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shebeafancyflapjack · 4 years

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Defrosting Grumpy Three (a Season 8 meta)

I keep thinking about how Season 8 of Classic Who is almost like the first one the show has to a ‘season long arc’ that I don’t feel gets talked about enough. Obviously everyone knows it as “the one where the Master is in every story” but I feel like there is a subtle character arc for the Doctor in this season as well which is tied to the two main characters introduced in the first episode; the Master and Jo Grant.

I’m not the first one to point out that out of Three’s five seasons; this is the one where he’s at his most grumpy and short-tempered. I know a lot of people point to this season as reasons for why they don’t like Three and I totally get that, he’s a real git sometimes, in particular the first and last stories. There are moments where he’s asking for a slap and, no, I’m not talking about him claiming to be buddies with Chairman Mao and a Tory MP. Because I would’ve thought it was obvious that he drops those names purely to gain trust of these people who don’t trust him (at least that’s my headcanon because it doesn’t fit with the anti-capitalist, anti-pollution, anti-imperialist writing). Just him being constantly ungrateful to the Brigadier, snapping at Jo, or just being childish in the most ‘kid throwing a tantrum’ way possible.

But it’s easy to get why. By Season 8 he’s been trapped on Earth for we can assume at least a year. New Who fans who’ve seen the Power of Three and saw how crazy Eleven went when he tried to stay on Earth to study the cubes just for a few days/weeks know the Doctor can’t stand staying still, especially in one time and place. In his first season he could be short-tempered but slightly less so. In Spearhead he’s quite polite and motivated, though that could be the most pleasant form of Post Regeneration Trauma he’s been through. Plus he had Liz, who you can see he immediately clicked with. A fellow genius who finds herself out of place or treated a little unfairly as a female scientist surrounded by men, both of them willing to sass the Brigadier when he deserves it. He also still keeps trying to fix the TARDIS, as if convinced this won’t be as permanent as the Time Lords intended.

But by Season 8 (or you could say even before that, in Inferno) his attempts clearly haven’t succeeded past slipping into a terrifying parallel universe, and now cabin fever is setting in. And Liz, his science bud, has gone off and left. And while it’s sad we didn’t get a goodbye between the two of them, her passing remark towards the Brigadier about the Doctor just needing someone to pass him test tubes and fill his praise kink maybe implies that, at least from Liz’ POV, they weren’t as equals as Three thought, or she didn’t feel that fulfilled working with him, even if she did appreciate him as a friend.

So enter Jo to replace Liz, who is everything Liz wasn’t. Liz had to study and work her way to her position; Jo is a spoiled girl who got to play spy by sheer nepotism. She failed A level science and doesn’t have the same sharp-wit he and Liz shared. Three is mean to her even before she introduces herself as his assistant when she only tries to help, and doesn’t hide his disappointment when she tells him. Perhaps it might also be that she reminds him of his companions before Liz; she’s cute and perky like Zoe and also loyal and determined like Jamie, even though she lacks Jamie’s physical strength and Zoe’s genius. Still, she’s young and he might not want to put her in danger the same way he nearly lost his previous young companions many times in the War Games.

When Three goes to the Brigadier to try to get rid of Jo, the Brig is far more smug than in the previous season, as he seems to have worked the Doctor out by this point. Their little moment at the end of Inferno where Three insults him and tries to escape only to then come back with his tail between his legs acting all buddy has shown him who Three really is; that this whole grumpy shtick of this is just a defence mechanism while he’s so out of his depth. I like to think the Brig hoped Jo would soften him up, to bring out the compassion that was more overt in his previous incarnation, as well as just pass him test tubes and keep tabs on him. His knowing smile when he watches Three try and fail miserably to fire her seems to prove his point.

In the same story we also have the Master showing up for the very first time. He was created to be the ‘Moriarty to the Doctor’s Holmes’. These kind of ‘foil enemies’ that pop up in so many stories, where you have a villain who is supposed to be a perfect match in intelligence or skill to the hero, are more often than not presented as ‘what the hero could have been’ if they chose to be evil rather than good; the Master is no different. And even though it’s not established until the next season that the Doctor and Master used to be friends, there’s clearly an underlining fondness in their banter which hints at past feelings as well as mutual respect. It says quite a lot that Three is more relaxed and friendly during his conversations with the Master half the time they talk than he is with the humans he’s meant to be saving, or even his own close friends. Because, for all their moral disagreements, the Master is his own kind and his only link - other than his broken TARDIS - to the rest of the Universe.

In almost every story of S8, after the Master has revealed his evil scheme only for the Doctor to point out how it will backfire on him, they have to work together or form some kind of alliance of convenience. In Claws of Axos, the Doctor outright pretends to betray his friends and elope join forces with the Master to escape, only for it to be a trick in order to defeat the Axons. But considering Three’s attitude in this season, it’s a very convincing act as much to the audience as to the humans. And then in Colony in Space, the Master offers the Doctor half-ownership of the Universe....and the Doctor clearly hesitates! Yes, the Master tempts him with the persuasion of ruling ‘in the name of good’ but Three has to take a moment to remember what a slippery slope that line of thinking is. He’s so tired of being trapped, sick of being leashed by the Time Lords, that the Master comes along as a devil on his shoulder at his most vulnerable point. Considering the last story involves the Master summoning the actual Devil (or close enough) and is also where Three’s temper seems to be at its peak seems all too fitting.

It’s also interesting that the Master’s greatest fear that appears in the Mind of Evil is an image of the Doctor laughing maniacally over him. It’s the closest we get to an image of Dark!Three in the show. To contrast; the Doctor’s greatest fear isn’t the Master, it’s the eruption from Inferno. Seeing the Earth swallowed by flame - not because of an outside force like the Daleks or Cybermen, but by humans themselves. It’s easy to imagine him wondering why he even bothers with them when they’re their own worst enemy.

(Side note; apparently the Evil Overlord in the Inferno parallel world IS the Third Doctor, according to the Expanded Universe, though I haven’t read up on this. We were robbed of seeing Pertwee play an evil Doctor.)

So while this is going on and the Master is playing his games with the Doctor while also tempting him, intentionally or not, to the ‘dark side’, we also have Jo at his side. And Jo takes all of the Doctor’s snapping and mood swings like a pro, and is very quickly overwhelmed with a lot of the stuff she’s faced which that she didn’t know she was signing up for - being hypnotised, captured by aliens, taken to alien worlds in the far future etc. She screams as most companions did at that time, but because it is what you would expect from a girl fresh out of school and throwing herself into something she clearly didn’t properly prepare for. The Doctor has to save her a lot, more than often because she tried to help only to get herself captured. As much as he does warm to her - because he’s not immune to how adorable she is - it serves to prove his point. Even when he finally gets to leave Earth for a day, she’s too frightened to want to leave the TARDIS. What good is she to him?

Now she continues to prove she has her uses. She has her escapology skills which get them out of a few tight spots. Depending on the writer, she can turn into an Emma Peel-esque agent capable of self-defence and subterfuge. And she’s always patient with the Doctor, no matter what mood he’s in, and extremely loyal. She’s also kind and compassionate with every side character she comes across. There seems to have been a backlash to these kinds of qualities in female characters in the past twenty years or so, what I like to call the Cinderella critique, where if a woman is kind and generous more so than smart, sassy and sword-wielding she’s seen as ‘weak’. Jo is always there at the Doctor’s side when he’s managed to get hurt or knocked out (Three took a lot of naps, anyone else notice this?). Even after he does whisk her away to another planet and nearly don’t make it back, she could easily throw her job away if it was too much, but she sticks with it because you can see that she wants more than anything to be useful and do good for her world - it would be another two season until she found what her own passion was with being an environmental activist but this is where she wants to start.

But it’s not until the end of S8 that we see Jo’s greatest strength and how it saves Three when every other defence he had was gone. He’s spent most of that story chastising her for believing in magic and superstition, as well as anything else he can find to snap at her for like criticising the Brigadier even though he does the same thing all the damn time (this could be seen as a ‘I can insult my bro but you can’t’ moment but it’s still not pleasant). But when he learns the Master is preparing to sacrifice her, he runs in to save her despite knowing it’s a suicide mission. He also gives a cold exchange to the Master when told he’s a ‘doomed man’.

Oh I’m a dead man! I knew that as soon as I walked through those doors so you better watch out! I have nothing to lose, do I?

It’s a telling line that, behind all his patronising and abruptness, he’s reached a point he doesn’t feel he has anything left to keep going. He’s lost his freedom and his knowledge of time travel; but he’ll die before letting Jo die or letting the Earth burn again. When Azal claims the daemons gave humans knowledge, Three responds: Finally he’s turning his anger on the one who deserves it to save the one who has been his friend, even at his lowest points, for the past several months, while still showing his disappointment in what he’s seen of humans living amongst them:

You gave them knowledge to blow up the world and they most certainly will. They can poison the water and the very air they breathe.

When Azal appears, he nearly makes the Master’s greatest fear come true by offering his power to the Doctor instead. And the Doctor looks horrified, immediately doing a Jon Snow and refusing it. Unlike when the Master offered him power before, he doesn’t hesitate for a moment, even though Azal’s powers could probably get his TARDIS working again in a snap. He looks almost scared at the thought of possessing something like that. Perhaps his dark persona in that other world became that way because he did take such an offer?

Azal prepares to kill the Doctor for refusing his offer, which is where Jo saves the day by offering her life for his. A lot of people dislike this ending for the idea of the villain being destroyed ‘by the power of love’ more or less, but this was a lot less common a deus ex machina as it is in New Who. The Doctor explains how it works when they’re free as:

Azal could not accept a fact as irrational and illogical as Jo being prepared to give up her life for me.

Three says it as he’s just as baffled, if also amused, by it as Azal was. Why would Jo give up her life for him? Compare that with when Ten has to give up his incarnation to save Wilf, how he rants that Wilf isn’t important but he has ‘so much more’ to give. Even the Doctor wrestles when it comes to sacrificing himself for others sometimes but Jo did it without a seconds thought, made even more illogical given Three’s often harsh treatment of her. But one thing that is obvious is that Three’s grumpy face is gone; he’s smiling for the rest of the episode, looking at Jo with quiet heart eyes, and letting her drag him into the maypole dance, conceding that she was right and there is ‘magic’ in the world.

Much like Rose was the companion Nine needed after the Time War to enjoy seeing the Universe again and appreciating life, Jo serves a similar purpose in S8 in that she gradually reminds the Doctor through her actions of the strengths in being brave, kind and selfless. She and the rest of the UNIT family are there to remind him of the goodness in humanity and that we’re always learning and trying to improve; as Three says to Azal that ‘they need a chance to grow up’. Jo is the angel on his shoulder to contrast the Master as his personal devil; right down to having her dressed in the sacrificial ‘virgin’ garb opposite the Satanic Master to cap the season off.

Three still has his sour moments after this but he’s far less cantankerous going forward and sweeter towards Jo especially, praising her bravery and learning in future, just as Jo also grows more confident in her abilities and enjoys her adventures with him. He seems far more relaxed on Earth and less desperate to get away because of the people he has around him that make it worth staying around for. Three’s morals and loyalty to humanity might not have been so firm had Jo not been there to ground him, especially with the Master constantly there almost holding out a hand to him offering freedom and excitement. Like all good companions, she saves the Doctor as much as he has to save her, in more ways than one, which she doesn’t get nearly enough credit for. And it’s what adds to the heartbreak of her eventual exit because of the effect she had on his life.

It’s just one of my favorite tropes when a character gets better and softens or becomes kinder not because they had to ‘change for someone else’ but because they were inspired by them, especially if it’s the person they underestimated the most.

#it's about found family yo #classic who meta #doctor who #third doctor #jo grant #three x jo #the master #unit era

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dwellordream · 3 years

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“...We can dispense with the first question fairly quickly: is violence the supreme authority from which all other authority derives in actual societies? After all, we keep encountering historical models predicated on that premise and they keep being pretty bad, inaccurate history. But even shifting from those specific examples to a more general appraisal, the answer is pretty clearly no. Reading almost any social history of actual historical societies reveal complex webs of authority, some of which rely on violence and most of which don’t. Trying to reduce all forms of authority in a society to violence or the threat of violence is a ‘boy’s sociology,’ unfit for serious adults.

This is true even in historical societies that glorified war! Taking, for instance, medieval mounted warrior-aristocrats (read: knights), we find a far more complex set of values and social bonds. Military excellence was a key value among the medieval knightly aristocracy, but so was Christian religious belief and observance, so were expectations about courtly conduct, and so were bonds between family and oath-bound aristocrats. In short there were many forms of authority beyond violence even among military aristocrats. Consequently individuals could be – and often were! – lionized for exceptional success in these other domains, often even when their military performance was at best lackluster.

Roman political speech, meanwhile, is full of words to express authority without violence. Most obviously is the word auctoritas, from which we get authority. J.E. Lendon (in Empire of Honor: The Art of Government in the Roman World (1997)), expresses the complex interaction whereby the past performance of virtus (‘strength, worth, bravery, excellence, skill, capacity,’ which might be military, but it might also by virtus demonstrated in civilian fields like speaking, writing, court-room excellence, etc) produced honor which in turn invested an individual with dignitas (‘worth, merit’), a legitimate claim to certain forms of deferential behavior from others (including peers; two individuals both with dignitas might owe mutual deference to each other).

Such an individual, when acting or especially speaking was said to have gravitas (‘weight’), an effort by the Romans to describe the feeling of emotional pressure that the dignitas of such a person demanded; a person speaking who had dignitas must be listened to seriously and respected, even if disagreed with in the end. An individual with tremendous honor might be described as having a super-charged dignitas such that not merely was some polite but serious deference, but active compliance, such was the force of their considerable honor; this was called auctoritas. As documented by Carlin Barton (in Roman Honor: Fire in the Bones (2001)), the Romans felt these weights keenly and have a robust language describing the emotional impact such feelings had.

Note that there is no necessary violence here. These things cannot be enforced through violence, they are emotional responses that the Romans report having (because their culture has conditioned them to have them) in the presence of individuals with dignitas. And such dignitas might also not be connected to violence. Cicero clearly at points in his career commanded such deference and he was at best an indifferent soldier. Instead, it was his excellence in speaking and his clear service to the Republic that commanded such respect. Other individuals might command particular auctoritas because of their role as priests, their reputation for piety or wisdom, or their history of service to the community. And of course beyond that were bonds of family, religion, social group, and so on.

...So while it is true that the state derives its power from violence (as in Mao’s famous quip that “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun”), the state is not the only center of authority within a society. And indeed, even the state cannot run entirely on violence; this is the point that Hannah Arendt makes in the famous dichotomy of violence and power. In many cases, what Heinlein’s premise does is mistake violence for power, assuming that the ability to violently compel action is the same as the power to coordinate or encourage action without violence. But in fact, successful organizations (including, but not limited to, states) are possessed not of lots of violence but of lots of power, with much of that power rooted in norms, social assumptions, unstated social contracts and personal relationships that exist entirely outside of the realm of violence.

And so in both theory and practice, Heinlein’s premise fails to actually describe human societies of any complexity. There are no doubt gangs and robber-bands that have functioned entirely according to Heinlein’s premise (and presumably some very committed anarchists who might want such a society), but the very march of complex social institutions suggests that such organizations were quite routinely out-competed by societies with complex centers of authority that existed beyond violence, which enabled specialization (notably something Heinlein disapproves of generally, ‘specialization is for insects’) and thus superior performance both in war and in peace. Kings and empires that try to rule purely with force, without any attention paid to legitimacy or other forms of power (instead of violence) fail, and typically fail rapidly. As with almost any simple statement about complex societies, Heinlein’s premise is not merely simple but simplistic and so fails.

...The Cult of the Badass, as expressed here, lives in what we might call the “cult of tradition,” “dreaming of a revelation received at the dawn of human history” about a certain set of warrior values which were both expressed by famous historical warriors and which now provide a blueprint for life. This point of explicit in Pressfield’s set of videos, and implicit in the Fremen Mirage’s strong men/hard times model of history. This “cult of tradition” is quite selective, of course; Pressfield makes functionally no effort to engage with actual ancient value systems in a sustained way, limiting himself mostly to ‘badass’ aphorisms from Plutarch (himself hardly the most intellectually sophisticated or morally challenging author in the classical canon). It is tradition as imagined dimly in the present, not tradition as uncovered by careful historical research.

Consequently, the cult of the badass must engage in “the rejection of modernism;” this is no accident because the cult of the badass is an “appeal to a frustrated […] class” – this too is explicit in that Pressfield frames his ideology was a way for individuals who are held back or stagnated to unleash their true potential and overcome their limits, through the explicit rejection of modern values and the embrace of what are at least presented as traditional, even timeless values. That sort of appeal is also explicit in a lot of the fitness marketing that trades on the cult of the badass (and it seems notable that Pressfield himself lists “anybody that is heavily into fitness” first among his people living out the ‘warrior archetype.’), calling on people to work out like the Spartans. Consequently, it is a “cult of action for action’s sake” often focused on doing rather than asking what should be done (it is striking that Pressfield, despite nearly all of his video examples coming from the Greek and Roman world, engages not at all with the extensive Greek and Roman philosophies of justice).

Instead, this ideology, because it positions the capacity for violence as the highest human value, presents the thesis that “life is lived for struggle.” Pressfield reframes all of life’s struggles, including struggles of motivation and self-discipline, in terms of violence, in terms of a war against the ‘inner enemy,’ and consequently “life is permanent warfare.” And I think this goes a long way to explaining the obsession of this philosophy on warrior elites, because there is an inherent element of “popular elitism” in the cult of the badass, an insistence that at least it should be the case that “everybody is educated to become a hero” and thus not only develop the capacity for violence but also orient themselves towards “heroic death, advertised as the best reward for a heroic life.”

Thus the outsized influence of Thermopylae, a ‘heroic’ Greek defeat over other battles; Pressfield, again, is explicit on this point that it is at Thermopylae in particular that the Spartan warrior ethic is best and most perfectly displayed. If these are held to be the highest ideals, then anyone who falls short of them or refuses to engage with them must be weak, perhaps even “so weak as to need and deserve a ruler” (a point that often emerges in the sheep/wolves/sheepdog metaphor used by many ‘warrior cops,’ an ideology Pressfield explicitly appeals to, lumping in law enforcement as exemplars of ‘warrior’ ideology).

And of course, as is I think obvious in these readings, there is an undercurrent of anxiety about masculinity here. It is, after all, strong men in the strong men/hard times trope (and that is no accident as the trope is deeply connected to concerns about masculinity throughout its history). ...While Pressfield insists in some of his videos that his life philosophy is equally applicable to men or women, it is hard not to notice that his historical examples of warriors are all men (no Molly Pitcher, no Deborah, no Hua Mulan, etc. Not even Empress “Imperial Purple is the best burial shroud” Theodora; he does discuss the legend of the Amazons with rather less historical rigor than I might like). Where actual historical women fit in to his narrative, it is mostly as the mothers and nurturers of warrior men. While Pressfield does his best to paper over this (and to be fair, I think he is sincere in trying to present his ideology as non-gender-specific, unaware of the ways in which the broader framework of that ideology is aggressively unwelcoming to women), I think it is fair to say this is an ideology created largely by and for men, which values a hypermasculine ideal – we might even say “machismo.”

And by now readers are beginning to wonder where all of these little quotations are coming from (apart from the bit from Theodora). But first I want to note that we have a name for an ideology that fits these main points – where “life is permanent warfare,” “lived for struggle”, such that “everyone is educated to become a hero” to participate in a “cult of action for action’s sake” in a “cult of tradition” seated in a “rejection of modernism.”

And it’s fascism. Because all of those little quotes are from Umberto Eco’s famous essay “Ur-Fascism” (1995) which presented one of the most compelling classifications of the foundational DNA that all of the various, disparate forms of fascism share in common. ...Now I think it is important to back up here and be fair to Steven Pressfield. I don’t think Steven Pressfield is a fascist; ...What I do think is that the ideology that Pressfield is advancing has fascist tendencies (that he is, I suspect, unaware of, having not interrogated the nature of Spartan society as carefully as he might have). The ideology he is advancing shares most of the DNA of Ur-Fascism and it is not hard to see how the remaining handful of elements might easily be bolted on to this framework.

It is also, in a way that Pressfield never really addresses (and I suspect has never really realized), an ideology which is fundamentally at odds with the democratic values he also holds. If only some people are ‘warriors’ and developing that warrior capacity towards violence it the primary or principle virtue, it follows – and literally any Spartan could have and would have told Pressfield this – that everyone else is merely fit to be ruled. Sparta’s brutal oppression was not incidental to its ideology or social structure (as we’ve discussed!) but essential to it. As Eco points out (in his 10th point), it does no good to suggest that everyone ought to be equally a warrior; this is after all a cult of violence for its own sake and in violence there must be winners and losers. No complex society is composed only of warriors; for there to be kings and knights, there must be serfs too.

...Put more bluntly, the ideology of the Cult of the Badass is so easily falsifiable that the act of disagreement itself, rather than the content of arguments, must be rejected). The rejection of disagreement in turn demands the fear of difference because the ideology requires consensus and an absence of criticism. And once the ideology fails – and it will, because it is disconnected from the real world – conspiratorialism is the natural response for true believers unwilling to reject the ideology. If your ideology tells you that you are superior, and yet you do not produce superior results, what recourse is there but to conspiracy? As Eco memorably quips, “Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy” which is also, by the by, why so many authoritarian armies, theoretically filled with supposedly highly motivated, ultra-badass super-soldiers, tend nevertheless to lose more than they win. We saw this with Sparta; the very ideology of the place made them bad strategists, in precisely the ways that Eco suggests it would.

In short, the ideology of the Cult of the Badass – which is easy to see in any number of modern films, books and TV (and occasionally read into films that explicitly reject it by their viewers; I suspect everyone of at least a certain age has known that guy who watched Fight Club and then wanted, entirely unironically, to start his own fight club) – is a gateway to authoritarian thinking which, contrary to the name, is based in violence rather than authority. The supremacy of action, of violence, of the warrior and his ‘ancient’ (but actually quite modern) values are the foundation stones on which fascist ideologies (and I’d argue, other non-fascist authoritarianisms, but that’s a debate for another day) are constructed.

And, as Eco notes, “The Ur-Fascist hero craves heroic death, advertised as the best reward for a heroic life. The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death.” This is not a good ideology. As I noted in the first post in this series, a free society has no need for warriors. Not among its soldiers, not among its police, not among its civilians. At times, a free people may need to become soldiers, or police officers, but always to return to being civilians again, either at the end of the day or at the end of the war.”

- Bret Devereaux, “The Universal Warrior, Part III: The Cult of the Badass.”

#the universal warrior #the cult of the badass #ur-fascism #bret devereaux #history #writing #warfare #ancient #medieval #greek #roman #spartan

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