It Volunteered

Last night I began watching the latest series of Doctor Who.  It's a show that my friend has only exposed me to a few scattered episodes of, so it isn’t yet steeped in comforting familiarity for me.  Anne Carson might call this point of intriguing unfamiliarity, like meeting a stranger, “pure anthropology.”

Anyway, my god, it’s the kitschiest show ever.  Not that that’s news to anyone.

The second episode in this series, “The Beast Below,” has our alien yet unmistakably English hero getting down and dirty in the bowels of the enormous spaceship that is the UK (minus Scotland) several centuries in the future.

The ship’s exploitative “police state” is a compelling yet comically overdrawn metaphor for nationalism: its citizens are kept under the thrall of “smilers” who surveil them, becoming angry enforcers if they veer towards discovering the secret that an enormous, endangered alien beast is being tortured to propel their ship to the promised land of a new home world.

The state, we are to understand, has constructed in its citizenry the sense that they voluntarily chose to keep this a secret from themselves.  Everyone has been to the “voting booth” in which one is shown a video of the horrific way that their ship is really kept running, and votes to “forget,” or “protest.”  Voting to protest of course sends you down the the garbage chute to be eaten by the alien beast.

 
(As a male-female duo, there is something between The Doctor and Amy Pond akin to but very different from the Mulder-Scully dynamic of “The X Files.”  In “The X-Files,” Scully is set up as the rational, scientific sitting duck who is almost always wrong.  The show of course needs Mulder to have a foil to vindicate his belief in the paranormal, a postfeminist woman to play sidekick and ostensibly temper his wild intuitions.  In the show they both repeat as a kind of mantra this logic of needing Scully’s scientific rationality.  Amy Pond on the other hand is more or less as kooky as the Doctor, albeit in different ways.  There is a similar avowed logic of necessity,: she provides the humanity to his beyond-human viewpoint.  She is a different kind of foil for the Doctor. Without her, he would have no one to expound zany shit to.)

The Doctor of course, postrational stand-in for divine authority that he is, must intervene, and therefore is faced with an agonizing ethical decision: either let the alien beast continue in excruciating pain, or release it and in doing so tear apart the ship and its inhabitants.  He chooses not quite either, instead opting to zap the beast’s brain into that of an unfeeling vegetable.

But no, his female, human counterpart Amy Pond announces, after a bracing montage of intuitional logic rivaling the Doctor’s, that they have simply framed the problem wrong.  It turns out, Amy explains, that the beast didn’t have to be tortured at all to move the Starship UK along.  It would have helped them anyway.  It just "couldn’t stand all those children crying."  The happy ending falls somewhat flat, as the problem has not been resolved so much as blissfully discovered to be nonexistent.  No, the city is not maintained via violent dominion over the natural world.  No, the Symbolic order is not held together with pain.  No, the nation’s continuing existence is not owed to innumerable unspeakable acts.  The beast, she says, volunteered.