Doctor Who: A Town Called Mercy

[calapine]

Ah, sci-fi doing Westerns. The sort of thing I feel like I shouldn't like given the whole 'Western' aspect but, actually, The Gunfighters, Gunmen of the Apocalypse, Back To The Future 3, Spectre of the Gun: smashing. Not A Fistful of Datas though. That's shit.

Anyway, A Town Called Mercy:

• Going to do this bit quickly this week: Amy's outfit; omg, don't want Ponds to leave; do love the popping out for adventures thing, though how long are these trips lasting since Amy's concerned about how much faster they're aging, relative to others on Earth?; OMG THEY KILLED CRICHTON; but he was lovely, even if being sheriff (marshall? what's the difference? isn't that a sheriff badge?) and having horrid facial hair was basically ASKING me to hate on him, he's just lovely; like humans of 19th century dealing admirably with alien contact; the entire episode just looks stunning. Really incredibly gorgeous.
  
  
• By gum, instead of rambling on about everything I liked for a couple of hundred words, I'm going to ramble on about this week's themes. Why? Cause there was a line I liked a lot: "war is another world; you cannot apply the politics of peace to what I did."
  
  So, for my money, Doctor Who's never topped Genesis of the Daleks for discussing the ends justifying the means. There the Doctor is asked, by the Time Lords, to destroy the Daleks before they are created else they might take over the 'verse in the future and the Doctor's torn over whether he has the right to do that. The end is a cop-out, a cheat, and when I'm feeling generous towards Genesis, and I usually am, that works for me. "Would you kill a child to save a million others?" is a hypothetical question. Reality is infinitely more complicated.
  
  And in A Town Called Mercy, we're asked should one person be sacrificed in order to save a town?
  
  The answer's easy: the answer's no. Because this is Doctor Who and the Doctor doesn't cold-bloodedly sacrifice the minority to benefit the majority. Except here, for a moment, he does, and fuck off with that. It's "The Lonely God" bullshit reappearing and although it's quickly shut down by Amy and it's a slow enough episode that it probably needed the drama, fuck off. The Doctor's pissed off and lashing out, but having his morals so easily compromised by a spot of anger and a dude who's a bit like him doesn't say a lot about how ingrained those morals are, and I hate that. Plus there's some bullshit about "honouring the victims" and I sure as hell don't see how victims are ever honoured by either continuing the violence or the fucking death penalty.
  
  I did love Amy pulling a gun on him though. I may have cheered. (And then cheering again when she was shit with it.) That's two for two on her Being The Doctor, because she's right: they have to be better than that.
  
  And the Doctor always was, or at least tried to be, or that was generally the aim, before the Time War when he was A Renegade Time Lord first, rather than The Last of The Time Lords and, as a rule, the switch to the latter has done his characterisation no favours. Anger and guilt lead him to attempt a horrible things and act like a dick way more often than I'd like in New Who.
  
  Anyway, as I said, he gets over it quickly, so it's not that bad. A few words from Amy and he remembers himself. But the 'moral compass disintegrates when travelling alone' thing I hate, and the Lonely God bullshit, I really hate.
  
  So, the hypothetical question, offering a choice between one person or the town, is made more interesting by both the man and the town. The town like the man, he's built a life there, prevented an epidemic, made friends, improved the technology. And he's also what we'd consider a war criminal - he created cyborgs out of people who weren't properly informed about what they were volunteering for and ended up killing a lot of them. Alas, the episode is rather heavy-handed about this dichotomy. Much better is the point Jex makes about how you cannot apply the morality of peace to the reality of war. Soldiers kill, but that's okay because they're soldiers and it's war. Jex killed: he performed surgery without proper consent, but his actions saved millions of lives. Is that worse than ordering millions to their deaths in the trenches because dulce et decorum est pro patria mori says society? Is it worse than dropping an atomic bomb on a city? Is it worse than saying "well, this piece of paper says we've declared war, so now it's not wrong to shoot these people dead" and following through? Or, as someone said to Leo in The West Wing, is all war a crime?
  
  The episode doesn't quite make Jex easy enough to sympathise with. He has no remorse for the immoral surgery, and even then, I'm not sure that would be enough. This is a tricky thing - that tipping point of what I would consider justified and what I wouldn't, because it's war. Star Trek TNG had an episode with a similar theme - where volunteers were enhanced to become better soldiers, but there the conflict was that after the war was over, the enhanced soldiers were shut away in a very nice, but very definite prison, because their enhancements made it impossible for them to reintegrate with society. The government had a clear moral duty to do everything it could to help those it had used so successfully, and they hadn't, they'd tried to sweep the problem away. There, it was too easy to sympathise with the soldier; here, it's too easy not to sympathise with Jex.
  
  The fact that the volunteers were not properly informed didn’t help. If they had been, if they knew the risks, that they might die, that they would be transformed, that they would lose themselves but be saving their people… is that still immoral? Is it still criminal? Should it be?
  
  (It's still a terrible thing he did and I'd consider it terrible informed consent or no, but if, say, it had been endorsed by his society during the war, then afterwards they had turned against him and wanted to condemn him for the horror of what he did, perhaps that would have been closer to the balance that I want from this sort of discussion… it's a difficult and admittedly very individual point I'm looking for - I want to be conflicted when asked "was it moral?")
  
  The Doctor condemns Jex despite being guilty of mass murder and genocide himself. And while there's not enough information on Jex's war to know if that's outright hypocrisy or not, the difference tends to be that the Doctor doesn't start wars. He doesn’t make pre-emptive strikes; he is either struck first or he's acting to defend those who cannot defend themselves. (Another neat thing about Genesis being that whatever crimes they or their descendants might commit in the future, or even by the end of the story, the Daleks the Doctor initially finds are innocent.) He's never been a pacifist, and many of the circumstances he encounters would make pacifism hard to justify, but using force and violence to convince aggressors to leave those weaker than themselves alone? That's a stance I imagine most people can sympathise with.
  
  Anyway, the Doctor finds another way. Which is the right answer to any irritating hypothetical question with two absolute choices. And there are enough parallels between Jex and Mas's situation and the Doctor and the Master's that, yeah, if the Doctor ever did kill himself to stop the Master then I could totally see the Master going "fuck this evil schtick" and deciding to protect the last dudes that were under the Doctor's care. Which is quite nice.
  
  That was the other really neat thing about the episode: violence begets violence, and more violence doesn't end anything, it only inflames it until everyone is dead, and that sucks. The Doctor standing up and saying this stuff, talking down the lad who was about to become a killer, fighting to protect everyone, to keep everyone alive: that was my Doctor. And he was there almost all of the time.

TLDR: Good episode. Asked some questions about war, morality and violence that I very much enjoyed. Didn't like the Lonely God bullshit briefly popping up, did love the Proper Doctor bits.