#11
Catastrophea
By Terrance Dicks
Or: Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with Colonialism.
On their way home after Planet Of The Daleks, the Doctor suddenly gets a psychic jolt from the planet Catastrophea and rushes off to investigate. There he finds a world of subjugated natives, uneasy peacekeepers, an opportunistic company waiting to take over and subjugate the natives even more, activists who want to help the natives, drug smugglers and drug users. The general feeling is of a powder keg.
Pretty soon we get the most interesting thing about the book: the fact that, on the face of it, the Doctor can’t help. “This wasn’t one simple evil like the Daleks; it was a complicated and tragic mixture of extraterrestrial and human interaction that he had seen repeated on many worlds. Perhaps he would just have to let this planet play out its own sad history.”
But wouldn’t you know it, he gets dragged in anyway. When Jo intercedes to stop a Company man beating a native they’re both put on the authorities’ watch list. When the activists get wind of this they wrongly assume that the Doctor is their promised revolutionary hero, El Llama. Then the authorities hear about this, and now they think he’s El Llama too. All the Doctor wants to do is leave (because the planet’s problems are too systemic) but all these wrong assumptions prevent him doing so.
It’s a frustrating setup, because almost everyone involved is stubbornly wrong about something in a way that reinforces everyone else’s wrongness, but at the same time it’s sort of interesting that the Doctor gets involved in a crisis genuinely without even trying, in fact despite conscious effort not to get involved. I clung to that while reading Catastrophea because not a great deal else about it is interesting.
The planet, for example, which is actually named Kastopheria but was nicknamed after a catastrophe — something we are told within the prose rather than in dialogue, which seems clunky, and then we’re told a few more times later for good measure. For all the effort though, I still don’t know how to pronounce it. Is it Ca-TASS-trophe-uh, or Cata-STROFF-ee-uh? Either way it feels like one of Ken Campbell’s “jokoids”: something with the shape of a joke that is not inherently funny.
Most of the planet’s troubles are recognisably human, which helps the reader identify with them, but also takes away any particularly exotic alien quality that you might otherwise have expected what with setting it on an alien planet. We’re familiar enough with the plight of natives under the British Empire, for example, to recognise that being replicated here. But it is just replicated, with awful land owners beating their gardeners and calling them “boy”, and customers thrashing their rickshaw drivers for no reason. Emotive, yes, but there’s not much imagination being applied here. Dicks doesn’t even need to break a sweat writing the actual natives — literally, aliens — apart from making them very big and golden skinned, because it’s plot relevant that they are passive and mute. The Doctor and Jo, of course, despair at the way society ignores them and works around them, but the book steadfastly does it too. They’re even referred to as “The People” — an unfortunate bit of New Adventures overlap there — a name they chose themselves that only makes them more anonymous.
There is something to be said for the simple allegory here, literally being so generic that it can represent any subjugation and thus make the point, if you like, that this happens much the same everywhere. But I suspect this is a charitable view, since it’s (British) humans doing the subjugating — so it’s the actual same thing, then — and just generally, knowing his books, I’m not convinced Dicks was thinking along those lines. More likely it’s: here is a thing you will recognise. (Which, to be fair, is a popular strategy.)
There’s a fair bit of that in Catastrophea, with policemen speaking the apparently “immortal words of policemen everywhere” saying “All right, all right, what’s going on here then?” (“Immortal” circa 1970s telly?) Jo sees a military base and comments that it looks just like Fort Apache, “‘Like it’s a Western.’ The Doctor [nods]. ‘Very similar situation.’” There’s even a café where the various parties can all mix on neutral ground which — groan — is actually called “Rik’s” and — groannn — when we meet the proprietor his first line is, “Of all the cafés in all the planets in the galaxy, you had to throw him into mine!” That’s not wearing your influences on your sleeve, it’s painting them on your face.
Dicks has a habit of writing in allusions to stuff he likes, and more generally just transposing settings and tropes wholesale. Look at Megacity (aka 1920s Chicago) in Shakedown and Mean Streets, which comes with old-timey anachronisms galore even though it’s, y’know, on another planet. Catastrophea follows a similar pattern, with drug dealers being just as awful as they were in Mean Streets and The Eight Doctors, and drugs/drug culture being on much the same basic “this is bad” level as they were there. It’s not a bad style, per se, but I find it all just a bit pedestrian. When everything’s an archetype, none of it pops.
Dicks (and the Doctor) at least finds the activists interesting — which is to say, he generally disapproves of their “do-gooding” as it’s not really helping, and he suspects their motives overall. (This contributes to a perhaps unintentional theme of anti-activism in the BBC Books run so far — see also Kursaal and Dreamstone Moon. I’m not sure where all that’s coming from, especially with pro-activist Sam as our representative.) As for the occupying military, they seem benign enough, apart from being an occupying military, and apart from things like General Walton regularly threatening to have the Doctor and Jo shot — before folding every time because they seem like good eggs after all. What a guy!
It’s hard to know where the book really stands on this stuff. The Doctor is confident that everyone should leave the People alone, of course, but he also seems disconcertingly sure that they’ve brought this on themselves, what with them years ago mentally calming their rages in a way that allowed their occupation, and then not fighting back against it. (The Doctor here smacks a little of his anti-pacifist stance in the first Dalek story, an aspect Terry Nation apparently later regretted.) Combined with a general “it’s bad that they’re here but oh well they’re mostly not that bad” attitude to the military, I think it’s best just to avoid looking under the hood here. At least the plot lands on the side of right, eventually giving the planet back to the People. (What it thinks of the People at that point is a little… hazy.)
There is at least, and at last, a sci-fi idea here, with the People having a history of psychic powers and a need to change who they are to avert catastrophe (ahem), only to find themselves mistreated by humanity afterwards. (If you think that sounds awfully like Colony In Space, well done: so does Dicks, who promptly lampshades that fact.) With their source of mental control fading, the People are on the verge of a mass breakdown — think, Vulcans losing their logic — and a violent uprising seems inevitable. They want the Doctor to help them transition to a less controlled way of life, but not a bloodthirsty one.
Continuing the idea of “he doesn’t think he can help,” the Doctor is critically indecisive about all this, and it ends up being a third party that triggers the change for selfish reasons. The People do, indeed, get a bit bloodthirsty before securing the planet for themselves, with the Doctor frantically asking everyone else not to fight back or they’ll make things worse. (There is something quite neat about forcing pacifism back onto the oppressors, but I’m not sure the book really registered it.)
The question of “was it right to interfere” is raised by Jo. (She dwells comfortably at the “charming nitwit” end of Jo Grant writing throughout, showing absolutely no evidence of the desire to leave that the Doctor somehow clocks at the start of this. Ah well, we’ll always have Dancing The Code.) I don’t think Catastrophea ever really grapples with that, since the Doctor’s involvement is entirely involuntary and, at every crunch point, he’s at best asking people to be nice to each other. You could argue these events would generally have happened without him. The psychic business at least allows a revolution to come, and explains why one hasn’t come already (as well as helpfully breaking us away from the “nothing we can do about it” line), but the real answer here is that the People got their planet back because they put up a fight for it. No one really has to make any hard choices, which is a slightly disappointing end to that promising starting point. All told, I’m not sure the story says anything about occupations that isn’t readily apparent.
It all trundles along with the usual easy reading pace of Terrance Dicks. It’s nice to see the Draconians again, although I think it’s a stretch to put one on the front cover. (Based on that I thought we might get a story that really delves into their culture for once, but alas.) Pertwee’s Doctor is very well captured — we should expect nothing less from his script editor — although I sometimes wondered at his outlook in this. What Catastrophea generally aims for is laudable enough, and it’s as nicely digestible as anything else by Dicks, apart from an awkward contrast between its general children’s adventure tone and some blunt swearing. As a story it takes a few too many shortcuts to really achieve anything, but I suppose it’s no catastrophe. Uh.
5/10
No comments:
Post a Comment