Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre
Doctor Who: Curve Left
In William Burroughs' In the buff Lunch, where 'nothing is true, and everything is permitted' insects are symbolic of strict control. They allow the central stamp access to the alternative dimension of Interzone. It's perfect that Russell T Davies' hallucinatory Exchange Left, whilst a wholesale version of his ideas for the entire series, is involved with Donna Noble's own fateful tour into the Interzone of her own life and times with the Doctor. Her capture by the time beetle also gives Davies an chance to boldy offer up a kind of 'specify of the nation' address and a rather pessimistic projection of humanity that he first articulated this year in Midnight.
He views modern society as a global village under perennial attack and in Turn Left he takes many of the submerged public subtexts in his work for the series and sets them cluster stage. His argument here is that we must not be blind to impressive and insignificant actions and he illustrates this by removing, from the whole Donna Noble narrative of The Riderless Bride and Series 4, the busy symbol of the Doctor. When you take the Doctor out of events unjustifiable choices become a fact and chaos ensues. Davies is not only echoing Edward Lorenz's Bedlam Theory and the predestination paradox of It's A Wonderful Memoirs but he's also taking the personal context of an scene like Father's Day and giving it a ubiquitous scale.
...she plunges into a regressive portrayal where, metaphorically speaking, she will never pass on into the subsequent.
The end point of history (and here I'm going to use a bit of Baudrillard so those of you with a difficult disposition around French postmodernist touch had better skip this paragraph) is seen here as a drop of universes vast and small - from the foundering between worlds that allows Rose to block Donna to the very bleak loss of hope within the Eminent family itself. Baudrillard argued that by the end of the 20th Century we no longer really believe in utopias and that historic moments, like 9/11 for norm, only petrify our societies further. Our sense of post progress, a belief in history continuing was, he believed, only just an illusion. In Turn Left Donna is unnatural to turn away from history 'in being done', with none of the crises of her adventures having been resolved, and she plunges into a regressive depiction where, metaphorically speaking, she will never pass on into the following.
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