Written by Tom
You know how a lot of nostalgia-obsessed male Star Wars fans took against The Last Jedi because it kept treating them as the villains and thus disrupted their ability to receive the hero wish fulfillment that they got from the series while growing up? Well keep that in mind because, starting from paragraph three, I’m going to be fucking livid at this episode due to the way that I felt targeted by it’s ending. This is an episode which deliberately states that people like me are everything that’s wrong with society right now. I’m obviously not happy with that.
Let’s take the egos out of this for a paragraph though and admit that this is a well done episode. Doctor Who takes on Amazon is a great idea and exactly the type of thing Doctor Who should be doing right now. The character work is superlative: with very little screen time, all of the guest cast become the most rounded and likable characters of the series so far. The design work is great too, particularly the robots who are fantastically creepy. Giving the first Kerblam! drone a Talking-Toaster-esque human personality was a nice touch. The escalator scene was really fun. The idea of killer bubble wrap is Doctor Who-y in the extreme. Having the break area be an externally-filmed garden was an inspired bit of weirdness. I really did love the first 45 minutes of this episode; so much of it was great.
But that ending. How fucking dare it.
Right, let’s firstly get into why doing a Doctor Who episode about Amazon is a really good idea. Amazon are one of the biggest companies in existence right now, representing one of the major examples of neoliberal business thinking alongside Apple and Pixar. And they work through the horrific exploitation of their workers. Workers are heavily monitored and penalized for not working inhumanely well for inhuman lengths of time. They pee in bottles at their workstations for fear of being told off for going to the toilet. Amazon employees have been hospitalised while working there 600 times over the past three years. It’s fucking horrible. And what do they get paid for this backbreaking labor which happens in a climate of fear? Barely anything. They only got a living wage a few weeks ago, and they had to fight for it through organised strikes.
Meanwhile the CEO of Amazon just keeps refuting any idea that there could possibly be a problem while making millions a day of the back of his workforce. He gets away with it because he’s a rich businessman and apparently there’s no actual repercussions for anything he’s doing because it’s accepted to be good neoliberal business sense. Neoliberalism is a system which puts all responsibility on the individual and none on the systems, allowing assholes like this prick to come up with a horrible work environment, fill it with people trying to survive in a horrific economy with fewer and fewer job prospects, then blame any issues on his workforce because if there were any real structural issues, they’d just get another job, wouldn’t they? Hell, it doesn’t just allow people like him to get away with things like this, it actively awards them for their efforts; hence why Amazon’s CEO just accepted an award for “business innovation and social responsibility” a few weeks before it was announced that his company is being paid to build another warehouse on land that had been put aside for some much needed affordable housing.
And this episode almost looked like it was going to condemn this type of shit. People being killed by an uncaring system gone wrong. A companion who had worked in these types of environments and knew how unpleasant they could be. A Doctor who wants people to be respected and free. This could finally be the punk Who that the series has kept threatening to be for seven episodes now.
But no, because you know who the real villain of the piece was? Someone who looked at this world of increasing poverty maintained by a neoliberal system and decided to rebel against it. And note the specifics of who this person is: a young person who grew up in a world where everyone he knew lived in poverty because of the system around him, and who thus doesn’t trust said system to serve the people properly, making him highly resistant to it. He’s a millennial. A Corbynite. He’s the current generation of political activists; one of the people who just got Amazon workers a living wage. And he’s the villain of the piece. Because the System is good. The System is just. And the System would benefit people if only we let it. That’s what this Doctor Who episode said: if only people stopped speaking up for themselves and let the business men do what they wanted to them, then everything would be great. We have PR managers and only 90% of the population in extreme poverty; what the hell are the kids complaining about, eh?
Due to neoliberalism, people are pissing into bottles because they’re scared to leave their workstations. They do this because they need their unpleasant job that doesn’t even allow them toilet breaks so much that they’re willing to put up with it. And people like me – those who have grown up in horrifically poor and run-down towns, horrified that this is the world they live in and furiously bitter at the political contexts which have allowed this world to be – are the wrongdoers in this situation because we have the veracity to critique this world and want more humane working practices put in place?!
Fuck you.
I mean come on, the company monitors it’s staff with ankle bracelets! This is treated by the episode itself as invasive and unpleasant. Yet by the end of the episode, these are completely forgotten about while the episode pontificates about how great modern capitalism would be without those fucking socialists doing things like demanding enough money to live on and a working environment where you feel somewhat comfortable. This is an episode of Doctor Who that’s in favor of putting tags on employees in order to keep them productive and in line. This is an episode of Doctor Who which is pro treating employees like cattle.
And it wouldn’t even be so bad if this episode was some vague metaphor dealing with ideas like capitalism and dissent in some nebulous way like “Oxygen” or “Kill the Moon”, but there’s no way of reading Kerblam! as anything but Amazon, there’s no way of reading it’s warehouse as anything but an Amazon warehouse, and there’s no way of reading it’s robots as anything but Amazon drones. And Amazon is in the papers almost every day at this point because of one contenious faux-pas after another. This is a real thing which is affecting real people’s lives. People are being hospitalised due to the things that this episode is directly about. This is literally people’s livelihoods. And Doctor Who‘s response this week was to wade into a situation where people are being hospitalised, terrorised and exploited, and it apparently couldn’t see anything wrong with this system other than the people outside shouting for it to be improved somewhat. This isn’t just the Doctor allowing the bad guy to win like she did in “Arachnids in the UK”; this is her joining the bad guys.
Doctor Who is such a potentially radical show. The Doctor used to go to places, find unfair and exploitative systems, stand on the side of the workers and fight against the status quo. It was never perfect but at least you could say it tried. But fuck it, because that’s not what this version of the show does. Trump shoots the spider and is allowed to walk away. The rich man is made to pay the prize money as part of his exploitative poor-people-racing habit (oh poor him!). And now this: the episode that’s in favor of Amazon’s draconian business practices, because isn’t getting an Amazon package such a fucking privilege?
Fine then, but if the right gets to claim that The Last Jedi isn’t proper Star Wars, then I get to claim that “Kerblam!” isn’t proper Doctor Who. This isn’t the show that gave me “The Macra Terror”, “The Mutants”, “The Sun Makers”, “Vengeance on Varos”, “Paradise Towers”, “The Happiness Patrol”, “Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways”, “Planet of the Ood” or “Oxygen”. Hell, this is barely the show that gave me “The Space Museum” or fucking “Smile”. Instead, this is the programme that gave us “The Dominators”.
Fuck this episode. That’s all I have to say about it.
Extra Thoughts
- Ok, so let’s step back and try to make an argument that it’s not solely against left wing youth politics. Charlie is a character who’s motivated by a scepticism towards technology because it’s caused labour issues which have affected his hometown. The Doctor has a line about how Team TARDIS automatically finding the robots scary because they’re androids is robotist. So the episode is about not immediately being against technological (and thus sociological) progress but instead embracing it. As such, as always, there’s ways in which the episode is actually a Brexit parallel, or perhaps a critique of the way the alt-right have allowed their current dissatisfaction with the age of identity politics to allow them to fall into increasingly violent fascism. But while making these points, the episode still falls into the trap of presenting the modern age as this perfect utopia that mustn’t be critiqued, despite such things as the tagging of employees and 90% of the population being in poverty. It also seems to imply that the programme makers see no difference between left-wing groups (who Charlie’s talking points come from) and right-wing groups (who, under the above reading, are the people the episode’s actually about). So at best, the episode lumps the entirety of post-financial-crash youth dissatisfaction under one undefined banner and tells it to shut up about poverty because neoliberalism is perfect and any issues they have are invalid. Yeah, this episode can still go fuck itself.
- There’s been people comparing the episode to “The Sunmakers”, making claims like ‘Robert Holmes would be proud’. Bullshit. At the very least, “The Sunmakers” had the dignity to end up on the side of its oppressed population. “Kerbalm!” managed to be further to the right than four episodes of a Thatcherite complaining about how much tax he had to pay. And Robert Holmes would be proud of that ending? The guy who had characters like Binro the Heretic and actually had the Doctor overthrowing people for crimes like being beurocractic and inhumane? If this is Robert Holmes’ legacy extending into the New Series, he would be spinning in his grave.
- It’s called “Kerblam!” How is an episode called “Kerblam!” anti-blowing shit up!
- Current Doctor Who rankings from best to worst: “The Tsuaranga Conundrum”; “Demons of the Punjab”; “Arachnids in the UK”; “Rosa”; “The Woman Who Fell to Earth”; “The Ghost Monument”.
FNORD 