The Triumph of Intellect and Romance Over Brute Force and Cynicism

“Hate is always foolish and love is always wise."

“Never be cruel and never be cowardly. And if you ever are, always make amends.”

When my daughter was a newborn, her mother and I split shifts on taking care of her through the night. I would stay up to about 4 a.m., reading a book in one hand while she slept draped across my forearm (she was a little premature and very small). I got a lot of reading done! I also watched a lot of late night TV, and we had a regular habit of watching Late Night with David Letterman, and then the Late, Late Show with Craig Ferguson.

It was an interesting time. We saw letterman make the announcement admitting to having an affair and how one of his producers had tried to blackmail him over it and been arrested. That was pretty wild. We were also watching Doctor Who regularly, and were especially enjoying Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor, and so it was also pretty wild when Ferguson had this cold open:

My daughter is now a teenager, and I get a lot of delight when she enjoys something I do. That's mostly been sitcoms, especially The Office, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and Bob's Burgers. This year she also got massively into Severance. But the funnest thing of all started at Christmastime, 2023, when I queued up the second of the three Doctor Who Christmas Specials, and she went mad for the show.

Geeks and Nerds

I went back with her and we got her completely caught up from the Ninth Doctor on (we both love Peter Capaldi as the Twelfth Doctor). All through those wonderful hours, I kept thinking about Ferguson's tribute, especially his description of the show as about "The triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism.”

It is exactly that, and it puts it into contrast with Andor. I find myself watching Doctor Who and, even if the current seasons with Ncuti Gatwa, as the Fifteenth Doctor so far doesn’t dig in as much as those for the Ninth-Twelfth (Jodie Whittaker’s years as the Thirteenth are let down by bad writing), it’s always enjoyable because the spirit of the triumph of intellect and romance is always there. Meanwhile, even though Andor is better written, acted, directed, and produced, it mostly left me cold.

Andor has a big problem that can't be helped, in that it is part of the long Star Wars narrative. Season Two ends just before Rogue One begins, and the difference in quality between the two is startling and makes Rogue One-which used to stand out as an atypically more adult and deeper story-look silly in comparison. Knowing that something serious turns into something crappy undermines the dramatic premise.

And of course it connects directly with the original Stars Wars movie. I was twelve when I first saw that, and I thought it was one of the greatest things ever. I’m not twelve anymore, and I rewatched it recently and was stunned at how bad it is. It's pitched at a preteen level, and everything about the tone and dialogue feels cheap. It’s a movie where you hum the music and the scenery, I get the appeal, but it manages to be both fast-paced and dull.

The politics of Star Wars are also at about the sixth grade, rudimentary civics level. Andor rises above this a bit through specifying and showing some interesting political character types, especially people who need external order to control their lives, but the way people who get paid to write about politics have taken to it as an exemplar is unsettling to me. Certainly they know better? Surely they’ve seen The Battle of Algiers?

Or Z? Or Bulworth?

The state of cultural literacy is pretty low these days, and the nadir is with the political people (and if I’m including some of your faves, I mean to do that) who like to opine of movies and TV and novels, and have shallow and mechanical taste.

Wars Without Consequences

Andor is political within hard and strictly defined limits. The show sees political society as a system that has no apparent purpose other than its own perpetuation. The Empire builds the Death Star to preserve its power because it exists to preserve its power. The rebellion seeks freedom from that power, and fans are jazzed about the speeches about sacrificing oneself and others, but as melodrama there’s no real cost or moral dimension. Battle for Algiers has the visceral effect of showing how people get caught in the crossfire for no other reason than they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, that both tyranny and rebellion are lubricated by the blood of others.

Those speeches are framed as dramatic high points, but they’re less interesting and effective than seeing the effects of the Empire's existence. The most meaningful and relevant political moment happens in Season One, when Andor is arrested and imprisoned for nothing other than having the misfortune of encountering a cop, a pissant wielding arbitrary power because they have a uniform. The cop is a bureaucratic extension of the striving middle management that seeks to implement the political will of the Empire while hoping to rise up through it, not only at the expense of citizens (and it’s never clear what that word means in Andor) but their colleagues.

The rebellion is also packed with its own middle managers and committees. Against this, the thing that makes Andor and Luthen Rael interesting is less what they do than that they are free agents, they work with the rebellion when it suits them and have no ideology other than being against the Empire and for the few people they care about. They are not necessarily good, but at times do good. They are anarchists, and absolutely have that spark of inspiration to them. They want to be free from order imposed from above or without. What bothers me about the Andor fandom is that it reminds me of people like Christopher Hitchens and David Frum and Andrew Sullivan, for whom 9/11 was the best thing that ever happened to them, giving them the freedom to air their bigotries and to feel the vicarious thrill that they were now part of important history—as long as other people did the killing and dying. They were (and are) amoral.

“Hate is always foolish and love is always wise."

For all its inspiration, Andor is a poor fit for American politics, 2025, while Bulworth is far better. The current regime has power because those who ostensibly oppose it have ceded so much power, have done fuck all about anything. The flaccid, value-less nihilism of the Democratic Party is not only immoral but politically stupid. There are millions of people who have actual values and want to see leadership. They want a Doctor Who.

The show is not explicitly political but instead is deeply political. That’s because it is deeply humanist. The show has no ideology, it has values. Yes, intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism: intellect meaning curiosity about the universe and the desire to know more, romance meaning cherishing the experience (and aesthetics) of life for oneself and all others. So simple you can’t fuck it up. To learn, to know, to live with a sense of enthusiasm, positive adventure, even a touch of heroism.

And that’s where the show is at its best. What is Doctor Who’s political system? It’s right there in those declarations: never be cruel and never be cowardly. It starts with a program for how to treat people, and continues with a program for how to live. The Doctor has values, but is not always nice, or right, and doesn’t always do right. The character is haunted by guilt and remorse, which are natural parts of having values. Anyone who never feels guilt is a soulless ghoul. The great enemies are the Daleks and the Cybermen, who seek to reduce the soul to a collective that seeks nothing but its own power.

A far more appropriate metaphor than Andor for the current moment is this scene from near the end of the Twelfth Doctor’s life:

Think of him as us, motivated first and foremost by values and how we would like society to be around us, free of any -isms, the Master/Missy (two versions from different times of the same antagonist) as Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, and the professional, careerist apparatus of the Democratic Party (lobbyists, pollsters, consultants, James Carville, Rahm Emanuel, Andrew Cuomo, etc) who are glad to sell us all into serfdom as long as they keep getting their sinecures and TV hits.

That plays out in the finale of the episode “Heaven Sent,” the one to watch if you’ve never watched any. It is Capaldi, solo, doing the best thing that Doctor Who does, which is figuring out an infernal puzzle in order to save the lives of others. This puzzle takes literally billions of years to solve, and it’s not just thrilling to watch but intensely moving, as the character never questions the point of enduring billions of years punching through a wall of something harder than diamond.

That’s not politics, that’s something better: values.

The current season of Doctor Who starts its finale May 24, the day the show has already indicated the Earth has been destroyed. So if we’re all still around, enjoy!