The Evil of The Doctor

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• PULL TO OPEN •

“As above, so below. 

From the tiny and ordinary to the vast and celestial.

Mr. Stubbs is the name of the circus chimpanzee in from a serialized story entitled Toby Tyler or Ten Weeks with a Circus collected in book form in 1881. The book, a gritty yarn for kids, was a favourite of both Harlan Ellison and William Burroughs interestingly enough. No idea what might have attracted Burroughs to this tale of lithe wild youths and chattering chimps!

Disney released a film version of Toby Tyler in 1960 and it was this movie adaptation that prompted my beloved cousin Agnes to borrow the name ‘Mr. Stubbs’ for the christening of her ‘Jacko’ chimp toy.

Jacko was a popular Chad Valley ape doll in the early 1960s, when most kids wound up with one of these rubber primates in his rakish striped jersey, like a beatnik bonobo. Like so many of my generation, I had a Jacko of my own and indeed still do – he sits, as he has done for decades, on top of my bookshelf with the same glass-eyed grin I’ve known since childhood – but as a show of eternal devotion to my cousin, there was no option but to name my toy after hers, and so was born Mr. Stubbs 2!

Some combination of the spirit of both our simian pals gives life to Uotan’s faithful sidekick.

I left Nix Uotan, Last of the Monitors, in his human guise at the end of Final Crisis – a cosmic being grounded on Earth disguised as an ordinary human being with everyday problems – like the need to pay his rent, which frames the entire story. 

For his appearance in The Multiversity, we chose to streamline Uotan into a more superheroic figure; I asked Ivan Reis to sex up Uotan’s previous A Clockwork Orange look to make it more of a sleek sci-fi superhero costume in black and gold with an impressive cape. I figured he’d have adopted a style more in keeping with his surroundings in the DC Universe.  

We never really resolve whether or not Uotan’s unnamed human identity is hallucinating his adventures as he lies reading comics on Xannies and Zoloft. Are stories real? Monitors move in mysterious ways…

Superjudge is an album by psychedelic rock band Monster Magnet. Frontman Dave Wyndorf is a long-time comics fan, often citing Kirby in his lyrics. Dave kindly gave me permission to use Superjudge as Nix Uotan’s official superhero name, and he’s thanked in the last issue of the series.

If Nix Uotan is Wotan, the God of Wednesday when the comics come out, if Wotan, like The Babylonian Nabu, Roman Mercury, Greek Hermes, Egyptian Thoth and many others is a god of speed, communication, language,  then Stubbs represents the so-called ‘Ape of Thoth’, the cynocephalus that capers around the silver-tongued mage like the Jester taunts the King, pricking pomposity with humour, obscuring wisdom with inane chatter and madcap interpretation.

Nix Uotan was created to be DC’s Dr. Who equivalent – in this case, a super-powerful black character traversing the many worlds of the Multiverse, solving problems in his cosmic yellow submarine with a wisecracking pirate chimp for company! I’ve always been a little disappointed no-one has thought to pick him up and run with the concept.

As our two heroes travel in their shiftship, the Ultima Thule to answer a distress call from Earth-7, they encounter only ruin and horror and a universe broken and spoiled…”

MASTER: 

Hello, Doctor.

Welcome to The End of Your Existence.

Say 'Hello' to my friends.

I believe we're all acquainted...

..right? Do you like the garb?

I love the garb. 

Got to Dress for The Occasion.

I was just thinking...

We could call this...

The Master's Dalek Plan.

Or The, er... Cyber-Dalek Master Plan, or

The Cyber-Master's Dalek Plan?

I can't quite get it.

But in the end I suppose

we'll just call it :

The Day I Killed The Doctor...

..with a little help

from my friends.

Our Lady :

SCOFFING: Your friends?

You hate each other.

MASTER: 

And the one thing stronger than

their hatred for each other...

..is their hatred for you.

Just took a little handsome

genius to point it out to them.

"What Unites Us is stronger 

than What Divides Us."

I mean, that's very You, that, isn't it?

You love a Team, don't you?

Letting every Tom, Dick and 

Harriet into Your TARDIS...

Well, You have Your Fam.

Now... I have mine.

Our Lady :

So everything else was a diversion?

MASTER: 

No. No. No! 

Not a diversion. Very important!

Three-phase plan. You'll see.

Except you won't.

MASTER LAUGHS

But rest assured, 

without you to defend it,

Earth will fall very, very fast.

I did warn you, Doctor.

I'm going old-school, Doctor.

A Tribute to our elders.

Do you remember The Ultimate Sanction 

for breaking Our Laws?

Our Lady :

[WHISPERS] 

Forced regeneration.

MASTER: 

They even did it to you 

once, didn't They?

Well, maybe more than once. 

Who knows? Not you.

Our Lady :

You don't have the Technology.

MASTER: 

I do. I do. I do!

MASTER GIGGLES

When I ransacked Gallifrey,

I took everything.

But where would he get The Power?

If only I had a planet built for this purpose....

No, wait, wait. I do!

MASTER LAUGHS MANIACALLY

You did get that, right?

A conversion planet.

Except it doesn't only convert organic to Cyber.

I brought it here to help another Conversion altogether.

MUSIC: 

Rasputin by Boney M

♪ There lived a certain

man in Russia long ago

♪ He was big and strong

In his eyes a flaming glow

♪ Most people looked at him

with terror and with fear... ♪

VINDER: 

OK, Doctor. This is my last roll of the dice. I've been

carrying this around with me since you gave it to me.

♪ ..like a preacher

Full of ecstasy and fire

♪ But he also... ♪

You need my help?

I could certainly do with yours.

But I'm not holding out much hope.

♪ Ra-Ra-Rasputin Lover

of the Russian queen

♪ There was a cat

that really was gone

♪ Ra-Ra-Rasputin Russia's

greatest love machine

♪ It was a shame how

he carried on... ♪

Let's get you out of there.

This is Inston-Vee Vinder saying,

if you need my help... Vinder!

..I could certainly do with yours.

MASTER: 

Hello, TARDIS.

Receiving this loud and clear?

Say Goodbye, Yaz.

TARDIS, lock on to his signal.

Forced regeneration, Doctor.

To force you...

to regenerate... into Me. 

Our Lady :

Oh, no! You wouldn't....

Earth-51

JAMIE: 

You're not really going to do as he says, are you? 


DOCTOR: 

No, of course not. 

I said I'd think it over. 

Well, I've thought it over. 

We're staying on and fighting on.

 


ZOE: 

But we'll be fighting on in The Dark — 

We don't know where the next attack will come from. 

Medusa was bad enough!


JAMIE: 

Ah, Medusa. 

Yes, I read about that on This Machine here. 

Wee words keep coming out of it all the time. 


DOCTOR: 

Oh, yes? 


JAMIE: 

Look. 


DOCTOR: 

Let's have a look. 


JAMIE: 

There. Look. 


DOCTOR: 

(reads.) 

“—Cancel-Doctor-test-report-failure—“

Oh, I think I'm beginning to understand. 




JAMIE: 

Well, I wish I was. 


DOCTOR: 

Well, when someone writes about 

An Incident AFTER it's happened — 

That is HISTORY. 


JAMIE: 

Yes....


DOCTOR: 

But when The Writing comes •first•, 

That is FICTION. 

If we'd have fallen into The Master's trap, we would have •become• Fiction. 

Zunderell, The Cosmic Don Quixote is said to originally a native of Earth-51 :

That’s The Planet of The Apes — an ape being  a creature that copies something that it has seen someone else doing first — The Earth which Nix Uotan was originally charged with Monitoring, which is where The Gold Lamp/Central Power Battery appears in the form of a half-burried statue of a liberated slave-woman, at the point where The Land meets The Sea — Earth-51, as a patchwork mosaic Earth, seems to serve as an analogue something like The Collective Unconscious or The Zeitgeist — IdeaSpace or The Land of Fiction.

“Metron gave you a WEAPON against The Gods! WE NEED IT NOW!” — Which is What...?

Active Imagination  — it has to be. And Active Imagination = Will = Liberty

“This, I was trying to say, is what happens when you let bad stories eat good ones. This is what it looked like when you allow the Anti-Life Equation to turn all your dreams to nightmares.

  In the end, there was nothing left but darkness and the first superhero, Superman, with a crude wishing machine, the deus ex machina itself, and a single wish powered by the last of his own life force.

  He wished for a Happy Ending, of course.”

And I Trust Nature.

“So I began to think more and more about The Individual, and I looked into what that actually meant. And what it was, was a structure that was pretty much created… The Ego structure was created out of what Julian Jaynes calls The Bicameral Mind becoming One Mind.

And apparently – according to him – he says that back in the old days of the Greeks, and the earliest writing of the world, people didn’t have self-consciousness in the way that we have. 

 

They didn’t have Egos. They didn’t understand themselves as “I” in the same way that we do. Because the corpus callosum – that connects the two hemispheres of the brain – wasn’t connected.

So if you heard A Voice, That Voice was God. 

And Homer, and all those guys, you’ve got plenty of examples of people hearing The Voice of God, and acting on that. 

Alexander constantly acted on The Voice of God.

Julian Jaynes suggests that it wasn’t The Voice of God – it was The Voice of The Left Hemisphere of The Brain communicating with The Right Hemisphere of The Brain, interpreted AS a God.

So okay : now we’ve got the two things joined together. We’ve got This Beautiful Bridge in The Middle that links The Two.  

 

But we have The Ego Structure – which was created when those things linked.

Suddenly we’re like: “Oh fuck. I am I. I am the I Am. This is my.. my god is this. I am separate; I am one.”

We made This Idea that we’re somehow separated from Nature.

No we’re not. Bullshit!

Again, I read New Scientist last month, right – and They’re talking about Nature: “We must control Nature; we must do this. How do we deal with our relationship with Nature?”

 

We  are fucking Nature! 

There’s nothing on this planet that is not “Nature”. 

Power Stations are Nature; 

Atom Bombs are Nature. Because Nature made us to make those things. 

 

Either you Trust Nature, or you don’t Trust Nature – and I Trust Nature.

So we have to ask: What is Nature getting at here?

If we ignore this crap that we’re somehow isolated from Nature; that we somehow have to tame Nature… 

 

Nature Knows Exactly What it’s Doing.

 

The Planet is NOT in Danger. We are.

The Planet’ll survive. The Planet’s been through, like, ammonia atmospheres and impossible-to-live-on, and everything dead – and it gets its way back out of it.

 

We’re in Danger. Or So We Think, because our hubris tells us that we are in danger. 

Our hubris tells us that we’re about to Destroy The World; We’re gonna Destroy The Planet; We’ll fuck The Atmosphere.

 

No. We’ll fuck our atmosphere. But some trilobites’ll come along and live in anything we create.

So that is not The Problem.

 

The Problem is we’re standing here at the 21st century, stuck with Individuality. Because we’ve believed in it so much; it seemed so important that we should all be distinct. What happens if we stop being distinct?

 

And what happens if we think about Individuality as something that was actually just scaffolding for where we are now?

 

So if you create a skyscraper, you put up your scaffolding, you build the building – and what’s happened here is that we’ve overlooked the building, and focussed on the scaffolding.

Y’know – why aren’t we taking the scaffolding down?

Let’s do it today: take the scaffolding down.

Because the individual was a way to get us to this point. And what I really think.. and basically why I’m here is to try and punt this notion.

 

After doing this comic book for six years; after thinking about this stuff for six years; after proving that it works for six years, I’m left with this notion: 

We’ve Been Fooled, and We’ve Fooled Ourselves, and We Continue to Fool Ourselves – 

And, like Doug said: 

There is No “Us” and No “Them” – There’s Just Us. 

And somehow we’re trying to make This Thing work. 

And it does Work.