MR 080: Time Works

Ah, now is this more like it. An actual good story that's not mean spirited and hateful towards time travel as a concept. And yet uses time travel as a key part of the story. It's just so refreshing to not hear the Doctor talk about how he has to kill everyone in this society to preserve the timeline. It's wild that I would even have to say that huh?

I will mention just real quick that I found the dialogue to be a bit hokey. I know that it's an audio drama, so it's necessary that you have to narrate what's happening so the audience knows, but it's kind of in your face in this one. There's a lot of physical movement that has to be explained. Charley in particular seems to be saddled with most of this dialogue for some reason.

Anyway, we do a bit of running around in a frozen world, ala Chimes of Midnight for an episode before the plot can really get going. I'm not a huge fan of this apparently trope at this point. It reminds me of the first episode of Mind Robber where they just run around for a bit before the TARDIS explodes. It doesn't really add a whole lot to the story in my mind. It does get the Doctor back a few minutes before Charley and C'Rizz which, again, doesn't really amount to a whole lot. The main thing is adds to the story is that the characters get to see... the clockwork men.

Mostly this is a classic Doctor Who overthrows a tyrannical government story. Most of the time is spent in the society just watching what's happening. It's a society entirely built on keeping the great "project" going. Everyone's time is catalogued. Anyone not working for a single second is considered a "time waster" and risks being "downsized," their euphemism for being killed. Nowadays, corporations use the phrases "time theft" and "quiet quitting" for things like this. You're standing there on the clock talking to your coworkers for five minutes? That time not working adds up, must be a "time thief."

We see a series of vignettes about what's happening. The Doctor encounters a bin man going about collecting the trash. Then he encounters someone working in a market stall. They don't seem keen on talking to him because he's wasting their time just by talking and asking them questions. I'm so curious why there are even market stalls at all in the first place. How do people have time to go and buy food? Or to eat? They work all day, sleep, and then come back to work some more. All they are is work and sleep, only because it's a biological necessity. If sleep was not biologically required, they would be required to work constantly until they collapse of exhaustion and die. We all know that's what would happen in our own world if that was the case.

The stall owner helps the Doctor who gets in to meet the king. The king is nervous about what is happening. His son is the "idle prince," he doesn't work like the others, but is not downsized. The king is not really in charge, you see. "In between the tik and the tok," as they say, anyone can be downsized at a moment's notice. One second someone is standing there and the next they are gone, disappeared from time entirely. And everyone carries on as if this was perfectly normal and right that they would disappear. They must have been a time waster. If they're not being efficient they deserved it. We need to replace them with someone who WILL BE efficient.

The Doctor already knows what is happening. The clockwork men exist in between the seconds of time. They walk through while everything is frozen and disappear whoever they like before going away and time restarting. Everyone lives in fear of being disappeared at any moment, driving them to work harder lest they too be downsized. The king fears this too. But his son does not work. He does not fear being disappeared because the king has no other children. If the clockwork men were to kill the prince, there would be nobody to take the king's place. Thus the prince is in a unique position to find out what is happening and try to stop it.

The stall owner's brother helps cover for her despite believing it is wrong. He's fully bought into the propaganda, yet he gets downsized for helping his sister who is now on the run. Meanwhile Charley and C'Rizz are brought in for their "job interviews" to see where they could best help advance "the project." C'Rizz gets to meet the source of all this. The "figurehead." It's just an AI, because of course it is. It's so prescient. This is always where corporate culture is going: an AI managing the numbers, making them as efficient as possible. It uses its "organic resources," i.e. the people, to maximize efficiency. All of life is efficiency. It then sends out the clockwork men to downsize anyone who isn't efficient enough.

The previous inhabitants of this planet created this AI to try to save their society when it was on the brink of collapse. It has been many things since. An architect. An innovator. Even a general. It makes me think about what a dystopian tyrannical society based around those traits would have been. Now it is an accountant, managing the spreadsheets to make sure everyone is working. Counting up all the time theft and cutting back on the least efficient resources. It gives C'Rizz a job in the office and downsizes someone else who it thinks won't be as efficient as him. Before Charley can go for an interview, though, it identifies the Doctor as a threat and turns the entirety of the world against him.

Not only can these clockwork men kill someone in between time, they can also implant ideas and suggestions in people's minds, propaganda, that it's up to them to accept or not. The Doctor responds by activating a device that stops all devices that interfere with time in the radius, something he says is mostly used for protection for people working in the time vortex. The result is that the clockwork men are now visible. Everyone sees them. Everyone sees the things that have been keeping them under thumb this whole time. And that's the source of the revolution.

Some people bow down to the clockwork men, seeing them as gods. While some attack them, having lived in fear all their lives. The Doctor gets to see Figurehead which tells the Doctor that it's just there to maximize efficiency. How long with it keep the people enslaved? Until they master space flight? Until they conquer the galaxy? What's the point? Why are we even doing this? To advance society, the Figurehead responds.

It's a meditation on this grand notion of civilization. Civilization exists to advance. There is a straight line from A to B where humanity gets better, technology gets better, we all evolve as a society. This grand myth of history. Civilization is just a game of tech trees. You advance along the tech trees and get a better society as a result. And eventually, one day, we'll reach the end of that tech tree, the end of society, where we've reached the pinnacle of humanity. A lot of video games use this notion. Games like Civilization or Grand Strategy games like those made by Paradox are all about this idea. Indeed, there was a lot of talk about "the end of history" when the Soviet Union fell. Yet history continues and there is no real point to it. It's a narrative of grand design. This is why we are on the Earth. An attempt to give meaning to the chaos.

Naturally, as the arbiter of chaos, the Doctor shuts it all down. He turns off the great clock that has been looming over their society for generations. It stops. Time stops. The work stops. The project stops. The grand game of civilization stops. And the clockwork men stop. They see no future in which they will be needed so they don't resist as they are taken apart. And finally, work without end comes to a close. There is finally time for other things in life besides work.

I quite enjoyed it. I usually like overthrowing totalitarian dictatorships like this, depending on what the dictatorship is about. And here it's about a corporate structure maximized towards the grand narrative of "progress" for the sake of it. That's all we are. Cogs in a machine of progress and efficiency. Shut down the machine. Break the wheel. While the narrative was a tad convoluted and at times it was a bit tricky to know what was happening, it was still good. It could have benefited from perhaps a couple more re-writes to tighten up the script and, as usual with these two hour stories, could have been cut down to an hour or hour and a half. Still, what is here is quite good.