The Daleks

Chapter The 123rd, in which the early Doctor Who 'no Bug Eyed Monsters' rule gets broken and stays broken forever.

Plot:

After becoming travelling companions by accident and surviving a detour to see early man on Earth, the Doctor, Susan, Ian and Barbara arrive on the planet Skaro. Missing the radiation meter in the TARDIS registering danger, they explore a petrified forest - the result of a nuclear war - and discover a far off city. Wanted to explore it, but facing opposition from Ian, the Doctor fakes a fault with a TARDIS component, the fluid link; so, they have to search the city for some mercury. (A side thought: this has always struck me as quite an obscure ingredient to expect to stumble across. If you asked me to search my own non-abandoned city today for some, I wouldn't know where to start: you don't just walk into a store and buy mercury. Do they still use it in thermometers?) The city turns out to be inhabited by survivors of the war, the Daleks: mutated creatures in travel machines. They capture and imprison our heroes, who are now in desperate need of anti-radiation drugs. The Daleks' old enemies from the time of the war, the Thals, are in the forest and have such drugs, so Susan is sent to meet them. Rather than it causing deformity, the radiation has turned the Thals into perfect Aryans, which is exactly how the mutations arising from nuclear fall-out work probably.

Susan returns with the medicine and the time travellers are cured, but still imprisoned. The Daleks get Susan to write a letter to the Thals offering them supplies in exchange for more drugs, but it is a trick to lure them into an ambush. The TARDIS team escape from their cell, and warn the Thals, but some are still killed. Everyone flees to the forest. Our heroes can't leave the planet, though, as the fluid link is still in the Dalek city after being confiscated earlier. So, Ian bullies the pacifist Thals into helping them. They start out towards the city in two groups. The Daleks meanwhile have discovered that they will need the radiation in order to survive. After a few ordeals and challenges on the way, the Thals and the time/space adventuring quartet stop the Daleks just as their countdown for irradiation is reaching its end.

Context:

This story was watched on DVD during the week of half term at the end of May. We had planned to go on a mini-break somewhere during this time, but in the end decided that would be too exhausting (there's lots going on for everyone in the household at the moment). I think it was for the best where this blog is concerned: The Daleks would be an odd one to watch abroad, and - being wholly shot in a studio in the earliest days of the programme - doesn't inspire any ideas for travelogue. It is more apt however as an accompaniment to a staycation, what with it seeing the regulars go on multiple excursions, but regularly coming back home to the TARDIS during the running time. Even with the benefit of a week off, mind, I still struggled to find opportunities to squeeze in seven episodes of black-and-white Who. I managed to interest a couple of the children (boy of 12, girl of 7) in the first episode. This ends in one of the series' finest cliffhangers (Barbara menaced by a sink plunger), and this did prompt lots of chants of "Next ep, next ep!", but as we had to do something immediately afterwards, the next ep could not be put on. By the time it could, any enthusiasm had dissipated, and I watched the rest of the episodes on my own, though people drifted in and out of the living room, including the other child (boy of 9) and the Better Half, occasionally.

First-time round:

It was the Summer of 1989, and I was visiting my Dad in Bognor Regis. I walked into WHSmiths, where I would have been regularly checking the shelves for new Doctor Who VHS releases, just as I had previously done for Doctor Who Target book novelisations (there was no early warning of release dates in those days, just to keep things mysterious and interesting). That particular Saturday, I was presented with an embarrassment of riches: a giddying three new stories had arrived. Not just The Daleks, but The Ark in Space and The Time Warrior too. I was then presented with the embarrassment of not having riches; I didn't have enough money to buy them all - and I had to have them all at that very moment. (An aside: this is not as obsessive or entitled as it might look; if I hadn't bought them then and there, as I was not planning to be back at Dad's for weeks afterwards, and with no guarantee these stories would be available in my home town of Worthing, as distribution was by no means consistent, there was a real possibility I might not find them again.) My Dad took pity on me, and lent me the money, and in one cash register transaction I increased by a third my VHS collection of the time.

The Daleks was the first story released that wasn't edited to remove the beginning and end credits; up to this point, including The Ark in Space and The Time Warrior, it was customary to turn a story into one long omnibus edition. It was no doubt a decision based on the length of this story (a stitched together version would not have fit on one tape) rather than any worry about the correct presentation; but, it stuck, and episodic releases became the standard from then on. Again, no doubt caused by its length, The Daleks can lay claim to being the first ever Doctor Who box set: it was literally a set of boxes - two ordinary, and almost identical, tape boxes, sellotaped together.

Reaction:

The initial release of The Daleks being split over two tapes probably seemed apt, as it is seen as a story of two distinct sections. The first four episodes (which were on the first tape subtitled 'The Dead Planet') cover the more eerily sparse and claustrophobic thriller part, as our adventurers explore the city and discover the Daleks. The final three episodes (on the second tape, 'The Expedition') cover the more traditional adventure narrative, as our heroes split up and trek through hostile environments to reach the city, and stop the countdown. The second section is the one that is usually accused of letting the story down, but on this viewing I found it the more enjoyable of the two. Its straightforward Saturday morning picture style action didn't require any surprise to power it. The first section is clearly, objectively, the better one, much more original and well made, but it didn't move me. This might be because every aspect of these episodes was so good that it has became ubiquitous and over-familiar in the years since that first broadcast.

Take for an instance the design of the Dalek travel machines. It's impossible for someone now, particularly a fan like me, to comprehend the impact that would have had on a viewer first time around. Every aspect of the design is so good: the gliding motion, the voices, the distinctive shape with lovely details like the skirt globes, eye-stalk and sink-plunger arm. They are easy to imitate, and easy to draw. Within a couple of episodes, we see Ian climbing into one, like he's riding in the bumper car to which it has earlier been compared. By a series of flukes under the usual time pressure, the various creative members of the crew, particularly designer Raymond Cusick, have made the right call in a series of design decisions to create the ultimate fun alien baddies for kids. For more than 50 years since then, the design has not had to change at all to remain current (and the one time anyone strayed a little too far from it, it was a disaster and they quickly backtracked). But all those years as an indelible image is going to take away from its first big reveal here, when watching it back.

It's not the only aspect of those first stories that's now taken for granted. The sets, the music, the sound effects, the cliffhangers; all of it adds up to a chillingly original four episodes, but none of it is a surprise watching now; it's all become commonplace, and it's impossible to pretend otherwise. When the Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Susan are free, and have teamed up with the Thals, it may be more traditional, but it's also more energetic. The more interpersonal nature of the drama - Barbara's little flirtation with Ganatus, for example - is more fun than the first section, as the regulars can play off the guest actors rather than be in conflict with their environment and some props (however well designed). Only two stories in and the regulars need this to drive their narratives; there's still a little interest to be extracted from their interactions with each other - the Doctor's duplicity re: the fluid link to get his way, a bit of comic padding with the food machine scene - but the series format is established now, and the story engine requires the fuel of new people and places.

The lead characters are already becoming like superheroes, too; Antodus is more of an identification character in this than Ian, to my mind. Ian is a natural leader, a man of action, and has depth enough to concern himself with the morality of his actions, but still decides to goad the Thals into conflict. He's the person we wish we could be like in a crisis, but likely not the person we would be. The script's intention is clearly to show Antodus as the coward of the platoon, a war film cliché still alive in the early 1960s; but he isn't in a platoon, he's a farmhand who's been press-ganged into a dangerous mission, which he keeps telling people is a bad idea. The one who gets picked last and isn't trusted to be athletic enough to jump a chasm - how could he not be an identification figure for the Doctor Who fans watching?! When he fails, and is left suspended, threatening everyone's life, he finds bravery enough to save the others at the cost of his own life. Ian calls him a fool, and he doesn't really get much posthumous credit for his sacrifice. Poor Antodus. 

Connectivity: 

This story and the Zygon Invasion / Inversion are both about two tribes at risk of going to war. Both stories see one side flirting with the use of an ultimate weapon, but this being narrowly avoided at the end.

Deeper Thoughts:

That Sinking Feeling. I have been having a tough time with the latest Doctor Who blu-ray box set, Tom Baker's last season (18); more than two months on from purchasing it, I have at least now watched all the stories and featurettes, but it took a while. I now only have info text and commentaries and isolated music tracks left. It seems like a lot of effort for something I'm not particularly enjoying. So, why am I compelled to keep doing it? I was struggling to answer this myself, when journalist Helen Lewis articulated a similar thought, this time about watching Game of Thrones to the bitter end, in an article for the New Statesman here. (Note: the New Statesman has a limit on the number of articles you can view per month before you hit a paywall.) Lewis explains it in relation to the Sunk Costs Fallacy. This has long been a favourite aspect of management theory for me, and I was surprised that I'd never before considered it in relation to collecting or completionism.

The Sunk Costs Fallacy is the tendency for a costly endeavour to be continued because of the size of the investment already made (the sunk costs). So, if I've already invested millions in a work in progress - a software project, or garden bridge, or high speed rail infrastructure - the total of that investment is considered in the decision of whether to continue to completion, and it shouldn't be. Often, this factor outweighs all others, including the key one: how much more investment is it going to take to finish? With the exact same level of sunk costs, two projects can look very different if one has only a thousand left to shell out, and the other, a billion. Or, to use a more important example, if you've shelled out for a box set, how much of your time are you prepared to invest further before you cut your losses? As Lewis highlights, most economists will tell you that humans very rarely behave rationally. And this is before we factor in the particular mindset of the fan or collector.

Being a fan is like the Sunk Costs Fallacy squared. Not only have I invested forty quid for the Blu-rays, I've also invested almost all my life into enjoying this silly little show and everything about it. If I were to cut my losses and stop watching without experiencing the info text and commentaries and isolated music tracks, am I still a fan? Who are all those peripheral materials aimed at if not the obsessives like me? If I'm just watching the stories, then I didn't need the Blu-rays at all, I already had the DVDs (and were it not for redundant technology, I wouldn't have needed the DVDs either, as I had the videos). Season 18 improved greatly at exactly halfway through: watching it all in order, it dawned on me how boring the first few stories are, but it hit its stride two episodes into State of Decay, and the remaining stories are much better. After the slog, the later episodes lifted my spirits. If I'd given up earlier, I wouldn't have got that little payback. But, if I hadn't been watching them in order in the first place, perhaps I wouldn't have found it a slog at all.

The problem I think is that Doctor Who, certainly the 20th Century model, is not designed to be consumed in season-long slabs. Very rarely in pre-2005 Doctor Who did the stories of a season build to the conclusion of any kind of arc; those plot strands that were picked up from story to story were very light-touch indeed. The show's fairly unique structure as a series of serials allowed it to be marketed for home release (starting with novelisations, but replicated for VHS and DVD releases) in the smaller and much more digestible chunks of individual stories. It's sheer longevity and the many changes of style during the show's lifespan meant that those stories were never released in order. The style of this blog - a random shuffle of stories from different eras, each one self-contained and enjoyable on its own merits - is not an accident; subconsciously, I was emulating how I - and many many other people - first engaged with the show, and the only sane way I think it can be properly enjoyed. The Blu-ray box sets, containing a whole season at a time, are the first new products to mess with that method.

So, do I keep buying them? The Sunk Costs Fallacy teaches us to look forward not back to answer this. The question is about what else I could invest the time and money on, and there's plenty of things to choose from. In the article, Lewis concluded that life is too short: "Even when it’s something you’re enjoying, junk it the minute it becomes a chore." But that's easier said than done when you're a fan and a completist collector. I can't decide, and will think about it for a while before the next box set comes along.

In Summary:

A game of two halves, but not necessarily in that order.

The Zygon Invasion / The Zygon Inversion

Chapter The 122nd, in which the blogger can't resist doing the let Zygons be Zygons joke, but only here in the title, so you've passed it now.

Plot:

Twenty million Zygons, in disguised human form, have been resettled across contemporary Earth, with the peace between them and humans maintained by members of UNIT, chiefly two versions of Osgood, one human and one Zygon (following her duplication in The Day of the Doctor). The two Osgoods represent the fragile balance, with neither ever answering to (nor even acknowledging the relevance of) the question of which one is human and which is Zygon. When one of the Osgoods gets killed, the peace starts to unravel. A radicalised splinter group of Zygons, who want to stop hiding and go to war for the planet, start to kidnap humans in the UK and duplicate them. Elsewhere in the world they perform acts of terrorism. When the remaining Osgood is kidnapped, she manages to get a distress call to the Doctor, who calls Clara. The Clara that answers however is a Zygon duplicate called Bonnie. She lures the small contingent of UNIT troops that are in on the Zygon secret into an ambush. Kate Stewart is attacked by a lone Zygon in the US, and the Doctor and a rescued Osgood's plane is shot down by Bonnie. Luckily, they all survive, and catch up with Bonnie, who has brought the real Clara to the UNIT Black Archive. This is the setting for a heavy handed war metaphor involving the Osgood box(es). The Doctor gives a speech, persuades Bonnie not to be evil, and she becomes the new second Osgood. Memories are wiped, and things carry on as before. Implausibly.

Context:

I'm finding everything Who-related hard going at the moment. The season 18 Blu-ray, and my current snail-like pace in consuming the episodes within it, is persuading me that season 18 is one of the dullest runs of stories ever produced for my favourite show. The last story covered for the blog, The Creature from the Pit, manages to be dull even though it features a monster with a giant green cock and jokes by Douglas Adams. The next story that's come up for the blog is a whopping seven episodes long. And before that, I have the stodgy Zygon two-parter from Peter Capaldi's difficult second year to contend with. That year, with the Doctor suddenly donning shades and playing electric guitar, and his disappearing off for years to deal with his grief, is nothing less than Who's mid-life crisis. And like anyone else's mid-life crisis, it's not that exciting to watch play out. I nonetheless tried to find some enthusiasm, and put on the Blu-ray for a episode per night on consecutive nights over the recent Bank Holiday weekend in the UK. I was accompanied by all three children (boys of 12 and 9, girl of 7) but the youngest got freaked out fairly early on in the first episode and decided to stop watching; the boys liked it though.

First-time round:

The end of October / start of November 2015. A very different time: back then, Jodie Whittaker's taking over of the main role in the world's longest-running sci-fi TV series looked as likely as the UK voting to leave the EU. A few months earlier I'd had the bright idea to start a blog where I covered every story - new series and old - in random order, massively underestimating how much time and effort that would entail. Had I been more organised, I'd have thought then to keep a viewing diary of the episodes broadcast after I started the blog, to feed in to these First-time round summaries in years to come; but, I didn't. All I remember from back then is watching these episodes in a slough of despond; well, I watched them in my front room, but that's how it felt. The first couple of two-parters were only okay, the Viking and Highwayman ones with Maisie Williams were a bit pants; every week, I was tuning it hoping it would be better than expectations. The Zygon story kept my attention, but offered not much more. The Better Half, though, reached breaking point, and after the closing credits of The Zygon Inversion decided not to watch Doctor Who for a while.

Reaction:

This is an example of the globe-trotting thriller Who story, a type tried a few times during Peter Capaldi's tenure. The production values are very high, the team having got very good at making the most of their budget and putting some great visuals on screen. It's a contemporary twist on the traditional use of a body-snatching alien threat, using them as a proxy for international terrorism (which was casting a particularly dark shadow at the time of these episodes' production and broadcast). It's also fan service central: a sequel to anniversary show The Day of the Doctor, another outing for the popular duo of Kate Stewart and Osgood (the latter cosplaying with elements from two or three 20th century Doctor costumes), a rematch with the Zygons, a furthering of plot threads and characters from recent stories like Death in Heaven and The Magician's Apprentice. Jenna Coleman gets to play a baddie, which she does with aplomb, and there's a deftly assembled moment of misdirection in the cut from one scene to another, withholding the moment where she's been converted, but giving the audience a subtle clue (Zygon Clara's ponytail). So, why is the product of all those inputs so disappointing? Maybe it's because the plot is so clumsily put together, that if you think twice (maybe even just once) about the logic of anything that transpires in these two episodes, the whole thing collapses like a house of cards.

Let me poke at just one minor card - just a Two of Clubs in the wider scheme of things - and show you how it brings everything fluttering down. Early on, the Doctor confronts two schoolgirls in a children's playground. (Not good optics, by the way; why leave it so long before they speak and confirm their true identities? Until they do, it looks very dodgy, but anyway...) These two girls are the Zygon High Command in disguise. So, what happened to the real girls? They must have existed at some point, it's always been established that Zygons have to copy humans, they can't just make up fictional new identities. The exact dialogue about the settlement is "They were permitted to permanently take up the form of the nearest available human beings." So, did these girls get killed to allow the Zygons to hide out in the UK in their forms? It hardly seems likely that the Doctor would condone the murder of lots of humans even as a way to ensure peace. So, were they two girls who had died? If so, are their parents Zygons too? Whole families couldn't have died of natural causes. So, are there unsuspecting human families out there sharing a home with Zygon children?

Perhaps all the Zygons are copies of still living humans. But then, isn't there a constant risk of the humans bumping into their Zygon doppelgängers and blowing the secret? Perhaps they were copied and then the Zygon copies were moved to other countries to avoid this (like the group taken to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico), but then why would there be such a concentration in the UK? Also, how deep is the deep cover of these two little girl Zygons? It would probably be good to leave this vague, but we are instead explicitly shown that they spend lots of time in a kids' play park and a school. The thought then occurs of two Zygons spending all their time playing with LOL dolls and doing Key Stage 1 homework - when exactly are they squeezing in all the high commanding of  Zygons on Earth? Even if one can rationalise all that somehow, there are then all the people in London that the Zygon terrorists have been forcibly replacing. They can't have kept them all alive in underground pods (and the script again is overly explicit in stating that this would be the exception rather than the rule), so are all those that are gone to be left missing presumed dead after the events of these two episodes, or will the terrorist Zygons continue taking up their place? At least it seems that the terrorists were dispatching entire family groups, but there will still be aunts and uncles and grandparents that will eventually twig that their relatives' personalities have completely altered. UNIT can't wipe everyone's memories. 

Essentially, the nuts and bolts plot just isn't workable, whichever way you look at it. It's not even very good on a purely metaphorical level. A lot of people rave about the Doctor's final anti-war speech, but it's too long and Capaldi overplays it terribly. Much better - one of the best scenes from this era, in my humble opinion - is the stand-off in a shopping centre between the Doctor, Osgood and a Zygon who just wants to be left alone, but has been forced to come out into the open. It almost works as a comment on the vast majority of peaceful members of any minority who are not represented by the hothead political agitator faction. Except, those minorities look and sound different to the majority, that's kind of the point. Whereas the point of the Zygons is they look exactly the same as everyone else. They are the opposite of what they need to be to make the comparisons work.

If these were the only problems, it might not be too bad. But there's lots of other annoyances: all the tiresome 'comedy' Doctor bits talking about question mark underwear or calling himself Doctor Disco; the waste of Rebecca Front's talents playing a one-note character; the hoops the script has to jump through to rationalise that Zygons somehow now have the power to model themselves directly from someone's mental images, even if they're miles away from them; the repetitive trick of UNIT being confounded by the Zygons modelling themselves on their loved ones so they won't pull the trigger (they're soldiers ferchristsakes, why don't they shoot their Mum in the leg and ask questions later?).  All told, it's a mess... and that's before one even gets to the possibly offensive nature of its themes (more on that anon).

 

Connectivity: 

Another story with an underground lair containing blobby aliens that aren't all they seem. In both stories, the Doctor arrives after answering a distress call.

Deeper Thoughts:

"Mixing Doc and politics, he asks me what the use is..."  I can't yet bring myself to watch Years and Years, Russell T Davies' dystopian glimpse into the future history of a family living through the years 2019 to 2034 (at the time of writing, the first episode is available on iPlayer). This is not because I think it will be bad, but because I think it will be excellent, and it will thereafter haunt me. Politics in the UK is depressing enough to live through at the moment; I'm not sure whether my psyche can take any fictional extrapolation from that base point. Davies' work has haunted me before: a close cousin of Years and Years, from what I've read of the set-up and seen in trailers, would be Turn Left, a 2008 David Tennant episode of Doctor Who that Davies wrote. The political subtexts of Doctor Who stories are often discussed by fans and the wider media. I've mentioned in blog posts previously that I think this analysis is overblown, or at least misdirected. I doubt Turn Left would be on many of the top ten most political Doctor Who stories lists (there are such things, of course - have a Google) but it nonetheless still works for me as a neat exploration of the worst human attitudes exposed by economic strife.

Conversely, those stories where the direct inspiration is more obvious turn out not to be dwelling much on the politics at all. The Curse of Peladon is a good example: it's not about the UK joining the European Community, that's just a bit of a gag in the set up of a gothic whodunnit runaround. The Mutants might touch on apartheid in a couple of brief moments, but most of its running time is about people turning into colourful psy-powered space butterflies - not something that reflects on the geo-political landscape of the early 1970s. Even in The Happiness Patrol, the story most discussed in this regard, including in a Newsnight debate and an Archbishop of Canterbury speech, the satirical touches are mostly just window dressing, plus a bit of 'capitalism's bad, kids' tacked on at the end.

This makes sense, though: the point of science fiction and fantasy to a great extent is to explore wider and darker themes, but in a different context, one that's perhaps more palatable by being one or two steps removed from reality. Superficially more palatable, I should say. The great trick of the best science fiction and fantasy is that the new context makes the exploration of the theme more effective. The many many lives destroyed by Stalinism over the years are of course important, but not easily graspable as more than a statistic. The fate of the horse Boxer, loyal follower of the regime, in Animal Farm, on the other hand, is devastating. And, like some of the scenes in Turn Left do - and probably Years and Years will when I finally get brave enough to watch it - it haunts me.

The Zygon 2-parter though is something else again. It is seriously attempting to explore the themes from which its context is derived, but the context is not any step removed. With splinter groups of radicalised youth, terrorist training camps, refugee trails, videos of executions, even a recurring symbol echoing the Isis flag, it's too close for comfort. That also risks it being too close to be effective. And, as discussed above, the concept is not really aligned with the reality that it attempts to reflect. This adds up to something tasteless. The shows were broadcast while the most egregious of Isis's filmed executions were still fresh in the memory, and executions were still happening. It was too soon to do something so on the nose, unless it was going to be exactly right and hit its targets with precision. It doesn't manage this. The safest and probably better choice would have been to construct something with more distance between the trappings and the theme. It's okay - to take another example - for Daleks or Kaleds to be Nazi analogues, but when they start doing Nazi salutes, it perhaps oversteps a mark.

In Summary:

Like a house of cards. Or like House of Cards (c. season 3, when it was getting very silly).