Discursive Essay: Doctor Who S8.05 - Time Heist

The Time:            2000 + some more years

The Place:           Karabraxos Bank

The Situation:   Starlight Robbery

RECAP

Skip to the TARDIS picture if you don’t need a recap.

The Doctor and Clara are discussing an adventure. The Doctor answers his phone, and ends up in a room with Clara and two other members of a team who have been enlisted in a bank heist. A mysterious ‘Architect’ gives them vague details about the heist. Their memories have been wiped, but there is a recorded message which lets them know they have consented to the wipe. They have little choice but to carry on with the heist.

Their team (Team Not-Dead) includes:

• An augmented cyborg named Psi, an expert hacker who has to deal with ‘dry glitches’. Facing interrogation in prison, he deleted his own memories to protect his friends and family. For robbing the bank, he is promised a reboot drive that can make him regain his memories.

• A shapeshifter named Saibra. Her mutant genes force her to transform into anyone who touches her, making it impossible for her to be intimate with anyone without being freaky. For robbing the bank she will receive a gene suppressant that allows her to touch others without triggering her ability.

• Clara, a ferocious high school English teacher from the planet Earth. Seriously though, if you don’t know the kind of shit she deals with on a day to day basis, watch Skins and you’ll have some idea. Undoubtedly one of the toughest explorers in outer space.

• Last and certainly not least, The Doctor, an enigmatic Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey. He is face-blind and has cross eyebrows. An egomaniacal needy game-player.

As soon as the heist starts, they are introduced to The Teller, an imprisoned alien with mind-reading and mind-eating capabilities. The Teller is commanded by the bank’s manager, a cheery sociopath named Delphox, who is acting under the orders of the bank’s director, the eponymous Karabraxos. The Teller is the reason Team Not-Dead has been memory wiped: it uses its mind-reading ability to sniff out guilt in the bank’s patrons (who are career criminals, and must therefore be guiltless in their own minds if not in reality), and then crushes those who pose a threat to the bank. The only safety from this introspection is to lose self-awareness (Don't Think).

Team Not-Dead is led through the bank, placing faith in the plan of the Architect. They are provided with an ‘exit strategy’ (assumed at first to mean a lethal poison) and with the select information and tools which the Architect provides. The Doctor takes charge, and conducts the mission with his usual grumpy charm.

“Underneath it all, he isn’t really like that.”

“It’s very obvious that you’ve been with him for a while.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re really good with the excuses.”

~Clara and Psi

The first time they face The Teller in the vault it hones in on Saibra, who has the greatest ‘guilt’, or as it may be termed, ‘Self-Hatred’, which has its basis in to her mutant nature. She uses the exit strategy to avoid becoming a semi-conscious soup bowl.

The Teller pursues them as they sneak their way through the lower levels of the vault. It finds Clara and starts to attack her, but Psi saves her by way of self-sacrifice. This is important because Clara is a relative stranger, and he still values her life more than his own, which is a second example of Self-Hatred. Psi uses the exit strategy to avoid becoming a soup bowl.

When they encounter an obstacle that can only be breached during an unpredictable solar event, The Doctor determines that the Architect must be in the future, planning the heist at a point vulnerable in the past. They recover the reboot drive and gene suppressant before they are captured by Delphox and The Teller. Delphox reveals that she has assured The Teller’s loyalty, claiming that everything has its price.

Psi and Saibra are revealed to be alive, masquerading as guards. The ‘exit strategy’ was really a teleport device that takes them to a ship in planetary orbit. The team continues on with the heist, toward the private vault in Karabraxos’ office.

Karabraxos is revealed to be a tyrannical ruler of a criminal empire, cloning many ‘Delphox’s from her own genes to act as her managers, replacing them when they fail her.

“She hates her own clones. She burns her own clones. Frankly, you’re a career break for the right therapist.”

The Doctor hates the Architect, and this gives him a clue to the Architect’s identity: as someone overbearing, manipulative, and far too clever, he suddenly realizes that he is the Architect. He has been plotting the course of the whole episode.

More, he realizes that the one with the greatest motive to act against Karabraxos is Karabraxos herself, as she is self-hating, and in the future she has come to regret her past. He gives her his phone number. The Karabraxos Bank faces imminent destruction from the solar storm, and Karabraxos leaves.

In the far future, she calls up the Doctor to act against the part of herself she hates the most – the part that imprisoned The Teller by threatening to kill the one other of its kind still in existence.

Meanwhile, in the past/present/future, The Teller scans The Doctor and doesn’t destroy him. Its telepathy lets him see the memories erased at the beginning of the episode, and The Teller realizes that The Doctor has come to set it free.

The Teller releases its companion and escapes the bank with the Doctor and his team. He drops them off on a solitary planet, and sends the team home.

ANALYSIS

The theme of this episode rests solidly on trans- states, and judgement as it exists through Self-Hatred and Self-Love.

Self-Hatred: The Transformation

“Would you trust someone looking back at you out of your own eyes?”

~Saibra

This concept is much less scary than it first sounds. All the main characters in the story except The Teller have their self-hate pointed out to some degree:

• Saibra hates herself because of her nature, how she was born a mutant.
• Psi hates himself because of his circumstances, which made him give up his memories.
• The Doctor hates himself because he acts as an officer, giving orders to others which he himself won’t follow.
• Clara hates herself because of her nurture, as she sees herself slowly becoming like The Doctor.
• Karabraxos hates herself because of her own imperfection, and because her aspiration for perfection consumes her.

In all these instances except one, the characters successfully manage to externalize their hatred. This means that they have severed one part of their identity from their active self with the intention of destroying it:

•  Saibra separates her identity from her body.
• Psi separates his identity from his amnesia.
• The Doctor separates the ‘officer’ identity of himself from the ‘soldier’.
• Clara separates her identity from The Doctor, hence her pivoting love/hate for him – and the pivoting love/hate for herself which prevents The Teller from locking onto her thoughts.
• Karabraxos doesn’t. She is truly self-hating, meaning that she cannot separate her faults from her central self. Thus, she destroys her whole self by implementing clones, and destroys part of herself (the decisions she made) by implementing time travel.

In the practice of Self-Hatred, it is important to pinpoint what is being selected for the active, hating self, and what is being externalized as the passive, hated self. For this the nature of ‘hate’ need be divulged:

Put simply, ‘hate’ is an inseparable species of judgement. When a person loves something, it means that they recognise its worth, and feel pleasure at attaining its value. Hate is the concordant opposite – to recognise worthlessness, and feel pleasure at being rid of it.

So it can be said that what hates is what judges, the part of identity that is aware of value, and pursues worth.

In the case of Karabraxos, constructive hatred is impossible because what she actually hates is her poor judgement. She makes terrible, superficial choices, locking herself away in a vault with stolen treasures, enslaving and controlling the beautiful and unique rather than seeing it thrive, and devoting her administrative talents to the protection of thugs and criminals. In Karabraxos’ case, Self-Hatred feeds a self-destruction to which the only release is true death.

In the case of Team Not-Dead, however, the effect is the reverse. They actually see their judgement as the best part of themselves, and arrange their identity according to its dictations. The amnesiac state they find themselves in is included to intensify this, and to establish judgement as a sort of ‘soul’: a higher existence deprived of their immediate worldly identity (their choices). Self-awareness is an awareness of their motives and judgements; they instead have to base choices on something beyond identity, what might be called their own Self-Esteem. Four Karabraxos clones wiped of their memories and placed in the same situation would never make it to the heart of the vault, even should they have the same abilities as Team Not-Dead – they would lack the self-esteem to judge the situation correctly, trusting neither themselves nor those around them.

What this teaches is that there is a very important difference between ‘Self’ as Judgement and ‘Self’ as Identity. Identity is fluid – facets of identity actually exist in one of three states, which are called Ultra-, Trans-, and Cis-:

Ultra- (Latin, ‘The Far Side Of’) is a state in which everything that encounters this facet of Identity is expected to conform to it. This is a state adopted by extremists, often those who hold together an identity by force, as Karabraxos does by militantly ruling over her bank and its management.

It isn’t entirely forceful, and isn’t always nonconsensual. An Ultra- may simply believe that all identity will conform to their own in time as a matter of rightness. But they’d be an asshole to say as much every time they met you.

It also encompasses the idea that facets of identity ‘pull’ toward a certain alignment. Karabraxos, who is Ultraggressive, may find that other facets of her identity become trans- in an attempt to exemplify that ultra- state. Suppositionally (and only as an example) she may become transmedicated in the search for medication that lets her control her body. She may also be considered something along the lines of ‘transingular’, in that she is attempting to produce perfect clones of one genetic reality.

The Doctor is predominately an Ultra- outside of this episode. It’s probably why he’s manipulative, meddlesome and controlling. He’s a special kind of Ultra-, though: one that exists as a counterforce to other Ultra-s. This kind of Ultra- action is seen as acceptable – even admirable – more than any other: if someone uses force on ‘the far side of’ identity, it requires someone on the opposite end of the spectrum, also a ‘far side’, to maintain balance.

Cis- (Latin, ‘The Near Side Of’) is a state in which an Identity is consistent with a judgement of worthwhile values. Cis- can be seen as an end-state to a facet of personal Identity, if an end-state is even conceivably possible.

In its regular sense, the term ‘cis-’ relies on an external judgement on the combinations of facets that are ‘normative’, which is to say they are aligned to reflect with the values of other facets that relate to them (or are seen to relate to them). The most common example of this is in sexuality and gender: we presume Clara is a woman, and the cisgender relative to this is ‘female’. But, ultimately, a completely regular sense of the cis- notion establishes permanent ideals of norms based on external judgements, not on internal, self-motivated judgements. In an internal, individual sense, a person may only feel the value of the ‘symmetry’ of their facets when they do not resemble the external cis- model at all; their parts are only ‘on the near side’ of one another when they are in a state that external judges would call ‘trans-’ (which implies a state of change). This is why those who are comfortable with their identity but still outside of ‘normative’ structures are labeled differently from other cis- types, as ‘queer’.

Cis- is often mistaken as a sign of sound judgement or concrete self-esteem, but is actually more than often a sign that people believe they cannot possess the values they deem worthwhile, or that they are incapable of judging a way in which they might more fully possess their identity.

This episode doesn’t deal with Cis- characters, but rather with characters attempting to attain internally valued Cis- identities.

Trans- (Latin, ‘To Go Beyond’) is a state in which an Identity is inconsistent with a judgement of worthwhile values. Trans- is the state we find Team Not-Dead in; they are all there to change a facet of their identity to something they value, and are all in a process of personal and actual struggle.

It is important to note that not all struggles for the attainment of a valued identity are the same, even though they are trans-. This can be because of actual physical barriers, but also because of immense social pressures.

For example, in this episode Psi is the closest interpretation of a Cis- character: he has been something he values, and he has had his cis- identity before. He doesn’t want to become something new, he wants to recover what he was in the beginning. No-one objects to this, they all believe it is a good, ‘brave’ decision.

Saibra on the other hand is the closest interpretation of a trans- character who is likely to be identified by others as queer for the remainder of her life: the group automatically questions her decision, believes she is wrong for ‘not accepting herself as she is’, and sees her choice as one more cowardly in ‘running away’ from her birth identity.

They are both trans-, but there is a double standard in the way they are perceived. This mainly has to do with direction – it’s always easier to go with the flow than against it, to remain what people expect rather than change.

So: ‘Self’ as Identity is fluid across Cis-, Ultra- and Trans- states. The episode shows this by having its characters quest for a different identity, and attain it.

But what about ‘Self’ as the vital, judging, ‘soul’ part?

Karabraxos is our interpretation in this case, as the one whose soul is inherently flawed. Right up until the end of her life, we see her lashing out at her whole self, not at externalized facets of her identity but at the rational, judging part of it that makes consistently bad decisions: at the identity’s managers. It’s not lazy writing, that both the bank and the villain share the name ‘Karabraxos’. Her character is locked in a continuous struggle to manage herself.

She does at least try to change the quality of her judgements at the end, and the method chosen is Remorse. Remorse in its truest sense is to go back on one’s decisions, to seek not to change the identity, but the soul. To reassess one’s values is the purest form of guilt-driven self-destruction. And yes, it is possible to hate the soul, and let it liquefy and become something better. But when you love it – when you have self-esteem – then it is very solid indeed.

Self-Love: The Tale of the Teller(s)

The story of the Tellers is told so that at the end, the message of Self-Love (not like that) is pulled into the spotlight, where Self-Hatred has been dancing all the while. It’s important to note the anatomy of the Teller, particularly its stalked eyes. In the process of mind-crushing its victims, its eyestalks twist so as to look at one another, symbolically an indication of Self-Awareness. In this act of reflection, the Teller itself survives while those around it are scoured for guilt (self-hatred) and are destroyed should they reveal any. The idea behind this is that, juxtaposed, the perfection of one thing can cause the destruction of the facets around it, just as it does with Ultra- states. This really just says that existence requires love, which seems a pretty obvious conclusion. The trick is that change requires hate. If a person is forbidden to hate, they can’t change. If they are stuck as something they can’t love, they can’t exist. Which is a cultural example of a viral reaction called lethal aggression, and the very basis of ‘Normative Culture’.

 The Tellers walk into the sunset as the only two of their kind left in existence, practically mirror images (Cis-), accompanying themselves down into an Eden as a united Judgement and Identity.

The message is that in the end, having split yourself into Subject and Observer, you are two of a kind that never was and will never be again.

Appreciate yourself. Set yourself free. Do whatever it takes, to make sure Self & Self remain united.

The Architect: The Doctor as Transitive

This episode integrates very well into the arcing parable of officers and soldiers, and Clara’s slow evolution into an equal of The Doctor. This is because within the theme of self-hatred, the ‘Soul’ and ‘Identity’ form the same kind of dualistic relationship as the ‘Soldier’ and ‘Officer’.

The Soul, as a sense of judgement and value, is sibling to the Officer (the Governess, the Superego, the Ideology). It is Directive – a moral conscience which tells people what they should do. It should not be mistaken for something inherently rational, or declared inferior if intuitive (there are good intuitive thinkers, and bad intuitive thinkers). It may tell a person that their world is wrong or their body is vile without explaining why, and without that explanation the rest of the identity is still expected to follow along.

The Identity, as an amalgamation of characteristics and decisions, is the Soldier. It is Active, following the plan devised by the directive Self. This means that it has to deal with all the rules of the game, dig the proverbial trenches and face the reality of the decisions the Soul makes. The Directive part feels love and hate – the Identity feels strife and pain. Sometimes without even knowing why.

“I still don’t understand why you’re in charge.”

“Basically, it’s the eyebrows.”

~ Psi & The Doctor

In the planning phase of the break-in, The Doctor strategically manages the plan as himself, a united Soul and Identity. He is not one or the other.

In the execution, he must follow the plan as a different person, not his unified, Ultra- self, but one whose Soul and Identity have entered an unaligned, Trans- self state.

During the execution he is forced to be the Soldier, or ‘Identity’. He isn’t party to any of the reasons behind his identity, or the Officiated decisions made by his Soul. He still has his judgement, but its only available choice is that of any soldier: to follow a commanding officer, or reject it. He can’t see the full picture, which means he risks judging wrongly at any point. This is the root of his self-hatred: he is a curious person who wants all the details. He’s been denied all the details by the Architect. Therefore, he hates the Architect for denying him the curiosity that is his identity. But the judgement he trusts – what pulls him along – is his own self-esteem. He knows from the recording at the beginning of the heist that he chose to undertake it as a willing participant. He trusts himself, even though his identity – curiosity & control – has been compromised.

Tower Mythos?

There are certain clear distinctions I’d immediately draw between this episode and elements of The Tower Mythos, most particularly the ‘Wizard of Oz’ interpretation. In it we have our tin man (Psi, the cyborg who deleted his heart), a cowardly lion (Saibra, who has claws and would not use them), a brainless scarecrow (The Doctor, removed from his own rationale) and of course Clara as Dorothy, our unifying protagonist. Karabraxos is naturally our wicked witch (or witches, as it may be), and the bank – practically a gold brick depository. The Architect may be interpreted as the Wizard, as he is a shadowy figure who promises to dish out hearts, brains, and courage to those who do as he says.

This is distinctly Tower Mythos because it deals with anti-heroes: ones who hate themselves throughout the story in the course of unifying what they have constructed in their mind with what actually exists in the physical world.