exactly what that future holds, when we open up the black box labeled AI that we found during all this dredging in the river, and see what those fast running waters
can tell us about our expectations, the uses and gratifications from
that most recent of our technologies.But we may have to wait a few
episodes to find out how that’s all connected to a guy named Samuel
Butler. And then after that, we’ll soon return to Appendix W to look at
Dune before the second movie’s release. Stay tuned. It’s going to be a
busy month.

Once again, I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. The research,
writing, editing, mixing, and music is all done by me.I can be
reached at drimplausible at implausipod. com, and this episode is
licensed under a Creative Commons 4. 0 sharer like license. Thanks for
joining us, and I hope to talk with you again real soon. Take care, and
have fun.

Jameson on Nostalgia

Writing on a topic like nostalgia is a path many have gone before, so my own thoughts – summed up over the last handful of posts (and a little bit on the newsletter too) – are unlikely to be wholly new to to the world. That by no means the exercise is wasted, as those reflective moments are wh0ere we can put together what we know, and what we think we know, about a given topic. That reflection can also allow us to compare those thoughts with other works on the subject.

As I outlined in my post on Nescience, I’m aware of at least one major author who has written on Nostalgia: Fredric Jameson. There are a few others that we may get to in time (but I’m not the biggest Freud guy, tbh, so there might be some skips along the way too). Jameson’s essay “Nostalgia for the Present” was published in the South Atlantic Quarterly in 1989, and has been reprinted in various books and collections of his since, such as 1992’s Postmoderism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Which, given our previous discussion on commodities and such, may come as a surprise to hear is on my TBR rather than “fully digested”. There’s a lot to chew on out there, and we come to these things as we are meant to, I guess.

Before we get to Jameson’s thoughts on nostalgia, a quick summary of what we’ve covered so far here:

Nostalgia is representational (in a memetic way)
Nostalgia is an assemblage
The perceived value of the nostalgia of a property can impact financing
This value is subjective, and also relative
Nostalgia is also subjective, and can be constraining
Nostalgia can be contrasted with Novelty
Real nostalgia can be the audience longing for something actually produced
Imagined nostalgia is something the audience thinks they’ve seen before
Nostalgia can be organic (from the audience) or manufactured (by the producers)
Nostalgia is substrate neutral – it can happen in nearly any field

With the above in mind, what does Jameson have to say, and how does his work compare with the above? Let’s check out…

1989

Whoops…

(Apparently 1989 was a pivotal year).

“Nostalgia for the Present” (1989)

Fredric Jameson is a literary critic and philosopher who is – as of the writing of this in 2024 – the Director of the Institute for Critical Theory at Duke University. He’s written in a lot of fields, most notably on post-modernism and capitalism, and “Nostalgia for the Present” fits in this vein, coming 30 years after the publication of his PhD. He’s been working on these ideas for a while at this point. For the piece, he looks at the role of nostalgia in three works: Philip K Dick’s novel Time out of Joint (1959), Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild (1986), and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), which is as unique a selection of content as one might to choose to analyze as any, I suppose.

(Though looking over what we cover here on the blog, I’m not going to criticize the selections. Glass Houses (not the album) and all that.)

Time Out Of Joint (hereafter, TOOJ) is a faux time travel story, where a man who is apparently trapped in the 1950s notices small differences are errors in reality, which leads him to suspect that something weird if going on, kinda like the “Deja Vu” moment in The Matrix. These themes are typical of Philip K Dick: representations of reality, false consciousness, things moving behind the scenes. Looking at it in 2024, we’ve seen it in so many of the adaptations of his work, Blade Runner, A Scanner Darkly, Total Recall, Minority Report, and more.

Here in TOOJ, the protagonist is quite astute: he is in a “potemkin village” of the 1950s, rebuilt in 1997 during an interstellar civil war (Jameson, p.521). Not quite our current reality (well the interstellar part, at least), and again like much older science fiction, now rooted firmly in our past, in a future that will not come to be, as we noted in a previous post. While at times TOOJ feels more like a rough draft of The Truman Show, with the apparatus moving around to ensure the world is static for this one particular man, and this feeds into our various narcissistic, main-character desires, the film clip that would best describe TOOJ would be the epilogue to Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), where he wakes in a room, and recognizes from the radio broadcast that things are not what they seem. If there were a way to cliff notes a 221 page novel, this would be it.

There’s more going on in the novel, of course. Jameson notes how TOOJ is set up to be a model of the 1950s, as something that the protagonist will accept, echoing the Machines’ creation of the late 1990s virtual world in order to pacify the humans kept in the endless rows of creches in The Matrix (1999). Elements of the work of PKD have been copied so many times (at least six, by last count) that it’s hard to recognize the original source. We find it here in TOOJ, but that’s what Jameson is arguing (what with the Matrix being released a decade later and all).

TOOJ: “(The novel) is a collective wish fulfillment and the expression of a deep unconscious yearning for a simpler and more human social system, a small-town Utopia very much in the North American frontier tradition” (Jameson, p.521). I guess here’s where we’ll put a pin in our discussion to talk about the Fallout TV series, and Westworld too, but for now we need to press on.

There are details of the other two titles Jameson refers to – Something Wild and Blue Velvet – and they are fantastic films as well, but here they are to bolster his case, provide further evidence and allow him to triangulate towards the elements of nostalgia he is looked for. As our remit, familiarity, and focus here in the Implausiverse is more on the sci-fi side of things, we’ll see what he says about that and then use that to figure out what nostalgia is all about.

Jameson on Science Fiction

Science Fiction is a “category” in Jameson’s words, with bunny ears included, though we might just wanna call it a genre that came about during that Eisenhowerian period, of the US conquering space and battling “communists” at the same time, and this ideology is inherent within the lit. The “category” might be bigger, going large to include some real lit like Moore’s Utopia, and others, or it might be more tightly bound to the pulps. I like the expansive view of sci-fi for our POV here, though it seems best to loop in Shelley’s Frankenstein by definition and intent, and pin down the start of sci-fi proper to ‘sometime around when Jules Verne wrote Journey to the Centre of the Earth‘ (1864 for those keeping track), which scoops up HG Wells’ stuff as well, and gives us a strong foundation.

The classic 1950s era of sci-fi is kinda the “Golden Age”: a particular vision of the future both technologically and aesthetically. Its goal is to help us process our history, to come to terms with it and understand how we fit into the current era. Jameson contrasts sci-fi with the historical novel, a cultural form (along with costume films and period dramas on TV) that reflected the ideology of the feudal classes, and had fallen off throughout the late 20th century as the (then new) middle class sought something different, something that amped up their own achievements. Enter sci-fi. The historical novel failed not simply due to the feudalist ideals, but because, according to Jameson: “in the postmodern age we no longer tell ourselves our history in that fashion, but also because we no longer experience it that way, and indeed, perhaps no longer experience it at all” (p.522).

(This may have been true at the time, though the recent rise in historicism and historicity in its forms in the 21st century may suggest Varoufakis is more correct about Technofeudalism than one might suppose. Or rather then, the other way around: did Shakespeare in Love preceed Technofeudalism? Or succeed because of it? Was it the harbinger or the aftershock?)

(We’ll put another pin down here for the fantasy vs. sci-fi debate too, while we’re at it.)

So for Jameson, science fiction is an aspirational vehicle for the masses who are rejecting the previous historical viewpoint. Compared to the historical novel: “Science Fiction equally corresponds to the waning of the blockage of that historicity, and particularly in our own time, in the postmodern era, to its crisis and paralysis, its enfeeblement and repression” (p.523). A lot of the reasons why this occurs have less to do with the content (though there are parts of that too, to be sure), or at least particular aesthetic choices that are made, and more to to with the socio-economic conditions of post-WWII USA (and to a lesser extent Canada and the UK).

And this is where nostalgia starts to come in. Because both historical novels and sci-fi have a tie to the imagination, an imagined past or an imagined future. They use representation in their relationship with the past or future (p.523), but they are really ‘a perception of the present as history’, a way, that we can look at our situation through a few steps removed. This is the conceit throughout the Star-Trek-War-Hammer(s), the alien “other” is but an aspect of our selves, our society, our culture, that we try to take a closer look at.

Nostalgia for the 1950s (in the 1980s)

Describing TOOJ, Jameson presents us with a list of things that “evoke” the 1950s: Eisenhower, Marilyn Monroe, PTAs, etc., and if it reads like a certain Billy Joel song, that’s not by accident (though “We Didn’t Start the Fire” also being released in 1989 is most certainly coincidental). Nostalgia can often look like a collection of stuff in some hoarders back room. The items are referrents to the era, not facts per se, but ideas about those facts. The question Jameson asks is “Did the ‘period’ see itself this way?” PKD was writing TOOJ in 1959, looking at the decade that just passed and choosing what the essential elements might look like from the perspective of 1997, the year of the fictional interstellar war in his novel, and for the most part getting it right.

There is a “realistic” feel to how PKD describes the `1950s, a feel that arises from the cultural referents that are used. Jameson notes: “If there is ‘Realism’ in the fifties, in other words, it is presumably to be found there, in mass cultural representation, the only kind of art willing (and able) to deal with the stifling Eisenhower realities of the happy family in the small town, of normalcy and non-deviant everyday life.” (p.518, emphasis mine). To the spectator looking back from the 1980s, the image of the 1950s comes from the pop-cultural artifacts that the people in the 1950s understood themselves by. We’re just looking at it from a distance, through a scanner, darkly, and darker over time.

What this accomplishes is “a process of reification” (p.523). The reality gets blurred by the nostalgic elements, and this ends up becoming the signifier that represents the whole. So our sense of our selves, and of any moment in history, may have little or nothing to do with reality, objective reality that is. Which is the biggest PKD-style head trip out there. Though it’s hard to put into words. Show, don’t tell, and in the works of PKD and all of the PKDickensian-inspired media out there, they keep trying to show, over and over again. It’s tricky though. It requires a lot of speculation.

And TOOJ is ultimately a piece of speculative fiction. “It is a speculation which presupposes the possibility that at an outer limit the sense people have of themselves and their own moment of history may ultimately have nothing whatsoever to do with its reality” (Jameson, p.520). How we think of ourselves, our histories, and our generations, are only tied to a fraction of the things that are out there, and much of it may be that “imagined nostalgia” we talked about a few posts ago.

Fitting the pieces together

Which brings us back to the goal we had near the top of this post: What did Fredric Jameson have to say about nostalgia, and how does it jive with our own concept of the nostalgia curve. We can elements of what Jameson was talking about in at least four of our categories:

Nostalgia is representational
Real nostalgia
Imagined nostalgia
Nostalgia happens in different media

Tackling these in turn, we can see how our idea of nostalgia being a representation of a thing, rather than being the thing itself is fundamental in Jameson’s work, and carried throughout it. The ideas of thing, not the things themselves. And for Jameson, those mediated examples coming from pop culture versions, and then informing the generational logic for successive viewers is important too; it connects with our idea of “imagined nostalgia”, the kind that the audience thinks they are remembering, rather than actually experienced.

Jameson doesn’t distinguish between different “kinds” of nostalgia, or at least at the source of where it is produced, but looks at what the the nostalgia is “for” (hence the title, natch). A 1980s audience longing for the imagined view of the `1950s; a interstellar warrior (in the text) longing for their imagined view of the same; or a writer from the decade of the 1950s constructing a longing for that decade while it is still going on. These are all “nostalgia” writ large, to Jameson, whereas we’ve increased the granularity a bit to fine tune our analysis of the Nostalgia Curve/

Jameson also looks at the construction of nostalgia in various media – novels and film in this case, though there could be others – tying in with our “substrate neutral” idea above. The Nostalgia Curve is a transmedia property, and not particular to any one kind or another.

The elements of nostalgia that focused on value are largely absent from his work. Not completely, but as he was looking at the reification of ideology that takes places via nostalgia, and not necessarily the production culture and political economy elements, this is understandable.

Next steps: Memory and Soylent Culture

There’s more to nostalgia than just the media aspect, though, and we’ll need to take a deeper look at the connection it has with memory. There are a few authors I have on the bookshelf that talk about it, and we’ll get into them soon.

The other place nostalgia is showing up in is as part of our Soylent Culture, where bits and pieces of past properties we like or love are dredged back up by the cultural sieves that are our Generative AI tools, and the Platforms that encourage their use as Spreadable Media. Media theorist Marshall McLuhan talked about how new media is built out of the pieces of the old, and nowhere is that more true than in our current online culture. We’ll look deeper into these pieces soon.

References:

Jameson, F., (1989). “Nostalgia for the Present”, The South Atlantic Quarterly 88:2, Spring 1989. Duke University Press,

Swift Studies

A recent article on an academic conference devoted to Taylor Swift prompted some discussion online. The article by Emily Yahr was posted on Dec 26, 2023, here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/2023/12/26/taylor-swift-eras-conference-academic/

My response was as follows:

I felt similarly perhaps 15-20 years ago when a college offered a semester length course on the topic of Lady Gaga, and I was aghast, but then I kinda got out of it.
Taylor Swift is no different in this regard, though I think the Swifties are more of a force than the Monster ever were.
But that’s the thing: the fact that both of them have a fanbase large enough to be a) identified by name and b) make an impact beyond the pop music sphere warrants the study.

And it’s not like pop-culture focused conferences are a new thing. From the article:
“One academic told her that, after speaking at events focused on Bob Dylan, Nirvana and the Beatles, they were thrilled to discuss a prominent female artist.”
… so there is this, at least, with expanding the scope of artists that can be discussed.

I think that’s pretty swell.

(And in the interest of full disclosure, I’ve presented on pop-culture related topics academically at the PCA before, as well as several Games Studies and Film Studies conferences before.)

I think there’s value in the conference though. The budget is usually pretty minimal, relatively speaking, from my experience with a couple organizing committees. It let’s the researchers get some reps in too, which honestly can be invaluable.

And obviously there is *something* going on with the Swift and her fanbase, so a bit of scrutiny isn’t a bad thing, even if I’m not on board with Lacanian interpretations of Swift’s Folklore either.

(Or anything Lacanian,tbh.)

When it comes to the utility of examining, pop-culture, I’ll grab a quote by Bruce Sterling from a couple decades past:

“The most fertile ground for analyzing motives is pop culture – not because pop culture is deep, but because it’s so shallow. It’s where those wishes and longings are most nakedly evident” (Sterling , 2002, pxii-xiii).

It was informative when I was looking at the role of #ScienceFiction back in the early Double-Ohs. It’s still solid now.

This whole subject was on my to-do list for the podcast a couple episodes from now. Look for an episode titled “The Old Man and the River” in the new year. I’ll link back to this when it gets posted.

Implausipod E019 – The 14th Doctor

What does a sci-fi fan who’s never seen Doctor Who think of their first exposure to a full episode of the series? Can you even be a sci-fi fan if you haven’t? Well, we’re about to find out. Welcome our guest, an academic and Dr Who fan Dr Aiden Buckland who helps guide yours truly Dr Implausible through some of the details of “The Star Beast”.

https://www.implausipod.com/1935232/14072417-implausipod-e0019-the-14th-doctor

Transcript:

DRI: Actors have a bit of a challenge in that they can become deeply linked with iconic roles that they play so that the audience always associates them with whatever they first saw them in. And so too it is for me with David Tennant and the Purple Man. Killgrave. From the Netflix MCU series Jessica Jones.

See, that’s where I first saw him. And he was absolutely stunning in that role. Super creepy. And it’s hard to imagine him as anything else. But apparently he has a long and storied history as an actor in various other cinematic universes. And one of those is returning to screen shortly. Something called Doctor Who.

And apparently it’s widely popular, but it’s a bit of a gap in my knowledge. I mean, I was aware. of it, but I’d hardly seen any episodes. Maybe something with Christopher Ecclestone back in the early 2000s and something with a dude in a scarf back when I was around eight, but it was never largely accessible to me.

But with it returning to the screen, it seems now is a perfect opportunity to get on board with the Doctor.

And I’m not kidding, I’m being completely honest with you. I haven’t really watched much Dr. Who and Jessica Jones was the first time I saw David Tennant. So there’s a lot of stuff out there in the media sphere and you can’t watch everything. And for some reason, Dr. Who just never really caught into me, you know, didn’t get its hooks in.

So I’m aware of it. I’m aware of some of the larger themes, but what we’re going to do for this episode is it’ll be in two parts. The first part will be me going to watch the first episode of these 2023 specials, StarBeast. And then I’ll come back and I’ll give you like, some of my initial impressions.

And then the second half is going to be a discussion with a colleague of mine, who’s a big Doctor Who fan. And so once they join in, we’ll kind of go over some of what my impressions are and how that connects to the larger universe. And then we’ll have, If time allows, we’ll do this for the other specials in 2023.

So stay tuned. I’m going to go check out an episode and I’ll be right back to let you know what my first impressions of watching a full Doctor Who episode are.

And we’re back after having seen the Starbeast, and that was an interesting episode. So this isn’t really a recap, it’s just kind of a list of impressions, so it may go chronologically for a little bit.

So, going in with having no history of the characters or any of their connections, it was a little odd. We got the recap at the start with the once upon a time, and I thought that was an interesting way to do it. We have the introduction of A British housewife, Donna Noble, and felt very much like, say, a British housewife canonically, as opposed to one from America or Canada or anywhere else.

And we learn that she is married and has a lovely child, and the child has grown. So there’s been a lot of history, I guess, in the past, but that doesn’t really have a whole lot for me. There’s some lines that they drop there that also stood out with an interesting juxtaposition where Dr. Who goes, this face has come back. Why? And Donna goes, the story hasn’t ended yet. So we get this idea that there’s something going on. And at least a little bit of a mystery that might be hinted at later.

The whole introduction itself felt very like. Marvel comics from the seventies and eighties, where there’d be a recap in the first few pages after a splash page or something, and I’m wondering if that’s common. We get the introductory title by Russell T Davies from a story by Pat Mills and Dave Gibbons. And that is very curious because I recognize both those names from sci fi, especially like 2000 AD and other comics, again, of the seventies and eighties. So I’m wondering what the source was, whether it was a comic or a novelization, an older episode or something like an issue of 2000 AD or something else, heavy metal back in the day.

So I’m keeping an eye out for that and maybe I’ll track down the references after, but for now, that just kind of jumped out like, Hey, I recognize that reference. And while they set up some tension in the recap that, you know, they couldn’t see each other again, they get like right to it with their interaction right away, and kind of release that tension, but also set it up for something later on. We get introduced to Rose, but I got no idea who she is. I, I understand she’s Donna’s daughter, but I got no reference or what those eyes are referring to. So I’m wondering if that’ll pop up later. And then the meteorite or whatever streaks across the sky.

There’s a comment that Donna makes, while her eyes are distracted, about never trust a man with a goatee, and something about being stuck in a drainpipe, and I was wondering if that was a hint to any prior episodes, but I don’t know. And then she makes the reference to the doctor telling him that he has to ditch the tie by the age of 35, that he can’t do that old 80s Duran Duran style anymore. I thought that was cute.

And then following that we have a ride with the taxi driver, Sean Temple. Ends up being a little bit more expository as well. When we get some of the backstory and I was grateful for that. It was kind of, came about a little bit naturally, but also a little bit, Oh, here’s all the main characters all, all at once altogether.

So I’ll get to this later, but it felt like everything was just like one after the other falling into place. Like we didn’t really have a whole lot of mystery. So it was just kind of straight into it. And. We arrive at the factory and this explosion looks like something right out of the nineties, like demolition man or Robocop, which is pretty good for TV, honestly.

I mean, full points. I remember what syndicated sci fi TV shows looked like in the nineties. It was a little rough. As he’s wandering around the factory, I think the only thing that would make it more 80s would be the lighting as we have that gold and teal kind of filter rather than the blue and red filter that was endemic in 80s sci fi.

And then we’re introduced to a few other characters or groups. The ship is being Surrounded by some soldiers or soldier type persons and there’s a woman in a wheelchair, but again, I don’t have a reference here I don’t know if they’re new or supposed to evoke something from past episodes And then we switch to a home scene with an older lady cooking and who says there’s no such thing as spaceships. Now Donna has a neat quote about the 930 mark or she says I will burn down the world for you darling And then she goes, I will dissent, or I will descend. I didn’t quite catch it, but it was kind of neat.

And Oh, okay. So the older lady is her mom, but her mom seems to remember more of the past than she does. So again, I, maybe they were in earlier stuff. There’s a lot of internal reference, even at this point, like, you know, 10, 12 minutes into the episode that it feels is starting to be there for people who watch it regularly. And I admit I’m not lost, but I’m kind of, I don’t have any association that the authors, the show runners might be trying to evoke with this.

So sometimes it’s coming across a little bit flat as again, I don’t know who the people are. I don’t recognize them, and there’s just a lot of assumptions made. About the audience, about who and what they see. So then, we switched to the kids and Rose outside and there’s an escape pod in the middle of a field. And it feels like right now they are speed running through ET and they meet this little critter called a meep.

And while it’s cute enough, I’m not sure what they’re going for here. There’s also some dudes with like bug eyes in the dark and they remind me of like bug from Micronauts, which is weird given that, you know, we had Mills and Gibbons doing this. So maybe they were kind of tying into like the seventies comics.

I’m wondering if there’s that earlier comic book reference there. So, but apparently they’re hunting something. So we’ll see what’s up with that. The doctor is in the warehouse or sorry, in the factory steel factory. So very eighties heavy metal video here with his whole display that he’s able to conjure up on the out of thin air and actually works as an interface.

And that’s super cool. I don’t know if he’s ever done that before. And then. We meet the redhead in the wheelchair again, who knows the doctor is familiar with him. She’s Shelly science advisor, number 56, and she knows his history. At least he was science advisor. Number one, don’t, I’m probably saying that too much, but that comment, I guess about Donna, where the universe is turning around her again.

And the, he does has, I don’t want to be the one who kills her. So there’s definitely linking to that back history again, and so we get more of the officers from the unit. It had unit in the badge. I didn’t quite see what it was from, but you know, they’re like the men in black or something or the paramilitary organization associated with the men in black, maybe like shield or sword or some other group.

So they’re not necessarily regular police officers, but they are something else. And then. They open up the capsule and that is, that stood out. If you remember from like the earlier podcast, I talk about dragon’s domain and how there was like a creature that came out and started possessing the crew members from space 1999.

And we almost have that exact same thing here. This strikes out with. The light and the light changes in the soldier’s eyes, and then it takes them over and is able to possess them and move them around. And that is, it’s kind of wild. So we have these linkages to earlier, like 1970s sci fi, that’s been going on within this episode.

And that’s super cool. I’m wondering how much more that is. I’m just going off what I know, but maybe this is something previously within the show as well. Now the Meep and Rose run back at the show. And then the mother who, I guess now the grandmother, sorry, Cynthia, she seems to know what’s up. She goes, the Meep isn’t real.

So I’m wondering if it’s illusory. With the family all home, they’re trying to keep each other away from it. And I think Cynthia recognizes the past history between the doctor and Donna and doesn’t want anything to happen, but, yeah, that’s a bit of an issue. So they meet the meep and then we have the little bit with the fur harvesting is kind of a bad thing and a discussion about the pronouns for the meep and that struck me as interesting, but it also just struck me as matter of fact that the doctor was able to just accept that and correct and ask and just went with it for the rest of the episode. So that was really interesting.

There’s a comment, I guess the doctor has twin hearts. And that’s cool. The space Marines in the Warhammer 40, 000 universe all have twin hearts too. And so does like, um, Longshot from the X Men and that whole Mojoverse series. So that’s a common thing, I think, with a lot of sci fi series as a way of kind of evoking a subject’s transhumanism that, you know, Oh, they’ve got multiple hearts or whatever. And, and that was kind of fascinating. So I’m wondering if the 40 K guys kind of cribbed that when they were making their trans war, transhuman warriors and the space Marines, or that, if that’s just so common that it’s not from a particular thing, but it’s just a trope in general.

So from there, we’ve get into the firefight, and I’m wondering how many factions are going on here. We obviously. We have the meep plus the family at this point are with them. We have the possessed soldiers. We have the bugs who are fighting the possessed soldiers. We have the regular military, the ones who haven’t possessed. And I don’t know if the doctor is his own faction or what, but you know, we’ve got four or five different groups here.

And again, while they’re doing some cool tricks with the shields and using the. tool, the sonic screwdriver and their defensive capability, and just being clever about getting away from it and trying to escape and save lives. And I thought that was really interesting. There were some airborne troops in there and I was wondering if those were the bugs.

They’re kind of in the black and I didn’t quite see if those were more drop troops coming in to support the paramilitary organization or not, but I guess we’ll learn more as this goes on. And then we get to this parking garage and it says either we’ve escaped or we’ve got things very wrong. And he says, we’re in a court, court is in session.

It’s a shadow court and he puts on a teleport intercept. And then the bug soldiers appear and it turns out that yes, we indeed do have everything wrong. There’s something about a psychedelic sun here that powered the meep’s homeworld as they ate the galactic council and this is the last one left. And we get the whole reveal that yes, curse your inevitable betrayal here as the Meep turns out to be the one that is possessing the soldiers and there’s a whole lot more going on.

The star beast is indeed the furry little creature that finally shows its fangs. And so from there, things move along rather rapidly. The doctor and the family are taken prisoner and moved back to the steel factory. The little critter is being worshiped and brought about on a plank when made out of metal by the possessed soldiers.

And while they’re trapped, there’s a rescue from Shelly, the science advisor, who’s in the wheelchair, who has weapons apparently embedded within it. Because of course, James Bond also probably echoes into the influences here as well. So We switch to the ship and the doctor tries to prevent the launch as the dagger drive is engaged.

And we start seeing this whole scale destruction of London with the tendrils of flame and like earthquakes going out. It feels a lot like Guardians of the Galaxy 3 where we know this is like a populated area with people involved. And like, how are there not casualties and catastrophic destruction from this?

Now, Donna Noble is assisting him as they’re trying to get this right. But it’s a whole lot and there’s a lot of like internal reference going on here. I can see the action that’s going on. And then finally Rose undoes the psychedelic lightness that shining in the eyes of all the possessed and everything kind of goes back to normal.

We’ve learned that the toys in the shed are tied to Rose’s memories of all the beasts that have been encountered in the past and We finally kind of get some resolution here, but as a viewer I was kind of starting honestly, from about the 30 minute point on, I was kind of tuning out a little bit.

There was a lot of internal references and I wasn’t necessarily getting. All of them. It was the thing with like the Phoenix force that was going through Donna and Rose. I don’t know what’s going on there. Some shared memories or something was embedded within Rose that allowed her to be saved and then finally they walk inside the Tardis and we get that tiny little ship or the family’s talking about just taking one tiny trip and it feels like every Rick and Morty episode ever. And honestly, I’m wondering how much Rick and Morty is kind of tying into the doctor at this point. It’s weird that I’ve seen almost all of Rick and Morty, but almost none of Doctor Who.

So is it just a case of picking one and not the other? I don’t know. Or can you enjoy both? To my friend who’ll be joining me later, perhaps that’s the question. We get into a what looks like a redesigned TARDIS interior. It looks almost like Cerebro from some of the X Men films with all the sphere and the railings and stuff.

And it has a coffee maker, but apparently it hasn’t been protected against coffee. It’s fragile enough that one spilled coffee is enough to almost destroy the place. And that’s kind of where we end. So as the credits roll, it It, it feels a little odd, earlier note I made about it feeling like a speed run through ET.

I mean, it feels like the whole story was a speed run as they were racing through the required story beats to try and link everything together with previous seasons and previous episodes. And there was a lot of history there and so much of it was being elided. It was kind of being relying on our cultural memory of other sci fi.

Movies and TV shows and episodes, and we got equal parts of like a very special episode and a lot of fan service going on there. So I’m not sure as a new viewer, it was a representative story of the franchise. I was able to make some external connections to some stuff. Like the authors and some other references to sci fi and even by the midpoint, but by the last 15 minutes or so, it was all very internally referential.

And the titular Starbeast was like a very thin foil for the rest of the narrative that was assumed, like we assumed things would work out. And. They were just used there for the show runner to hang all the connections together. So as a new viewer, I’m not entirely convinced. I do want to discuss this with my colleague though.

So I’m going to step away from a brief second for a brief second, and we’ll be right back.

And we’re back and we’re going to talk about the impressions of the show. I’m here joined by Dr. Aidan Buckland, who’s a professor of digital and social media. You can let him introduce his bona fides. I’ve known him for quite some time. And we’ll get into it. So, thank you for joining us today, Dr. Aiden.

Dr Aiden: Well, Well Dr. Implausible, thank you very much for having me. Yeah, so, Ph. D., Communication, I’m usually somewhere in that pop culture landscape, and Dr. Who is something, you know, I’ve been a fan of for a while, but also had a bit of a Professional interest in: done some presentations over the years at Calgary and Edmonton Expo, and have watched a number at places like the Popular Cultural Association.

DRI: Okay, so you have like an academic interest in that, then. Awesome. Okay. I’ll just let you know I think, I sent you the copy of the of the first half of the episode here. I’m coming in with this, like knowing that exists, I have almost no exposure. And for a franchise that’s like older than me, which is rare, it’s like, okay, Star Trek, Dr. Who, and like, I’m older than Star Wars, right, so it’s a rare thing. And like, how have you not watched any of this? So here we are. Yeah, I, found it really interesting, but I’m kind of like, what’s your kind of take on it as somebody who’s like well versed in this, cause I’ll admit there’s some parts of it that didn’t necessarily land with me, but maybe we’ll walk through the episode a little bit and you can tell me what I missed without going too much into spoilers.

Maybe we can just chat about that for a little bit.

Dr Aiden: For sure. Yeah, and I was thinking that while I was watching it. So, you know, myself as a fan, I jumped on during the new who era. So I have dabbled a little bit and kind of watching and rewatching. I think at this point, all of the doctors for at least a few hours of their runs each just to get a flavor for it before going out and speaking about it. But yeah, this was a daunting episode. I think in some ways for new fans to be jumping on board. It was relying on a lot of stuff that kind of happened during Russell Davis’ 1st run at the show. But at the same time, I also felt it was very emblematic of of his vision of doctor who like, it felt very much like it would fit very easily into, you know, what we sometimes refer to as the season of specials.

DRI: Okay. The season of specials is like the Christmas season where they just have these one offs. I guess there’s two more episodes coming up and if you’re, if you’re down for it, I’ll watch those and we can maybe chat about each of those in the coming weeks too.

Dr Aiden: For sure. I’ll definitely be watching them. So I would love to chat.

DRI: Okay, cool. So yeah, like for me, the first, it kind of had like a, it felt like a Stan Lee Marvel recap at the start of it. And then, I’m not sure if you’re familiar with it; while you do pop culture stuff, so you’re probably sure of who Pat Mills and Dave Gibbons were in that jumped out at me.

Cause I’ve been looking at both their works, Pat Mills, especially in his work on 2000 AD ties into something I’m working on called Appendix W, which are like the prehistory of the Warhammer 40, 000 universe. And so he’s really influential as like a creator from back in like the 70s and 80s, and that was just like, okay, so what am I watching here?

And I don’t know if you had any foreknowledge of that kind of era or influence on Doctor Who.

Dr Aiden: Yeah, I’d be interested. And I think, you know, in some cases with Dr Who, in particular, there is kind of a media kind of explanation for, you know, the influence that runs through here. You have to remember, of course, when Dr Who was.

In its prime, say, late 60s in through the 70s, you know, this is at a point in time where there are actually very few channels to watch in the UK. So whenever we’re talking about sci fi creators, writers, directors, who are living in the UK, you know, you can almost guarantee to a person that they would have been exposed to this show at least in its first run from, from 63 to 89 at some point.

DRI: Yeah. I’m getting a feeling, like we’ve covered Space:1999 a bit, and we’re going to be covering, as I said, 2000 AD and Blake’s Seven at one point, I’m sure. It feels like everybody knew everybody in this community. I mean, Britain is, is relatively small size wise, I guess, especially if you’re from the Canadian prairies, it’s like, well, we can just drive across Britain pretty quick here.

But yeah, so there’s that whole idea of scope and size, but as a community in the seventies, yeah, I’m assuming it was very connected. I can’t say for sure, but it has that feel to it.

Dr Aiden: And a hub of sci fi too, right? Like, there’s so much happening in television, in movies, so, yeah, it would be interesting to sit down and map all of that sort of stuff, like, who’s influencing who, where are we seeing, kind of things pop up, especially as it relates to the Doctor and his travels.

DRI: Yeah, that’s, well we’ll I think that’s kind of like the side project or maybe that’s something assumed with the Appendix W. I mean, we’re tracking everything up to the launch of Warhammer 40, 000, which is in 87. So yeah, it’s going to be coming. So, so how have I never watched the doctor before?

I got no idea, but what stood out to you from the episode? Like what was really kind of like a big thing, or just maybe walk through it chronologically, like how did you feel watching it?

Dr Aiden: I think the first thing that really struck me with the episode was the mixing and matching of the aesthetic of Doctor Who.

So, as, you know, you probably know production wise, there’s been a deal. Disney plus is distributing it now internationally. So there’s a lot more money in the budget, and this has been the case for a while. Chibnall, the previous show runner, also had a pretty big budget, for Doctor Who standards at least.

So, you know, we saw a lot of that, like that really lovely shot in (the) neighborhood. I’m jumping ahead chronologically in terms of the episode. Where we see the soldiers fighting the other soldiers and that nice over the action shot of that, like, that’s, that’s a really expensive thing that, you know, we sometimes got in new Who but we definitely didn’t get in the original run of the show, which was that kind of them flexing their muscles production wise.

I think the Meep in particular, in terms of the creature design, looked a lot more polished than a lot of Doctor Who aliens and and creatures look, but then we also had the Rolf, the, the grasshopper looking gentleman, who talked very nicely once they actually got to speak.

You know, they actually look more emblematic of that old aesthetic of Doctor Who. So I thought that that was, it was one of the things that stood out to me is this really does feel like A kind of crossover for Dr. Who: of Russell T. Davis going from kind of what he was working with in the early 2000s with the relaunch of the show to now having a bit more money, but wanting to stay true to that aesthetic that a lot of Who fans would be comfortable with.

DRI: Okay, so there’s he’s playing to some audience expectations there. Okay, that’s interesting because I mean, I noticed that with like, The set with in the steel factory with the spaceship in there that looked fairly impressive, like production wise. I don’t know how much of that was digital and how much of that was like a practical, but they at least had put that into place.

I mean, there was some obvious places where there’s like the digital layover of the city and the like, but even as you said, like that overhead drone shot that we’re seeing, it’s starting to become very common. We saw that in like The Peripheral and Westworld and a bunch of places where it kind of gives a top down third person perspective or not third person, but almost like an RTS perspective that we’re kind of used to.

Dr Aiden: I was going to say, it reminded me a lot of that series of games XCOM where you’re looking at the field from that and that’s an alien invasion game too. So it almost felt like they were trying to tap into that aesthetic with that shot, which It was neat, I think, for Doctor Who.

DRI: Yeah, for sure. So they’re expanding it now.

Like you said, these are the specials. So maybe it’s like the CFL on Grey Cup or the NFL on the Super Bowl where they’ll bust out multiple cameras and kind of go for broke and the regular episodes don’t quite have that same level of production. I don’t know, we’ll kind of see how that goes, but I’m always fascinated how the production culture elements influence the onscreen workings of it, or, you know, what we see as fans on screen and then how much the fans will, you know, develop the no prizes from Marvel or whatever to come up with explanations that kind of patch over some of those holes that might be simply explained by, well, we, we had no budget, so we had to put a plunger on the end of this, of the Dalek and, and kind of make it a thing.

Yeah, fascinating stuff, but we’ll keep an eye out for that in the future, for sure. So, what else kind of jumped out at you?

Dr Aiden: I mean, off the bat, I am a big fan of David Tennant, both as a doctor, but also as his other roles like Kilgrave, as you had mentioned earlier, having him do that kind of fourth wall break that once upon a time, once upon a time Lord was an interesting opening.

It reminded me of the last time Doctor Who as a franchise really started to, you know, put on a push to get American viewers, which I associate this Disney plus deal with, and they did something similar. They had the Companion at the time, Amy Pond do like a little voiceover kind of explaining her relationship to this being the doctor, and it got a bit of pushback actually, from some older doctor who fans.

It’s that gatekeeping element in fanculture that essentially. You know, Dr. Who’s been around for decades. Most people have grown up with it in the UK and in some of the Commonwealth countries like ours. And, you know, the idea that you would need to put this in here and, you know, clearly it is for newer fans. But how did you find that? Did that help you? or orient you for what was coming up. Did you find that useful?

DRI: I found it super useful, I think between the introductory bit before the credits, as well as some of the exposition that happened with the cab driver, I felt, you know, they kind of put a lot of pieces in place. So maybe they were, I think I commented earlier as a bit of a speed run, but I felt there was enough exposition that I wasn’t necessarily confused about who was what, like I didn’t, I didn’t have any deep connection with any of the characters, but I could generally tell the relationships and the social map of who was who there. Sometimes characters would show up and I wasn’t sure as, Oh, is this an old person or a new person or something?

So maybe, maybe that’s the thing, like what was new in that? What was, what was novel in the episode that I have no reference of. So like, was there anybody, what was new?

Dr Aiden: Yeah, well, production wise, I think that’s actually kind of one of the fun parts with Star Beast is that actually this is, you know, an adaptation.

So we’re, we’re dealing with a Who story that has existed since I believe sometime in 1980, there was a weekly comic strip and that’s where this story first shows up. So in the opening credits, I believe you see along with Russell T. Davis, the original writers for this panel in particular, but in terms of new stuff, I think there’s still lots in there.

I would say, you know, for a lot of older Who fans the Sonic was doing a lot more in this episode than we’ve ever seen it do, which, you know, is some fans have bristled on it. The ones that I’ve been watching reactions from online, but at the same time, it is always like a lot of the elements of Doctor Who, you know, the sonic does what the writers needed to do in a particular context.

So it’s kind of always had that, but generally, as a tool, it’s really done underwhelming things, like it just, it unlocks a door, or it sets off an alarm, or it, you know, turns on a sprinkler, it’s, you know, very underwhelming, so when he starts to look at it as a visual display, very MCU like, which is a comparison that Ellie Littlechild made over there at WhoCulture, or later on where he’s, he’s building light shields out of it, that almost seemed, in a lot of ways, to use a kind of gamer culture term, a little overpowered for the sonic screwdriver, which is interesting.

But again, this is a Doctor who is coming back, which again is something we haven’t seen, so.

DRI: Okay, I just yeah for reference. I didn’t know that any of those abilities like the the shields and like even just the interface I didn’t know that was new. It seemed I felt they were seamless I really liked the like basically passive or non combative use of the screwdriver because it gave a like a different way of solving problems and even though it wasn’t… I guess maybe firefights aren’t that common in Doctor Who, I don’t know.

It did seem like they put a lot of budget in it, you know, blowing up a wall and having the whole chase through the house. But having those ways of reacting that isn’t necessarily offensive, I thought that was really neat. And the interface, I mean, we’ve seen that see-through interface in everything since like Minority Report with Spielberg, Spielberg put a lot of money and effort into the development of that interface for that movie.

And then we’ve seen it from Avatar and Matrix and that whole idea of a see-through interface, which really isn’t that useful, like from a user perspective, this is amazing visually. Yeah, we’ve seen that. So I didn’t realize that was new, but it seemed like an awesome way to like engage with it. What about like characters or anything?

Was there any new peeps that showed up?

Dr Aiden: Yeah, we do have some new people in there, but I, I just wanted to respond to something you had just mentioned there. It is actually, this is the, the classic Doctor Who thing is he almost never is overtly offensive in the way he interacts with other species.

So, you know, he will do things to stop a villain from, you know, achieving their plan. He’ll do things like he shoots the Meep up in the escape pod by the end of it, but like his, his initial reaction is almost always to run, you know, so it’s, it’s something that you’ll see him saying a lot and generally, that’s because he’s trying to observe what’s going on and figure it out, which is usually what you get revealed in the end.

So it’s his non combativeness is actually by design and it was, yeah. At various points in the run in the original run, I think it was the 5th doctor who put his hands on a gun and that became kind of controversial. And then even in this new who run Matt Smith, it was in a trailer at 1 point for an episode, it was the 3rd episode in the season and, you know, it just has him holding a handgun and firing it, which, you know, got a bit of a negative reaction, and then when you saw what was happening in context, you see that it’s not the Doctor using a handgun against a person. It was him shooting a piece of technology with reversed gravity at the time.

So, it’s the kind of thing that he doesn’t like, it’s, it’s rare to see him actually holding offensive weapons, which was interesting.

DRI: Okay. Yeah. That idea that it ties into some of our other more iconic heroes, like, you know, a Captain America or Spider Man or Batman, you know, or there’s generally that idea that they didn’t have offensive weapons.

So Batman’s probably an edge case in that one. And I know they’ve made some changes to cap as well, but for a long time, the silver age view of those heroes was like no guns. Now, some of that was from, you know, especially in America from the comics code, but you know, there was some other reasons for it as well.

That, okay. That’s fascinating. Interesting stuff. What about Peeps? Was there, because again, I kind of got that the family all knew each other, that there was relationships there, but was there any other new characters that were introduced?

Dr Aiden: New character, old organization. So, in the episode, of course, we’re introduced or reintroduced, I guess, to Unit.

This is the, basically the task force that deals with alien kind of stuff on planet earth. They are often associated with working with or working against, depending on the episode needs, the Doctor. And of course, in this one, we get the introduction of an actress who essentially, Ruth Madely, as Shirley Anne Bingham, the newest science advisor.

So, you know, as you saw in the episode through dialogue, the Doctor is the first science advisor for Unit. This is during the period in the original run when he was basically banished to earth for a little while, but Madely, had a role on Years and Years, which is a Russell T. Davis show for the BBC, and I guess that’s seeing her crossover from that now into Who was interesting, and her role was, was fantastic, like, I loved the positioning of her. It was the scene where, you know, “don’t make me the problem”, sending the soldiers on up to the mind control.

And then, later on, having, you know, weapons in a wheelchair, and when the doctor remarks on it, you know, her response is, yeah, we all have as if, you know, this is just, it’s standard operating procedure. All unit members who may or may not be wheelchair bound will have weapons in their devices, which was fun.

DRI: Yeah. There was, there was a lot of that stuff was just and maybe this leads to some of my confusion because they, they dealt with a lot of stuff just matter of factly. Right. Like it did not happen. I noticed there was… okay. so unit, I saw the badge on the lapel, but I didn’t, I thought maybe I was missing something that there was another word for it, but it’s just, it’s called the unit. Okay.

Like they had a Sikh member and there was a few others. associated with it. So there’s a broad spectrum of representation within the show. And like I said, I’m going into this as spoiler free as I can, but I guess there’s some issue. Is there some controversy around the whole woke moment there in the middle?

Dr Aiden: I’m sure there will be just given the, the internet these days and, you know, Doctor Who has run into various.,let’s say communities who perceive themselves as aggrieved, for representation issues in the past. The previous Doctor in particular was the first doctor to be female presenting during her run.

We see another variant, or in Doctor Who terms of regeneration, who is also female presenting and also, African Britain. So it is something that they have run into before. But this is one of the things that I think is again, emblematic of Russell Davis as a creator. He’s not afraid to touch those, those controversial rails or those 3rd rails and really, again, the matter-of-fact nature in which they deal with a lot of the more, I think, sticky issues like the conversation that Donna and her mother have in the kitchen about whether or not she should be, you know, complimenting her daughter Rose for being attractive when she didn’t before the transition, was a lovely kind of way of, again, not, you know, scolding or preaching like, you know, Donna could have, you know, yelled at her mother in that scene.

Like, you know, better stop doing this stuff, you know, whatever, but really just kind of lovingly interacting with her and, you know, modeling that. Hey, it doesn’t have to be uncomfortable for very long. We can actually just have a nice. Little matter of fact discussion, you know, she’s beautiful. She’s gorgeous.

And then, of course, you get the Catherine Tate humor about, you know, “you could be saying that about me”, the generational bit there. But I think that that was quite lovely. And I think the pronoun bit in the middle was also again, another way of making it matter of fact. This, you know, pronouns have been an issue now for a little while.

They tend to cause some people to get very upset about having to use them or not, and you know, turns out, if you’re a Doctor Who fan, you’ve been using alternative pronouns for a long time, because he’s the definite article. He is The Doctor, and Meep is The Meep. So, he idea that it’s Rose that kind of puts that as a question, I think was, it was nice to kind of nudge that conversation in there, and then, you know, to make it so that, you know, actually, the Doctor has an alternative pronoun of the definite article, and always has.

So, You know, pronouns are really not that big of a deal, right?

DRI: Yeah, I liked how they approached it, that it was, it was, a long time ago I talked about, like, I guess it would be framed as agenda-setting in media, like how we learn how to deal with things and everything from commercials to just, you know, how shows present things, especially things like sitcoms, like the Slice of Life stuff, how you might see how the video game or internet is incorporated into family life and then that kind of sets how we talk about it in, in the broader culture.

And so, yeah, just seeing that kind of embedded within it, treated matter of factly and the show moved on, I think was a really effective way of showing to its viewers. a good way of dealing with this. So I know we’re kind of getting a little bit tight on time here. So just in interest of not really spoiling things for any future episodes, but like, what are you looking forward to in the next couple?

Dr Aiden: Oh, for sure. So this is actually an interesting production thing as well. We’ve 60th leading up to this latest episode and it turns out, that most of the footage in those trailers comes from this 1st episode. So, Russell T. Davis himself, in an interview I was reading recently, has mentioned that, you know, they haven’t cut any footage into a trailer from this 2nd episode coming up.

So, we literally know nothing about what’s going to happen in this next episode. We know, of course, how the episode ended. The TARDIS is doing its TARDIS thing. Things look like it’s a crisis and it’s going to take us anywhere it wants in time and space, which is actually something they’ve done quite frequently in Doctor Who, the TARDIS is always enduring and fragile at the same time.

It seems to always be breaking down and going the wrong place and not doing what he wants it to do, but then also always doing what he needs it to do, which is actually a line from the Steven Moffitt episode, called the Doctor’s Wife, I think, and pardon me if I got that wrong, but it’s essentially where he gets to speak to the tardis, ’cause it gets embodied in a human- ish body, for a little while. So you get this idea that, you know, it’s always kind of had that, so that I’m, you know, eagerly anticipating, you know, what kind of surprise are we gonna get next for this next episode?

DRI: All right. And for me, I think it was that toy box at the end with a bunch of little critters.

Some of those I recognize from various… I think there’s a lot of cross pollination between media in, you know, in various, not necessarily transmedia ways, but just the influence from one cultural element showing up in other ways. I’ve seen some of those creatures in other forms and other formats before, whether it’s dungeon and dragons or Warhammer.

So seeing which of those actually show up as dudes in costumes or, as special effects, I’m kind of curious as well. So we will see what happens. So, with that in mind, I think we’re pretty close to our time. So I’m going to, let’s touch base in a week here or maybe less. I think, we’ll get this out probably around the release of the second of the specials, give or take.

And hopefully we can touch base before the third one as well and talk a little bit further. So again, Dr. Aiden Buckland, thank you for joining me. I appreciate the insight, as always. And, from someone with no…, who knows nothing, I appreciate again you taking the time to share with everybody here on the ImplausiPod.

Dr Aiden: Sure. Thanks very much for having me, Doctor, and look forward to talking again.

DRI: Okay. Thank you. And once again, thanks to our guest, Dr. Aiden Buckland. You can contact him at doctoraidenwho at gmail. com. And again, I’ve been your host, Dr. Implausible. Join us again in a week or so for the second of the Dr. Who Christmas specials. We’re going to try and recap that one as well, or give you my impressions as I become a little bit more familiar with the. Dr. Who cinematic universe here. And again, you can contact us at Dr. Implausible at implausipod. com. We have a few other episodes going up shortly, so we’ll keep on with the regular production, but we hope to talk to you again soon until then have fun.