Family and Loyalty in New Doctor Who

Companions from the Russell T. Davies years: Rose Tyler (Billie
Piper), Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman), and Donna Noble (Catherine Tate)

Who are Bill Potts’ parents? I asked myself that question while recently re-watching the tenth season of the revived Doctor Who. From the beginning of the series’ revival in 2005, family origins have mattered significantly in Doctor Who, with the Doctor’s companions making frequent return trips to their birth families. Yet this has diminished in importance, to the point where I can’t assert, with any degree of confidence, that Bill Potts even has a family.

Fans knew, when the series returned from a sixteen-year slumber, that it couldn’t resume exactly where it stopped. Audience tastes had evolved; where each Doctor Who story in the classic series was essentially independent and hermetically sealed, viewers today expect stories to build sequentially, for characters to have arcs, with a clearly defined beginning and a conclusion where we believe they’ve accomplished something. In the original series, only some companions had that, often only accidentally.

For every character like Ace, the Seventh Doctor’s companion, whose dark secrets came from time travel itself, and whose tragic consequences preceded her causes; or Turlough, the Fifth Doctor’s companion, whose entire life was a fiction manufactured to trap the Doctor, we had characters like Sarah Jane, literally the Doctor’s most popular companion ever, who literally got dropped off at the conclusion to a completely unrelated story, simply because actress Elisabeth Sladen’s contract was up.

When Russell T. Davies resurrected the title, he immediately established that his show differed by making the entire first episode center on Rose Tyler. She’s already encountered the monster and started fleeing for her life before the Doctor arrives, and when he does, she’s mostly chagrined. The Doctor’s backstory, and the changes he’s endured since the original series ended, emerge only by increments. For the first several episodes, it’s clearly Rose’s series, not the Doctor’s.

Most importantly, Rose returned home in only her fourth episode. After one visit to the future, and another to the past, she immediately revisits home, something most original-series companions never did even once. Importantly, she revisits her mother and her old boyfriend, This proves fraught, but that doesn’t matter right now: Rose returns to her mother twice, and her boyfriend three times, in just her first season. Doctor Who basically becomes an emotional domestic drama.

Companions from the Steven Moffat years: Amy and Rory (Karen Gillan and Arthur
Darvill), Clara Oswald (Jenna Coleman), and Bill Potts (Pearl Mackie)

This isn’t a complaint. Given the new-millenium audience’s interest in long-term consequences, it only makes sense to show how the Doctor’s seemingly carefree exploits create impacts on those left behind. But it also establishes a formula Davies found useful to repeat: all three companions from the Russell T. Davies years still lived with their parents, and all three returned home several times, including a visit that happened in episode four of every season but one.

The companions during Steven Moffat’s hitch had no such formula. From the beginning, we discover that Amy Pond still lives in the house where she grew up; but her parents are missing, something which becomes increasingly pointed as the series continues. The Doctor doesn’t even bring Amy home until episode six this time, and even then only long enough to collect Rory before popping off through time again. Home, this time, is a layover spot.

Eventually, through means too convoluted to explain again if you haven’t seen the episodes, that season ends with Amy heroically rescuing her parents from oblivion, celebrating her wedding at her father’s side. Yay for Amy, apparently. Except, after that episode, we never see her parents again. They’re scarcely mentioned. Rory’s father appears twice, once at some length, becoming one of Moffat’s more interesting characters, but doesn’t carry the same weight Rose’s or Martha’s parents do.

This pattern becomes exaggerated through Moffat’s run: we see Clara Oswald’s parents in one episode, but not with Clara. Clara has family she returns to, but the family for whom she nannies, not her own, and even they get written out after half a season. And Bill Potts? I only partially rewatched her season, so maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t recall her family mentioned, much less highlighted. Throughout Moffat’s run, families become increasingly unimportant.

Importantly, all three Davies companions ultimately return to their parents, and in codicils, eventually get married. Moffat’s companions don’t. Amy and Rory are trapped in the past, while Clara and Bill travel forever in some poorly defined afterlife. Moffat’s companions don’t come from anywhere, and they ride off over the horizon. Davies makes family both his characters’ origin, and their destination. Moffat makes characters exist entirely as they are.

And Chibnall? Too early to generalize.

Sex and Murder on the Wrong Side of Town

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 99
Walter Mosley, Devil In a Blue Dress

Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins needs the money, so when a big-shouldered White man in a slick suit comes nosing around a Black bar, looking to hire a leg man for a poorly defined private investigation, he takes the job. Who is he to complain? Turns out the White man’s rich White boss needs someone inconspicuous to find a glamorous White woman who frequents Los Angeles’ teeming illegal jazz bar scene. Should be a quick payday, right?

Walter Mosley’s debut novel contains multiple dense allusions to prior genre fiction, particularly Dashiell Hammet’s legendary Maltese Falcon. Like Sam Spade, Easy Rawlins gets roped into a case he needs, but doesn’t necessarily want. He must work with a woman who lies as quickly as breathing, and a man who kills because he sees no reason why he shouldn’t. But Rawlins has the added complication of being Black in the years after World War II.

Newly laid off, Rawlins accepts a private investigation job for which he’s not particularly qualified, and also unlicensed, because his house payment is coming due. Like thousands of Black veterans, Rawlins served with distinction during the war, and grew accustomed to being treated with respect. He wasn’t prepared for renewed discrimination. He certainly wasn’t ready for California racism, which he thought he’d escaped when he left his crime-ridden Houston childhood. Apparently bigots are bigots everywhere.

Turns out his target, Daphne Monet, doesn’t want found. When Rawlins tries directly asking the right people whether they’ve seen her, good friends suddenly turn evasive. For a White woman in segregated California, she certainly seems to have plenty of Black allies. But to Rawlins’ shock, the people he questions start turning up dead. The police believe he’s the last one to see them alive. Rawlins faces interrogation at the blunt end of a fist.

To make matters worse, Rawlins’ White employer turns out to be a psychopath. DeWitt Albright keeps a long-bore pistol inside his slick suit, and points it at whoever earns his displeasure. Of all the White people Rawlins works with, Albright might be the least racist, since skin color doesn’t bother him when killing time rolls around. Rawlins must work quick-time to avoid Albright’s wrath, which isn’t easy once Albright decides Rawlins is already dealing dirty.

Walter Mosley

In Rawlins’ world, moral scruple doesn’t buy lunch. He quietly resists racism, but also proves remarkably willing to accept it as inevitable. “I didn't believe that there was justice for Negroes,” Rawlins mutters around the halfway mark. “I thought that there might be some justice for a black man if he had the money to grease it. Money isn't a sure bet but it's the closest to God that I've ever seen in this world.”

Trapped between a working-class Black community closing ranks against him, and a White city demanding results at any cost, Rawlins teaches himself detective work on-the-job. He discovers how to ask questions which don’t directly bear on Daphne Monet, but which cause others to reveal truths about themselves. He uses his employer’s advance to buy drinks for working-class people desperate to make their days go away; in return they oblige him with sudden welters of information.

The longer his investigation continues, the more Rawlins despises his community. Like him, many Los Angeles Black people moved west, thinking they’d escape poverty and bigotry wherever they fled (a remarkable number apparently grew up with him in Houston). But they moved in such numbers that Los Angeles didn’t expect them, or the cultural change they hastened; racism followed them west, and with it, a closed, guarded attitude about intruders asking questions. Even Black intruders.

Rawlins proves resistant to one tool that might loosen tongues: he won’t exercise violence against fellow Blacks. He fled Houston trying to escape the pain poor blacks push on one another. To his horror, his childhood friend Mouse follows him to California; only Mouse has a pistol as big as DeWitt Albright’s. Rawlins finds himself caught between two killers he has to appease, even though he knows either one will destroy him if they choose.

Mosley uses the tropes of crime drama with comfortable panache; mystery fans will recognize the tropes he uses, like the jaded antihero, the femme fatale, and the truth worse than ignorance. But he repurposes these tropes to tell a story about people born down, and kept down by a system that judges them from birth. Easy Rawlins didn’t earn cynicism, he had cynicism thrust upon him. And he’s ready to thrust it back on us.

On a related topic:
Small Town Murder in Black and White

Fighting Racism at the Root

Ibram X. Kendi, How To Be an Antiracist

If you’re browsing a book with a title like this, you probably already agree that “racism” means more than bigots using the N-word in public. It’s a network of policies and practices that keep some people structurally down from the start, a series of attitudes under which the law and the economy treat citizens born on the outside as always suspect. You likely already know this. Now you want to know what, materially, to do.

I started this book, the follow-up to Dr. Kendi’s National Book Award-winning history Stamped From the Beginning, expecting a step-by-step instruction for confronting bigotry when I encounter it, say, in the workplace. (Because I do, frequently.) This isn’t that book. Instead, I found a means of taking accounting of where I’m most likely to find racism, in myself, and what ordinary anti-racists can do with this discovery. Because being “not racist” isn’t good enough anymore.

We’ve all seen the moral trap of being “not racist.” Dr. Kendi notes extensively how we currently have a President who loudly, vocally protests that he’s not racist, mainly because he doesn’t use violent segregationist language, though he enacts policies that divide people according to race, religion, and national origin. Instead, it’s important for people who oppose racism to be “anti-racist,” which means taking firm stands against official or unofficial racism, wherever we see it.

For Kendi, this means multiple manifestations of race exclusion. He admits, early and often, that “race” isn’t an objective physiological description of different human populations, the belief most common among today’s working sociologists. However, having said that, he also insists that “race” is a powerful factor in social organization. Modern society relies heavily on distinctions between in-groups and out-groups, and skin color is one way this in-group behavior manifests itself. We need to oppose this.

Unlike his previous book, written as a more linear textbook history, Kendi generously incorporates his autobiography into this narrative. He enumerates racism’s many ugly faces not in the sequence they originated in society, but in the ways they manifested themselves in his life. He describes the forms of racism he recognized early, the ways White teachers glancingly overlooked Black students for instance, and the ways he confronted this racism, which, he admits, weren’t always productive.

Dr. Ibram X. Kendi

But he also admits forms of racism which he himself practiced, and didn’t necessarily see at the time. Forms like anti-White racism, which drags its adherents into the mud, or class racism, which allows the oppressed to feel good about themselves because some people are even more oppressed. His personal struggles with gender racism and colorism describe ways most of us, at times, struggle with internalized ideas we can’t clearly see, because they’re so internalized.

Racism, for Dr. Kendi, isn’t a single monolith which the pure-hearted can slay, dragon-like. It gets entwined with other forms of bigotry, including sexism, queer-baiting, and economic exploitation. It rears its ugly head in relation to space: what makes some neighborhoods, schools, and churches “safe,” others “dangerous”? And it isn’t the exclusive domain of White bigots; Black people, including Kendi himself, often manifest internalized, self-hating racism, which they can only beat by confronting it directly.

Importantly, Kendi recognizes his audience, which mostly consists of Black and White progressives who already share his broad thesis, and need the kind of fine-tuning his scholarly expertise makes easy. He knows his readers want step-by-step instructions. Late in the book, he observes how anti-racist activists keep making progress only by increments, and often don’t learn from our failures. Kendi doesn’t offer a ready-made praxis for confronting workaday bigots, because changing individual minds doesn’t work.

Instead, he gives pointers for challenging public policy. He believes widespread attitudes tend to follow law and practice, rather than leading them; White Americans only popularly opposed naked segregation after it was made illegal. Don’t confront attitudes, Kendi writes; confront law. (I understand his reasoning, but don’t completely agree: the blue-collar racists I work with might need policy to actually implement their bigotry, but they already have the deeply instantiated beliefs, regardless of the rules.)

Briefly put, you cannot become truly anti-racist until you’re willing to confront racism, in all its ugly manifestations, within yourself. This isn’t easy or straightforward, and Dr. Kendi admits he’s maybe not done fighting that battle himself. However, unlike “not racist,” being anti-racist allows you to see your own limitations without cognitive dissonance. And it gives you the moral courage to confront hatred at the roots. Kendi means this as a manifesto for a movement.

Changing the Rules In Mid-Game

I struggle sometimes when friends share something publicly, which they intend as uplifting and encouraging, but which reveals their unexamined biases. Do I draw attention to the implicit bias, knowing this likely causes hurt feelings for limited social gain? Do I ignore the situation, knowing it allows wrong ideas to ratify themselves? Spoiler alert: I’m so conflict-avoidant that I usually do the latter. But this time I’m speaking up.

This weekend, several friends shared a story on social media about a developmentally disabled boy named Shay who, seeing other boys his age playing baseball, asks to play. He gets placed low in the batting roster. When he’s at bat, the opposing team literally bobbles every available play to ensure Shay bats a run, even knowing it’ll cost them the game. This is presented as a heartwarming story of kids granting a disadvantaged boy the opportunity to feel loved and useful.



Having limited experience with similarly disabled kids, I appreciate the sentiment. These kids seldom get to feel included, or welcome with peers. Because developmental disabilities often manifest in parallel physical disabilities, such kids are often denied the opportunity to compete equally. Yet, for all I appreciate the underlying motivation, I think the expression is potentially dangerous, because it makes the story all about what we, the “normal,” do for them.

We can find the first problem in the name. Though the story got new traction this month, Snopes identifies the story originating in a book published in 1999. Shay’s name, though, has been anglicized from the more assertively Jewish “Shaya.” I’m reminded that a bowdlerized version of Taylor Mali’s poem “What Teachers Make” continues circulating, with the cusswords excised, and the narrator renamed “Bonnie.”

Setting this subrosa colonialism aside, I still struggle to understand how it’s ennobling to change the rules of a game already in progress to ensure desirable outcomes for certain kids. It creates the idea that their successes are something we, the arbiters of normalcy, permit them to have. It establishes the disabled, including all categories of the disabled, as requiring our pity. Ultimately, the story exists to make “normal people” feel good about themselves.

Part of the nature of sports is that we follow the rules. We don’t do so because the rules are morally right, like rules against murder or theft; nor because the rules standardize social interactions, like traffic laws. Rather, when playing baseball, football, or whatever, we follow the rules because they are rules. Because doing so puts every participant on equal footing, allowing distinctions to arise from comprehensible and consistent foundations.

That isn’t what happened here. In this story, players deliberately ignored the rules and biffed the game to elevate one kid above others. While I can understand maybe throwing the disadvantaged kid a slower pitch, the coördination necessary for this many kids to deliberately manipulate a game’s outcome seems particularly unlikely. Sure would be nice if kids really gathered to protect and advance their own this way.

Both teams could, hypothetically, huddle together—with Shay in their midst!—to create nonce rules that keep everybody participating equally and make the game about something other than winning. Existing leagues have done that. But that isn’t what these kids did. Instead, they created rules that only applied to one player, for one at-bat. Then they celebrated that kid for accomplishing the remarkably low standards they set him.

The celebration, therefore, cannot be about Shay, though he, surrounded in the excitement of the moment, may perceive in that way. Ultimately the kids celebrate themselves for showing magnanimity do somebody they consider deserving of pity. Like the temple leaders whom Jesus castigated for loudly pouring their coins into the copper kettle, these kids celebrate so they can publicly affirm, to themselves, what good people they are.

Please don’t misunderstand. I laud and praise these children’s motivation, even if, as Snopes admits, the story is more likely a parable than something which actually happened. They wanted to make a chronically excluded child feel included, and I cannot disagree with that. If something like this happens in your view, please reward this behavior, and help the children find ways to pursue their goals that aren’t condescending.

But as told, this story extols “normal” people bestowing largess from their places of power. It creates a temporary endorphin boost for one disadvantaged child, but teaches his peers that generosity is something they bestow from atop the hierarchy, with only minor sacrifices that won’t impact their lives very much. And that, sadly, is no kind of message for today’s children.

The Power Politics of “Scooby-Doo”

“Scoobynatural” was probably a gimmick, an attempt to keep the writers’ room on the adventure-horror show Supernatural working well into season 13. The show’s protagonists found themselves zapped into an episode of Scooby-Doo, a series older than Supernatural’s protagonists—it debuted in 1969. The episode plays mostly for broad comedy, though it does involve a scene where Sam and Dean explain to the Scooby Gang, famous for unmasking fake monsters, that sometimes, monsters are real.

I initially balked at this revelation. Scooby-Doo, throughout most of its history, turned on the theme that what appears to be an otherworldly monster causing terror in Middle America, is actually a human in disguise. This was important for the show’s young audience, mostly still young enough to be scared of the dark. It told the audience that their apparent nighttime terrors had human faces, and could be, exposed, given names, and taken to jail.

Most importantly, the human monsters were almost always motivated by profit. The series had a subtle political message, which I didn’t understand for years, that money distorted human values and turned ordinary people into monsters. While it wouldn’t be accurate to call the series anti-capitalist (the human monster usually terrorized a small local business owner in hopes of pushing a cheap buyout), the show was certainly anti-greed, and held no love for large corporate conglomerates.

To suggest that monsters might, even occasionally, be real, initially seemed a severe betrayal of Scooby-Doo’s legacy. Letting the truly, ahem, supernatural into that universe undermined the message Generation X learned from Scooby-Doo, that the terrors which stalk the darkness can be exposed by shedding daylight on them. Except, as I remembered the series run, I realized: that wasn’t always the show’s moral. Its real message changed over time, and became more tolerant of sectarianism.

When the original series ran on CBS from 1969 to 1976, the anti-fear moral remained consistent. (In fairness, the monster wasn’t human; I remember at least one episode where the “evil” was malfunctioning technology. However, the underlying problem was always created by human venality, and could be solved with honest ingenuity.) With the show’s move to ABC in 1976, however, it introduced storylines where the monster really was a monster, or anyway not altogether human.

Promo still from the Supernatural episode “Scoobynatural”

This marked a change in the underlying culture. The show, which began during the Nixon era, when an increasingly unpopular war dragged on for years, originated in a time when adult writers increasingly distrusted government, religion, and capitalism. But as the show endured, as Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon and nothing got better, the show increasingly included storylines where the story MacGuffin couldn’t be dismantled by exposing its human face. The monsters started becoming monsters.

This became overwhelming with the introduction of Scooby’s nephew Scrappy-Doo, around 1980. Writing out the human characters, except Shaggy, the show shifted focus to adventure over mystery. Importantly, many monsters the characters faced were ultimately revealed as monsters: in particular, I remember episodes featuring a rampaging Polynesian tiki god and a reanimated Chinese dragon statue. These storylines weren’t only supernatural, they contained poorly sublimated racism, as “foreign” monsters needed put back in their natural place.

Scooby-Doo went from believing evil could be countered by giving it a human face, to believing evil was intractable and could only be beaten through force. This paralleled the cultural arc of its Boomer-generation writers, going from Flower Power to the Reagan Revolution. After late 1985, Scooby-Doo stopped being a meaningful barometer of present-day trends, transitioning to a nostalgia property for Gen-X audiences, roughly equivalent to Classic Rock Radio. Which is where Supernatural comes in.

Supernatural turns on the idea that evil exists objectively and materially, as a physical force in the outside world. It presents our world as an actively malevolent place. In some ways, this suggests a throwback to medieval presentations of angels and demons; but, considering Global Warming, ICE concentration camps, and Fascist marches on American soil, maybe believing in active evil isn’t unreasonable today. One could argue that Scooby-Doo, not church, is the actively naïve model.

Which makes Supernatural’s response perfectly reasonable. Scooby-Doo becomes a playground for extended adolescence, a chance to chase girls and binge Scooby Snacks. Facing our world’s constant evil becomes quickly overwhelming, and even full-time professional resistors face the prospect of compassion fatigue. To put it another way, evil is simply tiring.The episode’s comedy approach reflects that Sam and Dean need relief from constantly battling literal monsters.

Which, isn’t that something we all need right now?

Me and My #FilthyMouthedWife

Chrissy Teigen

When I awoke to find #filthymouthedwife trending on Twitter yesterday, it initially had the feel of lonesome inevitability. Ho-hum, the President found another recipient for his legendary trademark vitriol, another private citizen somehow responsible for public democracy's continued breakdown. And a woman, which surprised nobody; he couldn't even say Chrissy Teigen's name. We can consult the Washington speechwriter's mandatory beat sheet to see how this is destined to end.

The longer I marinated in this stew, however, the less satisfying I found this explanation. While this track is familiar during this administration, it's also unique to this President. The dumpster fire happening in the Executive Branch represents a break in history from vocal conservatives of generations past. Despite all my dislike of our Ronald W. Nixon heritage, America's historic right wing has not descended to the depths currently plumbed. Why the change?

CUNY political science professor Corey Robin, who studies American and international conservatism, identifies a common thread in right wing thinking. Despite their long association with nostalgia and lost glory, conservatives, at least since Edmund Burke, have frequently strayed from loving the ancien régìme. We might want to bring back King and Country, or make America great again, but we don't actually want to revive the past.

Instead, in Robin's figuration, conservatives believe society has a natural hierarchy. This structure is both inevitable and just, because it sorts people into standings of wealth and authority which correspond to their innate merits: the weak, lazy, and stupid get flushed to the bottom, where they work in accordance with their ethics and ability. The meritorious rise to the top, where they plan, coordinate, and govern the lesser. Because they deserve to.

Thus conservatism, at least the historically principled conservatism my generation grew up watching, doesn't seek to conserve history like a fly in amber. Instead, it desires to conserve this natural hierarchy. History has changed how we construct this hierarchy, so that, for example, it's no longer acceptable to suppress Black Americans from higher achievement simply because they're Black. But the poor, weak, and dependent still deserve their lower place in the scale.

This hierarchy, however, has always been oppositional, at least in living memory. The epoch bookended by the World Wars defined Western small-d democracy contra the dying European aristocracy. Once autocrats and fascists were defeated (temporarily), the enemy became Soviet hegemony. The end of the Cold War left the hierarchy flailing for a while before the Global War on Terror gave everyone a concrete enemy to rally against, under the umbrella of institutional authority.

Now, even that enemy has receded to historic insignificance. Without an enemy to unite against, the hierarchy stands exposed as flimsy, artificial, and transitory. For the first time since the Great Depression, America's pharaohs face the possibility of meaningful numbers unwilling to accept the pyramid. In order to keep the largest number invested in the system, the aristocracy needs an enemy to keep everyone unified.

And they just don't have one.

This President's id-fueled rages have attempted to create an enemy. Whether outside adversaries like the EU and China, or internal ones like athletes who kneel and women who cuss, this administration keeps looking for that magic antagonist whose malignant machinations appear so awful that the anonymous masses will unify against them. Unlike other conservative administrations of the last century, this one keeps fumbling.

The #filthymouthedwife moment reflects multiple opportunities to distinguish an enemy: a woman, a person of color, a wife who doesn’t submit to her husband. Because it still offends many men to discover that women cuss, fart, and talk about sex. It’s also a callback to the arguments against second-wave feminism, a movement that struck during the President’s childhood and, probably, helped make America less great.

Except that, among everything else this President has said just this week, it becomes another piece of noise. Admittedly, I’ve amplified this noise by even talking about it, because I believe it makes a good indicator about his need for a clearly identifiable enemy, and his inability to find one. It mostly serves to unify those who already dislike him for a day, before it retreats under onslaught of his consistently awful policies.

The clutter of distractions that is news today indicates both sides largely lack direction. But the visible meltdown at the apex of American conservatism indicates they lack moral direction and clear guidance. Our debate system will only get worse if one side continues lashing out without some obvious mission, and for them, that will mean finding and naming an enemy.

Sherlock Holmes is a Queer Black Woman

Claire O'Dell, A Study in Honor

Doctor Janet Watson lost her arm and her dignity fighting the regressivist rebels in the Second Civil War. She came to Washington, D.C., to fight for a reliable cybernetic replacement from a cash-strapped and preternaturally risk-averse Veteran's Administration. But the fight is long and expensive. So while she arm-wrestles the government, she takes a flat-sharing arrangement with the strange and enigmatic Sara Holmes.

Claire O'Dell has written several previous novels and short stories which foreground LGBTQIA+ characters, especially women. Some have won prestigious awards, and been included on year end Best-Of lists. But with this novel, she proposes something apparently new in her C.V.: updating one of genre fiction's most beloved characters in a way that moves her protagonist between eras, genders, and genres, all at once.

This novel breaks neatly into two sections. In the first, O’Dell recreates the early chapters of the first Sherlock Holmes novel, where Watson meets Holmes and unpacks his personality. O’Dell makes appropriate changes, since her viewpoint character is American, Black, a woman, and same-sex attracted. It’s also colored by her near-future dystopian setting, where bigoted rebels in America’s heartland have rebelled violently against the government, and the war drags on interminably.

Besides scene-setting, O’Dell’s purpose in these early chapters is clearly political. Just as the crumbling British Empire provides background noise for Conan Doyle’s novels, the American house divided becomes the constant context for Janet Watson’s unfolding adventures. O’Dell couches this in real-world political events: the optimism Black women like Watson felt after the 2008 presidential election, and the inevitable descent into disappointment in 2016.

The second half is where O’Dell’s story really starts cooking. To mark time while the VA dithers on providing a better cybernetic arm so she can restart her surgical career, Watson takes a job beneath her credentials at a D.C. veterans’ hospital. Working below the level doctors ordinarily see, she uncovers a pattern of soldiers returning from the front plagued with symptoms beyond ordinary PTSD. Watson takes a particular liking to one damaged soldier.

Experienced readers know, the more confidently a genre protagonist likes an incidental character, the more certainly that character will die. The traumatized, over-medicated veteran Watson makes her special project, literally keels over one morning. Strangely, all of the veteran’s lab results, medical screenings, and documentation go missing from the archives. It’s like somebody wants the veterans to go away.

Claire O'Dell

Then a stranger attacks Watson on an empty Georgetown street.

Her curiosity piqued, Sara Holmes brings her considerable influence as a shadowy government agent into Watson’s case. That proves a mixed blessing. Holmes is smart, endearing, and sometimes charismatic; she also proves to be abusive, manipulative, and often dishonest. But this mix of virtues and vices proves her magic qualification to infiltrate a conspiracy so shadowy, even Holmes can only intuit its presence by the damage it causes.

This blend of near-future dystopian science fiction, with one of literature’s most classic detectives, gives a spin on political thrillers appropriate to today’s reading audience. As a Black, queer woman, Watson has a quintessential outsider’s perspective on circumstances of power. As a veteran herself, she knows the divide between those who start wars, and those who fight them. As a doctor, she can diagnose the destruction left behind.

If you’re anything like most people, you clearly see the widening gulf between government and governed, even when the government speaks the language of everyman. This has given rise to multiple conspiracy theories lately, everything from Q-ANON to flat-earthism to, well, whatever came dribbling from the President’s twitter account today. We’re surrounded constantly by aggressive distrust between the people, and those who speak for the people.

Janet Watson understands this distrust. She simultaneously depends on the government, as her employer and the bestower of VA benefits, and sees the ways murky bureaucracy devalues human life. When that bureaucracy turns violently against her, she has only one ally, Holmes—who, despite her vocal protests of loyalty and truth, is herself an admitted government agent. Watson must choose, repeatedly, between the devil she knows and the devil she doesn’t.

Authors wanting to update Holmes and Watson aren’t new. At times, O’Dell’s narrative suggests direct influence from Moffat and Gatiss, among others. Yet despite this common currency, O’Dell’s version remains worth reading, not because we know and love the characters, but because, like all the best literature, it’s ultimately about us. We live in dystopian, post-apocalyptic times. We don’t have cybernetic arms yet. But we need someone like Sara Holmes.

#1 With a Bullet

Depending how you count, either Elvis Presley (below) or the Beatles had the most #1 hits

Earlier this summer, hip-hop artist Lil Nas X broke another record, when his country-rap hybrid “Old Town Road” netted eighteen weeks as number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. It couldn’t happen to a better guy, or a better song: though it isn’t something I’d personally seek out, it’s a genuinely good track, with fairly complex hooks and lyrics you could read like literature. Which is saying something in today’s aggressively bland Hot 100.

“Old Town Road” beats the previous record-holders for most weeks at number one, a tie for sixteen weeks between 2017’s “Despacito,” by Luis Fonzi and Daddy Yankee, and 1995’s “One Sweet Day,” by Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men. “Despacito” is, again, a pretty good song, which I don’t mind when it plays on a shared radio. “One Sweet Day,” however, is so bland and forgettable, I had to Google it to write this essay.

That represents how meaningless the pop charts have become for understanding our culture. More songs stay at number one longer. At this writing, 38 songs have stayed at number one for ten or more weeks, a number likely to change. Of those 38, 24 have been since January 1, 2000, which we can roughly designate the beginning of the download era. If we expand our horizon to January 1, 1990, the number jumps to 36.

This happened, paradoxically (not really), as more artists have more opportunities for wider audience reach. Inexpensive on-demand CD manufacturing in the 1990s, and almost-free digital distribution in the 2000s, have turned more struggling garage artists into professional recording artists than ever before. But during that same time, radio charts have become less likely to roll over. It’s almost like the major labels and the radio industry have a handshake deal to protect major-label prerogative. Almost.

As more artists and studios become capable of producing more music at less cost, the peak of commercial musical accomplishment has incongruously become less diverse. Before 1990, only two songs perched at #1 for ten weeks: Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life,” in 1977, and Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical,” in 1981. Let’s be honest, these aren’t good songs. Neither are most others on this list. The longest stints at #1 belong to the blandest songs.

Whenever I talk about music, I inevitably come back to Charles Duhigg. Late in his book, Duhigg talks about how the music industry manipulates listeners’ fondness for tracks which resemble music they already know to create new hits. Read that again: the biggest hits are those which resemble something we already like. We embrace songs which sound familiar, not those which take artistic risks or break new ground. And the business feeds us that repeatedly.

Despite my comments about “Despacito” and “Old Town Road,” the songs which remained atop the Billboard charts longest have preponderantly been the blandest songs ever recorded. Los Del Rio’s “Macarena,” Mariah Carey’s “We Belong Together,” and The Chainsmokers’ “Closer” are songs so pugnaciously banal, one wonders whether they aren’t self-referential performance art. You may broadly remember these songs, especially if they were hits while you were in high school, but you probably don’t like them.

Even the genuine hitmakers on this list aren’t represented by their best songs. Elton John’s “Candle In the Wind 1997,” Santana’s “Smooth,” and Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” are crinkum-crankum radio fare churned out late in the artists’ career. Though sometimes played on radio for nostalgia, these songs, the biggest hits of their artists’ respective discographies, aren’t very good, especially played against “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” “Evil Ways,” or “How Will I Know.”

It bears repeating, the artists we consider “classic” didn’t have this kind of chart authority. The Beatles’ longest stay at #1 was nine weeks, for “Hey Jude.” The Rolling Stones’ “Honkey Tonk Women” lasted four weeks at #1; the Supremes’ “Love Child,” only two weeks. These are the biggest hits of pop’s greatest artists. Ernie K-Doe, Paper Lace, and Milli Vanilli all have #1 hits. Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and Creedence Clearwater Revival do not.

At a time when American public life is known for strife, controversy, and infighting, “Old Town Road,” though good, is also altogether uncontroversial, a commercial bid for valuable airtime that holds audiences by not challenging them. Which is a pretty good description of the most widely heard Top-40 hits altogether. We might argue that having America’s #1 hit mattered back when Elvis and the Beatles dominated the charts. But those days, sadly, are long gone.

Why Men In Skirts Are Dangerous

Damn right I'm a man in a
skirt! Click to enlarge.

Two years ago today, I returned from my first trip to Kansas City Irish Fest, bearing an armload of CDs and a new kilt. This was my third kilt, but my first patterned one, with a blue tartan inside black pleats. And of course, what do you do when you have a dashing new garment, designed to make a splash? Why, you wear it out in public, of course.

So I did.

Back in college, I wore Utilikilts so often, I became known around campus as “the kilt guy.” But when you get older, the opportunities to do something countercultural, like go out wearing unbifurcated leg garments, become less common. You get used to going along and fitting in, because you have to, because some conformity makes society possible. Grown-ups don’t get to dress funny for laughs.

Thus, when I casually mentioned getting yet another kilt to one of my co-workers, I probably shouldn’t have been surprised when he pulled a face like he’d just smelled a turd. “I don’t think I could ever wear one of those,” he said. I asked why not; he just stammered. He literally couldn’t explain why he felt unable to wear clothing that didn’t fit in. So I started attributing.

In my self-superior way, I assumed, for over a year, that my co-worker couldn’t wear something that so closely resembled a “skirt,” because he had internalized society’s gender norms, and he couldn’t bear the thought, even for one moment, of being mistaken for a woman. Especially in construction, a field that prizes highly demonstrative displays of masculinity, I found it easy to attribute my co-worker’s intent to deeply assimilated transphobia.

The longer I lived with this explanation, however, the less satisfying I found it. Yes, this co-worker, and several others, flippantly use homophobic and transphobic language, so that probably contributes. But I’ve come to realize something different also comes into play: people who stand out, often get knocked down. My co-worker has a wife and kids, and cannot afford to draw certain kinds of attention to himself.

In the summer of 2018, in protest of a “no short trousers” rule, a crew of British construction workers arrived to work wearing dresses and skirts. As summers continue getting longer and hotter, under the pressure of global warming, rules that prevent men working outdoors from wearing cooler clothes become more onerous. Rising temperatures may soon make such rules downright dangerous. So the men wore skirts in civil disobedience.

Equally important to wearing skirts, though, the men wore skirts in unison. They all arrived wearing gender-nonconforming clothes on the same day, having coördinated their protest in advance. Thus, men wearing literal dresses, wearing clothes actually designed for women, didn’t become something that undermined their masculinity. It just became a thing they did, together, to make a unified point.

Construction workers in dresses, summer of 2018. Photo via The Times of London.

That’s what my co-worker fears: not being mistaken for a woman, but being mistaken for somebody who rocks the boat. He wants to make a living, have a beer with the fellas, and come home to his family. The controversy which follows looking different, the consequences of being so non-conformist that everybody stares when you walk into the room, impedes my co-worker’s ability to simply be normal and live quietly.

I don’t have a wife and children. And realistically, I probably don’t have a future career in construction; this remains something I do to pay my bills until I can return to my teaching track. So if I look different, it won’t hurt my standings; indeed, if people notice me for simply walking into the room, why, so much the better. If future employers notice you, they remember you.

Of course, it’s easy to say that. Because I’m writing ahead, I don’t know whether I’ll return from this year’s Irish Fest with another new kilt. Probably not, because they’re expensive, and at my age, I have few opportunities to wear them. See, I’ve become just as conformist as my co-worker, even without the obligations of family and career. A working man can afford to look funny in his twenties.

(Edit: ha ha, fooled myself. I couldn't leave without buying a slick two-tone black and grey model. I guess I need to find places a grown man can wear a kilt anymore.)

I’m not special just because I own kilts and my co-worker can’t. I’m not free from the social pressures to look a certain way, and the consequences if I rebel. And, like him, I have to choose carefully which fights I embrace. Because like him, I have work in the morning. So like most blue-collar fellas, I cut my hair, buckle my belt at the waist, and assume my role.