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re--laaaaaxer · 6 months

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I undertook a brief session of mindful meditation to help me process the overwhelming events of the past four weeks. It's been an extraordinary and intense period, with a multitude of developments unfolding in such a short span of time. To prevent desensitisation, I found it necessary to step back from constant news consumption. I believed that this temporary detachment could provide some mental clarity and open new pathways for me to contribute to those who are deprived of the basic pleasures of life, like breaking bread, experiencing joyous laughter, and enjoying even a single night of peace.

This morning, I took a significant and somewhat daunting step. I composed a letter addressed to the UN Malaysian Ambassador, urgently appealing for the convening of an immediate UN Emergency General Assembly under the Uniting for Peace Resolution. Here is the letter I submitted:

"Dear Malaysian UN Ambassador,

I trust this message finds you in good health and high spirits despite the grave circumstances we find ourselves in. My name is [name], a fellow Malaysian, and I write to you today with a heavy heart, deeply concerned about the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

Over the past four weeks, we have witnessed a horrifying genocide unfolding before our eyes. Thousands of innocent civilians, among them countless children, have perished due to relentless bombings, leaving us all profoundly shaken and outraged. The people of Gaza are enduring unimaginable suffering as water, electricity, and vital aid have been cut off, trapping them in a nightmarish cycle of despair.

It is with great distress that I observe the obstruction of the UN Security Council by US vetoes, preventing it from taking decisive action against the war crimes being committed by Netanyahu's far-right government. As a result, the UN Security Council is unable to fulfil its primary mandate—to maintain international peace and security.

I draw inspiration from a proposal put forth by Uplifting Ireland, which suggests a path to a ceasefire in Gaza even in the face of Security Council vetoes. When such obstacles arise, the Uniting for Peace Resolution becomes a beacon of hope. This resolution, originally introduced to counter Russia's vetoes, can now be utilised to urgently address the crisis in Gaza.

The Uniting for Peace Resolution empowers any UN member state to call for an Emergency UN General Assembly when the Security Council is paralysed. This is precisely what we need at this critical juncture. Importantly, it allows for the use of armed forces as a last resort if either side refuses to comply with the ceasefire, ensuring accountability for all parties involved.

By invoking an emergency UN General Assembly under the Uniting for Peace Resolution, we require only a two-thirds majority for a ceasefire to be established. The global community has witnessed overwhelming support for a ceasefire, making this approach highly viable.

The public response has shown unequivocally that the people of Malaysia, and indeed the world, reject these heinous crimes and refuse to remain complicit in silence. As our distinguished representative at the United Nations, you hold the power to reflect our nation's values and principles on the international stage.

It is abundantly clear that the UN Security Council alone cannot bring an end to this ongoing tragedy. To halt the senseless bombings and alleviate the suffering of innocent women, children, and men in Gaza, I implore you to urgently demand that the Malaysian UN Ambassador initiates an immediate UN Emergency General Assembly under the Uniting for Peace Resolution.

A future where peace and safety embrace us all, where justice, freedom, and equality are our shared foundation, is the only path I fervently believe in.

Your time, dedication, and attention to this pressing matter are greatly appreciated, and we look to you to be the beacon of hope and justice that the world desperately needs in these troubled times."

If you feel hopeless over what is happening, here's a simple yet powerful action that we can do to call for an immediate ceasefire. All you have to do is reach out to your respective UN and/or Ministry of Foreign Affairs office and send as many emails as you can, to put a stop to these recurring horrifying events.

I hope you all are well. Please take care.

#personal #free gaza

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crimethinc · 5 years

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What Is Burning the Amazon? A Plea from Brazilian Anarchists

As the fires in the Amazon rainforest continue to burn, our comrades in Brazil have sent us this analysis of the causes of the catastrophe and how it should inform our vision of the future.

“I worry about whether the whites will resist. We have been resisting for 500 years.”

—Ailton Krenak

Living Dystopia

The scene is gloomy. On August 19, 2019, smoke covers cities across the state of São Paulo, turning day into night at 3 pm. The previous day, in Iceland, people organized the first funeral, complete with a gravestone and a minute of silence, for a glacier declared dead. The smoke that engulfed São Paulo is caused by forest fires in the Amazon Forest far away in the North of Brazil; the glacier has disappeared due to rising temperatures related to the carbon dioxide accumulating in the atmosphere.

Chief of the Tenharim people of southern Amazonas fighting wildfire.

These tragic scenes—almost picturesque, almost absurd—could sound comical if they weren’t real. They are so extreme that they remind us of fictional scenarios such as those described in the novel And Still the Earth, a Brazilian environmental dystopia by Ignácio de Loyloa Brandão. Written in the 1970s during the military dictatorship in Brazil, the book describes a fictitious dictatorial regime known as “Civiltar,” which celebrates cutting down the last tree in the Amazon with a jingoistic declaration that it has created “a desert greater than that of the Sahara.” In this story, all the Brazilian rivers are dead; jugs of water from each of the extinct rivers are displayed in a hydrographic museum. Aluminum can dunes and highways permanently blocked by the shells of abandoned cars are the backdrop of São Paulo. The city itself suffers from sudden heat pockets capable of killing any unsuspecting person; mysterious diseases consume the citizens, especially the homeless.

The author claims that he was inspired by real events that seemed absurd and unusual at the time. Today, these are becoming ever more ordinary.

News of the increased burning of the Amazon has sent shockwaves around the world. Burns rose 82% in 2019 over the same period last year in Brazil, according to the National Institute for Space Research, and new outbreaks of fire are still being reported as we write. The catastrophic images of destruction have fueled the indignation of people around the world who are concerned about the future of life on earth, seeing how important the Amazon rainforest is for climate regulation and global biodiversity. Images of the fires compelled French President Emmanuel Macron to bring the subject to the G7 summit and to exchange barbs with President Jair Bolsonaro in the media after France offered millions of dollars in funds to fight forest fires.

Protest against deforestation in the Amazon, in São Paulo, August 23, 2019.

Since the end of 2018, half a billion bees have been found dead in four Brazilian states. The death of these insects that are essential to fertilizing 75% of the vegetables we eat is linked to the use of pesticides banned in Europe but permitted in Brazil. In August 2019, the court dismissed the charges against a farmer who used pesticides thrown from a plane as a chemical weapon against Guyra Kambi’y indigenous community in Mato Grosso do Sul in 2015. The same month, groups of farmers, “land grabbers” [people who falsify documents in order to obtain ownership of land], union members, and traders used a Whatsapp group to coordinate setting fires in the municipality of Altamira, Pará, the epicenter of fires consuming the Amazon rainforest. As reported in Folha do Progresso, the “day of the fire” was organized by people encouraged by the words of Jair Bolsonaro: “The goal, according to one of the leaders speaking anonymously, is to show the president that they want to work.”

The recent wave of fires linking President Jair Bolsonaro’s policies to attacks against forests, peasant farmers, and indigenous peoples is an intensification of a process as old as the colonization of the Americas. While the Workers’ Party (PT) was still in power, many projects were introduced to expand and accelerate growth, including the construction of the Belo Monte plant, which displaced and impacted indigenous communities and thousands of other people living in the countryside. The approval of the Forest Code in 2012 enabled farmers to advance over indigenous territories and nature reserves with impunity, while suspending the demarcation of new protected lands.

Both left and right governments see nature and human life chiefly as resources with which to produce commodities and profit. The government of Bolsonaro, a declared enemy of the common people, women, and indigenous groups, doesn’t just threaten us with the physical violence of police repression. In declaring that he will no longer recognize any indigenous land, Bolsonaro is intensifying a war on the ecosystems that make human life possible—a war that long precedes him.

A 500-Year-Running Disaster

For centuries, we have struggled to survive the greatest disaster of our time, a disaster that threatens the sustainability of all the biomes and communities on this planet. Its name is capitalism—the cruelest, most inequitable, and destructive economic system in history. This threat is not the result of the inevitable forces of nature. Humans created it and humans can eliminate it.

Anarchists in Sao Paulo on August 23, 2019 protesting against the government and against the deforestation of the Amazon: “Burn fascists, not forests!”

In Brazil, we have witnessed firsthand how this system exploits people, promotes genocide, and degrades and pollutes the earth, water, and air. Even if we ultimately manage to abolish it, we will still have to survive the consequences of letting it go on for so long. The destruction of entire ecosystems, the poisons in rivers and in our own bodies, the species that have gone extinct, the glaciers that have disappeared, the forests that have been cut down and paved over—these consequences will remain for many years to come. In the future, we will have to survive by gathering what we need from the ruins and waste that this system has left in its wake. All the material that has been torn from the ground to be strewn across the earth’s surface and dumped into the seas will not return overnight to the depths it came from.

Recognizing this should inform how we envision our revolutionary prospects. It is foolish to imagine that the abolition of capitalism will expand that the consumer activities that are currently available to the global bourgeoisie to the entire human population; we must stop fantasizing about a regulated post-capitalist world with infinite resources to generate the sort of commodities that capitalist propaganda has led us to desire. Rather, we will have to experiment in ways to share the self-management of our lives amid the recovery of our biomes, our relationships, and our bodies after centuries of aggression and exploitation—organizing life in regions that have become hostile to it.

The ways we organize our resistance today should be informed by the fact that our revolutionary experiments will not be taking place in a world of peace, stability, and balance. We will be struggling to survive in the midst of the consequences of centuries of pollution and environmental degradation. The best-case scenario for the future will look like the situation in Kobanê in 2015: a victorious revolution in a bombed-out city full of mines.

Last stand: neither utopias nor dystopias—revolution!

So What Is Burning the Amazon?

There is a consensus among scientific researchers, government institutions, social movements, and rural and urban peoples regarding the impacts and risks of global warming and increasing industrialization and urbanization. Some of these consequences are about to become irreversible. The deforestation of the Amazon itself may become irreparable if it reaches 40% of its total area.

It has never worked to demand that governments solve these problems for us—and it never will. This is especially foolish when we are talking about the environmental disasters caused by their own policies. Land seizures and the deforestation of the Amazon are inextricably interlinked with the organized criminal enterprises that smuggle and kill in the countryside. Fully 90% of the timber harvested is contraband supported by a vast apparatus of illegal capitalism involving armed militias and the state itself.

Populist leaders like Bolsonaro aim to benefit from the unfolding ecological catastrophe at the same time that they deny it is occurring. On the one hand, they claim that there is no need for action to curb global warming—alongside Trump, Bosonaro was the only other leader who threatened to abandon the Paris Agreement, claiming that global warming is a “fable for environmentalists.” This helps to mobilize the far-right base, which admires and celebrates outright dishonesty as a demonstration of political power. On the other hand, as the consequences of climate chaos and environmental imbalances become obvious undeniable facts, these leaders will opportunistically take advantage of environmental crises, product shortages, refugee migrations, and climate disasters such as hurricanes as pretexts to accelerate the implementation of ever more authoritarian measures in the fields of health, transportation and security. Using authoritarian and militarized means to determine who can have access to the resources they need to survive in a context of widespread scarcity is what many theorists have called ecofascism.

The intervention of foreign states in the Amazon forests according to their own economic interests is simply the continuation of the colonialism that began in 1492. No government will solve the problem of fires and deforestation. At best, they might slow the impact of the exploitation they have always engaged in. Neoliberal capitalism demands endless growth, mandating the transformation of forests and soil into competitive consumer goods on the global market.

So what is burning the Amazon—and the entire planet? The answer is clear: the pursuit of land, profit (legal or not), and private property. None of this will be changed by any elected or imposed government. The only truly environmental perspective is a revolutionary perspective seeking the end of capitalism and the state itself.

Mundurukus warriors without state support set out for direct action to expel loggers from the Sawré Mybu Indigenous Land in Pará.

Exercising Our Ability to Imagine

The dystopian images of And Still the Earth and George Orwell’s novel 1984 were intended as warnings: exaggerated projections of the worst that can happen if we fail to change the course of history. Today, with cameras around every corner and our own TVs and cell phones carrying out surveillance on us, it is as if these dystopian novels are being used as a handbook for governments and corporations to bring our worst nightmares into reality.

Dystopias are warnings; but utopias, by definition, represent places that do not exist. We need other places, places that are possible. We need to be able to imagine a different world—and to imagine ourselves, our desires, and our relationships being different as well.

We should use the creativity that enables us to picture zombie apocalypses and other literary or cinematic calamities to imagine a reality beyond capitalism right now and begin building it. Today, as reality surpasses fiction, our activities are largely characterized by disbelief and passivity. But you cannot be neutral on a moving train—especially not one that is accelerating on a track into the abyss. Crossing your arms is complicity. Likewise, acting individually is insufficient because it maintains the logic that has brought us here.

We have to rediscover revolutionary reference points for self-organized and egalitarian collective life. We need to share examples of real societies that have resisted the state and capitalism, such as the anarchist experiments during the Russian and Ukrainian Revolutions of 1917 and the Spanish Revolution of 1936. We should remember, also, that all of these were ultimately betrayed and crushed by, or with the connivance of, the Bolshevik Party and the Stalinist dictatorship that followed it, which carried out unprecedented industrialization and the mass displacement of agrarian peoples. This illustrates why it is so important to develop a way of imagining that does not simply replicate the visions of capitalist industrialism.

We can also look to contemporary examples like the Zapatista Uprising in Mexico since 1994 and the ongoing revolution in Rojava in northern Syria. But in addition to the examples offered by anarchists or influenced by anarchist principles, we should learn from the many the indigenous nations around us: Guaranis, Mundurukus, Tapajós, Krenaks, and many others who have ceaselessly resisted European and capitalist colonial expansion for five centuries. They are all living examples from whom anarchists can learn about life, organization, and resistance without and against the state.

If there is any fundamental basis for solidarity in response to the attack on the foundation of all life in the Amazon, it is the potential that we can build connections between the social movements, the poor, and excluded of the world and the indigenous and peasant peoples of all Latin America. To put a halt to the deforestation underway in the Amazon and countless similar forms of destruction that are taking place across the planet, we must nourish grassroots movements that reject the neoliberal resource management of soil, forests, waters, and people.

For a solidarity between all peoples and exploited classes, not between paternalism and the colonialism of governments! The only way to address the environmental crisis and global climate change is to abolish capitalism!

Another end of the world is possible!

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thevividgreenmoss · 5 years

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For strategic, military and economic reasons, it is vital for the US government to persuade its public that their commitment to freedom and democracy and the American Way of Life is under attack. In the current atmosphere of grief, outrage and anger, it's an easy notion to peddle. However, if that were true, it's reasonable to wonder why the symbols of America's economic and military dominance - the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon - were chosen as the targets of the attacks. Why not the Statue of Liberty? Could it be that the stygian anger that led to the attacks has its taproot not in American freedom and democracy, but in the US government's record of commitment and support to exactly the opposite things - to military and economic terrorism, insurgency, military dictatorship, religious bigotry and unimaginable genocide (outside America)? It must be hard for ordinary Americans, so recently bereaved, to look up at the world with their eyes full of tears and encounter what might appear to them to be indifference. It isn't indifference. It's just augury. An absence of surprise. The tired wisdom of knowing that what goes around eventually comes around. American people ought to know that it is not them but their government's policies that are so hated. They can't possibly doubt that they themselves, their extraordinary musicians, their writers, their actors, their spectacular sportsmen and their cinema, are universally welcomed. All of us have been moved by the courage and grace shown by firefighters, rescue workers and ordinary office staff in the days since the attacks.

America's grief at what happened has been immense and immensely public. It would be grotesque to expect it to calibrate or modulate its anguish. However, it will be a pity if, instead of using this as an opportunity to try to understand why September 11 happened, Americans use it as an opportunity to usurp the whole world's sorrow to mourn and avenge only their own. Because then it falls to the rest of us to ask the hard questions and say the harsh things. And for our pains, for our bad timing, we will be disliked, ignored and perhaps eventually silenced.

The world will probably never know what motivated those particular hijackers who flew planes into those particular American buildings. They were not glory boys. They left no suicide notes, no political messages; no organisation has claimed credit for the attacks. All we know is that their belief in what they were doing outstripped the natural human instinct for survival, or any desire to be remembered. It's almost as though they could not scale down the enormity of their rage to anything smaller than their deeds. And what they did has blown a hole in the world as we knew it. In the absence of information, politicians, political commentators and writers (like myself) will invest the act with their own politics, with their own interpretations. This speculation, this analysis of the political climate in which the attacks took place, can only be a good thing.

But war is looming large. Whatever remains to be said must be said quickly. Before America places itself at the helm of the "international coalition against terror", before it invites (and coerces) countries to actively participate in its almost godlike mission - called Operation Infinite Justice until it was pointed out that this could be seen as an insult to Muslims, who believe that only Allah can mete out infinite justice, and was renamed Operation Enduring Freedom- it would help if some small clarifications are made. For example, Infinite Justice/Enduring Freedom for whom? Is this America's war against terror in America or against terror in general? What exactly is being avenged here? Is it the tragic loss of almost 7,000 lives, the gutting of five million square feet of office space in Manhattan, the destruction of a section of the Pentagon, the loss of several hundreds of thousands of jobs, the bankruptcy of some airline companies and the dip in the New York Stock Exchange? Or is it more than that? In 1996, Madeleine Albright, then the US secretary of state, was asked on national television what she felt about the fact that 500,000 Iraqi children had died as a result of US economic sanctions. She replied that it was "a very hard choice", but that, all things considered, "we think the price is worth it". Albright never lost her job for saying this. She continued to travel the world representing the views and aspirations of the US government. More pertinently, the sanctions against Iraq remain in place. Children continue to die.

So here we have it. The equivocating distinction between civilisation and savagery, between the "massacre of innocent people" or, if you like, "a clash of civilisations" and "collateral damage". The sophistry and fastidious algebra of infinite justice. How many dead Iraqis will it take to make the world a better place? How many dead Afghans for every dead American? How many dead women and children for every dead man? How many dead mojahedin for each dead investment banker? As we watch mesmerised, Operation Enduring Freedom unfolds on TV monitors across the world. A coalition of the world's superpowers is closing in on Afghanistan, one of the poorest, most ravaged, war-torn countries in the world, whose ruling Taliban government is sheltering Osama bin Laden, the man being held responsible for the September 11 attacks.

The only thing in Afghanistan that could possibly count as collateral value is its citizenry. (Among them, half a million maimed orphans.There are accounts of hobbling stampedes that occur when artificial limbs are airdropped into remote, inaccessible villages.) Afghanistan's economy is in a shambles. In fact, the problem for an invading army is that Afghanistan has no conventional coordinates or signposts to plot on a military map - no big cities, no highways, no industrial complexes, no water treatment plants. Farms have been turned into mass graves. The countryside is littered with land mines - 10 million is the most recent estimate. The American army would first have to clear the mines and build roads in order to take its soldiers in.

Fearing an attack from America, one million citizens have fled from their homes and arrived at the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The UN estimates that there are eight million Afghan citizens who need emergency aid. As supplies run out - food and aid agencies have been asked to leave - the BBC reports that one of the worst humanitarian disasters of recent times has begun to unfold. Witness the infinite justice of the new century. Civilians starving to death while they're waiting to be killed.

The Algebra of Infinite Justice

#arundhati roy #essays #*

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timeflies1007-blog · 5 years

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Doctor Who Reviews by a Female Doctor, Season 4, p. 2

The Doctor’s Daughter: This isn’t the worst episode of the reboot, but it might be the most emotionally unsatisfying. Producing a biological relative for the Doctor by putting his hand in a machine for a few seconds undercuts his grief about the loss of his people without really any payoff—his lackluster relationship with his daughter just doesn’t do enough to compensate for the notion that apparently getting Time Lords back into the world is a lot easier than we thought. There are a couple of nice moments in which the Doctor refers to his grief about his Time Lord family, but his sense of loneliness—usually taken very seriously by the show—is undermined more often than it is accentuated here.

I’m not really sure why Martha is in this episode, as she doesn’t want to be there and there’s very little for her to do. She forms sort of a nice bond with one of the fish creatures, but the Hath are mostly so dull that Martha’s forced to wander around in a weird, personality-less void in which fish with legs stand around breathing. She’s not really missing out on much while she’s a captive of the Hath, as the human civilization is also entirely without interest. There’s a lot of talk about war, and then there’s a brief creation myth, and then one of the humans claims that peace and genocide are the same thing so that the Doctor can yell about violence and Jenny can point out how violent he is. We’ve had an awful lot of this theme (the Doctor thinks he is above violence! but also the Doctor is violent!) in the past couple of episodes, which would be fine if it were going anywhere interesting but it’s basically not. The plot twist—in which it is revealed that the war has been going on for only a matter of days—is genuinely pretty surprising, but it’s so difficult to invest in these characters or this world that it doesn’t mean very much.

Jenny herself is likeable enough, but is one of the clearest foray into Mary Sue territory that the show has ever done. She’s born perky, quick-witted, and intensely athletic, and can easily understand other people’s motives and characteristics in spite of having only just sprung into existence. Other talents include asking lots of questions so that we get exposition about stuff that we already know, doing back flips through laser beams, and flirting. The actress (Peter Davison’s daughter and Tennant’s future wife) does as much as she can with the material, and she really does have a very charming screen presence, but the script confines her so thoroughly to the “attractive, physically gifted woman” box that there’s not much for her to work with. Given her origins, it’s not surprising that her connection to the Doctor comes across as forced and artificial, but I just never buy any real emotional connection between them.

I’m even more annoyed by the “death” of the daughter, as her return to life is weirdly emotionless and doesn’t follow any of what we know about Time Lord regeneration. This non-death also lands us with one of the worst-ever Doctor speeches. Tennant generally does grief and anger very well, but his shouty speech directed at the warring figures comes across as absolutely moronic. The Doctor has a tendency to tell other people what to do, which is somewhat justified by his years of experience in dealing with conflict, but it’s a lot more palatable when it’s tempered by his awareness of his own mistakes and problems. Here, he pretty straightforwardly tells the people of this planet to model their society around their consciousness of how much better than them he is, and it’s just absolutely insufferable. I do think that his claims that he “never would” engage in their destructive behavior are deliberate irony on the part of the show, in the sense that this season does give us fairly consistent reminders that the Doctor is always trying to distance himself from violence without ever quite succeeding. That makes sense of this scene’s role in the larger arc of the season, but it doesn’t explain why the character himself has so little self-awareness or so much willingness to lie to himself that he can bring himself to say nonsense like this.

Donna is loveable as usual here, and I particularly like her insistence that the Doctor take seriously his connection to his daughter. She also describes the feeling of stepping off the TARDIS onto a new place as being like “swallowing a hamster,” which is pretty fabulous. (I could do without the Doctor sending a mechanical mouse toy to distract a guard because Donna’s “wiles” aren’t enough, though.) She just doesn’t play a large enough role in this story to save it from the cheap emotional foundation; the entire concept of “we need the Doctor to feel feelings, preferably loudly and angrily, let’s put a blonde in” is so tired by this point that it’s difficult to watch. C/C-

The Unicorn and the Wasp: And we’re back to good episodes for a while! This is easy to forget in light of the bigger, flashier episodes to come this season, but it’s very fun. Donna’s having a great time pretending to be a 1920s socialite, and the episode gives both Tate and Tennant a lot of opportunity to demonstrate their marvelous comedic timing. Meeting Agatha Christie at a country house when someone has been murdered is a similar enough idea to “The Unquiet Dead” and “The Shakespeare Code” that they actually have Donna make a joke about it, but it’s a premise worth repeating. I do think that Agatha Christie would have written a much better mystery than this one, as none of the twists are particularly effective and the resolution is moderately entertaining but unremarkable. Still, having a giant wasp attack a bunch of rich white people (aka WASPs) is a good joke, and watching the characters try to figure out what’s going on is fun even in the absence of a compelling mystery.

Christie herself is generally pretty well-written, but among the major historical figures the show has portrayed, she’s not one of my favorites. Part of the problem is that the actress gets sort of upstaged by some of the other guest stars. The not-yet-famous Felicity Jones is a delight as a jewel thief, but the wonderful Felicity Kendal (one of the stars of the great 1970s comedy The Good Life) steals the show. I don’t think she’s really supposed to, as she’s a fairly minor character whose function is to have a dark secret that informs the mystery, but I find myself watching her rather than Agatha Christie when they’re on screen together. Nonetheless, the idea that the events of this episode are the reason why Christie disappeared for a few days gives it a nice sense of importance, and the revelation that her books are perpetual bestsellers is not quite as moving as the similar moment in “The Unquiet Dead” but is still quite lovely.

The heart of this story is not the character herself, really, but rather the whimsical adventures that ensue from the Vespiform’s absorption of her writing. A couple of serious moments exist, including Donna’s willingness to kill the Vespiform when the Doctor refuses, but for the most part this episode is all about the comedy. There are silly flashbacks, exaggerated plot twists, and at one point there’s a lengthy comedic bit about the Doctor cleansing poison from his system. There are also lots of accidental references to books that Christie hasn’t written yet, and Donna unsuccessfully tries to get herself into a copyright page. Nothing really remarkable happens here, but it’s just so bubbly and charming that the episode is an absolute joy to watch. A-/B+

Silence in the Library: Even if the story itself had been boring, I would have really enjoyed this episode just for the beautiful, terrifying library in which it takes place. I love libraries, and if I were in charge of the show we’d probably have a library setting about once a season. Happily, this library is home to a compelling story, with a spooky new set of monsters and a marvelous debut for River Song.

River is definitely the highlight of this two-parter, and Alex Kingston is immediately fantastic as the doomed time-traveler. It’s a bold move to introduce a new character, heavily imply that she’s the Doctor’s wife, suggest that there are lots more adventures with her in the Doctor’s future, and then kill her by the end of the two-episode story. I can’t think of many other characters on the show who have been introduced with quite so much fanfare, and so it’s a testament to Kingston’s performance that the emotional impact of the character exceeds the impressiveness of the plot to which she is attached. She has immediate chemistry with the Doctor, and her distress at having met a version of the Doctor who doesn’t know her unfolds beautifully across the episode. In spite of this distress, though, there’s just such a tremendous sense of enjoyment and energy in everything she does, as if she can’t help relishing the challenge and the adrenaline in spite of everything that’s going wrong. The rest of her crew aren’t quite as interesting, and Miss Evangelista’s brainlessness is a bit overplayed, although I do like the brief friendship she strikes up with Donna. This two-parter is basically about the chemistry between River and the Doctor, though, and even when the supporting cast isn’t quite as good, these two absolutely sparkle.

The Vashta Nerada aren’t quite as memorable to me as the Gas Mask Child or the Angels, but they are solidly scary monsters, and the fact that we see the gnawed skeletons that they produce but never see the monsters themselves definitely adds to the effect. The statues with human faces don’t really do much for me, and even when we see Donna’s face at the end of the episode I’m mostly unimpressed. I’m much more interested in the ghostly remnants of consciousness that linger in those the Vashta Nerada have killed—the notion of digitally-saved consciousness is creepy in itself, but hearing Proper Dave and Miss Evangelista continuing to speak even after their deaths is absolutely harrowing. Between the dangers that lie in the shadows and the terror of listening to the dead continue to speak, there are lots of properly terrifying moments.

The one major problem that I have with this episode is that I don’t really find the computer universe to be particularly interesting. I like the concept of having “saved” people to a computer, but I spend most of the scenes with the little girl and Dr. Moon just waiting to get back to the library. To be fair, the use of her television is pretty cool, as is the fact that she has a picture of a blond woman and a wolf on her wall, but I find the character herself to be pretty irritating. There are enough things that don’t work for me here that I don’t find this story to be quite as compelling as “Blink” or “The Empty Child,” but the gorgeous setting and the terrific introduction of River are enough to make this one of the stronger episodes of the season. A/A-

Forest of the Dead: Unreal universes clearly fascinate Moffat, who will return to this trope a number of times in later episodes. This two-parter is his first foray into a story like this, which gives it a sense of originality that diminishes as we see the concept repeat in subsequent seasons, but I would argue that this fake universe—which becomes more prevalent here than it was in the previous episode—is nowhere near as interesting as the ones that appear later on in episodes like “Last Christmas” and “Extremis” or Simon Nye’s “Amy’s Choice.” It is genuinely sad to see Donna realize that her children aren’t real, and it’s even sadder that she never finds out that her husband in the fake universe was in fact an actual person, but the whole place just says Fake Sci-Fi Universe so blatantly that I never find any interest in it as an alternate reality. It also feels oddly uncreative; I get that the other reality was initially created for Cal’s benefit, and that might explain the domestic focus, but the thoroughly unadventurous world isn’t very exciting and doesn’t seem completely suitable as a happily-ever-after for someone as energetic as Donna. Miss Evangelista, who experienced an error in translation that increased her IQ but also resulted in physical disfigurement, is a striking presence but even she doesn’t really hold my interest. (It’s also unfortunate that the script isn’t as clear as it could be about the relationship between the two changes that she experienced; I don’t think she really says anything that implies a causal relationship between the two, but a slightly vague sentence structure makes it possible to read this as a claim that her decreased attractiveness made possible her increased intelligence, which would definitely have been worth avoiding.)

Because I don’t really enjoy the world to which Donna and others have been “saved,” this episode only really works for me when we’re in the library itself. Fortunately, there are a number of good scenes in the library and then one absolutely sublime one, as River sacrifices herself so that the Doctor can live to make all of the memories that she’s already had with him. It’s an absolutely stunning piece of writing, acting, and musical underscoring, and River’s death is so moving that it’s difficult to believe that this is only her second episode. I’m not sure what gets to me the most in this scene; it might be River telling the Doctor “you watch us run,” as she thinks of the time together that’s still to come for him, or it might be the Doctor’s acknowledgment that there’s only one reason why he would ever have told her his name, or it might be some of the best music Murray Gold’s ever composed, but in retrospect, I think what makes me saddest is the fact that one of the last things she hears is the Doctor unknowingly saying her mother’s favorite expression. She’s quick to shut down the idea that time can be rewritten in this case, but if you watch this after seeing later seasons, the words allow the spirit of Amy Pond to make a brief, heartbreaking appearance in her daughter’s final moments.

River’s connection to the Doctor works marvelously well throughout the episode, and the notion that he’s like seeing a photograph of someone from before you knew them gives us a lovely way into her feelings. The Doctor takes an embarrassingly long time to get the connection between books and trees, but he does do some pretty stellar thinking as he figures out what it means to have “saved” all four thousand people. (He figures this out in the middle of Anita trying to have a meaningful last conversation, which isn’t his kindest moment, but it’s still impressive.) The Vashta Nerada and their creepy shadows continue to be very frightening, but the resolution—in which the Doctor intimidates them into leaving everyone alone by telling them to look him up in the library’s books—is not the most satisfying end to the main plot. The final moments, though, in which he “saves” River to the library computer, make for a much stronger conclusion. River is one of the many characters to only sort-of die, and my lack of interest in the computer universe means that I’m not that excited about the continued existence of her consciousness within it. However, the Doctor’s realization of why he gave her his screwdriver and his rush to “save” her is so compellingly done that I’m very moved by the scene in spite of the minor issues that I have with it.

As in the first part, I don’t find this episode quite as brilliant as some of Moffat’s other early episodes, like “The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances” and “Blink.” The Vashta Nerada are solid villains, and the library is a gorgeous setting, but this episode is really only sensational to me when River is on screen. Still, even with some pieces that I don’t especially like, this episode contains enough brilliant moments to make it a very strong story overall. A/A-

#doctor who #female doctor #tenth doctor #donna noble #david tennant #catherine tate #russell t davies #steven moffat #season 4 #reviews

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