Week 14: The History of the Remote

Time to dig in for some analysis of one of the most interesting concepts in the whole FP mythos, if not all of Doctor Who's wider pantheon. The Remote, what a great name they have first of all. Managing to evoke both the idea of a wireless signal receiver as well as their general alienation from the ordinary human experience. A perfect name for a faction defined by passively absorbing media and only being able to understand the world through narrative conventions.

The Book is quite cynical at times, cruelly targeting all sorts of banal programming designed to pacify viewers. The vast repositories of information newly being grown in the early 2000s, such as the internet or large numbers of tv channels, only end up garbling the feed of human knowledge with ceaseless distraction. The Remembrance Tanks are a particularly ominous idea, where you can sort of live forever, but only as a pale imitation crafted from the memories of those who knew you. Better hope your friends can accurately remember you, or else you're on the road to becoming a stereotype of yourself over countless eons. Perhaps it's because the Remote are now unmoored from the semi-uplifting ending of Interference, in which Sam Jones ascended from the role of companion to becoming a political activist in her own right, defying the Remote's prescribed eschaton and reshaping their culture for the better.

Still, even in this newer form, hollowed out by the Great Houses, there's still a spark of subversion. After all, the Remote aren't the only faction locked into a stereotypically boredom inducing conflict. The Great Houses can't see the fact that their own culture is equally sterile, with an othered 'Enemy' to battle forever, with breeding tanks and copied troopers to boot. The Faction have their skull masks, the Celestis their marks, and all end up just as much empty signifiers as anything the Remote became saddled with. The Remote, after all, are a product of their creators, with all their flaws and foibles included.


The Remote are also great for the way they pull off the same trick Lawrence Miles pulled previously with his reinvention of the Krotons in Alien Bodies. He takes an essentially forgotten b-list Who monster and has immense fun mocking the sillier aspects, while at the same time making them grander and devoting genuine attention to the way they work in a way no other writer would put in the effort for.

The Remote, as the second iteration of this trend, are even more effective at this. They mask their origins by being a genuinely independent enough group, so the strength of their concept carries them even before the jokey twist in Interference. Revealing that the Remote are in fact the secret descendants/ancestors of the Voord is a beautifully underwhelming rug pull. It's also not an empty reference. The Keys of Marinus is in fact a very clever target for this kind of reinvention.

In its original conception, The Keys of Marinus is essentially about forms of control. The conscience machine sways the minds of the planet, bringing them into a passive order. In the city of Morphoton we have an illusory web designed to fool the inhabitants into accepting a worse standard of living. And in Millenius, we have a society where innocence requires factual evidence and post-truth ethics rule. Of course, the serial quickly devolves away from these richer thematic concerns to concern itself with banal adventure japes instead (the Screaming Jungle and Snows of Terror adding essentially nothing to the greater themes of media manipulation).


The central irony of the whole story is that the Doctor and his companions are working the entire time to restore the very vector of control that previously blanketed the planet. In any other story the Voord would be the plucky band of rebels who help the Doctor's crew take down the oppressive instrument of social control. The end of the story, in which the conscience machine is ultimately blown up, taking all the Voord conveniently with it, feels less like an earned resolution and more like the show's normal sense of morals turning up, going "that's not quite right", and steering the rudder back on course. Whether it's down to the quirks of early Who's format, Terry Nation's limited imagination, or simply an ethical oversight, it goes down as a rather odd note in the history of Who.

Lawrence Miles seems to have noticed this dichotomy in The Keys of Marinus, which is why the Remote feel like such a rich concept when taken in tandem with the earlier story. The choice of target for this 'soft reboot' so to speak (and if it wasn't so subtly done, the Remote might almost be taken as one of those 'edgy 90's updates' of a classic concept), is very specific to enhancing Interference. A tale of carefully crafted narratives, a culture of passive receivers, Interference becomes a new and improved take on the themes of Marinus. Not for nothing is the fetishistic gear of the Remote shadow troopers carried forwards even into the Book of the War's take on the group. Miles is particularly enamoured with exploring the limits of cultural storytelling, it's something that crops up in most of his works, so latching on to one time Who touched on similar ground is honestly perfect.

Perhaps the Keys of Marinus was a Broken Remote transmission all along, teaching the viewers to accept mental control even at the same time decrying it in other aspects, all to create a haze of doubt and inaction in the populace. It's a testament to the Remote that they can overcome the idea that they're nothing more an cheap 60's monster and make even their origins part of the grander narrative.



Although you know what else the Voord or Remote remind me of, something from the same culture of the late 90's which spawned Faction Paradox? I mean, obvious totemic receivers on their bodies, passive watchers of media ("Television in their stomach. Now that is evolution."), it makes a sick kind of sense...