MR 046: Flip-Flop

Wow. You know it didn't have to be like this. This could have been fixed so easily with a couple more rewrites. This one is bad not because of badly written dialogue or being boring. It's not because of bad audio mixing or any technical issues. It's not because it's buried in technobabble or does hilariously bad accents that make your skin crawl. This one is bad because of its politics. Ironically the second with bad politics after The Fearmonger, another Seventh Doctor story.

But first, the story. The Doctor and Mel are involved in a double time loop. Two versions of history keep switching back and forth as people from those timelines want to go back in time and change it so their version doesn't happen. Like a grass is always greener situation. Yet each time they regret the change.

The basic premise here could have been a good one. You're supposed to be able to listen to either disc first and the story will make sense from either side. The first story of each disc is simultaneously the beginning of the story and the end of the story from the other disc while the second story of each disc is the end of the story and the beginning of the story from the other disc. It could work really well, especially if it didn't essentially repeat the exact same dialogue but with minor variations in each timeline.

The divergent point is when the human colony of Puxatornee (named for the groundhog in groundhog day, get it? get it?) gets visited by a battle cruiser filled with a species call the Slithergees, giant blind slugs. They are refugees who demand to be allowed to live on Puxatornee's moon or there will be war. One version has a war that leaves devestating radiation with the Puxatornee humans on the verge of extinction. The other version has the Slithergees essentially invading and conquering Puxatornee. This is where the problem comes.

Each version of history has a Stuart and Reed, commanders in the war history and dissidants in the conquered history who try to go back in time to change their history and end up creating the other time line. Thus it is a double time loop. Each time the loop goes round the history changes back to the other side. Like I said, this could be an interesting premise and could work better in the hands of a better writer.

The bad politics comes from the conquered Puxatornee side. The writer really thought he had something here. He thought he was going to create a liberal and a conservative side and have them both be dystopias. He wanted to satirise liberal politics. Just like every other conservative who thinks they're creating satire, they can only ever imagine liberals creating a fascist dystopia with the humans becoming slaves. It's as if we all inately understand that conservative politics are evil, even the conservatives who are trying to inact them.

All of the conservative "satire" comes from one episode in which we see the Slithergee have pretended to be victims in order to enact an actual invasion while the weak willed (naturally) woman liberal complies to all of their demands in an effort not to look offensive. It's a pretty dangerous line of thinking.

There's the typical rhetoric you see from conservatives. White people (I mean humans) are being made into a minority in their own colony (white genocide anyone?). It makes a point of saying that Slithergee occupy 90% of the planet while humans are forced into ghettos. Humans are forced into being servants/slaves to avoid looking offensive to the Slithergee.

There's even one to one War on Christmas rhetoric straight from Bill O'Reilly circa 2003. Quite literally. It's set at Christmas specifically so that the Slithergee can say that Christmas is offensive and should be replaced by their own holiday.

The War on Christmas stuff is obviously ridiculous, but it's part of a larger rhetoric to pretend like immigrants are forcing white people to become oppressed minorities. We live in the middle of the global ressurgance of fascism. We're all very familiar with this rhetoric by now. Conservatives don't really dog whistle anymore, they just show open contempt for minorities now. They believe that immigrants and refugees are invaders and the liberals are collaborators in white people becoming a minority and becoming oppressed.

If you really believe that refugees or immigrants are an invasion there are only two solutions to this problem. And it's not going back in time to prevent refugees from coming into your country in the first place. You either round up people from their homes and mass arrest everyone of that minority so that you can deport them. Or you do the same thing and kill them instead. The Nazis themselves did both. They tried to deport the Jews, but no other country would accept them as refugees, because of their own xenophobia. So the Nazis ended up killing them instead.

This is why this audio is seen as taboo. With good reason. And it could have been such an easy fix. The Slithergee actually invade and enslave the humans instead of this ridiculous pretending to be victims conservative fever dream. Done. It would have been much more respected in the past twenty years instead of seen as despicable as it is now.

This is always the problem with conservative "comedy" as well. They aren't funny because they have no relation to reality. Immigrants don't pretend to be the victim in an effort to enslave the majority in the country they're in. Whenever you hear anything about racial tension, it's always the white people in the area getting upset that non-white people are there and making up rumors about them. This can be things like there being an increase in traffic accidents or something like they're killing and eating pets or even they're killing and eating children. In the conservative fever dream of reality, that's what they're really doing, as we see in this story, which is why their attempt at satire doesn't land. It's not real in any way.

I'm mostly surprised that this script was green lit in the first place. Doctor Who has always traditionally been more left wing so whenever you see scripts like this with conservative politics you have to wonder how they got made. I'm also rather surprised that Sylvester McCoy agreed to do this one too, considering his own personal politics. Ultimately, this would have been an interesting experiment, but the author ruins it with his bad political beliefs. It could have been good with a better author.

It's wild how we JUST had Jubilee, this fantastic dissection and look into the way fascist politics works at the human level. I was just talking about, in that review, how we have to guard against the encroaching reach of fascism, because it always pops up insidiously. And here it is, popping up.