Paradise Towers

Chapter the 297th, never mind the Ballards, here's Paradise Towers.

Plot:
The 22nd century on an unnamed planet (which could be Earth, I suppose, things are left a bit vague - the inhabitants are described as human, and wherever they travelled from to get to the Towers they took a 'ship' but it's not definitively referred to as a space-ship). The Doctor and Mel journey to Paradise Towers, a supposedly luxurious apartment complex that has fallen into disrepair. They meet various groups of characters: gangs of girls wearing specific colours called Kangs, officious Caretakers who are bound by a vast set of rules, and the older female residents known as Rezzies. All were brought to the Towers for their safety when a war broke out, while the remaining people (including all males younger than middle-age) fought in the war. The only younger man around is Pex, a self-styled action hero, who stowed away with the others as he was too scared to be drafted into the conflict. Since then, the Towers has become a battleground. The Kangs fight each other, but do not take life, but they are being killed off by the Towers' cleaning robots. The Chief Caretaker has been programming the robots to kill Kangs and Caretakers and feed the bodies to his 'pet' in the basement - a vat containing an unseen entity that speaks to him a la Audrey from The Little Shop of Horrors.

The two time travellers are split up. The Doctor is captured by the Caretakers, but manages to escape, and meets up with the Red Kangs. Mel meets two seemingly nice Rezzies, Tilda and Tabby, but they have turned to cannibalism, having their eyes on Mel as a potential meal; she only escapes because of the arrival of Pex, breaking the door down; in that moment of distraction, a cleaning robot grabs and carts off both Tilda and Tabby. The robots are starting to kill people without the Chief Caretaker's knowledge, controlled by the thing in the basement. This turns out to be the disembodied mind of the Great Architect who designed Paradise Towers, and who treats those who live there as pollutants of his precious building. The architect has been trying to reanimate the corpses brought to him with his own mental force, and finally manages it by taking over the Chief Caretaker. As the Great Architect and the cleaners work floor by floor of the building 'cleansing' it of people, the Doctor and Mel bring together the remaining Kangs, Caretakers, Rezzies and Pex at the swimming pool on the 304th floor. They hatch a plan to lure the Chief Architect out of his base, and blow him up. It works, but only at the cost of Pex's life, who finally finds his courage. All the inhabitants of the Towers mourn Pex, and the Doctor and Mel leave for further adventures in time and space.

Context:

I watched this on my own from the disc in the Season 24 Collection Blu-ray box-set (the edition as broadcast, rather than the extended versions of the episodes that are also available on that set) over four days in April 2024. To prompt memories of the time of broadcast, I also watched the Trailers and Continuities special feature that these sets comprehensively provide for 1970s and 80s stories. I'd forgotten that later episodes of each story of season 24 were preceded by recaps of the story so far, an innovation retained from the previous year. It had made more sense to provide them in 1986 as the season was one long story (The Trial of a Time Lord); in 1987, there was only two or three weeks of narrative for viewers to recollect, and from the following year the recaps would be dropped. It was fun in 2024, though, to listen to a no-doubt nonplussed continuity announcer reading out things like "the Doctor drops into the Red Kangs brainquarters" while a couple of grainy photo slides were shown on screen.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. This post marks the 24th season completed out of the total of 39 to date (at the time of writing). In full, I have now completed classic seasons 1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 12, 14-18, 20, 21, 23-25, and new series 2, 6, 7, 9-11, and 13).

First Time Round:

I watched this on its BBC1 broadcast in October 1987, recording each episode onto a VHS tape that I then watched over and over again. At the time, I thought this was the best a Doctor Who script had been for many a year, and the story was refreshingly new (despite the visuals not necessarily being quite up to the level of imagination of the writing, which I'll cover more below, but that is anyway par for the course with Doctor Who). I know now - only from stumbling across the information subsequently rather than having any strong memories of the time - that in between the broadcast of parts two and three of Paradise Towers there was the great storm of 1987. I'd gone to bed on Thursday 15th October, slept fine, and woken up on the Friday to find the greenhouse in our back garden crushed under a fallen tree; luckily that was the extent of it for us (it could have been a lot worse). I got a day off school and explored the neighbourhood, where there was many a fallen tree. By the Monday, school was back on; by the evening of that Monday, the storm was probably long forgotten history to the 15-year old me as he sat down to watch the latest episode of Doctor Who go out in the evening.

Reaction:

I have not read High-Rise by J G Ballard; add it to the unread pile along with The Prisoner of Zenda (inspiration for Doctor Who story The Androids of Tara) and The Loved One (inspiration for Revelation of the Daleks). I have however seen the movie adaptation directed by Ben Wheatley (who also directed for Doctor Who many years after the time of Paradise Towers, helming Peter Capaldi's first two stories just before moving on to filming this 'unfilmable' novel). There are clearly elements and themes in Paradise Towers taken from Ballard's tale of a high-rise building and its residents' disintegration. The biggest clues are the importance placed in both upon a swimming pool and a mysterious unseen architect, but the influence goes deeper than that. This was a time of an influx of new imagination into Doctor Who with the arrival of a new script editor, Andrew Cartmel, with Paradise Towers as his first commission after taking up the role. The show had been through a time of chaos; the writing and production of the stories of the previous year had been beset by difficulties and conflicts bigger than the show had perhaps ever faced, but Cartmel - supported by long-term producer John Nathan-Turner, seemingly reinvigorated by a new working relationship far less dysfunctional than he had with Cartmel's predecessor - would steer the show out of these turbulent waters and towards the North Star of a new level of story quality. As the first tentative attempts at this navigation, Paradise Towers is fascinating: writer Stephen Wyatt and Cartmel sat down as newbies in charge of a British institution and decided that they would make a family friendly version of an infamously dark, disturbing and violent novel, with a kids' TV aesthetic and a BBC LE cast. It seems excitingly like both genius and folly.

Cartmel and Wyatt, in their freshness and newness, may not of course have realised at first that it would end up with a kids' TV aesthetic and a BBC LE cast; they can't, though, have been so naive as to not get even the slightest inkling, even before production started. If what was on the page was filmed straight without any heightened visual abstraction - if, for example, the cleaning robots were rusty, oily machines with sharp blood-encrusted blades instead of being giant, brightly-coloured Tonka toys, or if Richard Briers's Chief Caretaker was played as banally evil rather than sit-com bureaucrat, an administrator at Belsen, say, rather than Blakey from On the Buses - the programme wouldn't be suitable for children. It also, I think, wouldn't be as interesting. There is an energy that propels the programme arising from its textual/visual contradictions. This can most clearly be seen by watching the episodes with their initial incidental music (which is an audio option on the Blu-ray); David Snell's ultimately discarded score is doomy and dark as per Paradise Towers on the page. It kills any action is accompanies stone-dead; whereas, Keff McCulloch's replacement - for all its 80s day-glo spangles - lifts such scenes. So, what ends up on screen is a set of incredibly well-constructed and dressed sets of the decrepit floors of the towers used as a backdrop for a theatrical show featuring camp larger-than-life characters. This gives people an instant and obvious way to ignore or berate the story, but I think this is a mistake. I'm in a minority, I suspect, but I think that it has more than its fair share of greatness.

Paradise Towers has more than its share of not so great elements too, where the text and visuals are misaligned in a way that is definitely (as confirmed in interviews over the years) inadvertent. The supporting artists playing the caretakers are supposed to be middle-aged and out of shape, or else they'd have been off fighting in the war that entailed the very young and old being shipped off to the Towers - someone missed a memo. Pex is supposed to have a body-builder physique (hence the punning name) the better to counterpoint his cowardice - everyone of the right proportions who was auditioned couldn't act well enough to get a handle on the character. The Caretaker's rule book is supposed to be massive, as per multiple lines in dialogue - lack of attention or time from the production design team means it is presented as a thin pamphlet. This is a bit damaging, but probably not that big a deal in the scheme of things. Cartmel has kept banging on to date about the shortcomings on other departments in realising scripts from his Who tenure, and its understandable he would find that frustrating; but, he seems to take no responsibility for his part in it. Some of the issues with Paradise Towers are on the page. The Kangs are intended to be teenagers, but it would be impossible to cast them as such, and consequently - inevitably - they are 20-something actors playing teenagers who act like tweenagers as they are suffering from arrested development. That would be challenging to perform and watch for one actor, but the script needs hordes. As it is, the actors playing the Kangs comport themselves reasonably well; but if it all gets a bit like a dozen noisy principal boys on screen, as it sometimes does, that's built into the script and not the fault of any other contributor.

Where do the cannibalistic Rezzies get their supplies to make biscuits and cakes? What happened to the young boys of the Kangs' generation - did they really get kept behind to fight it the war, or did they come to the Towers and get killed there somehow? How long has everybody been there? Were the Kangs babies or toddlers or older infants when they arrived? The backstory is very sketchy, not precise enough; we can assume the war was real, though at times it's presented almost like the B-Ark plot from the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, i.e. an excuse to get rid of people. It seems unlikely that a society would voluntarily be separated from their children, so they wanted to keep them safe. If so, why would they deliberately house a malevolent force in the building with them? Why wouldn't they just kill the Great Architect? Beyond the why, there's the how. Was the Great Architect an alien of a different species to the other inhabitants of the Towers, and that's how his consciousness can exist outside his body? Is it a disembodied consciousness or the physical brain of the architect in the container in the basement? It's never shown and the script uses both 'mind' and 'brain' interchangeably. What is the container in the basement, and how does it allow the the architect to talk? Did the architect somehow arrange for it to be built or did the people who trapped him there provide it? Why does the Chief Caretaker think it's some kind of pet? Is he somehow under the influence of the architect's mental powers, or just naive? How exactly has the architect been able to develop skills of "corpoelectroscopy" in his very restrictive circumstances? It's all maddeningly unclear.

High-Rise - at least in adapted form - relies on a woozy, nightmare logic (why don't people just leave the building?), so maybe Paradise Towers is just following suit. Anyway, the Who story's relatively simple through-line is much clearer and logical than its backstory: the Doctor and Mel bring a group of squabbling factions of distinctively drawn, albeit exaggerated, characters together to defeat a common enemy. It's an optimistic plot, and the lack of cynicism is refreshing. The clumsy action scenes (the Cleaners never ever look even slightly threatening) don't harm such a plot too much. Only the one particular performance is impossible to watch, and that's only for one episode of four: when Briers's character is taken over by the Great Architect he overacts so much his performance can be seen from three hundred and four floors up; heck, it could be seen from space. He needed reining in, and sadly the director couldn't or at least didn't do it. All this has to be balanced against the many great scenes: all the fun had with language in scenes with the Kangs; the Doctor using the Caretaker's rule book against them, bamboozling them such that he can escape; Tilda and Tabby turning on Mel, their old lady accoutrements of knitted net blanket and toasting fork suddenly converted into weapons; the repeated scene of Pex breaking through the oldsters' door, played first for laughs and then for real when Pex inadvertently rescues someone for the first time; the Doctor bringing hope and joy to the Towers by dusting off a drinks dispenser machine; and, finally, the end with the camera zooming in on the "PEX LIVES" wall-scrawl. When these are all weighed up, the balance tips in Paradise Towers' favour. 

Connectivity:

Paradise Towers, like Scream of the Shalka, features a Doctor investigating an isolated community of residents cut off from anyone else, and an alien intelligence that transplants itself into another person's body.

Deeper Thoughts:

Horseshoes and prisms. I watched Paradise Towers at the same time as working my way through the latest wonderful and comprehensive Blu-ray box set of a season-long chunk of Doctor Who's back catalogue. The latest set is for season 15, the classic series run broadcast from 1977 to 1978 starring Tom Baker (in his fourth year as the Doctor) and Louise Jameson (in her first and last full year playing the character of Leela, having joined the show midway through season 14). As well as the stories of the season, there are many extras including oodles of archive recordings of Jameson - there are interviews and/or commentaries on the set featuring her recorded in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s and 2010s. In these, she is consistent regarding her favourite story, and it's The Sun Makers, because of its political subtext. Jameson feels that the story has a left-wing message (in at least one recording she calls it Marxist) about the encouragement of workers to rise up against an oppressive regime. Elsewhere in the content, though, it is confirmed that the writer of The Sun Makers Robert Holmes was prompted to write the story at least in part by the high UK tax rates of the time, which were set by a left-wing government (led by Labour Party Prime Minister Harold Wilson and with Denis Healey as Chancellor of the Exchequer). The script contains a reasonably positive allusion to Das Kapital, but also a villain seemingly modelled on Healey (the Collector's look includes the sort of excessive eyebrows that were Healey's trademark). So, is The Sun Makers a satirical barb aimed at left-wing or right-wing? What even are left-wing and right-wing, anyway?

Maybe it would be more useful to differentiate between the two poles in a more precise manner. This is just my personal take, but I plot things on an axis of more responsibility on the state on one side, and more on the individual on the other; additionally, one side is more likely to want to change norms (economic or social), while the other side is more likely to preserve them: larger state progressive versus smaller state conservative. With that in mind - and accepting that there is a Gaussian distribution with most approaches to government in a centrist zone with a flatter range tapering off to the two extremes - where on these axes would we plot the plot of The Sun Makers? The state apparatus on Pluto depicted in the story is overpoweringly large, with little room for individual freedom; every action is aggressively enforced and regressively taxed; this is done, though, to maximise profit for a large enterprise that has control of the government. The enterprise isn't operating in a free market, as one company has a total monopoly - there's no state intervention to break this monopoly. so in that way the state is small. The state applying minimal regulation on business is not a common feature in large state progressive approaches. Additionally, there is a lot of evidence in The Sun Makers that little has changed or is desired to change in the way that power is exerted (until the Doctor arrives) suggesting a more conservative approach. So, one could make a case either way, that the government on Pluto is a left- or a right-wing one. Is this the horseshoe theory in action? This is the theory that suggests that the most extreme left or right positions are much closer in their approaches and their impacts than any in the centre.

I generally dislike the horseshoe theory. The approaches at such extremes that would prove the theory are such that any instigating ideology has been left far behind. At those extremes, government isn't truly government at all, it's just the maintaining of power for its own sake, whatever ideals its leaders might once have believed in, or which books they may once have read. If approaches now look similar, it's because they have jettisoned anything that might have made them different, and is nothing to do with how the approach may have started. The theory also feels defeatist, smacking of the old adage that "politicians are all the same". The centre ground might contain policy areas that have smaller and more subtle graduations of difference between left- or right-wing approaches, but these differences can nonetheless have a great impact on the lives of the people being governed. It's in the nature of a television show like Doctor Who to show extreme positions, though, which throws a great horseshoe into the works of any analysis and perhaps obscures any party political reading (even if it was in the writer's mind). To take Paradise Towers as another example: governmental authority is represented by the Caretakers, who have a straight-jacket of infinite and infinitesimal rules and regulations (suggesting large state), but there is no mechanism for ever changing the rules (not so progressive). The ending has every different faction working together, which could be a model of socialism or of old-fashioned small-c conservative community in action. Viewing either story through a political prism, the light of each plot point is refracted such that one can see whatever one wants to see. Perhaps this is a good thing, whether it is deliberate or not. Doctor Who is aimed at a mass audience, and any political position is bound to put off as many people as it pleases.

In Summary:

It's not perfect by any means, but it is the first sign that the series was starting to build high for happiness once again.

Scream of the Shalka

Chapter the 296th, a false dawn with a cartoon Alison.

Plot:
It is 2003. Three weeks after a meteor strikes Earth bringing an alien lifeform, an alternate ninth Doctor materialises in the small English town of Lannet, Lancashire. Everyone is behaving strangely. He meets Alison Cheney, a barmaid in a pub and the only person in the town that seems defiant rather than just terrified. She explains that weird worm creatures under the ground (the Shalka) have recently been controlling people by emanating high-pitched sound (the scream thereof). They've ensured nobody leaves or enters the town. The Doctor works out a way to explode the creatures by reflecting sound back at them, destroying Alison's home in the process. The danger is thought to be over, and the town's population feel free again. The Doctor calls in the army to evacuate the town, and to help him locate his TARDIS which has been dragged underground by the Shalka. The evacuees come under the control of the Shalka again, overpower the soldiers and travel to somewhere in the Pennines. Across the world, other groups of people from other towns who had been in the Shalka's power do the same, each group led by one person with a little Shalka embedded in the head. The Lannet contingent's leader is Alison. They emit Shalka screams, which will change the Earth's atmosphere accelerating the ecological damage that the Earth people have started themselves. The Doctor finds Alison and removes the mini-Shaka from her head. The two of them go underground; the Doctor and Alison both bond with the mini-Shalka allowing them to defeat the creatures. Alison elects to join the Doctor on his travels; his other companion is a robotic version of his old enemy the Master, who cannot leave the TARDIS.

Context:

I watched from the DVD accompanied by the younger two of the three children (boy of 14, girl of 11) on a Sunday in March 2024. The youngest needed a bit of explanation of the background of this one-off with someone completely different than usual playing the Doctor, but then she went with it. Middle child instantly recognised David Tennant's voice (the future Doctor has an uncredited cameo as a warehouseman). I discovered that there's a scratch on the disc that causes a short jump in part four, but I quickly found the episodes online and we watched a short section that plugged the gap. I don't know whether to buy a new DVD (it's very cheap to get a second-hand copy) or wait to see if Shalka ends up on a Blu-Ray at some point as an extra, or on the fabled Collection box set of 'wilderness years' material that some fans are convinced will happen one day.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. I have completed 23 seasons out of the total of 39 to date (at the time of writing). I occasionally put off the point of catch-up a bit by including something like Scream of the Shalka that doesn't fit so neatly into the episode guide (although it did get an official DVD release ten years after its original web debut). There are a couple of other webcasts from this era that I could potentially cover in future too - stay tuned!

First Time Round:

I watched some of this story at the 2003 Panopticon convention in London, accompanied by David and Chris (long-term fan friends mentioned many times before on this blog). I very rarely did or do conventions, but as this one - the big official UK Doctor Who con of the time - was being held conveniently for me in London, and because it was the 40th anniversary, I thought I would give it a go. It was held at the London Hilton Metropole on Edgware Road over the weekend of the 1st and 2nd November 2023. Two sessions in the programme, one on each day, were kept secret, represented only by a tantalising question mark symbol. The first of these on the Saturday was a surprise appearance by Paul McGann in his first ever Doctor Who convention appearance. Through the Sunday, there was some wild speculation about what the second mystery evening session would be, with some guessing that it would be something linked to the new series being planned by Russell T Davies. There was a lot of buzz about that during the weekend, as it had only been announced just over a month earlier. In the end, it did turn out to be related to a new series, just not the one we were expecting. It was a screening of - if memory serves - the first two parts of Scream of the Shalka, which was accompanied by an all-pervading sense of disappointment from the assembled. This is the tragedy of Shalka in a nutshell; it was still two weeks from its online debut (it would be webcast weekly from mid November 2003 and I would struggle each week with my dial-up connection to watch it to the end), but it was already yesterday's news.

Reaction:

During the Panopticon 2003 Saturday night session (see First Time Round section above) Paul McGann expressed his surprise that his old mucker Richard E. Grant (they made 1980s cult comedy film 'Withnail and I' together) hadn't told him that he was playing the Doctor; as I remember, he said the following, or something very like it: if he (McGann) had been cast in something as the Scarlet Pimpernel - which Grant had played on TV in 1999 and 2000 - he would have told Grant in advance, rather than have him find out from a listings magazine or whatever. I don't know whether they ever spoke about it afterwards. One speculation from me is that perhaps Grant just didn't think it counted. I've stuck a picture of Marwood and Withnail at the top of this blog post as the miserable, sallow, long-coated look of Grant in the image seems to have been used as a template for the design of his animated Doctor, but also so I can look at that picture and imagine that it's some un-filmed adventure of the two Doctors. But is it, really? McGann didn't have long playing the role in his one proper outing, about the same as the duration of the 2003 animation, but it was on TV in live action and it was seen by millions. Grant might have thought that a little audio online thing with some Flash-animated visual accompaniment wasn't worth bothering McGann about. Some people have been a bit critical of Grant's performance since, including the person who had become the new Doctor Who TV showrunner around the time that Shalka was being prepared for its web debut, Russell T Davies. In an interview with Doctor Who Magazine (DWM) published in issue 360, he said "I wasn't a fan of Richard E Grant in it, I have to say. And yes you can print that! I thought he was terrible. I thought he took the money and ran, to be honest. It was a lazy performance."

There is a bit of evidence to back up Davies's views; not necessarily that Grant was being lazy, but maybe that he was keeping the role of the Doctor and the programme - the institution -  of Doctor Who somewhat at arm's length. DWM journalist - and a good friend of Davies, which may have coloured opinions somewhat - wrote up an eye-opening article a couple of years earlier in issue 336 about his being treated quite badly when he visited a Shalka recording. As someone writing for the official magazine of the show being made, one would think that the people making it would welcome him in with open arms, the better to get maximum publicity for their new Who venture. Instead, he was banned from the studio, then banned from the green room, then pushed out of the building. He's allowed back in from the car park only when it starts raining, waiting around for an interview shut in a stationery cupboard. Somehow, he managed to get in some chats with some of the cast, Jim Norton, Craig Kelly, Sophie Okonedo, and they all seem very nice, as does Grant after a slightly cool start. He seems to want to express strongly that he knows nothing about the series of Doctor Who, has never watched it, or any science fiction really. He's just an actor playing a part. There's a quote in there that is very telling "People have very strong ideas about Doctor Who, but I think it would be much more daunting to do it as a TV version." If Grant wasn't properly engaged with the material (and there are moments that to me feel like he's encountering the lines from the script for the very first time, reading them rather than speaking them), it was perhaps down to overcaution rather than laziness.

The producers of the story were certainly taking things seriously. It was a potential start of a series of web animations featuring Grant's Doctor (assuming they could persuade him back to record them); one might wonder if one didn't know the history why they didn't object to Cook's interview going out in all its grim detail. The clue is on the cover of DWM 336. A small inset circular caption sits next to the main image (a portrait shot of Richard E Grant pointing at the camera like Kitchener, taken in the same car park to which Cook had been banished); in the circle are the words "DOCTOR WHO SET FOR BBC TV COMEBACK!" It didn't matter that Grant seemed to be disowning his performance before the animation had even been finished; it didn't matter that a journalist who wanted to promote the animation was locked in a cupboard rather than be allowed to cover it; it didn't matter how good or bad the animation was, or the performances within it: elsewhere, Doctor Who was coming back on TV properly, relegating Scream of the Shaka to a footnote in history, a brief pitstop in a cul-de-sac on Who's journey. It's a shame for the people involved, but not necessarily any huge loss. The story is fairly generic Doctor Who fare. The things that are interesting about it are things that Davies's series (probably coincidentally) would also do, but on TV in live action and seen by millions. The events take place mostly in a limited space with a small group of characters that we get to know well, but there are quick cutaways in there to events happening around the world, to give things scale. That's textbook early Davies Who style. Shalka even casts Derek Jacobi as the Master, which would happen a couple of years later in Davies's Who.

There are many similarities to Rose, the first story of Davies's new era: a Doctor still shellshocked by a calamity in his recent past, hinted at but not spelled out, meets a woman first at her place of work, then later at her home when his investigations lead him there. The woman is in a relationship with a boyfriend that's clearly not working perfectly. The Doctor blows up this life (the companion character's home in Shalka, her place of work in Rose), and takes the woman on a whirlwind adventure. At the end, the woman steps up to assist in saving the world, then joins the Doctor in the TARDIS, leaving boyfriend behind. It's clearly a good structure for introducing the series anew. The Shalka story is not wholly being aimed at a new audience, though, including elements that only the hardcore could understand. Who else would know that the person in the TARDIS is the Master and know the significance of this, and be shocked when the Master turns out to be a robot? Who else would find it funny when the character almost says his famous catchphrase but turns it into something more friendly when the Doctor comes into the room "I am the Master, and you will... come to like me, when you get to know me"? Writer Paul Cornell couldn't count on so large an audience as to render the fan contingent meaningless, so he couldn't cut all those ties. It's probably not that much of a problem: a person coming to this fresh would probably just ignore those bits, or imagine that the Master's just the Doctor's robot butler, or sex toy. What's probably more damaging is the tone of the lead cast's performances. Christopher Eccleston's Doctor is haunted, but he still manages to be fun unlike Grant's doomy version; Sophie Okenodo's Alison is plucky, but with a downbeat cynical streak. It just needs to be a little more light, and fun. The most fun character in Shalka is a robot villain, which can't be right, can it?

Connectivity:

Scream of the Shalka is the third story on the trot (after The Sensorites and Nightmare in Silver) to feature an antagonistic alien race that are telepathically linked. Both this story and Nightmare in Silver see the Doctor travel with a female companion from Lancashire. 

Deeper Thoughts:

History v0.1. It might just be me, but I love the feeling of taking part in some small way in the progression of recent history. My day job is in technology work where things tend to move relatively fast, such that one can look back and see a significant amount of change in a short period that one wasn't fully aware was happening around one at the time. I find it fascinating, even though my contributions to the progression of this history are beyond peripheral. Scream of the Shalka, for example, contains the nice gag that the Doctor has a TARDIS-shaped mobile phone - note, not a smartphone, an ordinary mobile phone was seen as futuristic enough in 2003. Another thing that's changed in the same period is the rise of the social media behemoths. When Shalka was webcast, MySpace had only just started up, Twitter and Facebook didn't yet exist. The idea that Mark Zuckerberg would one day be worth hundreds of billions would have seemed silly to those people running the websites and message boards where people chatted online in 2003. For someone who worked in web technology, I was a somewhat late adopter at home (possibly because there was always an internet connection at work to use). I didn't get connected until late in the 1990s. I remember visiting David (fan friend mentioned many times before on this blog, including above) around 1995 and seeing my first ever Doctor Who website, probably using a Netscape browser; it was a collection of humorous bloopers from the show's history, including every time you ever caught an inadvertent glimpse of Jo Grant's knickers (which gives you a glimpse into the sort of person who was creating websites back then).

As best as I can estimate it, I first engaged properly with these burgeoning online communities - with my own dial-up connection and laptop and everything - around 1999 and got more and more engaged by 2001. One chapter ('The Velvet Web') of Paul Hayes's excellent book about Doctor Who during the years 1996 to 2003 helped me to date things. The book (for my fuller review, see the Deeper Thoughts section of this blog post) gives a lot of background detail about the long period of build up before Doctor Who finally went into production as a TV series again. Scream of the Shalka is covered, but also the history of the BBC's official Doctor Who website where Shalka was hosted. The book describes the particularly BBC decisions that led to there being two competing BBC Doctor Who sites for many years. I remember this; I remember generally getting my information from the BBC Online 'Cult' Doctor Who pages, but every so often also checking beeb.com's Who section to see if there was anything new there (there almost never was). I remember the disappointment of losing that tiny sliver of hope one day when beeb.com ceased hosting information pages and just became a place to buy things online. I remembering contributing to the Cult site's message boards; I thought they'd been around for a while before I discovered them, but this must have been in 2001, and the book tells me that the boards only started around then. For the next two and a half years or thereabouts, I was a regular reader and contributor there and occasionally on other forums around at the time. I never posted on Outpost Gallifrey, which was probably the biggest fan forum of the time, but I did lurk and read other people's posts there (until they stopped people from doing that if they hadn't signed up).

 

I don't remember any online discussions being that bad, really. There was as much positivity as negativity; people were opinionated, yes (they were Doctor Who fans, after all), but there wasn't much in the way of nastiness. Maybe I'm thick skinned, though, or maybe I have low expectations where my fellow fans are concerned. The people who moderated the sites were not so well disposed to them. In Pull to Open, James Goss - Doctor Who fan, writer, and one of the principle architects of the Cult sites' content - is quoted describing the forums of that time as "hate pits" and bemoans their cost that could have been used for some of the other innovations he spearheaded ('photonovels' of stories using off-screen snaps, e-books of out of print Who novels, webcasts with animation). He's consistent in this message, saying the same thing in different words on Interweb of Fear, a documentary about the BBC's early 'wild west' years of web content on the Shalka DVD. After Doctor Who was announced as returning to TV, it was probably inevitable that these boards would be shut down. Russell T Davies made the decision himself, and they closed in April 2004. I found other places to discuss Doctor Who, though I never went over to Outpost Gallifrey; reportedly, a lot of negativity migrated there (Davies mentioned many times over the years in his first period as showrunner that he advised other Who writers never to be tempted to visit the site); eventually, social media sites replaced all of this, and became toxic in their turn.

As I write this, it's towards the end of the Lent period in 2024, close to Easter; I chose to give up social media for that time, as something of an experiment, and I doubt I'll be going back. It's like the old days, I get my general news from the BBC news page, and my Doctor Who news from Doctor Who Magazine. The latest DWM was the first in years that actually provided me with information I hadn't seen first anywhere else - that Doctor Who is to return to TV with a double bill on the 11th May 2024. It also told of another small step in the development of history of the show's relationship to the internet. The two episodes and those that follow them weekly thereafter will for the first time debut on the BBC iplayer, a few hours before their broadcast on BBC1. The iplayer (as covered in Interweb of Fear) is something else that came out of those early years of innovation at the Beeb; it's fun to note that - like me for the last 40 days and 40 nights - things have reverted to a pattern from around 20 years ago; Ncuti Gatwa's episodes will start off as webcasts, just like Scream of the Shalka.

In Summary:

It's probably best if we don't mention it again.

Nightmare in Silver

Chapter the 295th, where Gaiman's in again, and seems game, but perhaps without as good an aim, man.

Plot:
The Doctor takes Clara and the two children she nannies (the Maitland kids) to a theme park planet in the future, a thousand years after a war with the Cybermen. The park is all but abandoned, with only a squad of soldiers on the planet plus the last of the original carnival folk Webley remaining, waiting for someone to give him a lift out of there. He shows the TARDIS travellers his main exhibit, a chess playing Cyberman. It's just an empty shell, though, with his assistant Porridge inside controlling things. Or is it? There are small Cyber-creatures scuttling about, and they reanimate Webley's Cyberman, as well as having built up an army of thousands of other new design Cybermen hidden on the planet. Webley and the two children are brought under cyber-control, as is the Doctor. The Time Lord fights the efforts to turn him into the Cyber Planner, mentally visualising this as two versions of himself battling for control. Meanwhile, Clara and the troops attempt a rearguard action, holding off the masses of Cybermen. This is difficult as the Cybermen have new powers to move very fast and silently (luckily only one of them uses these powers). The Doctor manages to free the kids from Cyber control; then, just when all hope is thought lost, he briefly halts the Cyber advance and the remaining soldiers and Clara are not killed. Porridge - who turns out to be the runaway Emperor of many galaxies - transmats everyone and the TARDIS onto his ship and they nuke the entire site from orbit.

Context:

I watched this from the BBC iPlayer over two nights in March 2024, on my own. The reason I split it in half was because of writer's cramp. I watch stories taking notes longhand in a pad, but the initial action of Nightmare in Silver is so busy that I could barely keep up, and had to have a break. After the first fifteen minutes or so it settles down a bit, but it never settles down completely - there's a lot of stuff crammed in there. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, it can work for a Doctor Who story to pack in a lot of different elements and concepts at a fast pace in a limited time, particularly in the more modern era of post 2005 Who; but, it's always a bit of a risk...

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. This post marks the 23rd season completed out of the total of 39 to date (at the time of writing). In full, I have now completed classic seasons 1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 12, 14-18, 20, 21, 23 and 25, and new series 2, 6, 7, 9-11, and 13).

First Time Round:

A clear memory about this story is from long before it was shown, November 2012, when I saw a news article that confirmed its working title The Last Cyberman. Eve de Leon Allen, the young actor playing Angie Maitland - who must have been mortified, poor thing - left her copy of the script in the back of a Cardiff taxi. A student found it and handed it back to the BBC without leaking any details (see here for the full story). It ramped up the excitement a good six months or more before the broadcast to know that Neil Gaiman was writing a Cyberman story. I didn't watch it go out live, as I was in Hamburg because of a big project for the day job. It was such a big project that they'd had a rehearsal of the launch over a weekend a couple of months before (coming home from which I endured a difficult journey in the snow, as retold in the First Time Round section of this blog post). The real thing was over the weekend of the 11th and 12th May 2013. I did at least get to watch some new (to me) Who that weekend, as there had been a leak of a recently recovered episode of The Underwater Menace, and it was available to watch online for a while. I celebrated the day job project's success by watching a Troughton episode on my phone in a hotel with the worst wi-fi in the universe (as retold in the First Time Round section of this blog post). I got home late on the Tuesday, and watched the recorded Nightmare of Silver on the Wednesday. I found it crushingly disappointing on that first watch, alas. Watching episode two of The Underwater Menace episode was more enjoyable; heck, struggling to get home in a blizzard was probably more enjoyable, or at least I thought so at the time. Would I change my opinion after this latest watch?

Reaction:

When I covered the writer of Nightmare of Silver Neil Gaiman's previous story for the show The Doctor's Wife, I wrote some things that are worth repeating here, as they are even more relevant when discussing Nightmare in Silver. I wrote that Gaiman has "always been a fan writer in the best sense of the term" and that consistently in his work "he revels in upending the toy-box of myths and legends, both ancient and pop, and playing with them in new ways". In the first of his two Doctor Who stories he polished up a cornerstone of Doctor Who mythology, the TARDIS; but, there is so much else in the show's long history. The chance to write about the Cybermen, who have built up a mythology of their own in all their appearances since first appearing in 1966, must have been enticing. Despite appearing in almost every story, the TARDIS had accumulated very little information to be assimilated into a 45-minute narrative: it's a constant companion of the Doctor, a bit telepathic, it rarely arrived where intended - that's about it. The Cybermen though come with a lot of backstory, mostly fragmentary, often contradictory: they're from Mondas, they're from Telos, they're from a parallel Earth, they died out years ago, they're still going strong, they were involved in an interplanetary war with humans, people on Earth have never heard of them, they're allergic to gold, they're not allergic to gold. Trying to put even a fraction of all that together in one screenplay is likely to produce something, well, fragmentary and contradictory. Gaiman's script appears to be attempting to include everything (even down to specific in-jokey references such as a weightless moonwalk sequence harking back to 1960s Cybermen story The Moonbase), and the result is predictably a mess.

A good way to see something has gone badly wrong is to look at Jason Watkins' character Webley. Watkins is a good actor, and a guest appearance by him is something of a boon. The character is introduced early on, an impecunious showman with a faded grandeur: it seems that he will be a significant presence in the narrative. A few minutes in, though, he's grabbed by a Cyberman long thought inactive (a nice jump scare, to be fair), is converted to cyber-control, and after that he just stands around. For nearly forty minutes, he just stands around, very occasionally spouting some exposition. Does he live or die by the end? Did that ever even get confirmed on screen? If so, I've already forgotten. The two Maitland children too spend a lot of the running time doing nothing of any consequence. In the wider season outside of this story, there have been a few clunky story beats required to engineer their presence in this story. In an easy to miss snatch of dialogue it's mentioned that the Cybermen needed children to create their Cyber Planner, but the Doctor's brain is even more suitable. So, the Doctor could have incited all the subsequent incident just by landing there, as he always does every week without two children in tow - they aren't needed at all. A big question that was in my mind most of the way through the story was 'Why now?' and I'm not convinced that snatch of dialogue adequately explained it: the Cybermen have built up a ridiculously large army, vastly outnumbering any resistance forces. Did they really need to wait for a Cyber Planner before they took action? Don't they have some standing order inbuilt along the lines of 'kill the rag-tag band of misfit soldiers and take over the planet'? It wouldn't take a whole lot of planning. And if they haven't had a Cyber Planner up to now, who planned the rebuilding of their forces?

Once the Cyber Planner is established, there are still logical flaws in the Cyber activity presented. In a bravura sequence, a redesigned (and it's a good re-design) Cyberman is shown in new speedy, silent mode zipping around lethally. So, why would any of them move any other way? Why does the army revert to stomping around later? Why is there even an army? One stealth mode Cyberman could wipe out every human on the planet in the blink of an eye. It's a long-standing flaw of the steel giants that they are presented as invulnerable, so any script has to give them a new vulnerability each time as otherwise they'd easily win, which would get boring quickly. These vulnerabilities are often not very convincing, but in Nightmare in Silver there isn't anything offered at all. In fact, it's shown - Borg-style - that the Cybs can adjust and upgrade to any weapon used against them. There's certainly no reason given why they can't all be in the stealth / zip / bullet-time mode all the time. This links in to a difficulty the script has in choosing between the two different styles of Cyberman story historically: creeping horror where there may be one or a few Cybs infiltrating a human base, hiding around corners, or quickfire action where they attack in large numbers. In a longer story, it has been possible to do both as different phases, but this story's too short for that; the setting of an eerie abandoned space funfair seems to have been picked (and perhaps the children included) for scenes of the first type, but then there aren't any, and the story lurches into the action sequences (which could have been set anywhere). This is possibly down to the director not accentuating the horror enough in the early scenes, but the script is not helping by trying to do too much.

There isn't very much for the Doctor to do in the action either. Gaiman shunts him off to one side, tied up (sometimes literally) in a mental battle with the psychic force of the Cybermen. This is personified by Smith playing the darker side in a battle against himself: Doctor and Cyber-Doctor. The trouble is that the Doctor isn't shown as that heroic before or after this battle is joined, so the two sides are not in sharp enough relief; he deliberately sticks around investigating instead of getting two children to safety, making comments to suggest he knows full well that he's putting them in danger. Later, he makes comments objectifying Clara (including an unforgivable line about her wearing a skirt that's too tight, which I suspect came from showrunner Steven Moffat). This is all when he's not under the influence. Gaiman has gone on record as saying he wanted to show people that Matt Smith could act, but it only shows me that he can overact. The material is too static and Smith perhaps thought he needed to go a bit wild to give it some oomph, or maybe the director didn't know exactly what tone for which he should aim. The Doctor's not the only character that doesn't contribute much to events; Tamzin Outhwaite is wasted in this as much as Jason Watkins; Warwick Davis has a bit more to do, but his character on the page is inconsistent - it might have been better to have his runaway Emperor backstory outlined a bit more rather than just be hinted, but maybe there wasn't time with everything else going on. The story's not 100% bad, but when judged in terms of the ratio of potential to result, it's one of the worst misfires of Doctor Who's history.

Connectivity:

Both Nightmare in Silver and The Sensorites feature a four-person TARDIS crew being transported between a planet and a spaceship without using the TARDIS. Both planets contain many members of a race of creatures that can communicate telepathically (well, sort of in the Cybermen's case - they are all linked by the Cyberiad). 

Deeper Thoughts:

Never go back? In an acceptance speech on his being given a Hugo award for The Doctor's Wife, its author Neil Gaiman joked that "only a fool or a madman would try again – so I'm on my third draft now", confirming that he was working on another script for Doctor Who and giving away that at some level he knew it was a risk. His first story for the series had been pretty much universally loved. Could lightning strike twice? Early on in his tenure, Steven Moffat, lead writer and exec producer (and the person who commissioned Gaiman), occasionally tempted writers who were names, but not necessarily for stuff like Doctor Who, to contribute a script for the series. Simon Nye and Richard Curtis, each known more for comedies, both wrote for Moffat's first season in charge; Gaiman's first script was made in Moffat's second year, and Nightmare in Silver for the third. Nye and Curtis's efforts (Amy's Choice and Vincent and the Doctor respectively) were both well thought of, but perhaps not to the stratospheric heights of The Doctor's Wife, but neither writer was tempted back. Gaiman's history as a writer up to this point was more aligned with Who in terms of genre, though he was at the pure fantasy end of the spectrum, but he wasn't by that point known for television. He'd written screenplays periodically in the past, some for TV, but it was by no means his full-time job - he was much more used to writing comics or bestselling novels. He didn't need the money, and could presumably have found more lucrative ways to spend his time. As noted in the Reaction section above, he was doing this for love of the programme, and he had at least enough love for two stories, not just one.

Looking back, the throwaway joke of the acceptance speech proved hauntingly prophetic. Nightmare in Silver was greeted with a reaction that was pretty much the polar opposite of that received by The Doctor's Wife, and in the years since it has not had any critical re-evaluation. It's generally seen as a misfire. Gaiman went on record a few years after Nightmare in Silver's broadcast that the treatment of his second story left "a bad taste in [his] mouth" saying - perhaps a bit generously - that the story was "widely regarded as having some good bits in it – but being rather a curate's egg". He also said at the same time of both his two stories that as far as he was concerned "both of the scripts were of equal quality". This goes beyond generosity for me, and I struggle to believe it, at least of the shooting script. I cannot think that all the issues in the final product came in between the page and the screen: as set out in the Reaction section above, there's just too many elements, many of which are not used well or barely at all. No director or production designer or even showrunner added all of those. I can only think that Gaiman is talking about the scripts he produced in toto, including the changes of multiple redrafts. The vision in his head may have been as good as The Doctor's Wife, but the process of making that into an episode of Doctor Who, with the compromises inherent in that process, mangled it. So, what went wrong? There's nothing on record to definitely confirm it, but there are strong indications that it was something to do with work between the writer and the showrunner, Gaiman and Moffat.

A caveat is warranted here: we're entering the theatre of rumour now. I've seen some wild theories out there, and I won't give them an airing. Moffat's job was to help Gaiman to tailor his vision to best fit the show's format. They'd worked together to this end successfully on The Doctor's Wife, and there was no reason to think it wouldn't happen that way again. Moffat didn't want a bad story in his season - who would? - and had indeed laid down the challenge to Gaiman in the first place with the commission to make the Cybermen "scary again". Gaiman generated a lot of ideas, but this was reportedly what he did for The Doctor's Wife also (there's no definitive source for this, by the way, but it chimes with Gaiman's work elsewhere which is always chock-full of different elements, some that might challenge even the biggest of budgets). Some have speculated that Moffat just wasn't as available as he had been first time round; but, based on everything Doctor Who fans have learnt about the showrunner's job over the years, there's never a moment of peace, it's always busy. Moffat would have had no less but probably no more distractions from focus on Gaiman's Nightmare in Silver script. He might have had less time in a different way, though. It may have been forgotten in all this discourse that The Doctor's Wife was originally scheduled for the series before the one in which it eventually aired. It was deferred because of worries about the overall season budget, but this presumably allowed a longer gestation period. It's easy to say with hindsight, but perhaps the same should have happened with Nightmare in Silver: leave it a year, work on honing things down to a central idea and visual, and produce something wonderful for Capaldi's first season. Some things are worth waiting for.

History, alas, went a different way; but, there is a happy ending of sorts. Gaiman has said that he was "really glad" in one way that his second Doctor Who episode didn't work out as he intended, as it inspired him to take more control of his future projects, becoming showrunner for the TV adaptation of the novel he co-wrote with Terry Pratchett Good Omens. "I can't just write the scripts, hand them over to somebody and hope that I get something fantastic back. I may or I may not. If this is going to be f**ked up, it's going to be f**ked up by me personally, with love and dedication. And I will hope that it isn't, but it needs to be done properly, and I need to care."

In Summary:

A mess, which is a shame.

The Sensorites

Chapter the 294th, covers a pair of Hartnells, one from early on, and one that's brand new.

Plot:
The Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Susan materialise on a 28th century spaceship in orbit around the planet Sense-Sphere. Two members of crew appear dead, but they are instead mind-controlled by the Sensorites on the planet below, who are keeping them in orbit. The TARDIS team manage to wake them up. There is also a third crew member John who has been driven mad by the creatures. The lock mechanism from the TARDIS is taken by the Sensorites, preventing it from leaving; the Doctor soon works out the weaknesses of these seemingly fearsome creatures. The Sensorites explain that they are fearful of exploitation of their planet, which is rich in the vital element molibdi- molybdu- molydem- ... iron, let's just say iron. Years before, a group of Earthmen arrived and caused trouble, but they're now missing presumed dead. Since, Sensorites have been dying from a suspected infection. If the Doctor can cure this, the Sensorites will allow him access to his TARDIS again, and will fix John. The Doctor, Susan and Ian go down to the planet with John and another member of the crew, his fiancé Carol. Barbara and the captain of the ship stay behind, though Barbara joins them on the planet later. Despite the City Administrator Sensorite working against them, and despite Ian falling ill, the Doctor works out that the water supply is being poisoned and provides the antidote. Ian and John are both healed. In some tunnels, the Earthmen are discovered to be still alive and poisoning the water supply with Deadly Nightshade. They are apprehended, and the TARDIS travellers are free to resume their journeys in time and space.

Context:

The plan was to watch an episode a day across six days in late February and early March 2024. Such is the reputation of The Sensorites as being a bore-fest that if I told you I enjoyed it so much I tore through it much quicker than that, you wouldn't believe me, but that is five-sixths true. The first episode proved a hell of a chore, such that I couldn't keep watching it on first attempt and instead split my viewing over two days, 10 minutes on the first, the remaining 15 on the next. After that, though, the story picks up, and though I didn't exactly binge them, I got through through the rest of the episodes much quicker than originally planned.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. This post marks the 22nd season completed out of the total of 39 to date (at the time of writing). In full, I have now completed classic seasons 1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 12, 14-18, 20, 21, 23 and 25, and new series 2, 6, 9-11, and 13).

First Time Round:

I met fellow Doctor Who fan, David, mentioned many times before on this blog, at university in the early 1990s and we've remained friends ever since. In the immediate years after my graduation, when none of my peer group had serious jobs or partners or families, there was a lot of time for visiting each other. Usually for no particularly special occasion apart from having a day or two of leave, we would traverse the country and meet up. In November 1997 (I can date this as I remember us both sitting eating breakfast in his kitchen with BBC Radio 1 on and hearing the first radio play of Help the Aged by Pulp) I was on such a visit to him. David had through various contacts and sources collected a video copy of pretty much every Doctor Who story that existed in the BBC's archives at that time. I only had collected what had been commercially available, though I'd borrowed some of his tapes from time to time. Being together and both fans, it must have seemed a good and obvious idea to sit down and watch some Who, probably with a beer and some snacks. Why we chose The Sensorites, I do not remember. Maybe it was the best of what I hadn't seen by other means by then. But all the available evidence - see the First Time Round section of this blog post for more details - suggests I hadn't seen Horror of Fang Rock by November 1997. Why didn't we watch Horror of Fang Rock? We got to watch that story together on a big screen recently at least - see the Deeper Thoughts section of this blog post for more details. It can be hard to remember details from that long ago, Was this the trip where David persuaded me to purchase his entire Target Doctor Who book collection from him, as he needed the space, and I had a challenging time getting it back home? Maybe that was a few years later. Jarvis Cocker isn't always around to help me date stuff, unfortunately.

Reaction:

Stories from Doctor Who's first 1963/64 season can't help but innovate in some way or other. The series was shiny and new, and trying out different types of stories each time, seeing what best fit. The Sensorites, though, innovates in a rather profound way in that the titular alien race are complex; individuals within the ranks of Sensorites have different motivations and form different factions, there's disagreement and dissent. They are not a monoculture, and they are the first aliens presented that way in Doctor Who. You don't get that with Daleks or Voord, and you won't get it with Zarbi or Cybermen. Most of the time in Who, alien races are there to be monstrous forces of antagonism, usually unreasoning, blank and implacable. There is a story type that would be used later, though, that is very like The Sensorites, such that the Hartnell story feels like a try-out. That is the suite of 1970s stories often of six episodes length written by Malcolm Hulke. In these stories, the 'monster' races had understandable viewpoints and different factions (The Sea Devils, The Silurians), or the antagonism comes from the machinations of humans instead (Invasion of the Dinosaurs), or all of the above (Frontier in Space). Put it in colour, swap in the appropriate TARDIS pilot, and The Sensorites would not look out of place during the Jon Pertwee era. Exploring this race of creatures provides lots of story potential for the portion of the narrative that takes place on the Sense-Sphere. It also provides a great villain in the City Administrator, who obstinately refuses to believe any good of the aliens visiting his planet. He may be a villain of the more hissable panto kind (so were Hulke's), but his presence lifts the scenes he's in.

That first episode really was a chore, though (see Context section above) and a fair part of the second episode isn't much better. Again, in line with many a 1970s story, it has the typical 6-parter blues, not quite having enough plot for the duration. Like many a 1970s 6-parter, generally after Hulke's time, it has a narrative structured as a two and a four, the first section on the ship, and the second section on the planet. The realisation of the ship in the studio is pretty good, with a nice continuous shot early on of the TARDIS travellers walking out of the console room and into the spaceship; but, the minimal cast can't sustain interest, and the sets don't feel big enough to contain the action. This can be seen when, in order to get into trouble, Susan and Barbara have to miss the very obvious sign saying 'WATER' and instead wander through a door looking for refreshment. They know there is danger elsewhere on the ship, but there's only one flippin' door, so you'd think they'd realise it's the one that leads to the danger. The only thing left for the cast to do to create dramatic tension is some very stagey and very 60s psychodrama about the impact of the Sensorites' mental powers. This has the unintended effect of talking up the Sensorites too much. Aside from the memorably creepy moment at the part one cliffhanger where we see the first glimpse of one floating outside of the ship, they are very disappointing and don't match up to the terrified reactions of the crew earlier.

Everything is fully explained in the script, if you pay attention: they are protective of their planet but didn't mean any active harm to the humans, so just left them in orbit in a sort of mental stasis, not knowing what better to do with them; the crewman John's excitement at discovering riches on the planet dropped his mental defences, and the Sensorites inadvertently altered his mind. All that material comes later, though: in the second episode, this terrifying unseen presence that has turned people into zombies or driven them mad is finally revealed... and it's a set of slightly cuddly creatures who are frightened of the dark and loud noises, and are at risk of tripping over their own feet. It can't help but seem risible. When it settles down to the more grounded conflict of the City Administrator's distrust, it's much more believable. As such, the story doesn't really need the creatures to be telepathic at all, particularly as it creates some plot holes. A lot of the double-dealing relies on the Sensorites not being able to easily distinguish between each other based on sight, but they don't need to - they're a telepathic race, wouldn't they just distinguish each other telepathically? The City Administrator's nefarious shenanigans involve disguising himself with another's sash of office, but couldn't other Sensorites work out his real identity by, I don't know, looking into his brain. The telepathy at least allows Carole Ann Ford to do something a bit different as Susan; her moments of discovering a telepathic link with the Sensorites causing conflict with her grandfather, and the love story subplot between Ilona Rodgers as Carol and Stephen Dartnell as John are nicely emotional scenes, done quite well.

There are other flaws in the story, but none of them felt big enough to trouble me much: the solution to the mystery of the Sensorites' affliction, that their general water supply is being poisoned, is so telegraphed as to be screamingly obvious; the writing out of Barbara, so that Jackie Hill can have two weeks' holiday, is terribly contrived (she spends the time alone on the ship with its captain for no apparent reason, though one could provide one's own subtext, then turns up on the planet with a nice new suntan); some of the dialogue is very on the nose; the schoolroom science of Molybdenum feels a little shoe-horned in. The worst mistake to my mind is that there's no comeuppance scene for the City Administrator, he's unmasked as the villain off-screen. This is because the focus switches in the final episode to the three surviving humans, ragged and mad and still fighting a war that's long over. The scenes with them were fine, with John Bailey's Commander keeping up an insane parody of military discipline, though I would have been fine with them just having been driven over the edge by their desperate situation, rather than there being an explanation included that the Sensorites' mind powers are responsible. I'd still rather have seen an ending where the City Administrator's plans come to a climax, but are roundly defeated. I'm reminded of Captain Dent, the love-to-hate-him baddie of Colony in Space, who similarly disappears from the story in the last episode and doesn't get a comeuppance scene. And who wrote that story? Why, Malcolm Hulke, of course! 

Connectivity:

Both The Sensorites and The Girl Who Died feature a grey haired Doctor played by an actor in his late 50s interacting with a race of aliens who are mostly indistinguishable from one another at a distance without their sashes of office / hologram projections of Norse gods. 

Deeper Thoughts:

From the Sense-Sphere to a realm beyond sense: BFI The Celestial Toymaker animation screening 2nd March 2024. It was a very rainy Saturday in early March as I made my way to the BFI Southbank for another screening. I'd bagged a ticket, and suspected that this one might have a bit less interest than the Horror of Fang Rock screening in February. The animations sometimes have less appeal to our little - but probably representative - band of regular fans than the Blu-ray tie-in screenings, the latter usually having better panel guests, and it's not the strongest story (a couple of our number expressed this opinion). Myself, I was wary of the possible audience reaction. The trailer showed that this was far from the usual style for these animated stories, and it was possible it would divide opinion. The panellists that there are at these events are usually those who've worked on the animated versions; I didn't like the idea of an awkward panel with rude audience questions from people who didn't care for what they'd seen on screen. My concerns were unfounded for a couple of reasons. First, the screening had sold out and the auditorium was full; second, there were no panels with audience questions at all. Our hosts, as usual Justin Johnson and Dick Fiddy, informed us that the animation team are based in Australia, but even if they'd had the budget to fly them over, they wouldn't have been able to come: they were working on what we were about to watch right up to the wire, with the final files having been sent over the previous evening ("They're still drawing the third and fourth episodes," joked Fiddy). As such, outside of the team working on it, nobody had viewed the animated story in advance; those of us in NFT1 that day would be the first.

Aside from the animators, the issue with forming a panel for the story is that almost everybody credited on the original production, both in front of and behind the camera, is no longer with us. They had apparently tried to engage Peter Purves, who played Steven, and one of the non-speaking dancers who appear in one episode, but diaries did not align. They are really the only remaining options. "You've got Dick here," quipped Johnson, "What more could you want?!" In the absence of a full panel, our hosts endeavoured to keep up all the other rituals of these BFI events, including double entendres. Johnson did a round-up of online and social media activity connected to the event, noting that - even though nobody had seen it yet - the DVD release of the Toymaker animation already had many reviews, apparently all either ones or fives out of five. There was also the usual quiz with giveaway goodies for those that could answer trivia questions; one of the prizes, in Fiddy's words, was "One of the rare medium-sized Doctor Who T-shirts." After this, sound supremo Mark Ayres was up on stage, for the first of two times on the day, to introduce the animation. He confirmed that he had still been working on the sound mix the previous day, but said that Fiddy's earlier remark about the latter episodes still being finished was not accurate: the episodes were delivered in reverse order, so it was the first episode that was the last to be worked on. Alas, it wasn't quite done in time. There was a sequence where the watermark 'NOT FINAL' showed over the action, and there were a few parts that had errors that Ayres had spotted in his last-minute review. If there were more that he hadn't spotted, he said, then "Twitter will inform us in due course." He summarised it thus: "You're all going to see something nobody else is ever going to see ... I hope."

Johnson (L), Fiddy (R)

The screenings of the first two episodes then followed, and the first part was fine, not nearly as bad as Ayres had set up. The only previous animation by Shapeshifter Studios, using their motion-capture process, was for one missing episode of The Web of Fear (see the Deeper Thoughts section of this blog post for more details). It was an experiment, and it was not well received. It remains to be seen how people will react this time, but I liked it. Lots more work has clearly been put in, and the overall quality (and in particular, the movement of the characters) has vastly improved. The character designs are of a different type of abstraction than usual for the animation range, which takes a little getting used to; but, once I was acclimatised, I very much enjoyed the style. This is the perfect story to further the experimentation. Only the three regulars and the Toymaker need appear in any way naturalistically (and the Doctor is invisible for half the time, depicted in the animation as a glowing translucent outline); the animators are freer in designing the other characters - human beings turned into toys - and it gets very inventive. The playing card characters have a lovely origami look, and move in a distinctive way (achieved, as Ayres explained later, by them appearing at a different frame rate to everything else). There's a hint of 60s psychedelia in the imagery, with some characters looking like they've walked straight out of the Beatles' Yellow Submarine movie. After the end credits rolled on the second episode, Fiddy made the droll aside: "They still have LSD in Australia then". The scare factor is also increased; the sequence of Dodo turning to ice after sitting in a booby-trapped chair is genuinely unsettling in a way that the original would likely have struggled to achieve.

Johnson (L), Ayres (R)

Ayres came back up on stage for a quick interview in between the first and second half of the story. He talked about how the script, what he thinks of as the only outright fantasy in early Doctor Who (even The Mind Robber having something of a scientific explanation), is extremely inventive. Anyone who can remember my write-up of the story many years ago for the blog will know that I disagree. The scripting is simple and repetitive such that it could only work with ambitious visuals far beyond the resources of the time. On the strength of the first half, the animators were making a good stab of finally achieving such visuals, with Ayres hinting that the third episode went even further and was his particular favourite. He had not been slouching on the audio front either. 1960s productions often let the audio fall back to just actors in the studio, which has a hollow sound, and often the music - pre-recorded and played in to the studio - could drown out the dialogue; he's tweaked things to fix both issues. He's also done an elegant editing job to remove an 'of the time' offensive version of 'Eeeny Meeny Minie Moe'. For the first time, the source for the audio was the so-called Randolph tapes. These were provided to the archives in 2018 after having been found years before in a skip. They have the word  'Randolph' written on the reel-to-reel boxes, hence the name, but who recorded them and how they came to be there is still a mystery. They provide better quality recordings for some stories than exist elsewhere, and may be counted upon for future releases. Episodes three and four followed the interview with Ayres, and a sequence in the third was indeed breath-taking, and very in keeping with the more hyperactive sequences in the villain's recent rematch The Giggle. The nasty schoolboy character Cyril's death got a round of applause from the assembled.

The best kudos I can give to this animated Celestial Toymaker is to say that it makes one want to see The Web Planet animated, or the Sensorites for that matter, or indeed any other story where the ambition for the imagery exceeded what could be achieved in Lime Grove or Riverside by several light years. Obviously, I'm not suggesting they don't animate all the missing ones first - I want to be alive to see them all. The final treat for us that day was another exclusive, and another investment that's going to pay off over a long stretch of time. The first 10 minutes approximately were shown of a bonus feature from the planned Toymaker release; this is the first of a series where seven different teams of three people - themed for each of the first seven Doctors' eras - all grapple with a specially designed Doctor Who escape room. Each team gets their own episode, with the attempt of the First Doctor trio (Peter Purves, Maureen o' Brien and - erm - Lisa Bowerman) going on the Toymaker disc. The remaining six will go on appropriate animation or Collection box-sets in future. As the presenter of the series Emily Cook said in a brief onstage interview, it could take 20 years to get to the end, but it will be worth it. The concept is one that you can't believe nobody's thought of before, and it looks like a lot of fun based on the excerpt shown. Emily talked about the difficulty of balancing the right tone in her role between being supportive and being gently mocking. The escape room was put together as a set, and all the different sessions were filmed over a scorching two days in the Summer of 2023. The puzzles are styled after various elements of set dressing from classic Doctor Who (references to the Trilogic game from the Toymaker story, the colourful puzzle from the Pyramid of Mars and the gameboard from The Five Doctors were clear from the clip).

Johnson (L), Cook (R)

The Doctor Who-themed escape rooms in the UK (see Deeper Thoughts of this blog post for details of one of them) don't require any knowledge of the show to complete the puzzles, as that would likely be too niche for wide customer engagement. As such, the escape room of the bonus feature series would be much better appreciated by the fans than the stars of the show; alas, the sets have been struck and it is no more, so we will just get to experience it through watching others trying it. This seems like a fundamental flaw, but is somewhat the point, I suppose: it wouldn't be as much fun watching people smoothly and successfully work out a set of puzzles. Cook hinted at some humorous meltdowns: Peter Davison gets somewhat frustrated, and the antics of the fourth Doctor crew of Matthew Waterhouse, Micheal E. Briant and - erm - Toby Hadoke were hilarious according to Cook. After this final interview, the event was done. The three of us (myself, Trevor and Alan) went to the BFI cocktail bar, and met up with Tim and Dave, who I hadn't seen for a couple of years. Then, Chris came out to join us for a drink and some food, though he hadn't had a ticket for the screening. It was almost a full house of our usual group (only David and Scott were not there); the talk was good, the food and drink were good, and I said hello to a few other fans. Having been worried that the event would be negative, I left that evening to travel home in the glow of the most enjoyable and positive BFI session for an animation to date. I'm looking forward to the physical release (date TBC at time of writing) to see the final version of the animation, and to see if Purves and Co. ever manage to escape from that room.

In Summary:

Never mind its reputation, The Sensorites is sometimes as powerful as gamma radiation (inspiration for the incredible Hulke).