“Doctor Who: Oxygen” vs. Capitalist Realism

Written by Tom

[Previously: “Doctor Who: Knock Knock” vs. the British Housing Industry]

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If you want to argue that Doctor Who Series 10 is a politically active show (and we do), then “Oxygen” is exhibit A. The villain is literally capitalism. Peter Capaldi’s Doctor spends half the episode making speeches about how society boils down to the workers vs. the suits. It ends with the event that will canonically end capitalism as a political system and bring on its replacement. It’s the single most blatantly anti-capitalist episode that Doctor Who has ever done.

From our perspective though, this leaves us with surprisingly little to talk about. You can pretty easily spin a few thousand words arguing that “Smile” is anti-neoliberal and you’re going to get something at least interestingly counter-intuitive out of it. You’re not getting any brownie points for noting that “Oxygen” is political though. My first plan for this entry was to just post a link to the script and leave it at that. There’s not a lot to do here.

This gets compounded by the fact that “Oxygen” isn’t actually doing anything much differently from the other episodes leading up to it. We noted the series’ anti-capitalist leanings when looking at “Smile”. It’s anti-exploitation angle and general alignment with anti-capitalist youth cultures is shared with “Thin Ice”. ‘People are being killed by the economic contexts around them’ is also the plot of “Knock Knock”. Sure, “Oxygen” might be the most blatant engagement with these themes – and its existence oddly helps things like the “Smile is anti-neoliberal” argument in that it proves that anti-capitalism was on the production teams’ minds at the time – but it’s not anything all too unique in itself.

What mostly separates it from the pack is how vicious it is: while “Smile” hides its messages behind sleek imagery and emoji jokes, “Oxygen” is a grim survival horror that temporarily kills a companion and ends by blinding the Doctor. This is mostly part and parcel of the episode being particularly blatant about its themes though: something that’s so willing to be a series of angry rants about the evils of capitalism needs things as heightened as spacesuit zombies, companion deaths and people getting blinded to justify the anger. Despite being the most openly anti-capitalist Doctor Who episode so far, it’s really just a particularly strong flavour of Series 10’s political angles in general.

Instead of looking at it from inside the context of Doctor Who then, “Oxygen” is best served by being taken as a cultural object, because the important thing to remember about this episode isn’t just that it’s a grimdark anti-capitalist rant, it’s that it’s a grimdark anti-capitalist rant first broadcast on a Saturday afternoon on BBC1 just before the Eurovision Song Contest.

rev.MrR0b0t[vers1].wtf (80% downloaded)

Written by Tom
The eighth part of our episode-by-episode look at Mr Robot. With spoilers, we look at how the episode surprisingly cleverly foreshadows it’s big plot twist, and what that twists means in the context of the season as a whole.

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01: A neat little structural marvel here as a series of incremental progressions in the show's plots get used to foreshadow the ep's big reveal:
02: [SPOILERS] Mr Robot is Elliot's dead dad, Darlene's his sister & Elliot doesn't remember the vast majority of his history.
03: Firstly we have the bizarre scene where Darlene & Angela do a ballet class together, & both know the other knows Elliot.
04: Given that Darlene's interactions with Elliot are meant to be top secret, we instantly know something's up here.
05: Elliot meets Whiterose, is told that Allsafe have installed a Honeypot and starts making a plan to get rid of it. Then it
06: jump cuts to the plan itself w/ the narration lampshading the cut. It's an odd scene where the way the show's edited gets discussed in the show,
07: but it prepares us for the idea that what we're watching is not necessarily the same as what's happening; i.e. there could be gaps.
08: At the end, there's a real sense that the episode's glitching; though I suppose actually the entire series up until now is the glitched bit.
09: Elsewhere, we have Elliot and Angela's meeting where Angela accuses Elliot of having not been there for her in months,
10: aka the bit of the series where it's subtextual issues with the immaterial sociopathy of Eps 5/6 get voiced in the show itself.
11: Mr Robot has always been the one telling Elliot to forget people & not to make too much contact with people. Ep 9 also reveals that
12: he's Elliot's darker side which he's disassociated from. It's acknowledged that he's also the side of Elliot who's got the most done though.
13: This turns Elliot's fights with Mr Robot into an internal debate about the morality of his actions, mirroring what the series overall is.
14: What separates Elliot from Mr Robot are his relationships and connections to people within the real world.
15: You can be a revolutionary who unites a bunch of hackers to blow up all the debt in the world, and a caring guy who helps people.
16: Indeed, Elliot is. Just make sure that when you're blowing up the world, you don't forget about the people you're actually protecting.
17: Similarly, don't allow the pressures of the material world to stop you from trying to fight back and change it. Know when to take a stand.
18: Which for a show as brazenly revolutionary as Mr Robot might seem a bit staid: that's basically the message we dismissed in Ep 2.
19: Usual TV tries to say what you can and can't do though: dissent is good, but don't dissent like that 'cause it'd cause damage.
20: Mr Robot actually says "blow stuff up and break things down", just make sure you get the right people. Think, act, then adapt.

 

rev.MrR0b0t[vers1].xyx (70% downloaded)

Written by Tom
The seventh part of our episode-by-episode look at Mr Robot. After the hectic episodes in the middle of the season, where does the season and its representations of dissent stand as it starts moving towards its finale?

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01: The bizarre thing about Mr Robot's fridge is the complete lack of any attempt to immediately follow it up;
02: instead it gets shown in a recap, we jump-cut to two months later and get a speech from Elliot about how it's soon not going to matter.
03: The show then goes back to the set-up established in Eps1-3: the daily lives of Elliot and co crossed with hacking & anti-corporate dissent.
04: The material & the everyday are back too: one of Elliot's main plots is his dog eating a computer chip and having to go the vets.
05: With him doing this, Angela's plot with Terry Colby comes to the fore and we have a new way of dealing with political machinations.
06: Terry Colby tells Angela to suck his balls, threatening the exact type of sexual assault the show has been focusing on a lot lately.
07: Angela refutes this and instead threatens Terry with one day being as powerless and aimless in life as she is - with one day being poor.
08: Terry relents. A focus on the material beats sexual sociopathy, bringing Angela one step closer to challenging Evilcorp & getting justice.
09: Her plan’s not perfect though: it's presented as a deal with the devil which will cost a company full of people their jobs & livelihoods.
10: It's compromised and, like fsociety's plan in Ep2, risks affecting a lot of innocent people (albeit it in a very different way).
11: Indeed, the 2nd half of S1 is setting itself up to investigate more emotional approaches to dissent the way the 1st did violent ones.
12: This seems to be very much the point of Elliot's emotional suckerpunch ending where he comes clean to his therapist and admits he’s hurting.
13: The events of Ep4-6 & have took their toll and are burning things out: now the show's cordoning them off to 2 months ago
14: and finding it important to work through the emotional aspects of them. At least the fridge isn't being used to justify more machoness.
15: The struggle still remains though: Tyrell's plotline is still about power, sex & domination, & culminates with another fridge.
16: This fridge is at least more narratively interesting though as it comes out of nowhere and genuinely destabilises Tyrell's narrative.
17: Not even Tyrell seemed to be expecting it; God knows where his plot goes now.
18: At this point, the show does feel like a lot of approaches fighting against each other, trying to find a happy medium.
19: It returns us to the question of the series as a whole: How do you/can you morally rebel? The episode implies that Angela has a potential way.
20: At this point though, the show’s playing its cards close to its chest about whether it’s going to be a good way or not.

rev.MrR0b0t[vers1].yxy (60% downloaded)

Written by Tom
The return of our look at the first season of Mr Robot. Today, prompted by the end of episode six, we discuss the season’s representation of women and find ourselves unsettled by it, for better and worse.

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01: Another episode, another genre – this week, Mr Robot is a crime drama about a poor kid getting on the wrong side of the mob.
02: Built into this is a straightforward fridging: the killing off of a female character to affect the male main character & heighten the drama.
03: This serves as the culmination of a surprising amount of displays of horrid treatment towards women, usually of a sexual nature.
04: Angela gets humiliated in the board room. Angela's boyfriend gets hacked and they record footage of her showering.
05: Tyrell walks in on Sharon peeing. Over 6 eps, Shayla is drugged, raped, kidnapped, killed & shoved in a car boot.
06: They're all about power: about a male figure dominating the female one and humiliating them.
07: If you want to, there are ways of contextualising it within Mr Robot's antineoliberal themes. Neoliberalism affects women more than men.
08: Neoliberalism is based on putting people in competition with each other, preaching an ideology of conflict and dominance.
09: This ties into ancient gender stereotypes where men are fighters and leaders. Neoliberalism expounds a very stereotypically male worldview.
10: And it tells women that they can be as good as men, but it tells them that they can do it through the market by becoming dominant & tough.
11: In short, it allows women to be as powerful as men, but only if they reject their femininity and be as masculine as possible.
12: And shaming women for not being men - for being weak, for having sexualised bodies, etc - is a large part of neoliberal society.
13: So an antineoliberal show where women are more frequently humiliated in sexualised ways than men are is technically true to real life.
14: But the series is never truly about these women: it's all about Elliot, his relationships and his choices. Not them; him.
15: Even when Angela decides to talk to Terry Colby, she has to run it by Elliot first and he's the one who tells her to go and do it.
16: As we've been increasingly noting, Mr Robot is a very masculine show following a main character who's a certain type of awkward male's fantasy.
17: But there's no real reason for it to be like this - you can show the horrors of being hacked without them recording the woman showering;
18: you don't have to kill the love interest off; you can affect a businessman without sexually targeting his wife. There are ways around it.
19: Ep5 bristled at the idea of the show becoming too sociopathic & mean. Here, it succumbs to finally being the show Ep5 worried about.
20: Can it rebuild, or has its focus on neoliberal artifacts turned against the system doomed it to being as nasty as the system itself?

 

rev.MrR0b0t[Vers1].htm (50% downloaded)

Written by Tom
The fifth part of our episode-by-episode look at Mr Robot. S01E05 marks a transitory period where the focuses of previous episodes get reconsidered and reconfigured, leading into the series’ second half. How are they changed, and where are they leading?

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01: With the series major components set down and defined, we reach the series' Act 2 where those components get shuffled prior to the denouement.
02: The fsociety plot becomes a surprisingly standard heist movie. But within that movie is Bill
03: and the way fsociety treats him is harrowingly mean-spirited, taking his sub-standard personal life and breaking him down with it.
04: Given the way that the issue with neoliberalism is how it deflects, abuses and manipulates the material, to see fsociety do it feels wrong,
05: & the parallels between Elliot and Tyrell become numerous: "You are like the rest of us", "We're the same", the dismissal of the waiter's life, etc.
06: It's consistent with the show so far though. Bill's a sad, lonely man, trapped in a system that famously makes people feel sad and lonely:
07: his issues are bi-products of the system which fsociety take & weaponise to pierce holes in the system they can then slip through.
08: It’s Ep3 all over again.
09: But it still feels ugly, particularly when the material has been sacrosanct in the series since Ep1.
10: Note how this ep defines the fsociety plotline in contrast to Angela moving in with her dad and Shayla getting a job.
11: These plots are almost entirely material, focusing on the character's home and work lives with almost no technology present.
12: As these become the material plotlines, so the fsociety one becomes the plotline lacking in materialism,
13: and without that materialism, the actions of fsociety become a site of genuine unease for the series, hence the Tyrell parallels.
14: Ep2 taught us that rebellion was always going to be ugly and immoral to people within the system, but does it really have to be like this?
15: Indeed, Ep5 seems to take the ideas set-up in Eps 1 & 3 and uses them to answer the question asked in Ep2 -
16: When does antineoliberal protest go too far? When it stops respecting the material existence of the people it's supposed to be helping.
17: Which is the show's main driving force leading into its 2nd half: can fsociety keep its grip on the material the closer it gets to its aims?
18: Already, a big blow has been dealt to this: Shayla - Elliot's gf and main link to emotional, material life - has been kidnapped.
19: As a plot point, it's a nasty, sexist thing which represents the only major misstep the first series really takes.
20: Things are about to get uglier before they get better.

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