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BBC Kerblam! |
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| Story No. | 309 | 
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| Production Code | Series 11, Episode 7 | |
| Dates | November 18, 2018 |
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With Jodie Whittaker, Bradley Walsh, Tosin Cole, Mandip Gill
Written by Pete McTighe Directed by Jennifer Perrott Executive Producers: Chris Chibnall, Matt Strevens, Sam Hoyle |
| Synopsis: A package arrives for the Doctor, but someone needs help in the Keblam corporation. |
A Review by Aristide Twain 17/12/19
There exist two Kerblam!s, superimposed, quantum-style, upon one another.
One is a fairly exciting Doctor Who adventure for the fans; as much like the Tennant or Capaldi eras as Series 11 gets, and all the better for wear. The omnipresent Kerblam-Men are, in both voice and design, the best "new monsters" in all of Series 11, hands down. (It continues to baffle me that Chibnall thought the Stenza and the SniperBots were the monsters worth bringing back in the finale when there were perfectly good Kerblam-Men and Remnants to spare. Even the freaking Morax would have been more satisfying! But I digress.) The pace is vivacious, the Doctor proactive, the world well-realized, the guest cast strong. And the story is nicely unpredictable, while still making complete sense (and being just as fun) upon rewatch. Unusually for the Chibnall era, there are even some full-on comedy moments such as the job assignments and the bashful robot Twirly.
That Kerblam!, in a vacuum, is by all means one of the top stories in Series 11, alongside Demons of the Punjab.
There, is unfortunately, another Kerblam! lurking beneath the surface, namely the one where Peter McTighe created an abstract science-fiction story based entirely on cyberpunk tropes without it ever quite clicking with him that those tropes are drenched in anti-capitalism activism. And, as such, that pulling a "clever, expectations-reversing plot twist" on the "corporate AI gone rogue, brave freedom fighters fighting robots" story would end up making something... well, not even something actively pro-capitalism, but something utterly politically incompetent.
The much-decried fact that the Doctor ends up making a speech about how "the System isn't the problem" isn't really the big issue, though certainly the fact that this phrase didn't look off to McTighe should be a warning sign. That line is actually grossly misinterpreted; as she has done throughout the episode, the Doctor is here referring to the sentient AI known as "the System", not about 'the system' as in 'the economy'. But, you see, that's kind of the problem: the resolution hinges on the revelation that the Kerblam central AI itself is a sentient individual with its own thoughts and (ultimately benevolent) motives. Unless you make the story about that, then you can't just plop such a concept as "Skynet has feelings too" in your "corporate AI goes rogue" story without it stopping to have any applicability whatsoever to the real world, whether as a leftist or rightist metaphor, and without bubbling incoherently about things that bear naught but an illusory resemblance to real things. Except it is a resemblance that can't just be ignored in the way you ignore that TARDIS-travel isn't a real depiction of airline safety, because on a surface level the episode couldn't trumpet "Kerblam is Space Amazon" any louder.
Not, of course, that Kerblam! is even consistent about this "the System is a person too, it was crying out for help, and it's a good guy" thing. It did, after all, kill the innocent Kira in cold blood as part of its attempts to placate Charlie, so while Charlie may have been framing the System for these particular thoughtless cold-blooded murders, it actually shows itself to be capable of them. It is baffling that the Doctor okays this. Imagine if an episode ended up with the Doctor coldly murdering a murderer's innocent family in an effort to "show the villain how it feels".
And, ah, yes, Charlie. Well-acted, but his motivations are beyond nonsensical. He's some sort of extremist labor-union terrorist fighting against technical unemployment through job automation, causing him to try and frame the Kerblam System for murder so people will stop trusting robot workers. Except... this is a world with easily-mass-produced robots and human-level AI. Any self-respecting far-left activist in this situation shouldn't be fighting for the right of humans to remain Amazon wage-slaves, fercrissake. They should be fighting for all hard human labor to be given over to robots and capitalism abolished. Is this just the villain's madness, you ask? No: the epilogue has the sympathetic Kerblam bigwigs promising they'll try to hire more humans in the near future, so Charlie is being presented as a well-intentioned extremist, not a raving loon.
Really, under the barest of scrutinies, all this "Go, organics!" business cannot bear any kind of resemblance to real-world job automation. The one thing that would have it make sense is that it's not actually economic concerns, but prejudice against robots. The Doctor actually quips about "robophobia" early on in the episode, stating that she has many dear robot friends (K9? Kamelion? Handles? ...Antimony? who knows quite who McTighe was thinking of, but it's not hard to see he's right). Yet even that is walled off by the Doctor's tacit approval of the "we'll hire more organics" decision at the end.
No, the fact is, Kerblam! is good for 50 minutes' fun-filled entertainment, but it so utterly breaks down upon being given any serious thought that you can't really call it a good episode. I would say this leaves Demons of the Punjab as the only Series 11 episode devoid of a serious episode-shattering flaw, absent the recycled plot twist. With said plot twist in mind, I fear Series 11 doesn't have any ambiguously good episodes at all. It has enjoyable episodes, though, and even the duller ones have enjoyable moments or ideas; Kerblam! is a prime example of that. There's a lot to like here. One just wishes it wasn't wrapped up in an imbecilic unallegory.
Three Theses on Kerblam! by Hugh Sturgess 6/11/24
1. This isn't a cause, you're not an activist.
The episode is pro-Amazon entirely by accident. What the episode is actually interested in is subverting Doctor Who conventions. McTighe can write "classic" Doctor Who in his sleep, and he knows exactly what the audience will be thinking when we see creepily cheery robots with glowing eyes menacing Yaz while people go missing. It's such a stereotypically Doctor Who scenario that even casual viewers know where this is going: the robots are turning evil. So leading us all the way to that point and then revealing that it's the opposite --- the robots are turning good --- is legitimately a great twist. It gloriously wrongfoots us as to where the episode is going, sending our guesswork back to square one. In an era of the show that falls back on Doctor Who conventions without any interest in examining them, an episode that depends on us recognising those conventions and then subverting them to tell a new story is actually rather brilliant, and if the subject matter wasn't so politically loaded, it would get more credit for it.
The "pro-Amazon message" is a by-product of this. Having done everything he could to paint Kerblam! in a sinister light, McTighe has only five minutes or so to completely reverse himself and point the finger of blame at someone else. This is done so inelegantly that as soon as the Doctor discovers that the computer itself called for her help, all suggestion that the company is actually rather bad is dropped. The "message", so called, isn't explicit, it's an implication stemming from the absence of any pay-off to all the bad sides of Kerblam! we just spent 30 minutes seeing.
It's worth putting Kerblam! in the context of British television of the time. And it's notable that the biggest show of 2018, which finished airing two weeks before Series 11 started, was Bodyguard, which pulls a similar twist with who its villain is. Spoilers ahead for those who haven't seen a seven year old show: the series wants us to think that the repeated attacks on the Home Secretary, blamed on Muslims and organised crime, are false flags orchestrated by MI5, but reveals that actually it was the evil Muslim terrorists and organised crime all along. This ends up tacitly endorsing the Home Secretary's proposed invasive and illiberal electronic surveillance laws, but there's no sense that the creators recognise this. Remarkably, this exact sort of twist happens in Vigil and Trigger Point as well: they try to misdirect you with red herrings that would point the finger of blame at powerful insiders only to reveal that actually it was demonised outsiders all along. So McTighe is certainly not alone here.
It's wrong to say that Bodyguard is a consciously pro-surveillance-state series or Vigil is a consciously pro-Trident text. It's wrong to say that Kerblam! is "pro-Amazon". What they really are is without a single shit to give about what they end up saying. They're fundamentally amoral works of fiction, because they are elevating surprise over every other possible reaction by the audience. They treat things like character, theme and ideas as interchangeable parts you swap around to surprise the audience. The point is the double twist; that it ends up endorsing reactionary politics isn't important.
2. Work gives us purpose, right?
There is a relatively coherent reading of this episode as being entirely concerned thematically with automation, not broader issues of worker rights or capitalism. Kerblam!'s distinctive feature is the army of TeamMate robots. The subject of human superfluousness in the face of fully automated non-luxury capitalism is returned to over and over: Charlie's motivation is explicitly about automation rather than worker rights. This puts the episode's conclusion, in which Judy declares that she'll be recommending that Kerblam! become a majority-organic company, in a different light. The suffering of the people of Kandoka is that they are excluded from work, not that they depend on jobs like Kerblam!'s.
I don't think the notion that human beings derive vital intrinsic benefit from even the most menial work is one that we should uncritically accept, but let's do so for the sake of the argument. The trouble is that we never see any of the teeming, idle masses yearning for the dignity of work. Instead we see kindly Dan unable to see his daughter unless he "splurges on an economy shuttle" once a year. We see him and Yaz hectored by a robot to stop chatting and get back to work. We see the employees given ankle bracelets like criminals. We see sweet little Kira, who sends gifts to anonymous customers every day but has never received one herself, bullied by the oleaginous Slade. Of course we sympathise with the characters we actually meet rather than the hypothetical masses we don't.
It's a massive misjudgement of impact. The episode is about technological unemployment, but the audience sees only that Kerblam! is a nasty place to work. So when the episode's resolution is to get Kerblam! to hire more human workers, it seems so utterly perverse as to be evil. Why should Slade suddenly become a nice person to his human staff just because they'll now be 51% of the workforce rather than 10%? It forgets the universal human rule, that we care about people we know, see and can relate to, not the faceless statistics who suffer far away from us.
There was a way to fix this. After all, isn't the reason machines can do the work of Kerblam! so much better than humans ultimately that Kerblam! expects its workers to be machines? The classical capitalist mode of production, based around mass production and the routinisation of tasks, requires workers to think and behave as machines, performing the same task over and over to yield maximum efficiency. The scientific approach to production embodied in Taylorism and advanced with things like electronic surveillance, timed bathroom breaks, KPIs and so on, are all presupposing the superiority of the machine. What worker would be Kerblam!'s ideal, one that didn't waste time chatting, that always worked at full speed and was trackable wherever they went? A robot, of course.
So linking the two experiences --- the obsolescent majority and the squeezed "lucky few" --- through the way that the logic of mechanical supremacy affects them both would make the episode feel like it was pulling in the same direction. It would mean its themes were as complex as its play with the show's conventions.
3. Systems aren't the problem.
The episode's ending is still bad, for all that it's an innocent mistake. I find the "pro-Amazon message" too confused to really be outrageous. I half-suspect that the notorious line that Kerblam! will suspend operations for a month and the workers will be given two weeks paid leave is just the usual shitty Chibnall-era script-editing, in the same bag as mangled sentences like "quite a grudge you've got against humanity, especially considering you used to be one" or "within its own image".
But what really astonishes me about this episode is the way it excuses the murder of Kira. Kira's death comes at the exact point the episode drops its twist that the computer is actually good. It's Charlie's reaction to Kira playing with bubblewrap that tips off Ryan that he knows more than he's letting on. But the computer's goodness is established purely through the Doctor's authority, overlooking that this oh-so-good computer has just cold-bloodedly murdered the nicest character in the whole episode! And it has done it to "show [Charlie] how it would feel" to lose a loved one.
In some ways McTighe's mistake here is the same as for Point #2. You can't kill Kira, a character defined completely by how sweet and innocent she is, and expect us to shrug it off. (In maybe the episode's most sadistic detail, her final thoughts would have been the crushing disappointment that the only gift she ever received in her life was empty.) McTighe is so keen to nail the twist in a tiny amount of time that he brute-forces the morality of this. The computer is good, therefore it must have killed Kira for a good reason.
It's hard to imagine why the computer felt forced into this horrific course of action. Let's assume for some reason it cannot just tell management that Charlie is planning to murder thousands of people (which I guess is hinted by its incoherent and detail-free plea for help). Was killing Kira in the hope that Charlie would gain empathy really the only option left? This elaborate and cruel scheme seems so far from a logical course of action that it's hard to imagine it could ever have worked. (A fun way to avoid this problem: the computer sees this as offering Charlie a "free sample" of the product he plans to deliver to thousands and asks him to rate his delivery.)
Doesn't this basically prove Charlie absolutely right about not letting computer systems take control of society? The Doctor utters in response the notorious line that "systems aren't the problem. How people use and exploit the system, that's the problem." This episode's few defenders point out that by "systems" the Doctor is explicitly talking about computer systems, not social or economic systems. But… this computer system absolutely is a problem. The Doctor has declared by fiat that the computer is now capital-G Good (another example of the Chibnall era treating good and evil as intrinsic qualities rather than behaviours), even though it's done something any human would consider horrifically immoral. As Aristide Twain says in their review, the Doctor wouldn't murder a baddie's family to make him appreciate how his murderous activity would hurt people, yet she's tacitly condoning the computer doing that to Charlie.
This is the result of a wildly misjudged idea of what the audience will consider most salient. It's simply bad writing, the product of not knowing how a particular moment will land. The episode sees its twist as the most important thing, but if you actually invest in or care about these characters, then Kira's death is what matters.
I said that this is a rare case of a Chibnall-era episode playing with Doctor Who conventions rather than simply taking them for granted. But that ends up being this episode's true sin. Because really this was never about Amazon, or labour relations, or technological unemployment. They're window-dressing. They're visuals McTighe thought a Doctor Who story could employ. And he's right: big spooky warehouses and robots replacing humans are classic Doctor Who things. But that's exactly how they're being treated: "Doctor Who things". They're just the arbitrary means of facilitating what he actually wants to do, which is to tell a clever "Doctor Who Story".
That is the source of Kerblam!'s banal evil. This is a piece of television that is more interested in being a clever Doctor Who story than being about human beings or anything in the real world.