The Element of Surprise

Nothing really makes a story sparkle like a zap of the unexpected. It doesn’t really matter what genre it’s in – we love to be led by the nose to a delicious banquet, only to discover that we will be dining on our dance partners. Or some such thing.

Writing is really about telling people about what they know, as observers into another world. But half way through a book, once the setting has been adequately constructed so as to make the reader feel like they understand that world, you need to remind them of how much they don’t know: there’s still half a book to get through, and if you just keep throwing information like character names and feelings and opinions at them, they’re going to become obese sacks of knowledge who politely decline a bite of the next chapter. You have to smack them over the head with your words and make them know they understand Nothing. They’ve been passive observers, treating everything you tell them with mild, polite curiosity. Lie to them, immediately. Convince them that it’s about more than taking on the perspective of the protagonist: they need to decide for themselves what’s going on. They need to digest what they’ve read, and hold out their plate for the next reserve.

It can be hard to come up with ideas, though, especially because the most effective surprises come with lots of hints that aren’t recognized as hints until much later, at a time when they themselves become obvious. When engaging a surprise, a writer has to function both as an unaware reader and an omniscient narrator – and it’s not easy, sincerely pretending you don’t know what’s on the menu. Especially when the person you are attempting to fool is yourself.

As such, there are two ways to approach the difficultly of surprise effectively. In the first (Storytelling Mode) you write passively, as a deranged psychopath who doesn’t actually know what’s going to happen on the next line. Will you kill the main character? Maybe. Will there be some unexpected incest? Probably. You can safely set aside the blame by claiming that you are just a conduit for these things, and you don’t really have much say in the outcome of the story.

The second option is exactly the reverse: plan everything. Every little detail. There are so many little hidden connections waiting in the wings, things you can refer to offhand to make the reader put the pieces together, they may even derive a measure of satisfaction from seeing everything play out as expected. Until you insert a surprise technique.

Techniques are the little tricks writers steal, improve or innovate to give a story structure. For the Element of Surprise, they have to come from outside of the pattern you have already laid down in your work. It’s a sudden change – the moment when the bucket of ice you’ve been nudging towards the edge of the roof topples off it and drenches or brutally decapitates the person beneath it. Many exist. Some have existed for so long, they are no longer effective. Others count on the fact that techniques have been around long enough to be predictable and pretend to be them before becoming some other oddity entirely. Learn them. They will help.

The “Sudden Relation”

People love geneaology. It’s probably some kickback from a former age when blood meant the difference between peasantry and nobility. It’s certainly still a matter of scandal in our own age where incest or bastardry is frowned upon and the products thereof treated with great suspicion. There is a particular phrase which is still popular in mainstream culture, and that is ‘missing heir’. With it come the prospects that all troubles will vanish in an instant, which for some reason people find attractive in a story, even though it’s really just a lazy way for a writer to tie up loose ends.

But it is popular.

People have come to associate specialness with genealogy. Whether it’s an ancient magical bloodline that implies they are more powerful or important than others, or the belonging to a family that is identified for its protagonists, birth matters. Not really, and if you’re a particularly cutting edge writer you’ll go about trying to convince people of the exact opposite, but in the way we humans like to group things, you can’t go wrong with sudden relation.

Why was the phrase, “Luke, I am your father.” such a popular twist?

Because horror! By this point in the Star Wars franchise Luke Skywalker already had his group: an identified cadre of social misfits trying to bring down an identifiable evil. Luke already had a father: a Jedi of the Light Side, like himself, which he aspired to be like.

Then in a moment of trying to reconnect with his son, Darth Vader shattered that illusion. Luke was suddenly born of something evil, was physically connected to the Evil group he had devoted himself to fighting. His mentor Obi Wan had hid the truth from him, as had his other mentor, Yoda. Did that mean they suspected he was evil, too? Were they trying to condition him against his very nature?

You’ll already see here the immense power of the Element of Surprise: it makes the audience question everything they know up to that point. It’ll make them read further, demanding an explanation. Curiosity is a wonderful thing.

The “We forgot to mention this in our mission statement…”

This is a wonderful technique born from spy thrillers and war novels. What you do is, you throw the protagonist in with a group of people who you call the good guys. You make them likeable enough, go into their characters details as much as you need to make them likeable. Then you get the protagonist involved in whatever it is that group does: deliver some important letters, steal a priceless relic, play a prank on the identified ‘evil’ group. Things in the good group are going great! and it’s all thanks to the intervention of the protagonist! And then –

EVIL. Sometimes with Nazis.

The protagonist puts two and two together and realizes that they’ve been working for the wrong side all along. The carefree, fun-loving friends they made, so craftily structured as amoral characters winning easy victory, turn out to be the ones the protagonist initially set out to defeat. And there hangs the tale: will the protagonist be able to recover their moral center, atoning for all the things they did under the belief that it was ‘good’? Even if it’s really, really hard? Will there be enough chapters left to do it?

There are some really good examples of this out there, and my favourite ones happen underwater. It was particularly well done in the Disney movie Atlantis, where in one short sequence the characters the protagonist fought so hard to earn the trust of turn on him and appear almost monstrously transformed. It’s also an interesting case because ‘redemption’ includes swaying the majority of the amoral villains to turn coat, just as he has.

What works about this technique is that it makes the audience feel guilty. They may not have taken an active part in the treachery, but they realize they’ve been rooting on the bad guys this whole time. And because they aren’t active in the story, and they themselves can’t atone for that guilt, their only real choice is to stick with the protagonist, supporting it through its redemption, and feel absolved through the protagonist’s success.

The Wrong Nemesis

It’s an easy enough mistake to make. Some people are just so unctuous and swooping, they naturally appear to be the enemy. The protagonist develops an abiding hatred of them, projects all the evils of the world upon them – only to realize, at the final confrontation, that their anger blinded them to the real nemesis. It had nothing to do with the unctuous swoopy one at all.

This is a great technique to use in combination with a shoal of red herrings. You can gloss over all the moments that made the false antagonist suspect, and lightly flit over all the truths that point at the real one. It’s one of those things that teaches readers not to invest in the perspective of the protagonist, but to trust their own, unbiased judgement of events. It’s not only sneaky, it’s educational.

The example you’re probably all thinking of is Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, or if you are American, Harry Potter and the Voodoo Pebble. Quirrel and Snape shall go down in history for this one, especially Snape because he plays at being the nemesis both often and well.

If you can remember what it was like to read the chapter ‘The Man with Two Faces’ almost twenty years ago, well done. I think my own reaction was, “No. Wait. What? Is that a typo? No… wait… WHAT? No… HOW???”

It is the perfect way to get the pulse racing for a final encounter. The hero goes in prepared… and turns out to be decidedly unprepared. For a moment the reader loses all faith in the protagonist’s ability, and in their own ability to predict an outcome. They’re hooked.

And then there’s the chapter after in which you have to explain exactly ‘what’ and ‘how’.

The Resurrection Misdirection

This one is tired, and begs to be shot in the face so it never has to be used again. But somehow it keeps coming back.

Pretending to kill a character only to bring them back to life, or leaving the reader in suspense as to whether they are dead or only mortally injured, is something we very generally expect these days. We are tragically desensitized to the sudden murder of our heroes, knowing that it’s never ‘really’ permanent. If you are considering using this one, please stop. It has been worn out. There are now enough variations on this technique to account for the fact that we expect it, and it no longer holds The Element of Surprise.

It’ll still work and make you sell, but you won’t have earned it because you are pandering to the docile mainstream.

The “Oh, I’m about to die, so pay attention” Trick

This is a clever way of approaching conflict in a story. Instead of killing a character, the writer brutally murders the suspense. They make it known that one of the characters will die, often casually slipping this in at the end of a chapter. Instead of the nibbling anxiety over whether the character is dead or not, the audience ruminates over the time and manner of their death, and how well they are using the time they have left on earth. You can make that character get into all sorts of trouble, examining spinning blades or bathing in shark-infested bathtubs, and every time, the audience will clench its gut and wait for the oncoming evisceration. If you are kind you will let it happen, and not pull some phoney Resurrection Misdirection trick at the end of the charade. They deserve that much.

This was quite masterfully done in American Beauty, in which there was no question of the character in question’s fate, but caused twists and turns in the audience’s perception and interpretation right up until the big bang.

The trick clicks when you have managed to make your audience foster wrongful prejudice. This means that they look at one thing you’ve told them about the future (Which character will die/whatever) and the things that they know about the story up until a certain point (who hates who, who has a motive to precipitate the chain of events) and directly relate them to one another. You set up the conditions for their deductions.

Then, because this is all about The Element of Surprise, you make sure that the deduction is incorrect. Have something else happen to prove the prediction. Let them know in no uncertain terms that you, the writer, are indispensable in spooning out the story. They’ll hate that, and likely keep trying to predict things to get you back for tricking them. Which is great for when you put out the sequel.

The Actual Death

As The Resurrection Misdirection has become so popular in the world of fiction, it is oddly, disturbingly shocking when a character does actually die. Most of the time when this happens on television, it is because an actor has had ‘creative differences’ and needs to have their character conveniently disappear so they can seek out employment elsewhere.

It takes a certain cold cruelty to off a character. We spend a lot of time shaping them just right, and like a favoured toy, it is difficult to set one aside. Especially since if you want an Actual Death to be effective, it really does have to be a favourite character. One of the good guys – the one your readers will feel a bit ill to consider the prospect of outliving. And no takesies backsies. They can’t leave a letter saying ‘If you are reading this, then I am dead’ (because honestly who besides me actually does that?), or magically pop up from the grave for a cup of tea. You aren’t trying to gently ease the audience into the idea of that character being gone, you are setting up a condition where no-one pictured them dying, and they died anyway. It is a sudden death, a tragedy.

Yes, it’s cruel. And a waste of something brilliant. But by doing this, what the writer creates is a martyr, and everyone loves a martyr, and fights for their memory even while cursing their foolishness. The audience keeps reading for the same reason we cling to memories of the deceased: to make sense out of what happened to them. To make their life and death mean something.

A seasoned master at this is GRRrrrr Martin. He murders characters you’d think central to the plot with casual, brutal disregard. He locks them up, gives them every chance at escape, and still kills them. Be glad that he became a writer.

But perhaps what is so great about the way Martin kills is that he reverses the tired Resurrection Misdirection. He feeds the reader lists and lists of characters, tells you how they are related to everyone else, what their politics are and how they darn their socks – and then squishes them. There’s this odd sense of relief that comes when you realize that you can forget the name and devote yourself to contemplating the other players of the Game of Thrones. He engenders bloodlust, particularly for a few hated characters. That isn’t The Element of Surprise so much as it is anticipation – but what does surprise the audience is that they can feel this bloodlust, that they can derive some satisfaction from the finality of death. It’s a bitter, twisted kind of self-discovery, but a legitimate one, and a powerful technique.

The Genre Swap

This is a technique best used either directly after the introduction or as soon as the setting has been laid out. It is exactly what the name implies – the sudden interchange from one genre to another. A common one is a switch from romance to horror, or romance to suspense, which is a thrill and delight to the phobo-erotics out in the world. But this one is hard to pull off in cinema, where people – especially people with kids – like to know exactly what they’re in for. It works a bit better with novels, which have by and large avoided censorship and age restriction.

Grass is a very fine example of an effective genre swap. It starts off with a slightly dull, male protagonist setting off to a planet as a diplomat, bringing along his conservative, church-going family to stay with him. The overtones are heavily aristocratic, almost archaic, as though the science-fiction aspect were a minor consideration. It has all the even-tempered civility of an 18^th century penny novel.

But then, unexpectedly, the diplomat’s even-tempered wife comes to the foreground as the real protagonist, proving herself to be much more bold and adventurous than anyone imagined. The story ends as a colourful romp with bestial alien sex, heroic feminism, and rebellious action sequences.

In short, Genre Swap is about adjusting your perception to find a real story hidden behind the boring, ordinary one everyone expects. The clever thing about it is that it lures in a disheartened, apathetic audience who really isn’t expecting anything new, and then lights their skirt on fire. By pretending to be mainstream and then adamantly rejecting itself, it wakes the audience up and excites them. It makes them want to read, not passively, but in search of all those things they missed by being asleep.

Granted, this will also make the audience critical, so be aware that you can’t let your standards slip, once you’ve poked your reader with a stick.

The Hole in the World

Not unlike breaking the fourth wall, breaking a hole in the world exposes characters within the story to the principles surrounding it. This doesn’t necessarily mean they become aware of an observer – it is more like handing the characters an essay on the symbols and meanings of their own performance up until that point. Sometimes a godlike character appears and explains everything, like in The Matrix: Reloaded. Sometimes a character is literally left staring through a hole in the fabric of their world, and both they and the audience are left momentarily stunned, trying to reorganize all their assumptions about the world up until that point. The audience’s attention is held because they want an explanation, and they want to know what’s on the other side of the hole, bless them.

An example of this is in The Subtle Knife when Will finds the dimensional cut through Hollywood Boulevard. He approaches it with a kind of academic curiosity. It is doubly effective because he so desperately needs to escape from his world, and a chance to do so appears. It mixed two important elements: surprise, and salvation. By doing so, it suggests that taking a risk, opening up to the unexpected, is a valuable attitude for the audience as well.

Futile Speculation

Part of preparing for the use of The Element of Surprise is setting the stage for it. Mostly this means misdirection. At any point in the story, characters should be allowed to talk to one another about what is happening in their world. They should be able to look at the way the wind blows and prepare for the future, not just remain static in one activity, waiting for it to smack into them.

And they should always, always be wrong about it.

A good way to go about this is to avoid alluding to the possibility of any surprise. Make your characters suppose what would happen if everything went exactly as expected according to what they know, discounting what they don't. This should present it self in terms of cause and effect, or ‘if this happens, then this will happen. If the opposite happens, then that will happen’. Really just cast some opinions about to distract your audience from forming their own ideas outside of those lines. If they see the story coming together before you get there, you’ve lost the element of surprise.

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I really hope to find more of these as I keep reading, but these seem to be the basics that writers should know about. And hey – get creative. A Sudden Relation doesn’t need to be purely about genealogy. It can be about significant objects, or characters who have met other protagonists in the past. A Genre Swap doesn’t need to escalate the pace of a story, just to focus on something truer and braver than what is originally presented. Play, fiddle, explore. There was never a technique that wasn’t improved without stepping boldly out of its intended use.

Discursive Essay: Doctor Who S8.04 - Listen

The Time:            Bedtime.


The Place:           All over the place.

The Situation:    Something under the bed is drooling.

“Question: Why do we talk out loud when we know we’re alone?

Conjecture: Because we know we’re not.”

This episode deals primarily with the idea of fear. The Doctor is always afraid: it is fear that made him run away from Gallifrey, and what keeps him alive each episode to run again.

But is fear itself justified? Panic, anxiety, nervousness – are these things, which govern so much of who we are, legitimate parts to recognise in ourselves? The Doctor descends into paranoia, believing that he has discovered evidence of an “Evolutionary Hider” that has only ever revealed itself to sleepers.

As he deals with his fear of the unknown, Clara and Danny deal with their more horrifying fear of dating (also known as the fear of discovery), and are initially conquered by it. The Doctor picks up Clara and they hurry off to investigate Fear, using the TARDIS’ psychic interface to pinpoint a moment in time when the ‘Hider’ appears. They find themselves at the orphanage where Danny Pink grew up, and help him confront a night terror.

“Let me tell you about ‘scared’; your heart is beating so hard I can feel it through your hands. There’s so much blood and oxygen pumping through your brain, it’s like RrrrROCKET FUEL! Right now, you could run faster and you can fight harder, you can jump higher than ever in your life. And you are so alert it’s like you can slow down time. What’s wrong with ‘scared’? Scared is a superpower. It’s your superpower. There is danger in this room. And guess what? It’s you.”

~The Doctor to Rupert Danny Pink

The Doctor determines that the way to survive the night terror is to give it what it wants; for it to be unknown. To surrender curiosity to the primeval, and walk away without an answer. This is because to him, not knowing is the greatest terror. And to let fear win, he must not know.

The Doctor also respect the rights of living beings (well, mostly), and one of those rights is privacy. As much as he wants an answer to his theories, he would no more get them against the will of a Hider than we would vivisect a human being. He infers that a Hider does not want to be seen, and is respectful of that right. An odd thing, for one so curious. But it helps establish the hierarchy of the Doctor’s moral code. He places the comfort of living beings above scientific curiosity.

Clara returns to confront her own fear with Danny. And messes it up, again. The lesson hasn’t been learned yet, or possibly the wrong lesson has been learned. Connection to a person doesn’t just come from knowing them better, or even admitting your own unknowing. There’s something else elusive still left to realize about Fear.

The Doctor and Clara go to the end of the universe (temporally or directionally unclear, just on the ‘last’ planet) and meet a time traveller. They spend a night listening to the clanking of his timeship, wondering if there is something moving outside in the barrens of the planet, or if they are imagining things.

What’s that in the mirror

Or the corner of your eye?

What’s that footstep following, but never passing by?

Perhaps they’re out there waiting

Perhaps when we’re all dead

Out they’ll come a-slithering

From underneath the bed.

When they leave, The Doctor is out cold and Clara psychically links to his distant past, where a young Doctor is crying in a barn on Gallifrey, afraid of the Time War, alone and terrified of the unknown. Clara hides beneath his bed to avoid being seen, and instinctively reaches out to grab his foot when he gets out of bed. This fulfills the features of the dream that triggered the Doctor’s paranoia in the first place.

But then Clara repeats what the Doctor told a young Danny Pink, and adds:

“Fear doesn’t have to make you cruel or cowardly. Fear can make you kind.

So listen. If you listen to nothing else, listen to this:  You’re always going to be afraid. Even if you learn to hide it. Fear is like… a companion. A constant companion, always there. But that’s okay. Because fear can bring us together. Fear can bring you home.

Fear makes companions of us all.”

~ Clara Oswald

Which is quite beautiful.

Ultimately, there never was an ‘Evolutionary Hider’ existing outside of the conceptual world. The Doctor has been driven by his fear of the unknown to discover the unknown. It has helped him become the Time Lord that terrified him as a young boy.

Clara returns to Danny one last time, and confesses her nerves got the better of her. She faces her fear of discovery, and snogs him.

The ultimate lesson is that fear is entirely legitimate, if you work with it, and confront it, and examine everything it clings to. It’s the best friend you’ll ever have, if you don’t push it away.

The Materialised Id

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The episode also compounds on the nature of the Doctor-Companion relationship. Not only because it links the companion with the Doctor’s fear, and suggest that he is afraid of loving and keeping something beautiful and temporary with him through danger, but because it is becoming increasingly obvious that the Doctor is engaged in a vital struggle between the part of him that is a soldier and the part that is a Doctor. This exchange is particularly revealing:

“I don’t take orders, Clara.”

“Do as you’re told.”

Clara is, from the moment we meet her and in several incarnations to follow, a Governess, put in charge of other people – frequently naughty children. It is her responsibility to command, officiate, and give orders.

As such she (and many other companions) act as the Doctor’s commanding officer, as someone who he respects being in command. In his war against soldiers, he has identified the true reason he dislikes them: they follow bad orders. Military orders. The doctrine of destruction, over the doctrine of investigation.

So he determines that for the part of him that is a soldier to be a good soldier, it needs a good officer: a companion/commander who negates the doctrine of war he learned under the Time Lords with a directive to be as the rest of him is; a scientist.

His second companion, Fear, is not an executive officer. It gives two orders whenever it appears: Discover, or Shut Your Eyes. Understand, or Destroy. 12/13^th’s of him know the right answer. The part that is a soldier doesn’t, and needs a human companion to enforce the correct directive.

The Psychoanalytical Model:

This episode really lends itself to psychoanalysis, particularly the fundamental Id–Ego–Superego model that plays such a huge role in that framework. The episode uses Time to establish a ‘ladder’ of sorts on which to place these mental personas, in typical fashion with the Super-Ego on the ‘top’ of Time (the future) and the Id at the ‘bottom’ of Time (the childhood past).

At the bottom of the ladder is the Id, the unconscious realm of unexplored desires, anxieties and impulses. This realm is a place of fluctuation and whim, not yet settled into a structure of established rules or contextual understanding. It is seen as being most active in a child, who has not yet gained the experience of reality necessary to grow a healthy skeletal frame to flesh with percepts. In Listen we are told that it is in childhood we are most open to the evolutionary Hider, and that it is from childhood that we dredge up the memory of its hand grasping an ankle. The episode takes us into the lives of two children, Danny and Doctor Who, both plagued by anxiety over this invisible monster. 

The natural assumption is that because fear arises from the Id, the 'monster' must originate from the Id, too. But Clara’s metamorphosis into the monster proves otherwise – a child’s fear is of not knowing, and while fear originates from the Id what it does not know is actually the Super-Ego, the elaborate ‘Governess’ of contextual ideas that resides on the other side of the mental spectrum.

The Materialised Super-Ego

We approach the Super-Ego at the end of the temporal universe, where the ultimate consequences of the framework of material things comes to light. The destination is bleak and fatalistic – there is no life, no apparent governing order or promise of continuity. Just an endless desert, and death. But faced with the demolition of the idea that ‘life succeeds’, The Doctor is not convinced. He still holds to the idea that there is life Hiding, waiting until it has outlasted all others so that it might claim the universe and assert its supremacy. In a way he needs the 'Hider' at the end of time more than anything, because it will justify his own support of life, his hatred of the Daleks, and his immortal explorations, by asserting that there is a universal will and not simply an atheistic disintegration of the universe. He is willing to face his fear to confirm this, needing this hidden companion, his Super-Ego, to justify the actions fear has driven him to. Fear is what makes him seek out the unknown.

The Doctor is knocked out before there is a definite answer to the nature of the Super-Ego and the story returns to the Id so Clara can play her part, filling in for the fact that the Super-Ego is absent. The lesson we learn in the barn is that while the Super-Ego may never be known, the Ego will perpetuate its own hierarchical one-upmanship over the Id, demanding that the response to fear can be courage and investigation. In something of a twist, this asserts the importance of a subjective attitude to objectives. Egos must continue to fight the flux of nightmares and anxieties even should the Super-Ego at least superficially appear to act against them, because in the course of narrative it may come to pass that the actions of the Ego create the Super-Ego.

Clara Super-imposed as the Super-Ego

Following on from the discovery that there is no Super-Ego, Clara attempts to hide it, fulfilling the final requirement for the establishment of a False Doctrine. Clara commands, “Do as you are told”, which can be rephrased as “Have Faith”, hiding the truth about the Evolutionary Hider from The Doctor and creating the schism between transcendence and discovery which resigns him to his place of perpetual Ego. In this sense it becomes a profoundly religious episode, featuring the classic narrative creation of an Ideology:

• The personality of a young boy is forever shaped during a childhood nativity – born in a barn, if you will – when he as an Idiot is visited by a higher power, becoming aware of the Super-Ego and ascending to the Ego median.

• The higher power then commits to a false doctrine in order to ensure the obeisance of its follower. (“Do as you are told.”/ There is a God.)

• The higher power thus establishes a conditional rule which is unachievable, and must be broken in order to experience subjective freedoms (to exist).

• A moment comes when it is impossible to identify the existence or validity of the higher power and, forsaken by God, the character of the narrative must either turn to blind faith or become an atheist.

Accepting or denying the Higher Power at the end of the narrative is a crucial point in the story. In the case of subjugation to faith, a religious doctrine is formed. In the case of atheistic denial, a personal doctrine is formed around the idea that there is nothing provably greater than the Ego. The Doctor does as he is told and can be seen therefore to be accepting subjugation – but it is important to stress this is only subjugation in 1/13^th of his personality, the part he knows to be a soldier. The rest of him has its own God Complex, asserting itself as a righteous universal dictator (It has a dominant Ego). In short he believes in ‘God’, or in his companion, who he elevates to the level of a ‘God’ by marking them out as his equal.

Harkening back to the part about The Soldier needing a good Officer, this means The Doctor is only willing to follow a good religious doctrine. But he also has his personal Doctrine, which might be viewed as equally important. In terms of the psychoanalytic model this means the episode concludes on middle ground, speaking out both for the benefits of Ideology and for the liberation of the Ego, and suggests they are not mutually exclusive.

Fear as the Companion

It is interesting that Clara is the one who inspires this ideology, and then compares the fear to a companion and by extension to herself*.

*I do sometimes wonder if the companions see The Doctor as their companion. That they never mention it seems to accept that The Doctor is the central figure of the story, which is a decidedly unhuman thing to do – we generally see ourselves as the central character in our own lives.

What do Fear and other Companions have in common?

They exist as an undeniable Other. The Doctor continually puts his Companions in positions of power, over the TARDIS, and sometimes over himself. They are there as a sort of sentinel against purely selfish action, because he puts someone different to himself on the same level as him. Having a friend like this forces him to admit there are opinions that matter other than his own. Rephrased, he acknowledges he is not the only one in the world. Both Fear and Companions are reminders that there are things he doesn’t understand and must always fight to be aware of.

Another implication is that fear is relatively constant, rather than a fleeting emotion that only exists for the extent of a situation. Placed in these terms it is something that can have a relationship built with it, even be understood, predicted, and directed. It becomes less of a liability and more of an asset when viewed in this way, as it gains narrative continuity. It can be seen as a relationship that gains strength and complexity over time. This is a particularly interesting quality because it allows Fear to gain a kind of personality, but forces us to recognize that the personality is purely based on our responses to its presence, not to its actual nature. Fear becomes a Hider because we hide it. Fear becomes a monster because we feel inferior to it. Fear can thus become a companion because we choose to accept and trust it.

How often do we really make up a person’s personality based on our reactions to their mere presence? We see people as brave because we ourselves are timid. We see them as vain, and enforce that belief by refusing to learn more about something that appears to reveal all of its qualities immediately. We see people as flirtatious because we ourselves desire them, and want their actions to have deeper, romantic meanings. In the end that’s all us, broadcast onto others to make them something we can more readily comprehend.

This is something particularly evident over the course of Clara and Pink’s date. They keep clashing because of the assumptions they have made in order to deal with the fact that they are strangers. Clara immediately boots up Pink in her assumptions about soldiers. Pink in return coats her in his assumptions about civilians. Both Clara & Pink cloak the date itself with the ‘personality’ of dating, and what it’s ‘supposed’ to be. They struggle with the idea of secrets and honesty, when the time comes to probe those false personalities. Clara makes the fatal assumption that Danny will not be able to understand the complex truth of her time-travelling double life. It is only at the very end, when they choose to combat their own assumptions and accept that they are strangers that they stand any chance of becoming each other’s companions.

Fear is a lot like that. You have to abandon denial and delusion and fear intensely before there can be any hope in understanding it.

The Psychic Interface

Aside from being a convenient plot device, the TARDIS’ Psychic Interface is a metaphoric symbol for the slightly yucky task of delving into the Id. Oddly foamy, presumably slimy and squelchy, the interface is immediately identified in the mind as something disgusting that could be dangerous to touch, like the body of a jelloid sea-creature washed up on a beach. This is an important association often made with the Id, something usually suppressed, ‘pushed down’ or flushed away on account of it holding those associations with the uncivilized and unclean. Clara has to touch the Id in order to find the answers the Doctor is looking for. The interface then proves its danger by latching on to Clara’s unconscious desires and bringing them out in the open. As is often the case when delving into the Id, there is no control and usually embarrassment or shame attached to that lack of control.

The deep and lovely Dark. We’d never see the stars without it.

Piracy: The Moral Ideal

There is a technique by which much of the world is kept controlled. It is called ‘guilt’. By engendering a sense of guilt in a person, that person comes to naturally believe that they deserve punishment. They will accept suffering or hardship as fair payment for their guilt. They will do what others say to avoid further guilt, and to atone. By this method, many individuals have come to wrongfully associate morality with legality. This association is incorrect. What is moral is decided by an individual, and when upheld by many individuals, it becomes law. But manmade laws are not the laws of reality, just as a majority belief in a lie does not make it the truth.

Piracy, while not condoned by human law, is regardless a law of reality.

Copyrighting is a system that was devised to ensure that the original creator of an artistic work could receive payment for any use or reproduction of that work. This was instigated at a time when it was nigh impossible to be self-supporting in an artistic field. The audience for an artistic work was too thinly spread. Only in the meeting halls – taverns and churches and markets – could bards busk a living. Those who were known for their skill could, when lucky, find a patron who would provide for them while they carried about their art, often in exchange for an endorsement of their patron in the cover of a book, the subject of a painting, or the introduction to a ballad. Patronage was not ironclad, as sometimes an artist’s patron would grow bored and forget about their promise of support. Writers who approached a printing house directly could sell their manuscript to a publisher for a lump fee.

When copyrighting was first decreed, it was a mix of good and bad, as all new laws are. It was limiting in the sense that all copyrights had to be sanctioned by The Stationer’s Company, who beside this service were entitled to seize and censor materials they deemed hazardous to the public interest. The implication being that all valid creations in the new system would be supportable not according to the beliefs of the artist or the audience, but a third party censor.

But copyrighting was, at that moment in history, good, for the prevailing reason that made even the most popular bards suffer: an inability to reach a wide audience. Even a performance in the most tightly packed tavern would afford a bard a fraction of what their work was worth, should they compare it to playing for the whole world of people who would pay to hear their songs. The function of the publishers was Distribution. They printed as close a replica of an artist’s work as they could, and spread it across as wide an audience as possible. Before copyrighting they could do this without the artist getting paid for the irreplaceable, intellectual component of the work. The Distributors would profit not only from the Distribution, but claim the rights of Creation, too. Take note of that: Distributers are not the Creators of a work. Copyright ensured that Distributors were symbionts of that work rather than parasites making use of the creative talents of others.

Then entered smugglers, or as they are more generally painted, pirates. Smugglers are those who have found a way to be Distributors at a fraction of the cost of a product’s value. They do this by avoiding taxes; aside from the ‘tax’ of copyright, this includes shipping taxes, road taxes, tax for warehouses, bureaucratic taxes, and service taxes. In short, they are those who have found the most efficient route for Distribution, where other Distributors stick to the mainstream, ‘legal’ avenues of logistics. Because the smugglers were not part of an official empire or navy, governments lost a lot of money due to their operation. They painted a picture of them as ‘Pirates’ – cutthroat, filthy criminals infested with lice, perpetually drunk, whoring and stealing wherever they went. They identified them with the highwaymen who stole at the point of gun, or the mercenary privateers of foreign nations who attacked their trade routes. ‘Pirate’ is a word for anyone who disobeys the law, conveniently clumped together as ‘the enemy’.

Copyright evolved over the centuries. Particularly when minds such as Thomas Jefferson realized the worth of free information, and worked towards ending individually placed copyrights after a number of years, so that information – though outdated – would be free. This presented an interesting new concept: the act of Creation of information, or art, or technology, cannot be free because the Creator needs to make a living. But once that information reaches a critical point of Distribution; when it has reached the shores of every continent, when it has become endemic to the structure of a nation, is it not then in a sense the property of whatever mind is capable of holding it?

Copyright remained a stable and fair system until one critical change in the reality of our world: 

Cyberspace.

Cyberspace is a reality in which information exists in a state of maximum Distribution. It is at once available across the world: on every shore, in every nation, with such a wide user base that the cost of its infrastructure is negligible. It is, in short, the most efficient Distributor. It has made the traditional modes of transferring information – DVD, VHS, TV – obsolete. Distribution costs nothing.

Copyright entitles a publisher to a percentage of the cost of each distributed product.

What is any percentage of a nil cost?

Distributors will warn you about the evil of piracy, the importance of copyrighting, and how ‘stealing’ information is hurting their industry – an industry which they waste no time claiming to be responsible for. They remove any distinction between being a ‘Creator’ or a ‘Distributor’. They profit from the widespread belief that it means the same thing, and that by evading a non-essential and costly Distributor, the Creator will be destroyed too.

Make no mistake, piracy will destroy the industry of the Distributors. Millions of people will lose their jobs if that happens, and many artists who profit from the clever distribution of an inferior product will not be able to compete with those who have managed to extract funds from the patrons of a better one. But there is a word for the sentimental payment of a group which earns as much for their work as other, more skilled workers: Communism.

This leads to a realization that many are afraid to face: artists no longer need publishers to distribute their product, and cannot rely on the outdated copyright system to pay them the true value of their work. But along with this there come expected benefits.

Who benefits the most from a product being distributed as widely as possible?

Talented artists.

Bad artists will quickly be discovered as frauds, and will not be able to rely on advertisers to peddle their inferior product at more than its worth, as its true value (the information, themes and sensations it contains) are freely available for consideration. It is only through the promise of additional good work on top of the successful Artistic creations they have already made accessible across cyberspace that an Artist will be able to turn a profit. In short, they will be paid for the act of Creation, at the highest price they feel they can sell it.

Cyberspace is, in effect, a planetary tavern, where they as bards can play to an audience of millions. Any patrons seeking an artist can find them, no matter where they are in the world. Where before the idea of having more than one patron was a logistic impossibility, today crowd funding is a reality, where millions of donators – even those without the funds to finance an entire artistic project – can contribute to the survival of their favourite creators.

Other fund sources, like advertising and merchandising, will also be able to benefit from their support of artists. Merchandisers in particular should be in favour of maximum distribution, as they generate profit through the fanatical adulation of successful artists. As such, it benefits them to fund artistic projects they feel are likely to be a success.

Advertisers will also benefit from stepping in to sponsor emerging artists directly, rather than sponsoring their former Distributors. Cyberspace is a competitive market because of the fact that it is the most efficient means of distribution. Often the prevalence of information makes finding the right information difficult. Advertisers will be needed as information brokers to help people find the best projects to fund, and artists will need them to advertise their product to gain the edge over others not yet established in the field, and to make the particulars of their project known. Advertisers can develop their own symbiosis with artists by managing their public image, giving money to artists in order to help their project be actualized (taking a percentage of each donation), and receiving money from other, less promising artists who never-the-less believe their project will be a success.

In short, Distributors are deadweight. ‘The industry’ is larger than them, consisting of the far more important Artists, Merchandisers, Advertisers, and – by no means forgettable – Consumers who need Art in their lives, and will pay artists to make it for them.

The phasing out of meatspace (‘real life’) Distributors is happening slowly, giving time for the Industry to reestablish itself. This is a good thing – if it were to cease to exist tomorrow, we would not have the infrastructure to support the newer, better system of a Free Information Economy. But in its death throes, the Distributors are doing something very wrong: they are attempting to brand those capable of doing a better job than them as criminals, and the supporters of pirate distributors as criminals. They wish to sell their products based on the idea that there is something wrong with using a superior service provider. This is the very antithesis of the Free Market, an immoral predation of superior value, though not an illegal predation.

This is my plea to those who do practice Piracy:

Don’t feel guilty about it. You aren’t doing anything wrong, or hurting good artists, or breaking any law deserving of that term. You have found the most direct and efficient way of exposing yourself to human culture, and the chances are you’re a pirate because you can’t afford to pay the taxes that come with meatspace distribution. Invest your money in ways to improve your life. One day, when your bank balance is fat and healthy, you can find the way that suits you best to fund the creation of art you know you will both appreciate and enjoy.

This is my plea to those who don’t:

Stop condemning pirates. You are not better than them because you do what is Legal without considering its Moral implications. You are not better because your cable package supports artists indifferently, rather than awarding them individually for their merit and skill. You are not better because you are in a position to waste money on a costly, inferior Distribution system. You are not better because you base your superiority on the debasement of others. Do what is best for you, by all means, but don’t hate those who do what is best for themselves.

Information Wants to be Expensive. High Calibre. Valued.

but never forget -

Information Wants to be Free.

Discursive Essay: Doctor Who S8.02 - Into the Dalek

The Time:            2000 + more years AD

The Place:           A Dalek

The Situation:    Mapping the Anatomy of Good and Evil

In this episode the Doctor meets up with the Combined Galactic Resistance on the medical ship Aristotle where they are hiding from a force of Daleks. They have captured an injured Dalek who by all appearances is ‘good’ – in the sense that he wishes to exterminate Daleks rather than regular people. But his injuries are killing him. Knowing what a difference having even one good Dalek might make, the Doctor agrees to be shrunk and sent into the Dalek’s body to locate and fix the damage.

“Fantastic idea for a movie. Terrible idea for a proctologist.”

~The Doctor

The main conflict in this episode is the classic one of good and evil. What is ‘Good’? What is ‘Evil’?

The contrast is placed between two morally dubious characters: The Doctor, and his patient.

The Doctor is conflicted because he is one of the most dangerous people in the universe: a justified racist. Every encounter he has had with the Daleks has asserted their genocidal, single-minded nature, their disrespect for life and individuality. This is his first encounter with one who does not fit into that mold, and so he is now left in the difficult position of overcoming his own racial hatred. It’s a kind reminder that all judgment is technically prejudice, because things can always change tomorrow. After seeing a stone fall a thousand times, we are certain – and right – to act on the notion that gravity will intervene the next time the stone is dropped. But that does not mean that it can’t float when dropped. It is just highly improbable. For The Doctor to see a floating Dalek after 2000 years of seeing them fall, it is the most improbable thing in the world. He needs one who has has not felt the gravity of the Daleks so deeply.

Knowing that he needs a companion at his side to govern his nature and hold him back when his prejudice blinds him, he fetches Clara.

“Yeah, my carer. She cares so that I don’t have to.”

The Doctor and his Dalek, Rusty, are greatly similar in the sense that both hate Daleks. In Rusty this is a malfunction, and to an extent it is also a malfunction in The Doctor. The racism they share is described as a ‘block’ in their memory filters that discounts any evidence to the contrary of what they have been told to believe. In The Doctor it is a malfunction for this block to exist. It the Dalek it is a malfunction for the block to be removed.

In light of this, is ‘function’ something that can be an indicator of morality? Is a ‘good’ Dalek one who behaves like a Dalek? Do we only see The Doctor as ‘good’ when he functions as we expect humans to behave, even if he is not human?

This is the idea of morality as a social construct. It is very often seen as being the case in real life, too. Only in very close-minded communities is sex now seen as a sin if done as an act of pleasure, but even two centuries ago this ban on pleasure was an idea of the mainstream, and an indication of morality. There are other constructs we have that allow us to make assertions on people’s moral nature that are almost certainly a product of social norms, from judgment passed on piercings to hairstyles to blood types. The question is, is the moral relativity between the Daleks and everyone else a matter of social norm, or is there a deeper, more universal measure of morality to direct it?

We get to see the Doctor portrayed in the light of evil as the Aristotle’s crew descends through the Dalek’s body. He tells a lie of convenience to a soldier who is about to be killed by antibodies. He does not mourn the soldier’s death even when swimming in his digesting proteins. He distrusts and belittles the Dalek as they converse. The Doctor is always like this, of course, but it is doubly important in the context of this episode because it strips away what might be termed as Superficial Morality. It is very easy to judge people as ‘good’ because they are sweet, or polite. But in the end, are these really the qualities that make a ‘good’ person? Especially a good Doctor? Or do we rather judge the goodness of a Doctor on its ability to deal with that wonderfully impossible vow, ‘To do no harm’, and to cure any patient who asks for their aid?

Bedside manner isn’t really worth all that much. Treating a patient’s feelings rarely takes preference over treating their wellbeing.

As the Dalek is explored further, the reason for its conversion becomes clear. It has witnessed and processed the memory of the birth of a star – undeniable proof that the universe itself creates life, and will perpetuate the conditions under which life will arise. This is an example of another type of morality: Universal Law. If the universe has an objective contrary to that of any of its internal forces, that internal force puts itself in competition with the universe, and is doomed to fail. There is in fact an objective, universal morality which exists outside of social construct. Is it then moral to side with the will of something so large and undeniable that it is godlike? Is ‘the will of the universe’ morality?

"Resistance is futile. Life returns. Life prevails. Resistance is futile.”

Ultimately, the Dalek cannot be saved. As soon as its injury is healed, the electronic filters in its memory kick in and it forgets the star birth which led it to conclude that the Daleks were evil. It’s back to what it always was, led by the chains of its species and social morality. Exterminate. Exterminate. Exterminate.

The significance of this is to point out that there are no ‘fixes’ to make us good or evil. It isn’t an on-off switch, and even when we are healthy and at our best, we are still capable of being evil because prejudice is part of our nature, something in our brains that blurs experiences together to make a firm operating code. It is never a war that can be fought passively. It is based on active choice.

The Doctor gives up hope for a little while, until his external conscience reminds him not to be a racist.

“Is that really what we’ve learned today? Think about it. Is that what we’ve learned?

~The Inestimable Clara Oswald

What they learn inside the Dalek is that Dalek’s are capable of independent thought, but that independent thought has been stripped from them to make the perfect soldiers. They have been forced to hold one particular belief, no matter what changes they perceive in the world around them. They have an engineered prejudice, an inner code which overwrites their reason and forbids choice.

So long as they cannot act on their own initiative or learn from the memories incarcerated in their Cortex Vaults, they remain evil beings. Evil, in other words, is to take perceptions on the level that they are presented: as orders, as motivators of instinct, without thinking about them and reaching new conclusions. Evil is the unthinking prejudice of a soldier, the absence of free will.

“Am I a good man?”

The Doctor reveals that after going to Scaro and meeting the Daleks, he realized who he was by knowing he was not them. He positioned himself in direct opposition to them, knowing that everything they were was everything he hated. This is yet another type of morality in being the morality of opposition. In a sense it is an instinctive morality, because it judges right and wrong based on feelings. But most importantly, it is Subjective morality. It is the act of deciding on what is right not as social propriety, or as deference to a superior force of nature, but rather from the perspective of an individual actor set against all of these things. An individual’s morals are based on choices that are made despite the pressure of these external forces.

But there’s a problem that comes with subjectivity: it marks all choices as equal. It presents the notion that choices are little more than personal opinion, whim and emotion. If The Doctor’s nature was primarily based on hatred, could he honestly say his choice was any better than a Dalek’s?

“I see beauty. I see endless, divine perfection.”

“Make it a part of you. Put it inside of you, and live by it.”

“I see into your soul, Doctor. I see beauty. I see divinity. I see… HATRED. Hatred of the Daleks. And it is good.”

Here we see the war between the subjective hate The Doctor has nurtured, and the objective acceptance of the perfection of the universe. Both are fighting within him. The Doctor does hate. By seeing beauty, he admits love. Love and hate are inside of him simultaneously, fighting for supremacy. He makes a conscious effort to choose love over hate; peace over war. Understanding over obliteration. In this the nature of morality cannot be more clear: it is choice. Not only having a choice, or producing choices, but in making a choice you can live with. The Doctor’s choice is to unite his subjective morality with an objective morality, claiming one as the other and through it holding himself up to something higher than race or emotion; he is a scientist. He sees the perfection of the universe as his own personal perfection.

But Rusty does not. Even turned into a tool against the Dalek empire, it lets hate dominate over beauty. It fails to become good, even though it fights evil, because extermination is more important to it than perfection. It makes the wrong subjective choice, falling to the trap of believing an objective will has no relevance.

“I am not a good Dalek. You are a good Dalek.”

~Rusty

It doesn’t really matter that the Doctor is flesh and time and the Daleks are pus and metal: in a similar way that we could speak of Daleks as humane or inhumane, and endow them with the potential of humanity, they speak of The Doctor as Dalek, having inside of him the potential for both good and evil. It is individual choice that makes a person good or evil. Not their race.

A bad wolf follows the orders of her stomach. A good man chooses its own orders.

Miniaturization?

Symbolically this looks at the idea of what happens when a body becomes a person’s universe, the objective “Universal Law” that is one component in choosing moral behavior. The intention of this is to point out that moral objectivity isn’t only something that operates out in the world, but inside people, too. The Doctor, if taken as a follower of objective morality, believes in beauty and perfection because everything in the world around him gravitates towards beauty and perfection. But in entering a universal body of a Dalek, everything around him instead gravitates to disgust and extermination. If he were purely objective, he would adopt these policies as his guiding laws. Good becomes the subjective decision to act against the will of the universal Dalek. It is questionable whether The Doctor would succeed in fighting against this evil universe if he had not brought his own external (objective) conscience with him in the form of Clara. He himself sees that his subjective will towards the Daleks is to commit evil, and if the objective decision too is evil, he has lost sight of all possibility of good.

Companions as Conscience

A recurring theme in Doctor Who is in that he lacks the moral centre needed to make good judgments. This is why he chooses human companions, and debatably, female companions. Being an immensely ancient and powerful being, there are times when his bedside manner is truly deplorable, as he has the power to do anything – anything – and none of the awareness of how it might impact an individual life, governed by fragmented perceptions (feelings) of what he sees clearly. While he tackles the big problem of fixing wounds in the galaxy, his companion acts as a nurse and treats the individuals affected by the problem, just as when combatting a plague a doctor investigates and fights the symptoms while the nurse keeps the patients alive long enough to benefit from a cure. Because of this, they often arise as his best resource for acquiring important details he may have overlooked in the course of diagnosis, such as in this episode when Clara points out that when liberated from anatomy, Rusty would act against the Daleks.

Humans, perishing little things that we are, imperfect in sense and sensibility, are the perfect companions for The Doctor, being the emotional or ‘subjective’ component functioning in a universe where he plays as an objective god. Females are selected over males because they are seen to be more in tune with the emotional, more likely to use diplomacy and understanding over ‘Soldiering’ when confronted with the unknown. They stand up to him when he is losing his ‘humanity’ rather than blindly following his orders.

This is the function of a conscience: a con-sci-ence: a complete condition of knowledge, or a regard of all things. To have an awareness of all factors of the universe, both very complex and very basic. While The Doctor has a knowledge of complex things, he could never be accused of being basic. He needs a human for that. Together they form conscience, making good decisions for the patient and for their condition.

Aristotle: Medicine & Ethics

The medical spacecraft where this episode takes place is called the Aristotle, named (presumably) for the forefather of the scientific movement. Aristotle did not make his mark on medicine so much as he did on ethics. But it is important to note how deeply the two are entwined. Who is put in the position of doing more good or harm to an individual life than a doctor? Doctors blur the line between good and evil, hurting others in the process of healing them. Sometimes they are even called upon to fix things that are not broken, and are faced with the ethics of changing a person’s nature to be socially acceptable, even if doing so is against that person’s will. This episode cleverly portrays the obscurity of morality through the practice of medicine.

Particular to this episode, Aristotle’s concept of Ergon is exhibited, the idea that all things have a proper function and are judged as ‘good’ by adhering to it. A good pencil writes marvelously without splintering or needing to be sharpened regularly. A good poison kills efficiently and with the required amount of suffering. Ergon is goodness as functionality. In this sense, Daleks are good by exterminating efficiently. The Doctor’s haunting question, “Am I a good man?” takes on a darker edge: does he possess any of the qualities of a functional human being? Can he even pretend to be one? Or is he so utterly alien as to be unable of even knowing what is right by other species?

To continue the course in Aristotelian ethics we have Logos, or Reason, which is taken as the correct framework for the animating spirit of man. In a sense this spirit it the ‘objective’, or the ‘form’ common to all men, oftentimes contradicted by the ethics of contextual decisions. An ideal human does not hack off people’s limbs. But a doctor might, to stop an infection. This is Phronesis, practical wisdom under which decisions can be made in the grey between Logos and Ergon.

Recap on Subjectivity and Objectivity:

Subjectivity   – The belief that the Subject of the universe is the Self, or the Observer, or the Decision-Maker (in brief, You, reader). All other things in existence are objects on which the Subject acts.

Objectivity     – The belief that the Subject of the universe is external to the Self. The self and other things in existence are all objects, acting according to the will of a conceptual Subject.

While some might say “Well it’s all perspective, innit?” it really isn’t. Yes, we all make decisions. But who we are to begin with is entirely a sum of nature and nurture, determined by contact with objects around us and our ability to reason out their meaning. Rebellion to an Objective Subject is based on the failure to reason, and while it is entertaining resistance is ultimately futile and a predetermined failure, just as if at this very moment you chose never to urinate again. Objects act against others until logic forces an assertion of universal will. While an illusory freewill gives us all an impression of being a Subjective Subject, it is an awareness of the limitations of choice that offer a counterexample, and an ultimate truth: what is Subjective and acts askew to the Objective is suicidal, whether as an individual or as a society, such as in the Dalek Empire. What is done from a Subjective vantage aligned with the Objective may temporarily fail but will ultimately succeed, promoting life, longevity, and perfection.

PINK

Clara is joined in this episode by a new love interest: ‘Rupert’ Danny Pink, who ironically enough used to be a soldier. The Doctor hates soldiers for the same reason he hates Daleks: they kill indiscriminately, following orders rather than making choices themselves, and they destroy things they do not fully understand (most soldiers die in Doctor Who, and in many cases are killed by things acting in self-defense. Many, but not all. When they shoot at things they don’t understand that really are trying to kill them, the Doctor is reasonably quiet.)

Pink is an interesting mess of emotions. On the one hand he respects soldiers (markedly distinct from the officers who direct them), and on the other he is wracked by guilt for accidentally shooting a civilian in the war. He rejects the idea that the only purpose soldiers serve is killing, and makes it known that he spent much of the war digging wells in drought areas.