Netflix vs. Amazon: Two Comic-Book Takes on the Post-9/11 World

Adorable shorts are cool. (Change my mind.)

It turns out 2019 was quite the year for dramas based on comic books. On the big screen we saw Disney's MCU series finally come to a gorgeous, decades-long climax with Avengers' Happy Ending Avengers: Endgame. On the small screen meanwhile Netflix and Amazon found themselves going head-to-head (although head-to-knee might be more appropriate given the disparity between the two) with two surprisingly watchable adaptions of comics from the late 2000s...

The Umbrella Academy

Tweenage superheroes in goofy prep-school uniforms (including kinky eye-masks, Argyle sweaters, knee-length socks and adorable little shorts) ought to be a genuinely fun idea. X-Men go full Hogwarts? Why not? Mix in time-travelling men in black assassins from Doctor Who (or at least from the 1990s "wilderness years" novels and comics versions of the franchise) and you should almost by definition have a kick-ass (if not quite Kick-Ass) comic book and a very serviceably fun but fucked-up TV show.

So! Did it work?

Well I've never read the comic, so I can't possibly say whether the Netflix people did a good job of adapting the source material. As a show though it's... OK. As I said, the main gimmick is sound, being mostly tried and tested, and the back-up time travel gimmick has of course been tried and tested to destruction (even if I use the phrase advisedly).

Just as Stan Lee taught us that superheroes can have their human sides, and Watchmen taught us that if Batman were real he'd have more in common with Nathan Bedford Forrest (or at least Bernhard Goetz) than he would with Sherlock Holmes, now we're invited to imagine that not all super schools are quite so "enlightened" as Charles Xavier's. In fact there's nothing like being brought up with your fellow (alien) septuplets in a big house in New York, with an emotionally distant authoritarian Englishman (also an alien though!) for an adoptive father and an android Stepford housewife for a mother and, er, an augmented chimpanzee for a butler to leave you... an angry, embittered, emotionally needy, "dysfunctional", and generally just typically obnoxious millennial. Only with superpowers!

If the X-Men were written to appeal to teenagers not too cool for school but definitely too cool to fight in Vietnam, the Umbrella Academy were evidently supposed to be channeling the angst of a generation that couldn't quite cope with 9/11, Bush and Iraq. Now they've been repackaged in time for the Great Awokening, I'd suggest that updating them by the better part of two decades wasn't such a great idea.

For one thing, they don't really fit into the post-2008 era, let alone the world post-2016. It's hard to sympathise with the marital problems of a super-powered Hollywood celebrity (for example) if you're a 40-year-old man who can't afford to move out of his mother's spare room, and when teenagers are being sacked from university and having their lives ruined for expressing the "wrong" opinions on WhatsApp it's a bit much to suggest they should be angry at their 'rents for having been too strict. (Then again, the total failure of the entire media establishment to come to terms with either the Great Recession or the post-Obama revolutions of Brexit and Trump is an ongoing cultural problem. So perhaps one shouldn't judge Netflix too harshly for failing adequately to adapt a 2000s comic-book to a late 2010s zeitgeist.)

Thomas Hoepker's "most controversial photo" of 9/11

Rather more important is that The Umbrella Academy has a very distinct post-9/11 vibe to it. When Mohamed Atta and his chums brought down the World Trade Centre, they also challenged many of the Baby-Boomers' and Generation X's previously devoutly held beliefs (even if in the end they didn't quite manage to bury them). Thomas Hoeopker's infamous photograph in fact illustrated not so much the indifference of young Americans' to their fellow citizens' suffering but their complete inability to comprehend what was going on. "I don't get it, dude. Why would anyone want to attack us? We're cool, aren't we?" Because whereas previously multiculturalism had been seen only as a Good Thing and America's role on the world stage had only ever (or at least since 'Nam) been seen as "a force for good", suddenly young Americans were invited to re-imagine both America's relationship with the world beyond their borders and their own relationship(s) with the American government itself.

Of course, in a comparatively short period of time the fantasies of the past all bounced back in the shape of conspiracy theories about Bush, oil, evangelical Christianity and (of course) racism. But for a short while the kids who'd grown up watching John Hughes movies and listening to the sonic sewage of MTV felt vulnerable both physically and intellectually. Having finished the first season of The Umbrella Academy therefore, I was interested to discover that it was the brainchild of Gerard Way, who was of course (with My Chemical Romance and in particular 'The Black Parade') one of the very, very few creative talents to have tried in any way to come to terms with 9/11 artistically. And whereas 'The Black Parade' was an unusual and (at least in some ways) original reflection on how young people should think about death, the first Umbrella Academy story gives the dysfunctional early 2000s generation their own comic-book avatars, who are supposed to overcome their own dysfunctionality and bickering in order to stop the End of the World.*

Admittedly, it's hard to make dysfunctional people dramatically engaging, let alone sympathetic. There aren't many people in The Umbrella Academy that we can really be expected to root for. But then one presumes that's the point. Deep down, each one of them is a beautiful damaged human being, and in the end they all love each other, and we learn to love them as they reconnect and rediscover what they have in common. Or... something like that.

The only really good thing about the Netflix adaption is of course Aidan Gallagher. Robert Sheehan finishes comfortably but still distantly in second place, playing a gay character who hardly develops at all. (He goes to 'Nam - having travelled back through time to get there - and comes back not significantly affected by the experience beyond having had a boyfriend who then died. Which makes one wonder if that's really all the significance that war can have to a X-gen/millennial audience.) And unfortunately it also has one really, genuinely bad thing going on, and that of course is the abysmal Ellen Page. And it is unfortunate because she's really, really, really bad. She's clearly supposed to be an "interesting" baddy. But alas, she really, really isn't.

And on the subject of interesting baddies, that brings us neatly to...

The Boys

Should one feel disappointed that a TV streaming series called The Boys hardly has any actual boys in it?†

Only joking! The Boys is glorious, and so gloriously fucked-up it should be on one of Russell Brand's 12-point rehab programs.

Simon Pegg gives it a big daddy kiss of approval. In the original comic book he was actually the inspiration for the main character, and he even wrote a foreword to one of the trade paperbacks by way of a wink and a thank-you. Here he literally plays the daddy of the main character, albeit with a slightly ropy Noo Yawk accent. Karl Urban sports an if anything even ropier London accent, though he goes on more or less to save the series on a character level just by projecting sheer scary bear charisma. Less successful is the actual main character, played tolerably but almost entirely without charisma or insight by Jack Quaid, as is his similarly one-dimensional super-powered girlfriend played by Erin Moriarty. (I just had to google their names, so trust me they're forgettable.)

In fact the series titular heroes - a slightly screwy squad of CIA gunslingers who are dedicated to "bringing down" (politically, legally and literally) the world's superheroes (who in general terms are asshole versions of DC's Justice League) - are surprisingly dull. There's a token black man (of course), who believes in Jesus and lies to his wife. There's a comedy token Frenchman (for some reason), who tortures people to death and then fusses about his baguettes and so on. And then there's Karl Urban's character Butcher, who's out for revenge, and we definitely feel his pain, but then he flies into a homicidal rage and murders Haley Joel Osment (whose guest appearance as a psychic washed-up former child prodigy is quite fabulously dark) in a public lavatory.

And that's sort of it for the goodies. Yes, obviously the series was trying to go down the now well trodden GoT route of not really having goodies and baddies. But there's a sense in which that wasn't quite what was wanted. It's clearly supposed to be "challenging", but if one really wanted to challenge modern norms one could easily have flagged up (for example) why a man and a woman who aren't married to each other should think it's OK to fornicate. Quaid's nerd and Moriarty's feisty blonde are supposed to be the goodies, but they're only goodies in that they both have utterly cliched story-arcs. Her "rebel without a clue" arc is even lamp-shaded by the Wonder Woman character. His arc looks as if he might be a new Breaking Bad-type character in the making, but as of the end of the first seasons he's nowhere near there yet. (In the last episode he shouts "Sorry!" whilst murdering private security guards. Is that supposed to be darkly funny? I'm not even sure that it was.)

"Post-modern? Moi?"

What saves the series rather than the Boys themselves is the baddies, who are of course the not-so-super superheroes. And boy, what wonderful baddies they are! If the X-Men comics humanised heroes and Watchmen and its followers meditated on the dehumanizing effects of having great power and great responsibility, The Boys takes the latter concept one stage further and asks what sort of people superheroes would be in the "real" world of rolling news channels, Hollywood blockbusters and media-savvy politicians.

Obviously the whole world at some point is going to have to come to terms with why we're currently spending the same sort of money at the cinema to see Iron Man thump Thanos as we used to spend on Gone with the Wind (or at any rate on a pseudo-sci-fi Gesamtkunstwerk like Star Wars - or even an American homemade neo-Marxist mythological masterpiece like Titanic). Personally I think there are perfectly legitimate economic reasons why we do. (Patriotic epics are all very well, but by definition they have limited international appeal. And yes, that includes Bondage.) And it's possible that even kiddie wizards and neo-mediaevalism may simply have had their day (especially now that China is opening up to Hollywood). But there's also a clear sense in which the 21st century world has both forgotten the past (the historical epic is currently beyond resuscitation) and lost faith in the future (because sci-fi as a genre isn't much better off), and so it contents itself with a fantastical version of the world of the present day. The question is, does it dare from such a vantage point to say anything about (let alone to) that present-day world. And does it have anything to say?

Like The Umbrella Academy, The Boys does indeed "deal" with 9/11, but having been written by a Brit rather than an actual resident of New York it does so far less obliquely, far more cynically and (arguably) more observantly.†† In fact it has an actual 9/11 calque in the shape of a 'plane hijacking that the heroes then make a hundred times worse when they intervene. And the character who fails to save the day but who then goes on to save virtually the entire show is of course Anthony Starr's Homelander. In the current golden age of television, when writers write to character rather than plot and then write their characters to the actors playing them (even when it means they end up with character-arcs that make no sense in the context of the plot - witness Jaime Lannister and Daenerys for a couple of good examples!) it was perhaps inevitable that having cast somebody really good as their main baddie they would end up whether intentionally or not making him the most "interesting" character of all. Because Anthony Starr, to employ a phrase, absolutely kills it.

Homelander on screen is cleverer, more charming, more three-dimensional, more devious and more ruthless, and altogether more interesting than he was in the comics. Is this just a problem with writing to a genuinely good actor? (And the Great Awokening has certainly sorted the men from, er, the boys in that regard. With fewer white heterosexual roles out there, even a thorough-going scary villain like Homelander, much like Smith in MitHC, will end up becoming a deeply compelling antihero.) He's cynical enough to bring a baby into a room with a bomb just because he wants to know if it will survive the blast - because he wants to know whether it's his or not. And the scene when he finally gets the measure of evil domineering single-mother lipstick-feminist nympho Hillary-clone Madelyn Stillwell and lasers her brain out of her head must have raised a cheer from every God-fearing toxic masculinist throughout the English-speaking world.†††

Umbrella Academy went to town on the idea of superheroes being emotionally immature adults, but The Boys goes all the way to the big city on it. And in doing so it doesn't just dip into a somewhat hackneyed critique of what a liberal American might consider to be a cold-showers boarding school-style of education. Perhaps inadvertently The Boys holds up what a leftist Ulsterman might consider a mirror to America itself. Yes, it turns out that Homelander was brought up in a laboratory. But then "real-life" modern America is itself just as much an artificial being. After all, what other sort of country could ever be satisfied with such an utterly banal version of protestant "Christianity", in which religion is reduced to pop music, scriptural slogans and foreign aid campaigns? (Give me dogmas and incense any day!) In what other sort of country is it considered sexually mainstream for teenage boys to lust over women's mammary glands. (Over here, even straight men prefer their hindquarters.) If America were a superhero it would be Superman, and if Superman were real he'd a smug but neurotic evangelical obsessed with tits.

One final thing that The Umbrella Academy and The Boys have in common is that each breaks with its comic book source by giving its first season a cliffhanger ending, and one indeed that holds out a glimpse of a possible "nostalgic" resolution. The Umbrella Academy's is fairly simple. Even if is about to "get messy", we're still invited to imagine the characters are on the verge of going back through time and having a Quantum Leap-type second chance, with childhood innocence, order and beauty restored. The Boys on the other hand ends with a humdinger of a twist, when we find out that both Butcher's wife and Homelander's son are alive and well and living in a leafy suburb somewhere - though not how any of them will really react to their discovery.

So, have we seen the last of Ellen Page? Will the Umbrella Academy now be able to move on from that quirky, slightly convoluted time-travel story and continue having new wacky adventures for years to come? Will Butcher be able to come to terms with the probability that he was legitimately cuckolded by Homelander and certainly not widowed? Will Homelander give his long-lost son the chance to become the emotionally developed human being he could never be? (Because even being brought up by a single mom beats growing up as a super-powered lab rat.)

With second seasons in the pipeline for both shows, each has plenty to play for.

"No! I am Darth Vader."

*Interestingly there are several musical choices in The Umbrella Academy that tonally feel quite out of place. Generally speaking if I recognize a song in a show's soundtrack the chances are that it's too mainstream for the drama. So 'Run Boy Run' may have briefly fitted the mood for the opening of the second episode. But 'Don't Stop Me Now', though in many ways excellent, certainly didn't. The idea of having any Black Parade songs in there may sound in and of itself incestuous, but given that a Black Parade atmosphere pervades The Umbrella Academy the fact that it wouldn't have fit the tone of the drama rather makes one wonder what tone exactly the show-makers were aiming for.
†There is one, as it happens, and he's mouth-watering.
††Having been brought up on legends about Dunkirk, Brits are perhaps more familiar with the ability government spin-doctors have to turn a monumental establishment fuck-up into first a national tragedy, then a national parable, and finally into a foundational myth for whatever the Government wanted to do in the first place. (As a WWII nerd, one suspects Garth Ennis would appreciate the parallel.)
†††They did repeat Brightburn's goof though - i.e. when Superman's heat vision blasts straight through the back of your skull it's unlikely you'll have time to wince and say "ouch".

@jacksgap nearly #naked #EXPOSED pic.twitter.com/IRmsjW55f9

— Jackson Finnegan (@jackfinnexposed) March 23, 2013

Conspiracy Theories: From Jack the Ripper to COVID-19

Watching dear old Christopher Frayling’s 1988 Timewatch documentary about Jack the Ripper (made to commemorate the centenary of the murders and available on Auntie’s iPlayer), my mind inevitably wondered back to the Coronavirus. Because the Ripper’s identity was just as much of a mystery to the Establishment 130 years ago as the nature of the Covid-19 disease is today. And just as both the MSM and “mainstream” politicians nowadays are finding themselves swept up in theories that even if they aren’t “conspiracy theories” are at least outlandish, so the Metropolitan Police of 1888 often had little more to go on than the evidence-free speculations of the general public.

The breakdown in relations between the police and the press of course has its own echoes in the rising number of horror stories in today’s ’papers and social media about unfortunate plods trying and failing to implement the Government’s social distancing and self-isolation regulations. The search for answers about the virus’s origins and spread has (albeit quite rightly!) turned attention to the secret activities of foreigners (i.e. Red China). And sooner or later, there is no doubt, there will be serious questions asked (even if they’re not in practice asked by particularly “serious” people) about why some social and ethnic groups have been affected by the virus worse that others.

And of course over both phenomena has hung the perennial and ultimate horror of death.

The only real contrast between the London of the 1880s and the London of the 2020s is that nowadays there is almost universal and unconditional respect for doctors and for men of “science” generally. But as the economic consequences of the Government’s response start to become apparent, and as some inevitably start to raise questions about the wisdom of implicitly trusting the judgement of latter-day quacks and wizards (because there is, it turns out, more to good government - and indeed preserving lives - than just “protecting the NHS), that too may very well change.

I feel like laughing but this is tragic.

Very soon, people are going to wake up.

And then they'll realise that however much they wanted this ridiculous, non-curative "cure" it was far, far worse than the disease. https://t.co/eT2XwiT1iv

— Man in Black (@Man_in_Black_63) May 2, 2020

The X-Files: The Shape of the Conspiracy - Part Two: Kidnapping and Clones

Herrenvolk

As in the good old days when the previous Doctor Who's outgoing script editor would write the first serial of any new Doctor, 'Little Green Men' feels like a season one story meant to refresh our memories. It makes little sense, beyond that the military are still the bad guys and the Smoking Man is pressuring Skinner to close down Mulder's work. Sen Richard Matheson is presumably the connection in Congress that Mulder mentioned in the pilot episode. But here he functions mainly as Deep Throat's replacement. The only real revelation of the episode is Skinner, who now suddenly starts to come into his own, apparently protecting Mulder by keeping him in an inconspicuous job, albeit one that's well beneath his talents and dignity. (Later on, in 'Ascension', he says 'I can't protect you, Agent Mulder.' The clear inference is that he has been protecting Mulder so far.) And the 'Get out!' scene with the CSM is priceless.

Skinner comes even more into his own in the next episode, in which we learn that he's basically been trying to restart the X-Files by the back door. His 'This should have been an X-File!' is one of the most haunting lines of the entire show. (At least it was for me.) And when he does eventually reopen the X-Files in 'Ascension', because 'that's what they fear the most', it's something of a spine-tingling and/or punch-the-air moment. In fact all things considered 'The Host' is a really good reboot episode for the series as a whole. (On a personal note, it was the first full episode I ever watched, back in the day, on dear old Auntie's very much terrestrial second channel, and it immediately cemented the show in my family's weekly telly schedule.) Yes, the story is crap, but it's literally so - and that's a good thing! And yes, there's something glorious about the fact that Darin Morgan, who would go on to become something of a guru for those who like the "monster-of-the-week" episodes, started out playing an actual monster-of-the-week in that cheesy "fluke man" costume. Of course as yet there's still no real difference between the two types of episode, and in retrospect that's actually a very pleasing thing.

'X', like Deep Throat, is a spy from inside the military. This is all but confirmed later on in 'Fresh Bones'. (More specifically, he's probably ex-Marines.) Currently though, he's "at the FBI". (It's a normal enough career path, after all.) In 'One Breath' X has a little rant at Mulder in which interestingly he reasserts the conditions that Mulder and his "predecessor" worked under. 'You’re my tool, you understand? I come to you when I need you.' But it's quite a different relationship. 'I don't want to be here.' he barks, in 'Sleepless'. Are we still supposed to believe that he, like Deep Throat, just wants to use Mulder for the same ends (i.e. to expose the fucked-up shit the Government is getting up to with aliens and alien spaceships and alien gene therapy and, er, getting loonies who've been interfered with by aliens to kidnap sexy FBI Agents and hand them over to the Navy for Japanese scientists to do, er, weird things to them)? Presumably! But we feel that X's motives are personal rather than political. He's loyal, albeit in a somewhat grudging way, to his "predecessor" Deep Throat and to Deep Throat's ideals. But we never really find out what the connexion was between them. Given their quite different characters one can theorise that the nature of X's "loyalty" is one of personal honour rather than shared sentiment. (Did Deep Throat save X's ass in 'Nam? It's possible. X looks old enough.) Whereas Deep Throat claimed he was trying to make amends for his sins, we feel that X has been hurt by the system and wants revenge on it. And whereas Deep Throat always came across as a patriotic patrician ashamed of what his country had become, who was seeking to expose a nefarious conspiracy even at the cost of his own life, X has more of an angry black radical vibe. (Even X's disdain for opera in 'End Game' hints at a man who fundamentally despises the Establishment and wants to survive long enough to dance on its grave.) In 'Soft Light', when X effectively manipulates Mulder into leading him to Dr Banton, we get our first, er, glimmer of how he might be using Mulder: just as the Smoking Man used Mulder and Scully to retrieve Ray Soames's tracking device and the alien foetus from Fort Marlene, so presumably Deep Throat could always claim as cover that he was running Mulder as his own double agent within the Bureau. But in truth this is almost certainly just X at the same stage as Deep Throat was at in 'E.B.E.' - abusing Mulder's trust (not to mention sacrificing various mostly innocent lives along the way) out of fear that his own credit with the Syndicate may be about to run out.

The real watershed episode is of course 'Duane Barry', in which we "learn" (for want of a better word) that "the Government" are "in on it"

DUANE BARRY: The government knows about it, you know. They're even in on it sometimes. Right there in the room when they come. They work together with a, uh, secret, uh, corporation. ... A man, the military. They're all in it together. ... The government knows why they're here, but they wouldn't dare let the truth out. So they cooperate.

I have to say, personally, that I've always thought the new idea of the dear old, sinister old "Government" co-operating with extraterrestrials to be something of a lapse in tone for the series. Frankly, men in suits may be scary to crazy hipster libertarian types. But for me the vision of the men with the goofy tie-pins standing next to the creepy child-aliens just made the latter seem considerably less creepy. And fundamentally the whole idea of men dressed as bank managers nattering away to little green men is frankly just silly. It's a concept that gets somewhat salvaged later on, with the whole idea of the conspiracy within the world's governments working in secret to become the Vichy Government to the Alien Colonists' invaders, along with slogans like 'Resist or serve' and 'Survival is the ultimate ideology'. But at this point the revelation comes as something of a "now you're being silly" moment.

And then again, the whole idea that it's not really the government but a "government within the government", made up of men wearing stripey shirts and stripy ties, is itself somewhat disappointing - as indeed, for that matter, are the "politics" of The X-Files generally. But I digress.

Ostensibly at this point, the Smoking Man and indeed Alex Krycek are still just secret agents for the military, acting in secret for the sake of national security. (For all his pixie good looks, we can easily imagine that Krycek is ex-military as well. We later find out that he's a Russian secret agent, but hey, these things happen.) But the extreme possibility is dangled out for us not only that they look down on FBI dogsbodies like Skinner but also that they have no real loyalty either to the military, whose alien foetus they didn't return at the end of 'The Erlenmeyer Flask' or, indeed, to any legitimate government. And if they're the ones behind Scully's abduction, and in other words if they're controlling Duane Barry, then they may as well be the "secret corporation" that's "cooperating" with "them".

We later find out, in 'Anasazi', that the Smoking Man's "day job" is as head of Garnet, and it's the nearest we ever come to discerning what his actual official position is in the whole US (and international) establishment. Indeed it's almost the only time we see him actually break sweat over a case. As the MJ-12's chief troubleshooter he's essential not just to the generals who are trying to keep the truth about UFOs out of the limelight but also to the Syndicate itself. More generally, it's given him carte blanche, in the name of national security, so glide around not just the J. Edgar Hoover Building and the Pentagon but pretty much everywhere, keeping an eye on government secrets and finally, apparently, building up literally a vast storeroom of his own. And he's been around for so long that in the upper echelons of the FBI they can no longer even remember his name.

In 'Ascension' he gives Krycek some blather about not killing Mulder for fear of 'turning one man's religion into a crusade'. It's a cute line, and indeed it's repeated again and again in later episodes. (He uses it to Bill Mulder in 'Ansazi' and to Strughold in the 1998 movie, and clearly he's used it so much by 'Talitha Cumi' that even X has heard it.) But it's not terribly satisfactory, and one cannot blame the writers for retconning later on that the real reason he doesn't want to kill him is that the Smoking Man actually admires Mulder. (A mere two episodes later he tells Mulder to his face that he likes him, and we later find out, of course, that he's Mulder's father. In 'The Erlenmeyer Flask', Mulder refers to Deep Throat as Obi Wan-Kenobi: perhaps it was inevitable that the CSM would turn out to be Darth Vader.) It's just possible that even in the early years the Smoking Man was grooming Mulder as a possible ally in case things went pear-shaped with the Conspiracy.

Mulder for some reason (though we later find out he was right) assumes that Scully was abducted by the Navy, presumably on the basis that he knows he didn't kill Duane Barry so the Navy must have covered up his cause of death. (And Mulder calls Krycek 'Alex'. Soooooo cute! Ahem!) Yes, this feels like another lapse of judgement. The Smoking Man can sit in on meetings at the FBI, and he's got a big private stash of alien gizmos at the Pentagon. And somehow he also has a hold over Krycek, Blevins and, to a lesser extent, Skinner. (And no, we never find out how, exactly! For some reason we're just supposed to picture him as some sort of school superintendent, who can make people sit up straight and look nervous whenever he's around. "SKIN-ner!") We're encouraged to imagine (from the final scene of 'The Erlenmeyer Flask') that he's from "the executive branch", but what does that mean exactly? That he plays golf with the President and can have anyone who works for any government agency immediately fired on a whim. (According to X, referring to Sen Matheson in 'Ascension', 'They have something on everyone.') Or are we supposed to accept that anyone who knows anything about him knows the deep dark gangster secret of state power, and that none of them wants to end up like Deep Throat? It's fine, on a level of immediate drama - tone and setting and so on. But given that just two episodes on from 'Ascension' we find out that he's just a lonely old man who lives in a dinghy apartment, as X-Files mysteries go it's even less satisfying than most.) The only, slightest hint of an explanation we ever get is that as head of Garnet he has the authority of some sort of permanent executive branch, inter-agency chief "fixer". But is it really feasible to imagine that he has the entire US Navy at his beck and call?

Well anyway, for some reason the Navy kidnap Scully, they access her medical records by using a weird genetic tracking device that was put in her arm when she had her smallpox jabs, they snaffle her ovaries to make baby alien hybrids (albeit still quite crap ones that don't last very long), they put a Japanese microchip in the back of her neck to stop her getting cancer (and possibly to read her mind, possibly even to call her back whenever they feel like it using some hokey alien mind-control device!), and then they dump her back at the Georgetown Medical Centre. It's not at all clear how this all came about, but we're invited to believe that this is all part of a long-standing secret tri-services alien hybridisation programme. (Still all sold to the military as being in order to breed super-soldiers? And covered up in the name of "national security"? Presumably!) So presumably the Smoking Man just got her name on the list. And got them to accept deliverance at a UFO abduction hot-spot! From a gibbering loony in drawstring pants called Duane Barry!

And, er, then she got lost in the bureaucracy and ended up half-dead and half-alive at the hospital attached to her old uni in Washington. Because, er, these things happen! It is of course quite plausible that some sweet old navy doctor recognised Scully from some Christmas party when she was a kid and so quietly had her dropped her off at Georgetown. This would at least explain why the Syndicate, presumably smarting because they never got a sample of Scully's blood, dispense one of their thugs to pick one up from the hospital.

Of course, the Smoking Man claims that he was responsible for returning Scully because "he likes her", but it doesn't quite ring true - or at least not quite so true as his "I like you" to Mulder (because, er, I am your father, ahem!). His 'I'm in the game because I believe what I'm doing is right' though does have a glimmer of plausibility. It's possible that even at this point Carter was imagining the great project of the conspiracy - to resist colonisation or to serve the colonists, and to make sure their families (in C.G.B. Spender's case his wife Cassandra, and maybe one or other of his two sons Jeffrey and Fox) would survive. Certainly the 'If people were to know the things I know, it would all fall apart.' is a meme that's going to come up again and again before the conspiracy arc is exhausted. (And yes, the 'This'll be our secret.' is fabulously pedo.)

There's a sense in which 'Red Museum' is a sort of last hurrah for early-style X-Files. I starts out "monster of the week" and, after a fabulously overstocked* set-up (not just handsome teens being abducted at night and ending up in the woods in their underpants, but loads of paranoia - i.e. paranoia about eating meat, paranoia about vegetarian New Age cults, paranoia about teenage violence and rape, paranoia about modern farming methods, paranoia about peeping Toms and pedos, paranoia about family doctors, paediatric medicine and vaccinations, paranoia about, er, the government... and, of course, paranoia about paranoia) suddenly who should emerge out of nowhere but the Crew Cut Man (who killed Deep Throat)? Yes, by inference he's still working for the Smoking Man, so the experiment he's closing down here is either another hybrid operation (injecting children with alien DNA) or (just as likely!) the flip-side "Purity Control" experiment - "control" meaning probably not so much a 'control' as in an experiment as a means of fighting the spread of the alien virus by creating a vaccine for it. (And are we supposed to imagine that, like Michaud in the movie later on, he sacrifices his life for the project partly because he's been told that he'll come back as a super-soldier?) And of course it's all rounded off, once again, with Gillian Anderson's beautiful sexy vowel sounds and the beautiful chilling finale that the case is still open.

'Colony' of course introduces the theme of alien colonization. (Duh!) In the process, of course, we also get clones, alien viruses and, of course, the Alien Bounty Hunters (and, perhaps more importantly, their race) into the bargain. But Carter's original conception of his great arc seems to have been quite different. According to the original plan, apparently, the "aliens" actually doing the "colonizing" were themselves clones. That is to say (implicitly) that they reproduced asexually. They presumably had some rudimentary "shape-shifting" ability, so that they could look like humans (because by any stretch of the imagination it seems far fetched that an alien race would all look like humans with matching male pattern baldness), but at the same time, irrespective of external appearances, they could also always recognize other aliens. But they had no real individuality. (We learn later on that the Samantha clones have an "original", archetypal clone, who, if she survives, will somehow ensure the survival of her race as a whole. And the Alien Bounty Hunter's question "Where is he?" in retrospect sounds as if he was referring to an original Gregor archetype rather than simply to the next Gregor on his list.) The reason why the clones are interested in the "government"/military's hybridization experiments (which apparently go back to the 1940s) is 'to erase that aspect which has forced the community [i.e. the colony] to scatter... [i.e.] their identical natures'. If they don't all look the same then it won't look weird if they live together. But alas, they're now being closed down, and this time it's by their own people rather than by the US government. Though the extraterrestrial politics of The X-Files are never really explained, clearly there are nasty right-wingers out there just as there are down here. This at least seems to be the implication of the Samantha clone's explanation that 'The experiments weren't sanctioned. It was considered a dilution of their species, a pollution of their race. So a bounty hunter was dispatched to destroy them and terminate [Terminator-style] the colony.' The Bounty Hunters apparently are chauvinists who take the concept of "identity" very seriously. (One idea from this early stage that certainly didn't survive was that of the "impure" Gregor clones' wanting "to share the planet" with the "pure" Bounty Hunters. It's barely audible in the screened version of 'Colony', but just about detectable if you put on the subtitles.)

In practice, even Mulder doesn't quite believe this shtick from Samantha about racial purity. But at the same time there's a certain thematic elegance to all this, so it's something of a pity that so much of it was later implicitly jettisoned and retconned out of existence. The only thing that doesn't quite sound right, oddly enough, is the Samantha clone's claim that there were two clones who originally came to Earth in the 1940s and pretended to be her parents. If they really had arrived in the 1940s, presumably they would have been so old that they could only have posed as her grandparents. And since the only clones we see who are old enough to have been born in the 1940s are the Gregor clones we must, alas, admit that the story about the two original parent clones was probably a fib. After all, since when did clones need more than one parent, especially if we're supposed to imagine that like the hybrids in their vats in 'The Erlenmeyer Flask', clones can be grown to term in giant fish tanks?†

One of The X-Files's great strengths of course has always been that, unlike every other show on American TV (though not unlike older British shows such as Doctor Who, of course!) it never had a "bible": scriptural authority was never an issue, and sometimes even the show's fundamental doctrines could evolve and change from one season to the next. In the case of the hybridization and cloning experiments, it's not long before the show is using the two words interchangeably. (In 'Memento Mori' Mulder addresses the Kurt Crawford clones with a cheery 'You're hybrids!' and they don't disillusion him. And in the movie the Well-Manicured Man says 'Without a vaccination, the only true survivors of the viral holocaust will be those immune to it - human alien clones.') And yes, unlike the Jeremiah Smiths (who work for the Social Security Administration rather than in abortion clinics, albeit arguably no less improbably) and (we later learn) the Bounty Hunters, the Gregors never "shape-shift", so with a bit of retconning we might just about be able to shoehorn the Gregors into being not alien clones but human clones whose genes have been spliced with alien DNA. And arguably we can legitimately speculate about the nature of the Gregors' attempt to erase their identical natures, and about the individuality (or "freedom") that they were hoping to achieve for themselves: the only reason the extraterrestrial colonists would have engaged the services of a bounty hunter must have been that the Gregors, via their hybridization, had discovered a way to resist the Black Oil. We learn later on in 'The Red and the Black' that the Alien Bounty Hunters' race have started their own resistance movement against the Colonists, but these clones are evidently the original "rebel colonists". (Their goal of subverting "the Project" is shared by the Kurt Crawford clones in 'Memento Mori', and indeed we are probably supposed to imagine them sharing a similar grisly, bubbly green fate.) But then how things changed from season to season! In 'Colony' the Alien Bounty Hunter arrives from outer space in a UFO. In 'Talitha Cumi' he's apparently just bumming around New England waiting for a call. And by 'Memento Mori' these things can apparently be left to the Grey-Haired Man - who, despite not being very nice, is apparently quite human.

The Gregors' relationship with the later X-Files mythology (not to mention the later X-Files clones) does of course raise the whole question of timelines. We can legitimately deduce that there have been three periods when batches of the clones that appear in The X-Files have been produced: the original Gregor clones were apparently "born" in the 1940s, the first batch of Adam and Eve clones and the Samantha clones that appear in 'End Game' (and presumably the Kurt Crawford clones that appear in 'Memento Mori') were cloned in the 1960s, and the cute little Samantha and Kurt Crawford "drone" clones were products of the 1980s. (And finally, is William a clone as well? Was there one final batch of millennial-baby clones? It seems we'll never know, but the final shot of 'My Struggle IV' would seem to suggest that William has the standard "hybrid" abilities of surviving gunshot wounds and breathing underwater that were established in 'The Erlenmeyer Flask'.)

So was Samantha cloned when she was born? If she was, we might imagine it was her father's doing. Was the original Samantha a test-tube baby? Was Bill Mulder himself unable to get children naturally? It would certainly cast both his relationship with his divorced wife and his wife's affair with the Smoking Man in a different light. And did he put Samantha forward for the cloning programme because, you never know, a spare favourite child might just come in handy one day - not that such a plan would have worked, of course, because presumably the aliens would have "just known". But having his own daughter cloned, before later getting in touch with the Gregor clones from Russia, could well have been an early gesture of defiance, showing faith in the cloning programme and a personal commitment to the survival of his genetic inheritance. It also seems possible, if Samantha was that important, that that was why the Smoking Man was keen to hold on to her, as we later learn he did in 'Closure'.

The question then of course is why? What was the point of making all these clones? We learn from Chris Carter's "secret track" that the "Purity Control" project began as a series of cloning operations in the 1940s, 'its original conception the brainchild of German scientists given immunity themselves for war crimes, and allowed to continue the eugenic experiments that were Hitler's dark legacy.' It's perfectly possible that Carter was thinking of The Boys from Brazil at this point, and we know from 'Eve' that the US military were initially interested in clones for their super-soldier project, so it's quite possible that that's how the conspiracy started, well before the start of the hybridisation experiments and long before the great betrayal of 1973. (Of course it's also possible that by this stage Carter is confusing 'clones' and 'hybrids' willy-nilly.) And even when said "Nazi scientists" started splicing human DNA with alien it's perfectly plausible that the "control" in 'Purity Control' meant just that - because what better control group could one ask for than one made up of clones?

We can take it for granted that the Samantha clones tell Mulder that his sister is alive because they are manipulating him. (Somewhat cruelly, it has to be said - but, then again, survival!) But why does the Bounty Hunter then confirm it? Quite honestly, that's a tough one. It is just possible that he knows about the "walk-ins" who took her in 'Closure' - though again, in The X-Files we're not really supposed to know what happens "off-world". (As it happens, Cassandra Spender confirms in 'Two Fathers' that Samantha is 'Out there, with them. The aliens' - though admittedly this was more than a year before 'Closure'.) It's also possible that there are now so many Samantha clones knocking around that no one can remember which one is the real one - except the original one presumably, which could have been a neat Twilight Zone-type story to tease out, if anyone could have been bothered. Finally, in all probability the Bounty Hunter has just got it wrong. He was privy to the original abduction (because according to 'Within', abductions is one the services the Bounty Hunters offer) but not to the decision to return her just a couple of years later. If this is the case, it casts an interesting light on the whole galactic economy. The Bounty Hunters aren't controlled by the Black Oil. They do what they do because (by definition!) they're paid to by the Colonists. But how? With what? One possibility that springs to mind is that the Bounty Hunters really love their whole sweet, sweet shape-shifting gig and basically are just junkies for the DNA of different species, so the Colonists supply them with the means to travel between planets on condition that some of their best soldiers and assassins do a few jobs for them in return. (It's not so far-fetched when you consider that one of Carter's main inspirations for the clone/hybrid episodes is the old 1960s TV-show The Invaders.) The Colonists themselves, it later transpires, are actually quite slight, gentle creatures - albeit amoral, and with little more than disdain for humanity.

We might even speculate, given that we later learn that it was not the Syndicate but the Russians who eventually managed to develop an antidote to the Black Oil, that the Gregors really are from Russia and that their operation was the true beginning of "the resistance". And if the cloning of Samantha really was part of a plan by her father then it might well explain why he's oddly quiet in the 'Colony'/'End Game' story. If he's in on the Gregors' and Samanthas' resistance plans, his sitting outside smoking when Fox arrives at the Vineyard is lest any interaction between him and the clone give the game away to his estranged wife. It's also possible that his claim that Fox's mother wanted him to come is a fib. (Actually it was he.) And it would explain his reaction - frustration and anger, and an oddly faux concern for his estranged wife's feelings rather than personal grief -  when he learns that Mulder has "lost her" again. Certainly we later learn that he's on the Syndicate's "resistance" wing. (Indeed, in 1973 he was the lone dissenter in the vote to cooperate with the Colonists.) And so of course the reason the Bounty Hunter is there to terminate the Gregors and Samanthas is because (so far) they're the most dangerous potential resistance to the project that the colonists have yet come across.

And of course all this means nothing to the military - the best reason yet to think the the Syndicate's deal with the aliens (handing over their children as hostages in return for baby aliens to do experiments on, on condition that they produce a hybridization process that will allow them and their children to survive the Black Oil's colonization process so that they can act as a "Vichy Government" for the colonists, etc. etc.) is unknown to the wider US "government".

Alas, that would change quite drastically as the whole politics of The X-Files became re-imagined at the beginning of the Season Three.

*No pun intended!
†Incidentally, there's a weird sort of superstition amongst fans either that the alien foetus in 'The Erlenmeyer Flask' cannot be a true alien (because of the first movie) or that the aliens can reproduce sexually (despite the movie). In reality, there's no reason to imagine that the aliens gestate in any way other than as we see on screen: the Syndicate's bees are intended to infect the human population with the Black Oil, who will then be impregnated with alien foetuses that will come to term as violent, heavily clawed and armoured monsters. Presumably the hybridized members of the Syndicate would then have the job of taming them and helping them to mutate into their final "Grey" forms. (Again, this isn't just from Alien(s): it's also largely inspired by The Invaders. Alas, it's an idea that was ultimately missing from Prometheus/Alien: Covenant that the human race was in fact originally engineered to act as a host race for the xenomorphs, the Engineers' plan being first to "seed" Earth with their own DNA, and then to "seed" the human race with their X Files-style black goo in order to produce a new third race of purest malevolence. Indeed, The X-Files started as a clone of Twin Peaks, but it soon became a hybrid of every science-fiction film and TV-show you can think of. A bit of reverse genetic engineering was only a matter of time.)

Wee Eck vs. the Strasserites?

The Murdoch Press are having a lovely time over Alex Salmond’s acquittal. One doesn’t doubt for a moment that they were expecting the bastard to go down. After all, if the #MeToo generation could get Harvey Weinstein, why not one of our own? And since Salmond is a Far-Left loon, an anti-English hatemonger and a Russian stooge, not to mention a grotesque oaf to boot, I’m quite sure The Times's editorial team were rubbing their hands with glee at the thought of him, er, eating porridge for a while.

So what went wrong?

As usual, the answer is almost certainly Conspiracy. And then the real question is of course What sort?

Salmond is himself no slouch when it comes to coughing up conspiracy theories and pointed accusations. Back in 2015 he fingered both the BBC and the “metropolitan” press for their coverage of his referendum campaign to destroy the UK. (One can understand why a politician who hates Britain with every fibre of his being wouldn’t be too fond of the British Broadcasting Corporation - even though to all extents and purposes they’re really just British in name only.) This time though he’s going to go all in to get back at conspirators within his own party.

So, there’s going to be an inquiry, and he’s going to write a book. And his allies within the Party are rallying behind him. Nicola Sturgeon, who for most English people has always appeared to be little more than the Janette Tough (aka “Wee Jimmy Krankie”) to Salmond’s Ian, has declined to comment, but one can imagine that whether she wants to or not she’ll end up being cast on the side of the gruesome tartan fembots who, for reasons so far known only to themselves, have lined up (and apparently colluded with each other in doing so) to denounce Wee Eck for his wicked ways.

The internal politics of the SNP are of course impenetrable to outsiders, not to mention quite irrelevant to the vast majority of British subjects. Life’s too short to go into them in any depth. Suffice it then to refer to Sayre’s Law: “In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake.” And I suppose one should add that when the motive is primarily ideological, sectarian or nationalistic (and the SNP is all three) the struggle is only going to be even more vicious. (My own feeling is that this is indeed a battle between the Scots Nazis’ “woke” and “nationalist” wings. Basically they’re Scotland’s Strasserites and Hitlerites du jour, and if not an actual Night of the Long Knives then at least some sort of reckoning is definitely on its way.)

Not to be out done, of course, The Times have come up with their own conspiracy theory, which as ever involves none other than dear old Vladimir Putin. (Who else?) Because not content with gassing civilians in Syria, rigging the US presidential elections and threatening the peace and security of western Europe, he’s now apparently taken time out to try and destroy the Scottish National Party. ‘Analysts say that President Putin’s regime has strategic reasons to put pro-EU and pro-Nato Scottish nationalists in its sights.’ What-ever!

For what it’s worth, one can easily imagine the Far Left of the Far Left of Scots nationalism objecting to Wee Eck’s having a chat-show on Russian telly. And the objection would be essentially the same as their objection to Julian Assange after he helped get Trump elected. “Putin is nath-ty. Putin is Hitler. Putin betrayed the Revolution by being nationalistic. Orange Man Bad! Russia Evil! Alex Salmond Too Sexy!”

Well, it’s something to think about. With luck it will at least be entertaining, at least once we’re all allowed out of our hovels again and back into the so-called “real” world.

A Patriotic Swimmer

Doctor Who: The Cartmel Legacy

It's been said recently (and with some justification!) that the recent rebooting of Doctor Who's backstory in Auntie's latest (and wokest yet) series of her sometime top show was little more than an attempt to revive the old so-called "Cartmel Masterplan". And yes, there is a very obvious sense in which as the current 21st-century version of Doctor Who flags with viewers (albeit not so much with the critics) it is not just making the same mistakes as its 20th-century predecessor (i.e. alienating its core audience, being too on-the-nose with its leftist politics, changing but not in a good way, etc.) but also reaching for the same solutions (i.e. trying to inject a bit more magic into the mythos, not to mention some morally questionable attempts at "darkness" and ham-fisted stabs at social realism).

So how long actually is a generation? It's an important enough question in Doctor Who, and the Doctor's own answer of "twenty-five years" (in Four to Doomsday, if you don't believe me) is one that for a long time I've used subconsciously as a rule of thumb. Looking back over Doctor Who at the (finally!) respectable age of fifty, it was startling quite how easily the division between "old" Who and "new" Who became a generational one. What was startling about it though was quite how old "new" Who really was.

The truth of course is that far from being a twenty-first century phenomenon, the "new" version of Doctor Who that we know today in the shape of the post-2005 TV-series was very clearly conceived in the last few years of the pre-1989 one. Though it may come as a shock to some, the "modern" version of Doctor Who is to a large extent the Sylv McCoy/Andrew Cartmel-version (or, to put it yet another way, the Cartmel/Ben Aaronovitch/Marc Platt-version). Or at any rate it was up until Peter Capaldi's ill-advised passing on of the torch to the Lady Doctor, but then since I have never watched Jodie Whittaker's take on the Time Lord (and have no desire to either) I'll let that slide.

To put it another way, to a large extent it was Sylvester McCoy's Doctor who was the turning-point - the half-way house between the Edwardian Doctor of old and the hip, cool, "modern" space Gandalf we know today, between the TV-plays of yesterday that used to go out in time for tea and the slick mini feature films that nowadays get broadcast in the early-evening slot. He's an oddly mid-Atlantic figure too, stuck halfway between the nonchalant tea-and-crumpets Britishness of the first half-a-dozen Doctors and the gun-toting, finger-wagging Americanism of the 2000s bunch.

Indeed, even things that we now think of as being standard, such as the Doctor speaking really quickly and being vaguely manic, were inventions of the McCoy era. Before Sophie Aldred, the female companion was there to look pretty and to scream. Ace was genuinely the first one who didn't. The broad, subtle story-arc as a concept never really existed before Fenric*, but in the RTD and Moffat eras it was part of the very fabric of the show. And perhaps most importantly there emerged the idea of the Doctor as not just a mythological hero - or at any rate as a Merlin/Odin figure - but as a comic-book superhero-type one at that.

The character of the Doctor has of course always been evolving. William Hartnell gave us the serious scientist/aloof sage with the mischievous inner child, and in fact in doing so laid down most of the groundwork for his successors. Patrick Troughton added the idea that the Doctor was funny. Jon Pertwee added the action man (in part because, thanks to budget cuts, the male companion character had by his time been ditched by the producers). Tom Baker cobbled on the idea that the Doctor should be slightly crazy. Peter Davison's Doctor saw an ill-advised attempt to strip away the Doctor's darker, alien side and make him "nicer", and Colin Baker's saw an even more cack-handed attempt to make him "nastier" again. But it was Sylvester McCoy, who carefully and deliberately modeled himself on the Troughton Doctor but with aspects of Hartnell and Tom Baker thrown in for good measure, who went on to redefine the role of the Doctor was that of the actual protagonist.

He didn't do it alone, of course, and in fact he did it much less than the modern Whovian race memory relates. Just as popular mythology remembers William Hartnell's Doctor as "grumpy" and "crotchety" (when in fact he was perfectly likable in a surprisingly childlike, giggly sort of way), and just as according to media cliches we all watched Doctor Who from behind the sofa (when in fact we watched it with our noses pressed against the screen, drinking in every magical moment), so it's become an established assumption that in every story of the Seventh Doctor's era the Doctor knows everything that's going on from the outset and he's always playing some sinister psychological chess-match at his companions' expense. In reality, of course, the manipulative Seventh Doctor only really arrived on the scene in Remembrance of the Daleks, which worked well enough for him to re-emerge in Silver Nemesis - albeit belatedly, as it's inferred that in that story he's really only following through on a plot that he originally set up in his second incarnation. After that, with the one genuine exception of Fenric, all of the Sylvester McCoy stories proceed in pretty much the same way Doctor Who stories always used to: by and large, the Doctor and Ace arrive in the middle of a mysterious situation and then set about investigating and sorting things out. There are a couple of Seventh Doctor stories such as Dragonfire and The Happiness Patrol where the Doctor has heard about strange things going on somewhere and wants to find out more. Ghost Light even slightly deconstructs this in that when the TARDIS materialises at Gabriel Chase the Doctor knows where they are but hasn't told Ace, but then by the end of 'Part One' Ace has found out where they are, and then thereafter until the story's climax she actually knows more than the Doctor does. But the fundamental dramatic principle remains the same.

Despite these quibbles though, the point stands that before 1988 the Doctor was always very much the catalyst in his adventures, as he had originally been intended to be by Sydney Newman back in 1963. From 1988 onward though he started actively to take charge of the stories. Looking back, that was a big change, and it was Cartmel and his team who did it. And so when confronting the Daleks in 1963 (in 1988), the Cybermen in 1988 (same year), and Fenric in 1943 (in 1989), the Doctor was very much the man with a plan, leading the action from the word go in a way that he never had before, not just with a trick up his sleeve but with a veritable "masterplan" that he would only allow the viewer (and, by extension, his companion) to see bit by bit. He set out to defeat his enemies from the start, and when he did so he showed an uncompromising ruthlessness that had never been seen before.

It would have been unthinkable for any Doctor before McCoy, for example, to win the day by blowing up an entire planet (Thals and all, by implication!), let alone deliberately† committing genocide - much less follow this up by talking his arch-enemy into committing suicide, or go on intentionally to break his companion's faith in him. But since 2005 the writers have been quite comfortable with the idea of the Doctor being bad-ass, not to mention functioning on a higher, more epic moral scale than his human companions. Back in the 1970s it was the Doctor who acted as a civilising nay "moralising" influence on his companions††, but by the late 1980s, although ostensibly the Doctor disapproved of Ace's constant resorts to violence, as often as not it was he who would call on her firepower to blow up Daleks, spaceships and even an archaeological dig when the greater good required it. By the time the Tennant Doctor was finally reunited with UNIT it was taken as standard practice for the Doctor to turn children into warriors.

In many ways then Russell T Davies himself just picked up where the authors of the Cartmel Masterplan left off, and this should of course come as no surprise. The reason why Davies's Ninth Doctor seems so much more like the Seventh Doctor than like any of his predecessors is probably because Davies had already written for Doctor Who for the Seventh Doctor (in his otherwise forgettable novel Damaged Goods). Sophie Aldred herself notes in the commentary on the DVD release of Survival that the tower blocks and council estates in 'Part Three' of that story directly influenced the setting of Rose sixteen years later. More importantly, Rose is very much Spearhead from Space for the post-Fenric generation: the Doctor knows exactly who the enemy is before he even appears on screen (it's the Nestene Consciousness) and exactly how he's going to defeat it (with a magic trick he's had up his sleeve the whole time, in a manner that would become all too familiar during Rusty Davies's tenure on the show).

So what caused the change? In my opinion the real pivot was surely Cartmel and his gang's new awareness of science-fiction lore generally and their interest in American comic-books in particular. Before Cartmel, most of the sci-fi stories in Doctor Who were determinedly British, whether they were fantasy versions of the the British Empire (Frontier in Space, and in fact all stories about the Earth "empire") or the Second World War (The Dalek Invasion of Earth) or pompous little disquisitions on anti-colonialism (The Sensorites, The Mutants, Kinda, etc.). Knock-off versions of Alien tended to be the exception (Dragonfire) rather than the rule. And with the notable exception of Chris Boucher's dual homage to Asimov's robots and Frank Herbert's Dune in Robots of Death, American science-fiction rarely got a look-in.

But then the comic-book geeks arrived and changed everything. The Time War was something of a hackneyed cliche long before the TV-series came back. Indeed the first Doctor Who time war in real life (and for all we know in the Whoniverse itself) appeared in one of the "back-up" comic-strips in Doctor Who Weekly - written, as it happens, by a little known scribbler geek called Alan Moore. More to the point though, it was the Time War that helped to complete the final transformation of the Doctor into the comic-book superhero that Cartmel and chums had seemingly wanted him to be all along. From the Ka Faraq Gatri to Time's Champion to the Destroyer of Worlds (etc. etc.), by the time David Tennant's Doctor eventually took his long overdue bow we had surely had too much of a Good Thing.Yes, it's exciting for the Doctor to have a "darker side". But the real Doctor is the eternal child rebel and runaway. He's not effing Superman.

One's hope towards the end of the Moffat era was that what with Auntie's inevitable budget cuts the Capaldi Doctor might end up being a bit more old school than maybe some of the Internet's Tennant-fanciers were used to. My view at the time in fact was that if you want the Doctor to be a geeky, swaggering, sarcastic teenage heart-throb then it's probably Peter Parker you should be fantasising about rather than a thousand-year-old Gallifreyan. After a generation's worth of comic-book exploits it was time for the Doctor to grow up a bit - and go back to being a children's character again. Alas, it wasn't to be! Capaldi's attempt at playing the Doctor as a lovable curmudgeon was arguably more successful than Colin Baker's, but those who predicted that, just as Rose was the new Spearhead from Space and Tennant was the new Tom (etc.), Capaldi would inherit Colin's short straw as the "screw-up" Doctor, ended up being more right than they could possibly have known. There was in the end something of an inevitability about Whittaker's bringing NuWho full circle (to coin a phrase) and pulling in the worst viewing figures since Battlefield 'Part One'.

For what it's worth, I suspect Whittaker will be the last TV Doctor we'll be seeing for some time, and any plans Auntie has for a brown-skinned version of David Tennant (which actually wouldn't be the worst idea in the universe) will come to nothing. After that, bar a possible 60th anniversary reunion special, it's unlikely there'll be much Doctor Who on British telly ever again.

And if anyone asks they'll blame Boris.

*The nearest attempt at a "subtle" story-arc before Fenric was of course Season 18's "entropy theme", though in practice it was a bit too subtle and the idea didn't catch on. Stories that just happen to segue into each other (all the stories between Planet of the Spiders and Planet of Evil, say) don't really count as arcs (much as one would love to make a pun about The Arc in Space), nor indeed do clumsy attempts to turn whole seasons into long-running serials (Seasons 16 and 23 being the prime offenders).
†The Trial of a Time Lord notwithstanding!
††The Doctor's infamous attempt to murder a sick cave man in 'The Forest of Fear' notwithstanding!

Biafra and All That

One of those incidents that seems to have survived only on Wikipedia (and, I suppose, on its various imitators and copycats) is the strange affair of the “Harry letters”. This was one of Mad Polly Toynbee’s early claims to fame. Whilst she was working for Amnesty International she coughed up what she intended to be a scandal about the Hard-Left Wilson Government's supporting Amnesty International by giving them public money.

So far, so dodgy, one might think. And yet of course Mad Polly, who has never been one not to ignore real wrongdoings when imaginary ones will do, got completely the wrong end of the stick. She complained that Wilson’s people were actually bribing Amnesty to ignore “politically sensitive” parts of the world such as Nigeria and, er, Southern Rhodesia.

The problem with this particular conspiracy theory alas was simply cui bono? Yes, Wilson’s government was one of the most notoriously corrupt in British history. (Quite how corrupt we only really found out with his Resignation Honours.) And yes, one can easily imagine they’d have wanted to divert attention from their support for Nigeria's military dictatorship, not to mention (later on) their illegal interventions in the Biafran civil war. But Rhodesia? Really?

Where the conspiracy theory breaks down is the thought that there might have been a ha'penny worth of difference between Amnesty International and Harold Wilson’s administration about anything at all ever. Biafra was fighting for independence from Nigeria and supported by Rhodesia, as well as by Israel, France, and what by then was left of the Catholic Church. Britain supported Nigeria because duh!

And the idea that Harold Wilson or Amnesty International could ever have supported Rhodesia can only even have been the most paranoid of paranoiac fantasies. (No, in fifty years the British Far Left really hasn't changed much.)