Tony asks the ultimate question.
War! Good God, y’all! What is it good for?
Errrrrrrm…
Well, that rather depends
on your point of view. If you’re one of the bodies doing the actual fighting of
it, up to your neck in mud, blood, bullets and dysentery, then probably
absolutely nothing, as advertised.
If you’re safe at home, guiding the destiny of a nation from a reinforced bunker or a safe stronghold, it could be argued that war is good for all sorts of things – standing up to offensive ideologies, grabbing land and resources previously belonging to the Not-We, removing infrastructure and human obstacles from a pathway to what you yourself consider a superior outcome… So long as you regard the people who fight the wars as a resource worth spending, and their deaths as the operational cost of victory, war can be highly useful in a whole multitude of ways. Quite apart from which, war is like adrenaline to human cleverness. Absolutely, people will invent clever things, discover new breakthroughs in peace time. But nothing gives an appetite to research and technological development like the thought that someone else is being cleverer than you, and they’re your enemy. And of course, nothing opens up the floodgates of imagination and crucially funding for research, development and technological advancement like that paranoia being played out on a governmental level.
If you’re safe at home, guiding the destiny of a nation from a reinforced bunker or a safe stronghold, it could be argued that war is good for all sorts of things – standing up to offensive ideologies, grabbing land and resources previously belonging to the Not-We, removing infrastructure and human obstacles from a pathway to what you yourself consider a superior outcome… So long as you regard the people who fight the wars as a resource worth spending, and their deaths as the operational cost of victory, war can be highly useful in a whole multitude of ways. Quite apart from which, war is like adrenaline to human cleverness. Absolutely, people will invent clever things, discover new breakthroughs in peace time. But nothing gives an appetite to research and technological development like the thought that someone else is being cleverer than you, and they’re your enemy. And of course, nothing opens up the floodgates of imagination and crucially funding for research, development and technological advancement like that paranoia being played out on a governmental level.
All of which is fairly
horrible, but has the depressing advantage of also probably being true.
Now here’s the thing.
If you’re safe at home,
you have the luxury of viewing a far-away war as advantageous in all of these
ways.
If you’re divorced from
the action by time, instead of space, the effect is the same. The soldiers who
died in the First World War, the Second World War – to us, their deaths are
historical fact, and so are the technological developments that were created to
help them. The world we know has been revolutionised in very many ways by the
wars they fought, and we are the products of the people who either went to
fight but reproduced, or who didn’t go to fight, and passed on their genes. If
peace, instead of war, had happened, things would be different, in some ways
subtly, but in other ways hugely.
That sort of philosophical
argument is at the heart of Peace In Our Time, by Una McCormack.
The First Doctor and
Steven arrive in London in time to investigate the seeming theft of the plans
for the Dreadnought – for the non-history-fans, a class of ironclad ship
that fuelled an arms race which was to ultimately erupt in the First World War.
Are the plans set to be sent to Germany, or is there something darker and more
twisted afoot?
Ruby Watkins, maid to the
Gledhill family, doesn’t know the answer to that, but she does know something’s
not right with her family upstairs. They don’t have the right number of
servants for the house they live in, for one thing, putting extra pressure on
Ruby to fulfil the duties of any number of servants. Then there are the
silences, and the odd stops that shouldn’t be there, when they go still as
statues without, it seems to Ruby, any business to do so.
When the Tardis team’s
mission to investigate the theft of the Dreadnought plans and Ruby
Watkins’ mission to find out about the oddness of her employers collide, a
deeper truth is revealed. Yes, the plans have been stolen, but it’s not the
Germans who are due to get their hands on them. Someone somewhere has found out
quite how useful war can be, and intends to put a stop to it for their own
nefarious purposes.
As a premise for a Doctor
Who story, there’s something intrinsically modern about Una McCormack’s idea
here – it resonates somewhat with the likes of Rosa, where the Doctor
and their companions are out to stop history from being radically perverted
from the course they know, but where time at the point when they interfere or
don’t is still in flux, happening in its moment. If the Dreadnought arms
race doesn’t happen, the major elastic-twist of history that leads to the
explosion of the First World War probably won’t happen. Possibly, just
possibly, peace will prevail. The difference here of course is that the Doctor
and Steven are acting as agents for the war that will come in their version of
accepted history. Arguably, by thwarting the plans of the temporal profiteers
in the early 20th century, they’re the ones at least tangentially
condemning all the soldiers to die in the trenches of France in World War I.
The settlement at the end of World War I was such that it stoked resentment and
anti-European feeling in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, allowing the Nazis a
populist cause to ride into power. Without World War I, it’s questionable – and
historians love questioning this kind of temporal tipping-point – whether there
would have been the thing we know as World War II. So the Doctor and Steven and
the clever and brave Ruby Watkins (with a little help from her feminist
friends), by aiming to ensure the Dreadnought plans are retained in
England and returned to the proper authorities, are at least arguably making
themselves responsible for all of the carnage that resulted.
No pressure.
The difference is, when
dealing with the First Doctor, there’s much less trepidation, much less web of
time carefulness to contend with – certainly, he’s the Doctor who said that not
one line of history must be re-written, which gives him a gung-ho sense of
action here, but he’s also the Doctor who didn’t hesitate that long before designing
the Trojan Horse, and who accidentally set Nero’s Rome on fire, the Doctor
prepared to impersonate a leading figure in revolutionary France and who
ultimately nailed the defeat of Mondas by Earth into the web of time personally
by bringing his Tardis crew to the Snowcap Base. He’s altogether more certain
of the rightness of his actions than any 21st century Doctor would
be, so there’s little time spent weighing the moral rights and wrongs of the
situation – a person or persons unknown wants to meddle with established
history as the Doctor knows it. They must be stopped. As such, Una McCormack
welds a story together with the philosophical core of 21st century
Who, and the charge-ahead storytelling focus of the early days. The result is
pacy, punchy, and makes a lot of Classsic Who sense, spending little time
examining its philosophical navel, but cracking on to try and defeat the
twisters of history. Without spoiling too much of the story for you, there’s
something deliciously Upstairs, Downstairs about the story too, and the
conclusion is wrought not so much by the amazing time traveller and his space
pilot friend, but by Ruby bloomin’ Watkins, than you very much, and others like
her who want to make their own fundamental change to history and society.
All in all, Peace In
Our Time is a fabulously conceived little gem of a story, polished by the
gumption of its telling, and the race towards its conclusion. It’ll feel
shorter than it is, because Peter Purves understands the pacing of the
storytelling and pushes right ahead with it, garnering the energy it needs to
make it feel like a real race to retrieve the plans and defeat the forces who
want to use them for their own ends. Ultimately, you’ll enjoy it for the
pacing, the world-building and the characters, with Ruby Watkins coming across
as absolutely a proto-companion who never was. It’s only really afterward, as
you sit reminiscing about how much of an adventure you’ve just had, that the
philosophical implications of a timeline without the First World War really hit
you. Fortunately, the story makes clear that while the specific people
who suffer and die will be different, doing nothing and letting the time
meddling go unchecked will ultimately result in a bigger, darker destiny for
the whole of humankind. It’s by no means a competition, but it does weigh the
wars we know in the balance and compare them with the whole of humanity for
generations, which is a slick way to exonerate the Doctor and Steven from any
of the actual consequences of keeping time on track here. They
ultimately act for the greater good, and by the time the story ends, they more
or less understand as much, rather than simply doing what they do and stopping
people messing about with time. They’re explicitly saving the Earth by
forcing it to stay on course and fight the wars it needs to fight to deliver for
instance the world that we know.
Check out Peace In Our
Time now – and prepare for war…
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