Pah

The War Machines

Here is a further bulletin on the London emergency. It is announced, a few minutes ago, that the machine which is now being described as the War Machine has successfully been put out of action. The city of London has responded with characteristic calm to the emergency.

Calm is certainly what characterises this story. And coldness. The Doctor dismisses Ben’s concern for Polly, saying “if we worry about one person we shall never solve anything,” to which Ben offers the sarcastic aside “Looks such a kind old bloke too, doesn’t he?” In fact I misheard the latter as “Looks such a cold old bloke too, doesn’t he?” The final cliffhanger works not because, after three episodes of WOTAN’s egoless and methodical plan unfolding, the Doctor strides into confrontation at last, but because he’s standing cool, almost as if observing a bus he isn’t going to catch.

If you think there’s such a thing as a pseudo-historical (and I’m not sure there is) then this is the first pseudo-contemporary, a type which the series has made such good use of up to the present day. Just as Spooner earlier made the past stories very much present, Ian Stuart Black here makes the Earthbound fantastic. The Doctor takes an interest in the modernist Post Office Tower within moments of landing and observes “You know there’s something alien about that tower, I can sense it!” There are no extraterrestrials here (other than the Doctor), no interference in history (other than the Doctor’s). It is our own present strange moment that concerns the story.

We’ve reached a standstill. We cannot develop the Earth any further. Further progress is impossible. That is the conclusion reached by WOTAN.

More than Kit Pedler’s idea of cybernetic intelligence, this is the astonishing core of the story. There is a future, but it does not belong to humanity. Our own instrumental philosophy is the end of us, but it is not the end. The Doctor and WOTAN do a silent dance. The latter wants the former’s brain. The former recognises the latter as deadly. There is no rebuttal from the Doctor “There’s nothing more important than human life. Machines cannot govern man!” There are simply two programs in opposition.

I’ve seen Dodo in The Ark, The Gunfighters and The War Machines—three of her five stories. Where Steven is a kind of copy of Ian, Dodo is a kind of copy of Vicki who’s a kind of copy of Susan. There seems little to distinguish her from the earlier characters or indeed from the background characters of each story.

In Episode 2 of The War Machines, the Doctor sends her off to the country house of a civil servant (who he’s just met and doesn’t like) so that she can recover from WOTAN’s mind control. Obviously unimpressed with this evaluation of her strength, she returns the favour in Episode 4, by sending word via Polly that she’s decided to stay on Earth.

Surely the most ignominious exit ever.