MR 040: Jubilee

He doesn't miss ladies, gentlemen and others. He doesn't miss. Robert Shearman can do no wrong. He's so good, he wrote the first good Main Range Dalek story.

And boy is it a story. It's not as good as his first two stories: The Holy Terror and The Chimes of Midnight, but it is very good. Like his first two, there's some exploration of narrative structure here, specifically the way in which we view the Doctor and the Daleks. The Daleks are the eternal evil and the Doctor is the eternal good. But you can twist either to suit your own ends.

That is what this story is about. A century ago, the Doctor and Evelyn stopped a Dalek invasion in pre-WW1 UK. The British Empire used that as a rallying point, bolstering national confidence and preventing the British Empire from ever falling. The Nazis presumably didn't come to pass because the British WERE the Nazis. They grew more and more fanatically fascist, seeing the Doctor as this great fascist military war hero who fought off the Daleks. And now the British Empire never fell and has conquered a great deal of the world, including the US. Possibly all the world.

And like any fascist regime that has run out of enemies to fight, they have to invent new enemies. Daleks were the great enemy, but they are few and far between. Now we invent new things to execute people over like contracting your words. There are even whole pretend Daleks ready to be executed to maintain the public hatred of an other.

The real secret is that the British Empire took prisoner a single Dalek and they torture it regularly. They create juice out of its fluid it leaks under torture. They're trying to get it to talk, to say anything, so that they can blow it up in front of the people to maintain that fear of an other.

They market the shit out of Daleks in the media and on products. There's a great comparison here to the way we treat the Nazis in our reality. We often just use them as a fun plaything, a cartoonish super villain without any real thought to the real horrors that they committed.

The direct comparison would be how the people of the British Empire have the Daleks, an evil fascist force, and then they market them and sell them and then end up just like the Daleks. We do the same thing with the Nazis, we market and sell them as this evil force and yet we have literal fascist political movements that are prominent around the world right now, especially in the US. Everyone knows that the Nazis are evil, but we're not Nazis, you say as you believe the same things they did.

The real REAL secret is that they also took the Doctor prisoner as well. The Empire presumably thought that the Doctor would work for them, but he always refused to become their fascist puppet. So he ended up rotting away in the Tower of London, stuck there for half a century after they cut off his legs. Evelyn starved to death right next to him in that very cell. This shit is dark and this is where it goes to the straight up horror that Shearman is so good at writing. The idea of cutting off the Doctor's legs is so effective because it's his thing. What is the Doctor known for? Running. What can't he do without legs? Run.

The story does an effective job of making you think this is Davros as well. The President's wife starts out by saying that he's in a wheelchair and he's been lurking in the dark in the Tower, going mad. That he's responsible for the Daleks being there. And then it does a great second episode turn around cliffhanger when it's actually the Doctor who's been there the whole time. This was horrifying for Evelyn, to discover this Doctor, a hundred years older, trapped here, decayed, a shell of his former self.

Speaking of the President's wife, the story has two very good characters in her and the President himself. The President is quite mad, thinking he wants to be good but that everyone is under mind control and so he has to pretend to be evil. But he's really just using it as justification for his evil. There's a great scene directly illustrating this point when the dwarf who came from America won't fit inside his Dalek casing (since he uses dwarfs to pretend to be Daleks and get killed for the people's continued hatred of the other) and so he cuts the man's hand off, but then immediately says that he's not actually evil, he's just pretending to be evil. The President's wife WANTS to be the anti-feminist fascist barefoot and pregnant house wife who acts silly, wears tons of makeup, gets abused, and follows her husband's orders. But she thinks her husband is TOO WEAK to actually abuse her properly and wants to depose him to get a stronger ruler. They're both quite insane and they're both justifying their actions with their insanity.

The scene that gets people to compare this to Dalek from series 1 is when the Doctor sees the imprisoned Dalek, but this story is very different from that one. There's a similar set up in the Doctor confronting a weak and helpless Dalek who has been tortured as well as his companion being sympathetic to said Dalek, but that's where the comparison ends, really. The people doing it in Dalek are doing it for money and the people doing it in Jubilee are doing it to maintain the fascist regime.

Speaking of the Dalek, there's a fantastic scene where the two fascists who have been torturing it now attach the gun stick back onto it, giving it the ability to kill someone. The one who is used to giving orders orders the Dalek to kill the other one, who is used to following orders. The Dalek reverses it and orders the one used to giviner orders to kill the one used to following orders. But he can't do it. He can't kill with his own hand. He's killed SO many people by ordering others to do it, but he can't do it himself. But the one used to following orders absolutely can and kills the other one. The ones on the top can brainwash other people into following orders and being willing to kill for their cause, but they can't do the same things themselves. As if they don't really believe the bullshit they spew.

The Dalek, itself, is struggling because it doesn't have any orders to follow. Daleks follow orders. Fascists follow orders. But nobody has given it orders in a century. So it goes to the Doctor in the tower, its old enemy, and begs for him to give it orders, but he won't. Colin does a fantastic, hysterical, chilling even laugh at the suggestion before the Dalek kills him, wiping out this timeline. I wasn't sure why he didn't regenerate, but that would rather defeat the point of the sequence I think.

When the actual Jubilee comes, the TARDIS and the Doctor serve as a link between the two times. A century ago and now. They're both stuck in both times at once and so now the Doctor is serving as a conduit to allow the Dalek invasion in 1903 to come through into 2003. The President's wife deposes her husband and wants to marry the Dalek because it will be a stronger ruler, because she's quite mad. But it doesn't matter because they both get killed by the Daleks anyway, fighting over who is the leader. There is also a really good speech from Colin in which he says that he can't tell the difference between the Daleks and the British Empire, which was great. Colin is always good at giving scolding speeches and this was a good one.

The Dalek invasion is stopped, ironically, by the Dalek that his been imprisoned all this time. It has decided that the British Empire tore itself apart. And because the Daleks are so like the British Empire, they have to avoid becoming them and ripping themselves apart. In order to survive, the Daleks must die. To win the Daleks must lose. It's the self-defeating mental gymnastics that fascists have to do to justify their own beliefs. And so the Daleks end up killing themselves. The invasion force from 1903 is destroyed and thus the invasion never happened and thus the timeline returns to normal.

But the Doctor and Evelyn still have echoes of it. In a very Chibnall style "this is the moral" wrap up, the Doctor talks to Evelyn about how the humans are doomed to repeat their fascism. We bury it and try to ignore itand pretend like we're not like that. We could never be like that. But in reality, it comes creeping up and we have to deal with it again and again.

What another triumph for Robert Shearman. This is a knock out of the park. It's dark and edgy (and not just for the sake of it like Project: Twilight) with some really profound things to say on the nature of fascism. It feels like Shearman took a course or read a book about fascists before doing this one because he nails the fascist attitudes spot on. The need for an enemy, the denial and disassociation from the evil you're doing, the inability to believe or act on the horrifying bullshit fascist ideas from the upper leadership, and the deeply submissive nature of fascists, unable to do anything without orders. Shearman took a huge swing with his very direct comparison of Dalek ideals with humans at their worst and creates a story that is not only relevant to the current age, but is also timeless. Fascism always has a chance to creep up from the shadows and take control. We must be ever vigilant to stamp it out.