The Marathon Not Taken

Sometimes, inspired by Philip Sandifer's slog through mediocrity, I want to pick a really lengthy, terrible cookbook, cook every recipe in it one by one, and write about them.  I have one in mind in particular, which, because it is in a language I don't entirely understand, would provide even more work and need to research.   (Well, actually I don't sometimes want to do this--I only did once, just ten minutes ago before writing this entry.)

If the creative and/or productive aspect is taken away, the extended adherence to the sequence of some content might be referred to as a marathon.  For instance one (or more ideally more than one) could have a Star Trek marathon, or a Doctor Who marathon.  Without specifying, respectively, which show, or which series, a marathon of either of those television shows would be a massive undertaking.  But, unlike my scrapped plan to go through an entire cookbook filled with some seventeen thousand mostly unremarkable recipes, the undertaking is normally driven on by an already held devotion to the show.  In fact, it is likely that such a marathon would be largely comprised of repeat viewings, because you just can't get enough of it.  In a marathon, however, the viewer also subjects himself to the worst episodes, to the episodes he would otherwise probably not watch.  My cookbook task would be almost entirely of this sort of recipe, the ones I would never otherwise bother cooking.  There would really be nothing to keep me on that track, it would be an entirely contrived task.  It would be an endeavor that the Doctor would never commit himself to.

In fact he has never encountered his most feared enemy: drudgery.  Yes, he has faced Daleks and nearly lost hope in the process, but even as the human race teeters on the edge of pan-dimensional extinction and he could by all accounts die at any moment, he is never threatened.  Because even if he did die, I mean die die, his being would remain intact: he would have never been removed from the moment of heroism.  He is what he does.  He stumbles into some corner of Time, stumbles into a problem, fixes it, then leaves.  (It is, I must say, a perfect paradigm for a television show.)  He defies linearity not because he's some hipster postmodernist, but because he abhors boredom.  He hops around Time to evade anything that doesn't fit into narrative convention.

My account of what he has never encountered may prove somewhat heretical, as I have only watched the most recent five series.  In fact my viewership of the show is precisely not a marathon.  The first episodes I watched were those that my friend deemed I needed to watch, and after that I just jumped around looking for the ones worth watching.  You probably already know where I'm going with this: I watched Doctor Who just like the Doctor would,  jumping around in search for the best stories.  Except of course the Doctor is in plenty of shlock episodes.  He is not so much in search of the best stories, but in search of a story, his story.  He's looking for someone in distress--although it is likely they don't know it until he shows them.

At this point in my viewing, I seem to have run out of palatable episodes.  The last few I tried to watch I didn't even finish.  I knew where they were going, I had already been there.  And this...

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.