Previous chapters have revealed the Doctor as a radical individualist who nonetheless cares about the fates of communities and as someone who refuses to countenance the status quo by virtue of the knowledge of a higher science and centuries of wisdom. While he admits to Madame Kovarian that good men don’t need rules, he also warns, ‘Today is not the day to find out why I have so many’ (‘A Good Man Goes to War’). Yet he also claims to be ‘a citizen of the universe, and a gentleman to boot’, implying that there are political principles and social values behind the way he conducts himself.
The Doctor’s unique status, in all these ways, implies that he is not a particularly political animal; indeed, he mentions many times in his first eight incarnations that he left home because he wasn’t comfortable alongside his people in their high, starched collars. Gallifreyan politics and culture are Byzantine in their complexity, as befits a world that has enjoyed ‘ten million years of absolute power’ in the universe (‘The Trial of a Time Lord’). It is not so much this fact, but rather the basic hypocrisy of the Time Lords, that the Doctor rejects. The High Council of the Time Lords, comprised of their President, Chancellor, Castellan of security, and various other high-ranking officials, is most often portrayed as a bickering mess. Through their intelligence service, the Celestial Intervention Agency, they do in fact make historical adjustments while cleaving to a policy of strict neutrality in the affairs of the cosmos. In one momentous case, they put an entire planet to the sword to protect secrets in the Matrix – the repository of all Gallifreyan knowledge (‘The Trial of a Time Lord’) – while, in another, they fail to prevent one of their own from destroying the Daleks’ home planet of Skaro (‘Remembrance of the Daleks’).
Gallifreyan society is divided into six ‘Chapters’, with the Prydonians (which the Doctor and Master hail from), the Patrexes and the Arcalians being dominant and the Dromeians, Ceruleans and Scendles being less politically active. A number of Houses subscribe to each Chapter, of which the Doctor’s is called ‘Lungbarrow’. Members of Houses are related to each other as cousins, but are born from genetic Looms, not parents.1 In ‘The Deadly Assassin’, one of the first explicitly political of the Doctor’s adventures, we find out from Castellan Spandrell that the Doctor, now in his fourth incarnation, is considered an embarrassment to the High Council and a criminal by the general populace. The situation becomes vastly worse when the Master and his puppets frame him for assassinating the Lord President of Gallifrey, and on the latter’s resignation day, no less. Interrogated and tortured in the vaults deep beneath the Capitol, the Doctor is aghast to find out that Chancellor Goth (Bernard Horsfall) is eager to have him done away with in light of the upcoming election. ‘What? Well, that’s monstrous! Vaporisation without representation is against the constitution!’ the Doctor blurts.
In extricating himself from the situation, the Doctor’s knowledge of Time Lord laws and procedures – which he also demonstrates adroitly in ‘Arc of Infinity’ and ‘The Five Doctors’ – becomes key. To extricate himself from the snares of the Time Lords’ arch-bureaucrats, he will ‘out-bureaucrat’ them. However, when it comes to defeating Goth in the bizarre virtual landscape of the Matrix and thwarting the Master’s plans to gain an entirely new set of regenerations, whoever can corner the market on sheer power will be the winner. Can humans preserve justice, unaided by the wisdom of millions of years of Time Lord memories safeguarded in the Matrix, as the Doctor demands in ‘The Deadly Assassin’? Or are there merely balances of power beneath shifting political allegiances, as the second Doctor’s evil twin Salamander realises in ‘The Enemy of the World’? In ‘Ghost Light’, one of the final serials of the original programme broadcast in 1989, the Doctor sadly tells us, ‘I can’t stand burnt toast. I loathe bus stations. Terrible places. Full of lost luggage and lost souls […] And then there’s unrequited love. And tyranny. And cruelty.’ Which sorts of governments, societies and civil associations succeed and which fail in the Doctor Who universe? As we’ll see, the programme has much to say about war, political violence, and the pathologies that result when economic reasoning trumps the moral dimensions of politics.
Western philosophy typically links political philosophy very closely to ethics and to social theory. With few exceptions, political theory usually gets the worst of these alliances because of two tendencies in understanding their connections. One is to treat the study of political relationships as simply a version of ethical duties or principles writ large. The other is to classify political institutions as a subset of social institutions. Phenomenologist Alfred Schutz provides such a framework in his concept of social reality, which is
the world of cultural objects and social institutions into which we are all born, within which we have to find our bearings, and with which we have to come terms. From the outset, we, the actors on the social scene, experience the world we live in as a world both of nature and of culture.2
Philosophers also tend, in the grand scheme of things, to subordinate projects in all three of these areas – political, social and ethical – to considerations of what might be seen as more ‘foundational’ problems in areas like metaphysics and epistemology. The idea is that, since claims about reality or about knowledge encompass political as well as non-political actions, categories and events, fundamental questions must be settled first. Arguably, this relative lack of autonomy has undermined the creativity and concrete problem-solving abilities of twentieth- and early twenty-first-century political philosophy. Just as in other disciplines, philosophers usually accept that the questions they ask should fit a certain well-established, traditional schema and, as a result, they have been myopic to the fact that each and every human activity, including philosophising itself, has its political dimension. In this, we have less of an excuse, because it was one of our own, Aristotle (384–322 BCE), who noted that ‘man is more of a political animal than bees or any other gregarious animals’ because of the power of speech, which
is intended to set forth the expedient and the inexpedient, and therefore likewise the just and the unjust. And it is a characteristic of man that he alone has any sense of good and evil, of just and unjust, and the like, and the association of living beings who have this sense makes a family and a state.3
The varieties of political theory, like those of the other human sciences – including history and sociology – are numerous and diverse. The examination of states, laws, constitutions, civil associations and institutions that those theories share also differs from the physical sciences in two crucial respects. First, political theory and its humanistic correlates are reflexive disciplines that demand methods for how humans can inquire after themselves, not merely about an objectified nature of physical properties, energy or chemicals. Second, because of this, they cannot make a plausible claim to value-neutrality. The diversity of approaches in thinking about political life stems from worthwhile research programmes in the area, each of which cannot be entered into without adopting a framework or ‘paradigm’ that, at least, stipulates the meaning of key terms (like ‘state’, ‘individual agent’, etc.) and describes a method by which investigation will progress. So, despite what some political scientists or philosophers might claim, it cannot be true that ‘they are seeking to match or test empirical claims against a political reality which is itself “objective” and “value-neutral”’, as Richard Bernstein explains.4 Although we needn’t commit to any one particular framework of valuation to engage in political philosophy, it is clearly true that no work can be done without accepting one that ‘contain[s] beliefs and expectations about what is correct, appropriate, or “rational” behaviour’.5
The Doctor has his own strong opinions about politics, even if the nature of political life is never the same from destination to destination. One particular piece of wisdom comes in ‘The Face of Evil’ when the fourth Doctor lectures Leela:
You know, the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don’t alter their views to fit the facts. They alter the facts to fit their views. Which can be very uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering.
This same episode contains a subtle illustration of the social and political problem of unintended consequences, as the Doctor slowly unravels the reason for a bizarre schism of cultures – the Sevateem and the Tesh – on a colony world in the far future. It soon becomes clear that his own efforts in the past to set the colony spaceship’s computer to rights has failed, and that it has suffered from the silicon equivalent of a split personality after the Doctor forgot to wipe his own ‘memory print’ from it. While the programme earnestly tackled concerns about repressive taxation (‘The Sun Makers’) and alternate energy sources (‘Planet of Evil’, 1975; ‘The Hand of Fear’, 1976), ‘Face of Evil’ can be interpreted as a rare instance of the programme criticising the intrusiveness of the welfare state, symbolised by the mad computer Xoanon’s experiments with eugenics among the Sevateem and Tesh.
As these and other examples will show, the 1970s were the high-water mark of clearly discernible political positions in Doctor Who, and, unsurprisingly, the values of socialism and welfare liberalism often provided its critical edge. In their discussion of ‘The Sun Makers’, the authors of Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text reference the Doctor’s humorous pastiche of Karl Marx (‘What have we got to lose?’ ‘Only your claims!’) when elaborating the story’s message against oppressive taxation. Indeed, many of the most political Who episodes from the 1970s are also the funniest, a coincidence explained by Tulloch and Alvarado in Unfolding Text as a narrative strategy in which ‘capitalism and class exploitation were propounded only to be displaced by the family conflict between “inhuman” bureaucracy and “human” spontaneity’.6
With Tom Baker now a confident lead, the show did not shirk from employing humour and irony to throw barbs at the political and economic status quo. Like ‘The Sun Makers’, two other adventures of the fourth Doctor, ‘The Robots of Death’ and ‘The Pirate Planet’ (1978), use economic realities rather than moustache-twirling villains to oppose the protagonists. The latter of these was Douglas Adams’ initial script contribution to Doctor Who, and the second adventure in the quest of the Doctor and fellow Time Lady Romana for the ‘Key to Time’: a fabulous artefact needed by the White Guardian to restore balance to the universe. Adams’ idea for where to hide one of the six gleaming pieces to the Key was, typically, absurdly outsized: it is disguised as the planet Calufrax, which has just been swallowed by the space-hopping ‘pirate planet’, Zanak. The story is a thinly veiled allegory for rapacious capitalism, as Zanak’s Captain – who not only swears like a genuine pirate but also allows a robotic parrot to perch on his shoulder – cares nothing for the worlds that are compressed, mined out and then discarded after each of the planet’s jumps. Another target of Adams’ wit is the populace of Zanak, most of whom enjoy the bounty the Captain rains down on them every so often without so much as questioning it. Precious jewels are a common sight in the gutters of Zanak, and the citizenry are close to a state of permanent ennui from the ever-more-frequent ‘golden ages of prosperity’ that the Captain brings about. A trope for the spiritual opposition to this languid materialism emerges in the Mentiads, citizens of Zanak whose incipient telepathic powers are boosted each time a planet is devoured:
DOCTOR: You were absorbing what you would call the life force from the plundered planets.
PRALIX: What is the life force?
DOCTOR: Well, er, well, it’s quite difficult to explain in simple terms, but basically, Romana?
ROMANA: Every atom of matter in the universe has a certain amount of energy locked inside it. Now, with something the size of a planet, there’s an enormous quantity.
DOCTOR: Oh, enormous.
ROMANA: So every time Zanak crushes a planet, it releases all that energy. Now, some of it will be on psychic wavelengths.
DOCTOR: Right.7
The Captain is not without scruples, but those he has are sadly misplaced. When the Doctor confronts him in the midst of his gallery of super-compressed planets, of which Calufrax is only the latest (and Earth is to be the next), the Time Lord can barely control his rage: ‘What, you commit mass destruction and murder on a scale that’s almost inconceivable and you ask me to appreciate it? Just because you happen to have made a brilliantly conceived toy out of the mummified remains of planets?’ The Captain is not ultimately in control of Zanak, however. When it is revealed that its staggeringly old queen, Xanxia, needs destroyed planets to fuel time dams that are extending the life of her withered corpse, the serial’s message is hammered home about moral decadence being the outcome of unrestricted exploitation of the environment.
‘The Robots of Death’, a futuristic murder-mystery by Chris Boucher, who also scripted many Blake’s Seven episodes, has been lauded as ‘a fine example of a story on which everyone involved was clearly committed to achieving the best they possibly could’.8 Through an integration of fine acting, scriptwriting and design, the story portrays a future human society that is decadent in morals and baroque in taste. A sandminer combs the deserts of an unnamed planet for traces of valuable zelanite, keefan and lucanol. It is manned, not by the sort of intransigent miners who play such an important role in activist stories like the earlier ‘Curse of Peladon’ (1972) and ‘The Monster of Peladon’ (1974) but by upper-crust citizens of Kaldor City, members of the 20 ‘founding families’. Bickering between the spoiled and often bored members of the crew soon turns ugly as their fellows begin to die in unpleasant ways. Their leader, Commander Uvanov, never conceals his bitterness at being from a lower social stratum than his crew, and is more interested in keeping pace with profitable sandstorms than in solving the murders. This is the situation that the Doctor and Leela walk into when the TARDIS appears on the sandminer.
‘The Robots of Death’ trade on worries about large-scale industrial exploitation, since the sandminer’s brutally efficient processing powers and its tendency to sink beneath the sand if not in constant motion are sources of two of the three cliff-hangers. It is also an effective demonstration of how technology and the profit motive sunder social reality. The deepest message in this regard is sent through the story’s eponymous robots, which fall into three classes. The ‘Dums’ are drones that cannot communicate; ‘Vocs’ speak, carry out complex functions and even take care of the human crew; and the ‘SuperVoc’ coordinates the efforts of all the rest. Writer Boucher utilises black humour and plays on tensions about the threat of impersonal technology in the following exchange from the witty script of ‘Robots of Death’. The sandminer crew has just found that one of their number, Chub, has been killed and a red disc is spotted on his hand:
DASK: It’s a corpse marker.
UVANOV: What?
DASK: Robot deactivation disc. They use them in the construction centres. If ever we used the stop circuit and turned off all our robots, they’d have to go back to a construction centre for reactivation. On arrival, each would be marked with a disc like that to show it was a deactivated robot. The technicians call them corpse markers. It’s a sort of a joke.
POUL: It seems our murderer has a sense of humour.
UVANOV: That was on the back of Chub’s hand.
BORG: Not just a murderer, then. Seems like one of us is a maniac.
CASS: Use your brain, Borg. We would know, wouldn’t we?
BORG: But we don’t.
(Borg puts the marker on Cass.)
BORG: Do we?9
Sinister comments like Borg’s abound in the story, emphasising how little these future humans care about each other. An ingenious invention of Boucher’s here is the condition of ‘robophobia’, or Grimwade Syndrome. This is a debilitating mental illness that stems from spending too many of one’s formative years solely around robots, and is acted out with relish by David Collings as the miner’s ‘Mover’, Poul. The robophobic reaction Poul suffers after the initial killings aboard the sandminer is treated as a pathology by Commander Uvanov, his second, Lish Toos (Pamela Salem), and the Doctor. In a clever twist, Poul’s suspicion of the robots proves to be correct, as the SuperVoc SV7 has been reprogrammed to coordinate the sandminer’s mechanoids to kill every human. By an even cleverer turn of events, the human who reprogrammed SV7 was also raised by robots, with the result that he has come to believe that he ‘was brought up a superior being. Brought up to realise my brothers should live as free beings, and not as slaves to human dross.’10
I stated earlier that political theory cannot hope to get off the ground without adopting a framework that stipulates the meaning of central concepts and uses a method for research. Like the ‘base under siege’ stories considered in Chapter 4, the closed environment of the sandminer provides an environment of ‘micropolitics’ exposing the interplay of authority, proper procedures and, in this case, the desire to get out alive. Using a detailed and powerful definition of the ‘realm of politics’ offered by Benjamin Barber, the situation in ‘Robots’ clearly qualifies as a case of the political. Barber writes,
One can understand the realm of politics as being circumscribed by conditions that impose a necessity for public action, and thus for reasonable public choice, in the presence of conflict and in the absence of private or independent grounds for judgment.11
In this view, we have to account for the actions in the face of conflict aboard the sandminer as a frank failure; of its original human crew, only three remain alive. The fundamental elements of the social reality that fuels the sandminer’s micropolitics, Barber would probably claim, lead to the breakdown of politics as public problem solving. But an atomistic sense of individualism frames most issues in Chris Boucher’s ‘Kaldor City’ future. This casts all political concepts in terms of a ‘vocabulary of materiality’ that today characterises much modern political discourse in the real world. The terms of this vocabulary include
property as an extension of the physical self and of physical self-ownership (the labour theory of value); […] boundaries as the crucial metaphor in conflicts of rights, autonomies, and jurisdictions; sanctions as an extension of physical penalties, designed to control behaviour through the mechanics of hedonism; freedom as the absence of external impediments to motion, as liberty from ‘chains, from imprisonment, from enslavement by others’ (Isaiah Berlin); and power as brute force, physical coercion, the absence of freedom.12
The citizens of Zanak and the sandminer crew are alienated from the social values of human interdependency and community as well as from the political values of cooperation and citizenship. Similarly to the disastrous politico-economic decisions found in episodes like these, Karl Marx proposes that a theory critical of capitalist societies can begin by adopting all the presuppositions of profit-oriented political economy – ‘private property, the separation of labour, capital, and land; […] also division of labour; competition; the concept of exchange value, etc.’ – and still come to revolutionary conclusions. He writes:
Using the very words of political economy we have demonstrated that the work is degraded to the most miserable sort of commodity; that the misery of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and size of his production; that the necessary result of competition is the accumulation of capital in a few hands, and thus a more terrible restoration of monopoly.13
If recognition, a concept introduced in Chapter 2, names the ways in which we see ourselves as social beings and moral agents by taking the attitude of others towards us, Marx’s alienation, the key to each worker’s immiserisation, is its opposite. For Marx, one can be alienated in three ways: from oneself, from the products of one’s labour, and from others (the social context in which production takes place). The lassitude of those living on ‘The Pirate Planet’ and the mutual hostility of the mining crew in ‘The Robots of Death’ qualify them under all three characterisations. Marx, who spoke the language of revolution (some would say treason) fluently, would have appreciated the Doctor’s assessment that the events aboard the sandminer represent a focal point in that particular future history. Leela asks, ‘So what happens if the strangler is a robot?’ Without batting an eye, the Doctor replies, ‘Oh, I should think it’s the end of this civilisation.’
So should our political views fit the facts, or may we change the facts to fit our views? In ‘The Face of Evil’, the Doctor seems to prefer the former, since he calls those who act on the latter either ‘very powerful’ or ‘very stupid’. Yet Barber’s sketch of the conditions that must be met for action to be political sheds doubt on the possibility of there being non-trivial ‘political’ or ‘social facts’. Recall that he claims that there are ‘private or independent grounds for judgment’ in public problem-solving scenarios. While I may have private grounds for judgements in (non-political) decision making that concerns only me or those I have close relationships to, Barber is implying that there are many opportunities for public decision making that do not have ‘independent’ grounds for deciding one way or another. Putting it another way, regarding many first-order problems or questions (such as, ‘Should abortion be outlawed?’ or ‘What is the effect of political contributions on free speech?’), there is no algorithmic way to apply second-order values or methods, such as ‘democracy’ or ‘equality’. The philosopher’s concern is that if these terms are fundamentally contestable, lacking an essential and universal definition, then we are stuck with one of two options.
The first is a facile political realism in which ‘anything goes’ given the concatenation of power relations at the time. This is very similar to the ‘state of nature’ of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) or the opportunities for gaining and holding power that the Renaissance prince finds himself in, according to Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527). The second option is that taken by the radical democrat, like Marx or Barber in their different ways, who realises that the foundation laid by political philosophy for political life today is misleading in its basic approach. Barber sums up the error when he writes:
In a word, politics is not the application of Truth to the problem of human relations but the application of human relations to the problem of truth. Justice then appears as an approximation of principle in a world of action where absolute principles are irrelevant.14
European theorists of democracy such as Claude LeFort attribute attitudes like Barber’s to the ‘dissolution of the markers of certainty’ in understandings of power, law and knowledge.15
What kind of models for political practices and institutions can we generate if Barber is correct? Generating such models is an endeavour as old as politics itself. It is an oversimplification to say that there are two species of such models, the ideal and the empirical. Accepting such an uncluttered ontology of political life does give us the advantage of being able to clearly trace the roots of political philosophy back to Athens and the approaches of Plato and Aristotle. Plato’s Republic, the ancient subtitle of which was ‘On Justice’, is an early entry in the tradition of constructing an ideal political system: a tradition continued by Thomas More’s Utopia in the sixteenth century and John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice in the twentieth, among many other illustrations. Aristotle’s Politics is an empirical study of city-states and their constitutions around the Mediterranean, and Plato’s late work – the Laws – is a hybrid of ideal and empirical theory focusing on the pros and cons of the political institutions of Sparta and Crete. To ‘consider what form of political community is the best of all for those who are most able to realise their ideal of life’, Aristotle suggests we examine constitutions ‘as actually exist in well-governed states, and any theoretical forms which are held in high esteem’.16 Plato and Aristotle both thought that, given the various options for governance, democracy was one of the worst. Aristotle demarcates democracy as a state in which ‘the free, who are also poor and the majority, govern’.17 While Plato’s ideal state described in the Republic is meritocratic and run by the wisest men, Aristotle’s preference in his political and ethical works is for an aristocratic state guided by the best (that is, the most virtuous) men.
Both Athenians would have disagreed with the claims we examined earlier made by Benjamin Barber, who is not only a committed democrat, but advocates a radically participatory democracy in his very definition of politics. In particular, they would have taken issue with Barber’s idea that politics is ‘the application of human relations to the problem of truth’, since both Plato and Aristotle thought that the truth about human nature, and in particular human moral psychology, dictates preferable political forms. In the dialogue Laws, one of Plato’s characters, an unnamed Athenian, claims that:
pleasure and pain, you see, flow like two springs released by nature. If a man draws the right amount from the right one at the right time, he lives a happy life; but if he draws unintelligently at the wrong time, his life will be rather different. State and individual and every living being are on the same footing here.18
Indeed, this is a truncated version of the argument for the ideal city-state in the Republic, where the economic and social separation of the ‘guardian’ class from the working class is made on the principle of ‘the natural division of labour’. In short, this principle implies that ‘more plentiful and better-quality goods are more easily produced if each person does one thing for which he is naturally suited, does it at the right time, and is released from having to do any of the others’.19
The goal of the leader – what Plato calls politikos or statesman, and who in the Republic is referred to as a ‘philosopher-king’ – is ‘to make [the citizens] wise and to provide them with a share of knowledge, if it was to be the [art] that benefited them and made them happy’.20 Democracy is a fundamental perversion of the principle of the natural division of labour because it presents the populace with two values that are illusory: freedom and equality. ‘Democratic freedom presupposes, contrary to the principle of the natural division of labour’, Plato scholar David Keyt explains, ‘that human nature is sufficiently plastic to allow for real choices among different lives.’21 Valuing equality, likewise, assumes that each person is just as good as anyone else at the work of governance. And, while Aristotle agrees that these two political values are fictions given the relative rigidity of human nature, he also argues that Plato
deprives the guardians even of happiness, and says that the legislator ought to make the whole state happy. But the whole cannot be happy unless most, or all, or some of its parts enjoy happiness […] And if the guardians are not happy, who are? Surely not the artisans, or the common people. The Republic of which Socrates discourses has all these difficulties, and others quite as great.22
After enumerating five different types of democracies, Aristotle concludes that this form of government is too unstable because it relies on popular deference to laws and to demagogues. Democracies are more likely to ignore the former and be misled by the latter, he claims, and so once again the theme of a well-ordered state, guided by the more restricted group of those citizens who see further, emerges as a philosopher’s preference.
In contrast, the claims made on behalf of democracy have typically been based on moral claims about freedom and equality rather than on attempting to refute the ancients on the questions of efficiency and effectiveness. ‘Its cardinal principle has always been that, in matters affecting their collective life and interests, the people appropriately rule themselves,’ as Ian Shapiro writes.23 Doctor Who’s ethos is generally pro-democratic, and it is not unusual among other sci-fi venues in expressing doubts about the viability of political utopias; in ‘The Savages’, the glory of the Elders’ civilisation is based on their draining of the life force of the savages outside their walls, and ‘The Keeper of Traken’ rehearses the story of the serpent in Eden, with the Master playing the part of the tempter. The programme more often tends to plumb the social reality of dystopias (‘Frontios’; ‘Gridlock’) and has received attention for its revealing – and often disturbing – disclosures of the pathologies of democratic societies in stories such as ‘Vengeance on Varos’ (1985) and ‘The Beast Below’.
Besides emphasising the democratic values of freedom and equality, episodes such as these deploy narratives about democratic competition and deliberation to heighten drama. ‘Vengeance on Varos’, the third outing for Colin Baker’s sixth Doctor, is a multi-layered tale which,
at its simplest, is a tense and mildly horrific monster story that can be enjoyed as a piece of pure escapism, but at the other end of the spectrum it is an intelligent and thought-provoking discourse on such weighty issues as video nasties, torture and the responsibilities of leadership.24
‘Vengeance’, the first contribution to the programme from writer Philip Martin, is an unremittingly grim tale set under the ‘Punishment Dome’ of the planet Varos, where the Doctor and companion Peri Brown have set down in hopes of finding Zeiton ore to boost the power reserves of the TARDIS. ‘Areas of danger lurk around every corner,’ says one of the characters they meet, a woman named Areta. ‘You can die in oh so many ingenious ways.’25 The tale is edgy, to say the least, as it features not only televised torture but also a gallows scene, a reprehensibly flinch-worthy, slug-like villain named Sil (Nabil Shaban), and violent reprisals by the Doctor against his attackers. It was one of several stories that drew the wrong sort of attention to Doctor Who in the mid-1980s, a period of time in which the Controller of BBC 1, Michael Grade, complained that ‘the show has got rather violent and lost a lot of its imagination and a lot of its wit’.26 The criticism did not only come from the top of the BBC: the President of the Australian Doctor Who fan club, Tony Howe, wrote in his group’s newsletter in 1985:
The 1985 season with Colin Baker is NOT the scary, stylised horror of the mid-1970s Doctor Who. The new style is sick, shock violence like Andy Warhol’s: the Cyberleader crushes a prisoner’s hand until it oozes blood; two men die in a vat of acid in ‘Vengeance on Varos’; there is an attack with a kitchen knife in ‘The Two Doctors’; and in the Dalek story someone is stabbed in the chest with a hypodermic needle. These incidents occur unexpectedly, they are not part of a total atmosphere for the whole story, they do not make the story interesting.27
In hindsight, the effort that script editor Eric Saward had made to bring ‘a sense of realism’ to the show, together with what many viewers found to be a jarring, bombastic portrayal of the Doctor by Colin Baker, was a recipe for disaster. Dedicated viewers could express disappointment, but little surprise, when the show was ‘rested’ for 18 months after Baker’s first full season. With further hindsight, though, ‘Vengeance on Varos’ not only emerges as a prophetic example of what would become a fascination in mainstream SF with cruelty and meaningless violence, but also stands as a well-played meditation on political violence.
Varos is a human colony on a cold and uninhabitable world. There, weary and jaded miners, descendants of the population of the criminal and insane when Varos was a prison planet, live under opaque domes in dirty and dreary apartments. Their rations are unreasonably small, their mandatory ‘entertainment’ – footage from the Punishment Dome – of highly questionable taste. The miners produce one of only two things of value on Varos: Zeiton-7, a mineral that allowed craft, including space-time vessels like the TARDIS, to generate orbital energy. The other export consists of videos of torture and executions from the Punishment Dome. With Varos little more than a ‘third world’ outpost controlled by a thin layer of lawfulness hiding naked force, the Doctor’s journey through the Dome is not unlike that of Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, at the end of which lies, ‘The horror! The horror!’
In many ways, Varos represents the complete inversion of Plato’s ideal state. Plato emphasised the signal importance of the principle of the natural division of labour in order to make Kallipolis self-subsistent in a world in which alliances and rivalries with other polei or city-states could be remade quickly. Yet Varos is at the mercy of cosmic conglomerates like the Galatron Mining Corporation, whom Sil represents; its Zeiton-7 is underpriced by their monopolistic tactics. There are no philosopher-kings on Varos: the malicious Chief Officer (Forbes Collins) is in collusion with Sil and has no concept of the common good for his people. Fortunately, standing between him and complete exploitation of the planet is the Governor (Martin Jarvis). But the Governor is worn down by the rants and demands of Sil and by the very nature of his job – which reflects a direct democracy in that every citizen of Varos (save those in the Punishment Dome, of course) must vote on each of his policy proposals.
This direct democracy, however, reflects only cruelty and desperation in its design. If the Governor is successful when calling for a vote, he’s bathed in rays of healing light; the opposite occurs if his proposal is voted down, which happens more than once in the episode. As Peri watches, he prepares himself in front of Varos’s ever-present television cameras for a ‘final vote’ after unsuccessful negotiations with Sil, chronicled by Martin in the novelisation of the story:
The Governor looked away. ‘We haven’t a hope, Peri.’
The leader’s gloom deflated Peri a little but she tried to imagine what the Doctor would do and began glancing around the office, searching for a way out.
‘How long have we got?’ she demanded.
‘Not long. Once the officer elite is assembled the twelve most senior officers must gather to witness a final vote-down […] once the Governor is eliminated regulations insist the dozen candidates place their names in hazard. The unlucky winner is brought in here and forced to govern.’
‘And to go through the same daft process you did?’
‘Yes.’ A mirthless smile formed on the Governor’s mouth. ‘The theory being that a man terrified for his life will somehow find solutions to this planet’s problems. The poor unfortunate will discover, like me, that there are no popular solutions to the difficulties he will find waiting for him here.’28
While it is true that the Governor, unlike Sil or the Chief Officer, aspires to the Platonic ideal of ruling in favour of the advantage of his subjects rather than himself, the coercive conditions of Varos – both for him and for those unfortunates in the Punishment Dome – indicate that social harmony cannot be his goal. Each of the officer elite on Varos is unwilling to rule, meeting another criterion of good leadership for Plato, but their unwillingness stems from the wrong reason: fear. Plato writes:
Now the greatest punishment, if one isn’t willing to rule, is to be ruled by someone worse than oneself. And I think that it’s fear of this that makes decent people rule when they do. They approach ruling not just as something good or something to be enjoyed, but as something necessary, since it can’t be entrusted to anyone better than – or even as good as – themselves. In a city of good men, it if came into being, the citizens would fight in order not to rule, just as they do now in order to rule.29
Despite the story’s happy ending, we have to wonder if political violence, such as what is taped and televised off-world for the pleasure of other planetary populations, isn’t in the life-blood of Varos. Indeed, for many citizens of democracies today, the issues and common problems faced in the public sphere are of much less interest than political theatre and charged ideological exchanges. To Barber’s necessary conditions for politics of ‘a necessity for public action, and thus for reasonable public choice, in the presence of conflict and in the absence of private or independent grounds for judgment’,30 I suggest we also need to add a reflexive understanding of the nature of the political in the minds of agents of change within such a social reality. This is obviously what is lacking when, at the end of ‘Vengeance on Varos’, the public entertainment terminals are all unplugged as the ‘video nasties’ are ended. ‘It’s all changed,’ says Etta, the wife of the miner Arak. ‘We’re free.’ ‘What shall we do?’ Arak asks. ‘Dunno,’ she replies.
The citizens of Starship UK in ‘The Beast Below’ also pride themselves on their democratic ways. ‘Twenty-ninth century’, the eleventh Doctor explains as he and Amy Pond prepare to materialise on Amy’s first spaceship:
Solar flares roast the Earth, and the entire human race packs its bags and moves out till the weather improves. Whole nations. I’ve found us a spaceship. This is the United Kingdom of Britain and Northern Ireland. All of it, bolted together and floating in the sky. Starship UK. It’s Britain, but metal. That’s not just a ship, that’s an idea. That’s a whole country, living and laughing and shopping. Searching the stars for a new home.31
Despite the Doctor’s enthusiasm, the moment he steps out of the TARDIS he seems to have another of his intellectual intuitions about the social reality of Starship UK. After speaking briefly with a crying girl, he tells Amy:
Hundreds of parents walking past who spot her and not one of them is asking her what’s wrong, which means they already know, and it’s something they don’t talk about. Secrets. They’re not helping her, so it’s something they’re afraid of. Shadows. Whatever they’re afraid of, it’s nowhere to be seen, which means it’s everywhere. Police state.
The Doctor is correct: the people of Starship UK are living in a police state, tended by cowled ‘Winders’ who tend the creepy ‘Smiler’ machines (and, sometimes, turn into them!). But they, and their queen, Liz X, only understand the gravity of their situation at an implicit level. This is because the appearance of democratic consensus and civil accord on the ship is kept up by a mutual agreement – a social contract, as it were – of the citizens in order to keep themselves mutually ignorant of the great secret at the heart of their migration to the stars: the ‘beast below’. Comparing this adventure to ‘Vengeance on Varos’, it seems that the citizens of Starship UK have a degree of conscience that the Varosians lack, since they don’t want to be reminded of the violence that makes their political system possible. When Amy Pond enters Voting Cubicle 33C soon after arriving on Starship UK, she is presented with two buttons – ‘PROTEST’ and ‘FORGET’ – and the following video message:
You are here because you want to know the truth about this starship, and I am talking to you because you’re entitled to know. When this presentation has finished, you will have a choice. You may either protest, or forget. If you choose to protest, understand this. If just one per cent of the population of this ship do likewise, the programme will be discontinued with consequences for you all. If you choose to accept the situation, and we hope that you will, then press the Forget button. All the information I’m about to give you will be erased from your memory. You will continue to enjoy the safety and amenities of Starship UK, unburdened by the knowledge of what has been done to save you. Here then, is the truth about Starship UK, and the price that has been paid for the safety of the British people. May God have mercy on our souls.32
A fleeting series of images of war, poverty, environmental disasters and (presumably) the secret behind the ship’s mysteriously non-mechanical propulsion system are then presented to dizzying effect, and Amy chooses to ‘FORGET’ what she’s seen. It seems that those leaving the UK (excepting, of course, Scotland) for a home in space have accepted the ‘reflexivity’ amendment to Barber’s definition of the political suggested above, only to realise that they cannot live with the implications of their predecessors’ actions.
As the Doctor and Amy unearth the truth, and as Queen Liz finds that she is responsible for her own mystification through past orders that she’s had erased from her memory, it becomes clear that if Starship UK is a totalitarian state, it is a curious and perhaps unique one. The real-life anonymous bureaucracy of fascist or Stalinist totalitarianism worked to ensure that ‘the people it dominates never really know why something is happening, and a rational interpretation of the laws does not exist’, so, according to Hannah Arendt, ‘there remains only one thing that counts, the brutal naked event itself’.33 In ‘The Beast Below’, the Starship UK citizens have utilised democratic means to pinpoint their own collective best interest (survival) as well as the best means to that interest (their own ignorance of their complicity in harnessing and torturing the ‘beast’). Their self-inflicted plight reflects a paradox about democracy that progressive or social democrats often do not want to face up to. It is of course true that the norms of ‘equality’ and ‘freedom’ may be actualised, potentially without end, to broaden and deepen opportunities for participation for the citizens of a democratic state. In the end, however, the deliberation and voting on which democratic participation is based will always leave a dissenting minority. This isn’t true merely of politics, but about any broad consensus in a democratic social reality, like the working of effective markets and practices of social trust. While these need not historically be the same groups over time, there is nothing in the concept of ‘democracy’ that says that all must be satisfied with it as their primary vehicle for self-governance.
This chapter has resolved around a debate that drives, not only political theory, but all the human sciences: structure or agency? Are political decisions the causal result of interplays of structural power and influence, such as institutionalised racism or the belief, best put by Immanuel Kant, that ‘out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made’? Or are individual political actors the agents of public change, with ‘civil society’ simply being the aggregate of all such actors? While Marx’s historical materialism might have opted for the first type of explanation, and participatory democrats like Benjamin Barber engage more frequently with the second, we have recently begun to distrust the dichotomy itself. In what must surely be the most peculiar of Doctor Who’s politically incisive serials – ‘The Happiness Patrol’ – the seventh Doctor plays the spoons, is chased through sewers by an alien hunter named ‘Fifi’, and immobilises the seven-foot-tall confectionary killer, the Kandyman, all in the service of bringing down an oppressive regime on the planet Terra Alpha. A thinly disguised critique of Thatcherism, the Doctor takes aim at those who – like some naïve crew members aboard the sandminer and the misguided citizens of Starship UK – would see only stability, progress and happiness despite human misery. With some help and a few well-aimed prison breaks, an alliance with the ‘Killjoys’, and the decoction of the Kandyman, the Doctor and Ace successfully overthrow the regime and ensure that the blues can once again be heard on Terra Alpha. ‘I can hear the sound of empires toppling,’ the seventh Doctor announces as their plans come to fruition. The entire episode is a lively parody that conceals an intriguing use of the fantastic imagination to deconstruct the separation between structure and agency in the midst of a revolution.
And while it is true that Doctor Who is less explicitly political than SF programmes like Firefly and Battlestar Galactica, we’re always on solid ground in seeing any given adventure of the Doctor as an experiment in what structures of a particular social reality can survive when a freewheeling agent arrives in his tall blue box. Like any good SF or science fantasy that entertains political dimensions, the most valuable contribution that Doctor Who can make to thinking about political philosophy in the twenty-first century will be to spur the human political imagination. Henry Farrell explains:
[W]hile the fantastic imagination—the ability to imagine that things are different than they are in the world we live in—plays a crucial role for politics, it is an indirect one. It does not substitute for political activity, or even necessarily guide it, but it expands the space of political possibilities, making people aware of the contingency of existing social arrangements and the possibility of changing them.34
In its explorations of alterity, some of which we examined in Chapters 3 and 4, and in its willingness to present characters that defy expectations and social norms such as Vislor Turlough, Jack Harkness and Donna Noble, Doctor Who also makes an important contribution to the fantastic political imagination. As we have seen, the mutability of its basic premises and the chance that the Doctor could always re-engage with his own society back on Gallifrey in the future indicate that its own political possibilities are far from exhausted.