Death In Heaven (A Rant)

So. There were a lot of things wrong with Death in Heaven, the final episode of the Twelfth Doctor's first season. There were a lot of things wrong with a lot of things in that season. But for me, one really stood out. It showcased the wild incoherence of the show's recent writing in a way that no amount of "bananas" could. It contradicted itself and the purposes it had been set up to establish. It spoke from the heart of something messy and political, something which I'm not used to coming across in my light entertainment, and for the sake of a simple visual salute, tainted itself and its own future. It's the following:

The Tragical Ending of Danny Pink

or

What Does An Emotional Inhibitor Actually Do, Anyway?

So. There's this problem.

Cybermen are emotionless killing machines who want to make everyone like them, killing those who aren't*. An extreme-authoritarian analogue, if you will, whether far-right or far-left.

If you give them emotions, they die on the spot. Because Reasons. I'm okay with that - it's a good message and a good bit of storytelling: people can and do get swept up in political/ethnic/religious conflicts and then spend their lives filled with remorse they were too busy to feel at the time.

Can the power of love prevent someone from committing atrocities in such circumstances? Why yes, of course it can, because of human free will. While we understand the story where the (to invent some ethnicities) Ayese kills the Beean because she feels that the Beeans are the enemies of the Ayese, far more compelling and important to her personal story is the Ceestani girl she lets live and escape because they're in love, even though C will flee and A will never see her again.

But if that's possible, be consistent, for Gods' sakes. There's also stories where the Ayese girl kills her Ceestani lover because the mob she's with force her to, or because of other kinds of fear or compulsion.

All I can think of is how, offscreen, Dafyd is grieving at a grave that opens, and out comes a Cyberman. Terror paralyses him, as it often does to Doctor Who extras. The Cyberman, his little brother, who fell off some scaffolding at work, is now an emotionless killing machine. It holds out its hand with a cry of "DELETE".

Now it's time for the asterisk from earlier. Pop back up and check where it came from.

*This angle seemed to have dramatically changed in Death In Heaven, going from factory-production to nanomachine-enabled conversion; I'm cool with this, but as it appears to shift control and responsibility from "soldier" to "general", it changes the story somewhat.

These Cybermen are different. We can take that for granted: most incarnations of Doctor Who villains are what the writer needs them to be at that moment and nothing more. Their free will, always a scarce commodity, is even further degraded by 1) the fact that their controller isn't one of them and 2) the "babies" thing, which I'm willing to handwave as a way of not having them immediately slaughter the population of the world, but which nevertheless impacts on their place in the story. Their increasingly-limited autonomy helps to underpin the soldier/officer dichotomy the season has spent time building up. That's all good.

But why is Danny Pink special? Is there something about being a Time Lord's Companion's Boyfriend that means that his emotions are special and unique, and he's uniquely placed to resist cyber-control? Was the no-emotions thing really a choice in the afterlife? Why? No other Cybermen were ever given that choice. And how many of them were left in the world after the Great Mass Suicide? Disconnected from the hive-mind, what is it like to be them?

Most importantly, the boiled-down question at the heart of the last paragraph, is this: does Evan, the recently-deceased construction worker, kill Dafyd? Does he retain enough autonomy to resist, or does Dafyd only escape because Evan's had his hamstrings cut by the needs of the plot not to kill him and everyone like him?

This is the question: why is Danny unique? Probably the most troubling message I took from the episode was this: that out of the entire Cyber-army, for no particular reasons and working against the entire season's story-arc, Danny Pink was their officer, and not just in commanding them.

He alone was neither brainless, like the other recently-risen grave-Cybermen, nor aware/complicit, like those around Missy on the steps of St. Paul's.

He alone, in the history of Cybermen, was shown to keep his face, for reasons it's difficult to imagine except to make the audience cry.

He alone was a different category of person from them, in direct opposition to his own personal story, which was about how he wasn't different to other people and the Doctor was.

Danny Pink commanded the vast army of mindless, voiceless, unwilling automata, and the fact that he did so on the orders of his General doesn't change the reason he was able to do so. Because he was different. He was special. And everyone else is just lucky their husbands, wives, brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, children and best friends were "babies", cognitively impaired while the proper programming for their new robot bodies was downloaded, because there's obviously no way that extras could have enough love in them to cause a Cyberman civil war when they killed one another instead of following orders. Emotional inhibition or none - well, it didn't make a difference to Danny. Nor the Brig, but that's a comparison that painfully highlights the embarrassing collapse of Danny's storyline.

Consistency. Does the Ayese girl have a choice about whether she kills her Ceestani lover? If she doesn't, by fear or compulsion or literal programming, that's a horrifying tragedy. If she does, is she special or is that true of all people? If she's special, what makes her special? If it's true of everyone, why isn't it happening everywhere?

In Danny Pink's case, the answer is obvious. He's special. Which goes against the story's message, scuppering the point of his life, as the soldier-in-contrast-to-the-officer, and the tragedy of his death, in return for a cheap, tasteless, jingoistic message for Remembrance Day: that officers are relevant, capable of decision-making, emotion and love; and those they command are mindless, voiceless, cruel and disposable.