Empress of Mars

Chapter The 166th, where the chances of anything coming from Mars are 1:1 actually.

Plot:

The Doctor, Bill and Nardole are (for some unstated reason) visiting NASA as a probe sends back its first image from Mars's surface, a vast message written in rocks: "God Save The Queen". Intrigued, the Doctor takes his two friends to Mars in 1881, the year his analysis suggests the message was made. Nardole (for some unstated reason) is transported home in the TARDIS leaving the other two stranded. They meet with a company of red-coated British soldiers and an Ice Warrior, who the Britishers call Friday. The soldiers, led by Colonel Godsacre, and his smarmy second-in-command, Catchlove, found Friday on Earth, defrosted him and helped fix his ship for the trip to Mars, where Friday has promised them riches await for the British empire to claim. The troops break into what looks like a burial chamber, but it's really the Ice Warrior Empress in suspended animation. She wakes and releases many more warriors. The Doctor, Bill and Godsacre try to keep the peace, but the hotheaded Catchlove takes over, discrediting his CO who has in the past survived being hung for cowardice. A lot of soldiers get killed, but Godsacre finds his bravery, offering himself in place of his men, and the situation calms down. The Doctor sends out a distress message, and they create the giant "God Save The Queen" message to help guide the rescue ships down. Nardole returns to Mars having got Missy out of the vault to pilot the TARDIS. The Doctor's worried, but Missy seems to have turned good. Can it be true?

Context:

Watched from the BBC iplayer by me and the children (boys of 14 and 11, girl of 8) one Sunday afternoon. The younger two stayed the course, but the eldest wandered off halfway through, never to return. He'd amused himself at the start, before the regular cast appeared, by trying to guess which Doctor's story this was (he guessed Tennant), but after that, nothing seemed to hold him. At the end of the pre-credits sequence, which features Matt Lucas as Nardole,  my daughter asked me whether I'd deliberately put on one with "the potato man" because he'd joined Bake Off that week. This was a coincidence however, as Empress of Mars was selected by the usual random process, though Matt Lucas had indeed joined the regular presenting team for Channel 4's Great British Bake-Off the previous Tuesday. Her reference to Lucas was not based on him looking like a potato, by the way, but instead because of his ubiquity on social media platforms during the UK's first Covid-19 lockdown singing his baked potato song. The arc plot elements of this story (the vault containing Missy that the Doctor and Nardole are guarding) confused my daughter a bit, and we had to pause the action for a brief explanation. Both the boys remembered it from having seen the story go out.

First time round:

I can't remember anything at all about watching this the first time round on its first BBC1 broadcast on 10th June 2017, so I will instead dredge up a completely unconnected anecdote, the story of how my favourite nerd place turned against me. The place in question (which has been mentioned many times before on this blog) was Volume One, an independent book and video shop in Worthing, the town where I grew up. I can't remember when it first sprang up in Montague Street, Worthing's pedestrianised main shopping area, but by the early 1990s it was a regular haunt. While not specifically sci-fi themed, it had large sections given over to such product, and was my most dependable and regular source of Doctor Who videos and books in the 1990s. My remembrance of the New Adventures last post reminded me of the one time I didn't feel completely at home there. As I said last time, I was never flush enough to be a regular purchaser of the New Adventures novels when the range began, as all my available cash went on buying the video releases instead; but, I would often be found in that section of the store, looking at front cover pictures and back cover blurbs, and maybe caressing the pages just a little bit.

It was just before Christmas in 1991. I was back in Worthing after my first term studying at Durham, and was particularly cash-strapped; I'd arranged to meet my sister in town to do some joint present buying for our parents. It's probably important to picture me at this point in my life: I had a long and shabby grey coat, very similar to the one Richard E. Grant wears in Withnail and I, shoulder length hair, and a couple of days stubble. Because my old watch had broken during term, and I didn't have the money to get it fixed, I also had a large alarm clock in my coat pocket so I could be on time. It was a traditional - and quite heavy - wind-up model with two bells on top, and it was weighing my coat down on one side, but needs must. I was a few minutes early when I got to town, so I went to Volume One, of course, to look at Doctor Who books I could not afford. Because of the season, there was a security guard on duty in the shop who was not employed there for the rest of the year. After a few minutes, I took a peek at the alarm clock, realised I needed to go, popped it back in my pocket, and rushed out of the shop...

...only to be grabbed by the security guard just outside the door. It was an understandable mistake. He'd seen me, in my tramp-like togs, staring at books for a while before pocketing something hefty and high-tailing it out of there. After being accused of shoplifting, I turned my pockets out in front of the guard and the store manager, with a particularly sheepish look on my face when I revealed my time-keeping mechanism. I was only a few minutes late in meeting my sister, and I would not have thought any more about it, except I'd mentioned it to her in passing. She told my Mum, and - because of how my Mum is, and to my utmost embarrassment - my Mum rang up Volume One to complain. This is where I felt a little bit of the warm glow towards this favourite shop diminish slightly: they claimed that they'd found a Doctor Who and a Star Trek book dumped in a display by the door. It had been an honest mistake up to that point, but I was a bit annoyed by that. I did not dump any books by the door, and the chances of someone else doing so at around the same time with two books in the exact section I had been looking at, seemed slim. To my mind, either the security guard or the shop had put them there themselves, or just made it up. I've never shop-lifted (too much of a scaredy-cat), and - as anyone who knew me at the time would have attested - I wouldn't have touched a Star Trek novel with a ten-foot pole.

I didn't feel bad enough to stop shopping there, though. I didn't have much choice, as nowhere else got the titles I was interested in so reliably. It continued to be a haunt for many years after, but I always made a point of leaving the place at a slow and unhurried pace thereafter. I was never accused again. I don't remember when Volume One folded. Towards the end of the 1990s, I'd moved to Brighton and was commuting to London, so the MVCs in Brighton and London Bridge became my default suppliers. By the early 2000s, the space previously occupied with Volume One had become a Bonmarché (as shown above). If you're ever there, there is one lingering hint of the place I used to love and used to spend quite a bit of money in (and on just one day, the place that accused me of stealing from them), the door handles at the front of the shop are shaped like books, even though now there are no longer any books for sale.

Reaction:

Towards the end of Empress of Mars, a character from Classic Who returns after more than 40 years off screen, still played by the same person. I won't give away who this is, just in case someone is reading this that hasn't seen it. What's wonderful and surprising about this is that it works within the narrative pretty seamlessly - it's so brief that I don't think it would seem odd to those who have no idea of the history of the character, and for those who do it works very well to fit Empress of Mars into the wider history of the Ice Warriors as seen in their various stories to date. This is typical of the efficiency of the story-telling. There's no subtext to speak of here. Maybe there's a little hint that the Ice Warrior Friday, in tempting the soldiers with baubles and trinkets, is behaving as the soldiers themselves would do to other native races, in their work as a colonial oppressive force; but, the time I took to type all that out is longer than the episode itself dwells on this. Most of the running time us taken up with action that could be summarised as Redcoats versus Ice Warriors on Mars, won't that be fun?!!! And it is. Early on, there a couple of wonderful reversals that set up that we're in for a roller-coaster ride rather than any treatise on colonialism: a scary figure appears in a strange space /diving suit, but it just turns out to be a Victorian bloke; another soldier sees the Doctor and the warrior, and the Doctor is the one to whom he levels his rifle.

The regular cast of this period is a particular favourite of mine, and by this story, which is quite late into their time together, they are working perfectly as a seamless unit. Lucas only appears for a couple of scenes before being written out (this was likely one of the scripts written before the decision was made to feature him in every episode), but makes his mark. He gets to fetch Michelle Gomez as Missy for an intriguing coda, to remind the audience about the season's overall plot arc. The rest of the time, though, it's just Peter Capaldi and Pearl Mackie, as the Doctor and Bill, and they do not disappoint. The Empress asking for Bill's counsel is a particularly good moment, as is her overlooking Godsacre's Victorian attitudes (as he happens to be Victorian) and Mackie plays them well. The Doctor's appeals for peace are nicely underwritten and well performed. The rest of the cast are uniformly good. I almost forget there are actors in the Ice Warrior costumes, the main two performers Richard Ashton and Adele Lynch inhabit the creatures so well. The two main human guest stars are very good too. Anthony Calf plays Godsacre with a perfect weary dignity, and Ferdinand Kingsley is having the time of his life playing an absolute dastard in Catchlove. 

The writer Mark Gatiss is having fun too. Victoriana is one of his hobby topics, and he's populated the piece with larger-than life characters with a succession of colourful names: as well as Calf and Kingsley's monikers, there's Sergeant Major Peach, Jackdaw, Vincey and Knibbs (echoes of  a Trumpton fire crew are no doubt coincidental). He also gets to stich together lots of Doctor Who continuity, as mentioned above, and finesse the mythology of the noble Martians for whom he must have a lot of affection (he's the only writer other than their creator Brian Hayles to write for them in TV Doctor Who). A particularly gruesome innovation is that their sonic guns now crumple anyone in the firing line into a human paper ball, with twisted limbs fleetingly on display. Underneath these somewhat superficial but nonetheless interesting trimmings, the story constructed is solid, straight-ahead adventure fare, and none the worse for it.

There was only one note of perhaps false controversy when this most inoffensive story was broadcast. The presence of a black soldier in the British army in 1881 caused a few comments to be thrown around online. A few were possibly concerned about historical accuracy, but in general it was the same tedious arguments from the same quarters about "wokeness", whether that was the specific term used back in 2017 or not. As it turned out, there was a historical precedent, but only one ever in history, and that person didn't disappear off to Mars presumably. I don't think it really matters, though. The recent film version of The Personal History of David Copperfield, also starring a certain Mister Capaldi, has demonstrated that 'colour blind' casting in a costume drama can not only work but can invigorate the subject matter. Someone could make the case that the Copperfield movie uses certain other artifices and alienation devices which distance it from any notion of accuracy, and this makes it more easy for the viewer to factor in anything that might otherwise take them out of the drama. Steerforth, for example, is cast as is traditional as a handsome white-skinned, dark-haired fellow, but his mother is played excellently by Nikki Amuka-Bird; they both just go for it, so any moment of dissonance is brief, if it happens at all. But Doctor Who isn't known for its documentary realism either, so there's no reason why it couldn't do the same sort of thing. More wokeness please. 

  

Connectivity: 

Both Empress of Mars and Remembrance of the Daleks feature a group of soldiers dealing with an A-list returning Doctor Who monster race. They both start with a pre-credits sequence that focusses on activity in the solar system near Earth. Both were written by people who also penned titles for the New Adventures range of novels in the 1990s, and neither story title begins with the definitive article, even though both could. 

Deeper Thoughts:

Coronavirus and hiding from the sun (reprise). Doctor who loves a return; in this story, the Ice Warriors are back for a rematch with the Doctor and the people of Earth, and for the last blog post it was the Daleks doing the same. In real life, something coming back again can be less welcome. Welcome to UK lockdown 2: The Revenge. At the time of writing, the UK Prime Minister has within the last few days announced further restrictions that will potentially last for another six months. Like any sequel, it's not going to exactly recapture the spirit of the original - they haven't got Joe Wicks back, for example. Schools, pubs and restaurants remain open for now, though they have to shut at 10pm (it's well known that viruses are only impactful after 10 in the evening, so this makes perfect sense). As I think it's obvious to any reader of this blog, I am given to nostalgia; I already look back on the early days of the lockdown with a great deal of satisfaction, as I was mandated by the government in my country to stay in, order takeaways and watch TV, which is pretty much my idea of heaven anyway. But can I improve on how I managed things first time round?

The key thing I'll have to do better this time round is to eat and drink less. It became a running joke in the media, social or otherwise, very early on last time, certainly before Easter, that lockdown was causing everyone to comfort eat and hit the wine more. This was definitely true for me. One shouldn't be too hard on oneself, as it was an unprecedented and psychologically tough period, and for a good portion of it there were severe limitations on how active one could be, and - I'm already forgetting - what kind of food one could get in the shops or delivered. But it's a shame. I remember mentioning in the Deeper Thoughts section of my blog post for Mawdryn Undead two years ago that I had lost some of the excess weight I'd previously been carrying around for many years. In the 18 months or so that followed, I kept most of it off, but 6 months on from the start of lockdown, and it's all back along with a few more pounds for good luck. Since the start of September, I have started to gradually up the exercise and decrease the intake. Slow progress at the moment, but I'll keep going. 

Another diet I'll be keeping a closer eye upon is my consumption of Doctor Who stories. It strikes me, looking over the last six months of blog posts, that lockdown has reduced my rate of posting a bit. More slow progress, but - again - I'll keep going. One would think I'd have more time on my hands, but there's always proved to be a lot of other things to watch. A great deal of these have been other Doctor Who releases. At the start of lockdown in March, I was still working my way through the last Blu-ray season boxset (season 26), and since then another classic season box set (season 14) has been released, as has the collection of the most recent Jodie Whittaker series, and three bumper-pack releases of animated stories (The Faceless Ones, The Power of the Daleks Special Edition, and Fury from the Deep). I've watched almost all the material on these now with just a couple of special features on Fury left to enjoy. When that's done, for the first time in a long time, I'll have no Who-related pile of discs backlog and nothing on pre-order either. This is almost certainly covid-19 related, the impact of the virus having caused a bit of disruption to BBC product releases; otherwise - based on previous years - there would have been another box set announced by now. Of course, this same disruption is going to mean the next broadcast series with Jodie Whittaker is likely to be delayed too. It does free me up to roam randomly through the Who back catalogue on my unending quest to cover everything on this here blog. But, if we all are going to be locked in for the foreseeable, it's a shame there's nothing shiny and new to see. I'll just have to do some keep fit instead!

In Summary:

Empress-ively solid fun.

Remembrance of the Daleks

Chapter The 165th, which sees a return to some unfinished business

Plot:

The Doctor left some unfinished business in 1963 Shoreditch, the time and place where he was based for a few months many years back, with the TARDIS in a junkyard and his granddaughter Susan enrolled in the nearby Coal Hill school. Recently becoming aware that the Daleks were following him, out to obtain a Time Lord superweapon - the Hand of Omega -  he'd left there, he leads them back. However, he hadn't anticipated two factions of Daleks, the Imperial and the Renegade groups. Teaming up with Group Captain Gilmore and his team, a sort of proto-UNIT, the Doctor endeavours to stop the humans getting killed while the Daleks fight amongst themselves. The Renegade faction obtains the Hand of Omega, with help from a schoolkid wired into a Dalek battle computer and a local neo-Mosleyite group called the Association.

One of Gilmore's soldiers, Mike, has been feeding information to this Association, and it just so happens he's the very same squaddie that Ace has taken a shine to: rule 1 of Doctor Who, anyone Ace fancies will probably betray everyone. He gets killed soon after, anyway, as is customary. The Imperial Daleks bring out their big guns, well, big gun singular, really - the Special Weapons Dalek. It helps them defeat the other faction and make off to their mothership with the Hand. Davros reveals himself to be the new emperor of the Daleks, and the Doctor - having lashed up the 1960s tech equivalent of a Zoom call - broadcasts to the mothership, advising Davros not to use the Hand. Davros takes no notice, of course, and the Hand destroys the Dalek fleet and their home planet Skaro.

Context:

Like the Doctor in Remembrance, I too am returning to unfinished business. After a summer holiday (staying at home), I took a short break from doing the blog for the rest of August and the start of September. But during that time I had watched two stories which needed to be written up. After watching The Lodger on my own, youngest child (girl of 8) requested a specific story, which she described as the one where the girl beats up the Dalek with a baseball bat. She's not seen it before, but the Better Half has talked about it to her previously. Over the many years I've been doing the blog, I don't think she has ever requested a story, so I was happy to override the randomiser to allow this. The whole family - Better Half and youngest being joined by myself and two boys (aged 14 and 11) - watched an episode a night from the revisited special edition DVD. It's taken a while to get back to the notes I took and write them up for the blog. That's not to say I haven't been watching Doctor Who in the meantime, of course; I have been working my way through a lot of animated Pat Troughton goodness, the new improved special edition of Power of the Daleks, and the recently released Fury from the Deep (I'll try to find an appropriate point in a future blog post to share some mini-reviews of those).

First time round:

I'll inevitably and rightly need to discuss below in my review of the story the kind of impact it had when it was first shown, as it is an intrinsic part of every viewing of the story even to this day. But there is an anecdote to tell about my own very first encounter with episode 2, or half of it at least. I don't think it's giving too much away to say I'd been blown away by the first episode on its debut UK broadcast. A week later, on the 12th October 1988, a few hours before it was shown, I was looking forward to seeing the second part; this was the point at which my sister decided to play a trick on me. She systematically went round our house changing the time on every clock, putting them all forward to the time of Doctor Who's BBC1 slot. Then, she played my tape of the Doctor Who theme, loudly, on the home hi-fi in the living room (where the TV also was). The idea was that I would come running thinking that Doctor Who had started, and I was missing it. I came running instead as I was intrigued why anyone in the house would be playing the Doctor Who theme who wasn't me. My sister hadn't counted on my extreme nerdiness in being able to tell the difference between the Peter Howell arrangement (on the tape) and the Keff McCulloch arrangement (on the current episodes) from fifty paces. 

The joke was on me in the end though, as I failed to reset any of the clocks, nor work out exactly how fast they all now were. I was then distracted by my other lifelong obsession apart from Doctor Who, the music of the Pet Shop Boys. Their album Introspective had come out at the beginning of that week, and I was at the time listening to it over and over again on my personal stereo in my room (quite rightly, too, it's brilliant). Returning to this activity after my sister's trick, I lost track of time completely, and couldn't rely on any clocks around me either. Had I not had a new PSB album, I'd have been watching TV in the run up to the episode, poised to start the video recording. As it was, sometime during my third or fourth time marvelling at the piano break in Frankie Knuckles' remix of I Want a Dog, I was suddenly jerked into the realisation of how late it was getting. Rushing into the living room, I jabbed at the VCR's record button in time to catch the last 15 minutes or so of the episode. The first thing I saw was a split second of Joseph Marcell, playing an unknown character, disappearing out of shot. 

I'd missed the resolution of the cliffhanger, some action scenes and what later became a famous and lauded scene of Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor and Joseph Marcell as John - the latter later to become famous as the butler in the Fresh Price of Bel-Air - talking about slavery in a late-night caff. Asking my friends at Sixth Form the next day wasn't much help in filling in the gaps, bagging me as it did threadbare explanations along the lines of "A soldier turned up at the school with big guns" and "The Doctor had a chat with a bloke about sugar". It was five more years before I saw that missing section, when the VHS of the story was first released in the Dalek tin, the first ever Doctor Who home video release to come in such a container (there would be many more). I still have the tin, but - unlike the others, which I've also kept - it's got a bit rusty since 1993. 

Reaction:

Luckily my sister didn't play any tricks on me (see above) one week earlier. The beginning of episode 1 of Remembrance of the Daleks is not one you would want to miss. The BBC globe ident faded out and another image of the globe of the Earth hanging in space faded in (nice little formal gag, probably intentional?); every fan in the audience will be automatically aware that we are seeing a pre-credits sequence, a rarity during the 'classic Who' years - this would be only the fourth time it had ever been done, and the last time before the show was resurrected in 1996 and 2005 onwards. If those watching were clued in already that what was to follow would be a bit special, they wouldn't have been wrong. We hear snatches of speeches of 1963 vintage "I have a dream", "Ich bin ein Berliner", etc. coming in and out like a radio being tuned. A tense, but still energetic music cue comes in (part of what is probably Keff McCulloch's most successful incidental score for the series). It's an excellent model shot of the earth, and as the scene continues and builds, the shot zooms out and we see an alien spacecraft heading sleekly and ominously toward the planet. Bang - we're into the beginning credits. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I think that it is the best opening few seconds of any Doctor Who story up to that point. Simple; cheap, even, but damned effective. Could the rest of the story live up to this early promise?

Yes, is the short answer. The rest of this blog text is a slightly longer way of saying it, but it is but one of a chorus of such reactions, longer and more detailed from all across fandom and for years since it was first shown. In Doctor Who magazine polls of all the broadcast stories to date, Remembrance made the top ten in 1998 and 2014 (it was slightly relegated in the intervening poll in 2009, but only dropped to number 14 of 200).  It stands on its own, but for those of us who were watching around the time it is probably inextricable from its context at that moment. The last story shown before this, the final episode of the previous year, Dragonfire, was a good enough script, and had some good performances and a few good effects. At the time, I'd latched upon it as the most traditional, and probably best executed story of the year. But it's so outclassed by Remembrance, that the difference is like night and day. But in one of those extreme North Scandi areas where the night lasts for months. It felt like a long time since we'd had a story so good and so self-assured. To me, it was the best story since The Caves of Androzani, four years previously, and - with no hyperbole, I assure you - the best Dalek story since the 1960s.

With Davros hidden for most of the action, the Daleks get to dominate the story in a way that they hadn't in their more recent previous outings, where they were playing second fiddle to their creator. And, by restating their xenophobia in a fresh new way, contrasting it with the racism (both casual and full-on neo-Nazi) of some of the human characters in the 1960s setting, Doctor Who's biggest baddies are revitalised. It doesn't hurt that the props are revitalised too. The Daleks themselves, and all their tech - including a full-size shuttle craft - gleam, and it's nice to see innovation too, with the Special Weapons Dalek being a memorable creation that lived on in viewers' imaginations, finally making a cameo appearance in the new series (in Asylum of the Daleks). The colour schemes of both factions are great (gold and white Daleks led by an Emperor based on the old 1960s comic strip look, and grey and black Daleks, led by a traditional black and silver Supreme Dalek). The idea of two factions is a complicating factor to allow the narrative to fill its running time interestingly, and allows some comments on the Daleks warring over racial purity, but it also extends the mythology of the series admirably. The last time we saw Davros, he'd created a new race of  gold and white Daleks, and was taken off - by grey and black Daleks - to stand trial. Somehow, the wily Davros has turned the tables sufficiently that he has once again managed to take charge, and his old captors have become the renegade splinter group. It's not spelled out, it's just there as a nice bit of world-building for the fans, allowing imagination to flood into the gap (at least one tie-in medium has since written the story around that connecting narrative tissue).

It's not perfect, few things are, but any flaws are minor and seem to be borne out of ambition, so it's hard to criticise too much. For example, the concept of the battle computer (a child plugged into a Dalek-like casing) is an interesting and chilling one, and the child actor Jasmine Breaks performs it perfectly; it provides a nice shock reveal moment for anyone watching, but particularly for fans as every scene up to that point has been framed to suggest that it is Davros. It's let down, though, by the staging - the set or the prop in the room where George Sewell as Radcliffe is conversing with the computer should be constructed so that he can't see that there's a schoolgirl in there. And it isn't. He'd have to have zero peripheral vision and zero curiosity for it to be in any way credible. The writer Ben Aaronovitch, working on his first TV screenplay, is feeling his way. The feint about Davros, and the reveal of the girl were all in his screenplay as it developed, but he hadn't actually included Davros elsewhere until someone suggested people might wonder where he was.

Adding that particular character and another wonderful reveal in the final episode was welcome, but another minor flaw of Remembrance, shared with a lot of stories of this period, is that there were already too many characters chasing around for this week's cosmic MacGuffin. Pamela Salem and Karen Gledhill (as Professor Jensen and Alison respectively) are both great, but their characters contribute nothing to moving the narrative along. Simon Williams as Gilmore is the class act one would expect, but he doesn't do very much more. In fact, the whole cast is excellent, even down to the extended cameos from a couple of actors who kept coming back for guest spots in Doctor Who over the  years, Michael Sheard and Peter Halliday. The dialogue they're all given is nice and colourful, and they're directed well. It's just that they aren't needed really. The story boils down to a very simple bait and switch con trick that the Doctor is playing on Davros. Everyone and everything else that happens just defers that; but, the script makes something of a virtue of this - it's the dark chess-playing Doctor's finely tuned clockwork scheme being interfered with by humans and Daleks that won't quite play ball.

The performance of Sylvester McCoy to achieve the dark chess-playing Doctor is something else that's wonderful to behold. Though there are occasional flashes of a more thoughtful or brooding nature in the previous year's stories, that side of the character hadn't been very much explored; from here on in, the writing and the leading man's performance bring this expertly to the fore. Another new aspect that has been thoroughly embraced since the series went off air in 1987 is Doctor Who's long history. There's an excuse for it here, given that this is the opening salvo of a season that acts as an anniversary 25-gun salute, but forever after this point the Sylvester McCoy stories will be informed by, and build upon, without slavishly copying,  the show's established mythology. This is exemplified by the first ever sustained and successful depiction of a Dalek levitating up a flight of stairs. A triumph, and just one of many many magical moments in this superlative serial.

  

Connectivity: 

Remembrance of the Daleks and The Lodger both take place in the South of England, and both see the Doctor stay for a night or more in the house of one of the guest characters.

Deeper Thoughts:

This Time Machine Kills Fascists. Remembrance of the Daleks, the TV story, started a trend of the series being more socially conscious in its subtext, in highlighting modern racism through both a 1960s and a Dalek lens. Remembrance of the Daleks, the tie-in novelisation, published a few years after the broadcast, arguably continued that trend into a new medium and kicked off a whole new line of original Doctor Who novels, the New Adventures, that would continue Doctor Who's ongoing narrative in the years when the TV show was not being made. Aaronovitch, in adapting his own scripts for 1990 publication, was the first of the set of new young Doctor Who writers who'd recently written for the TV show to flesh out the world and characters of his story on the page to a much greater extent that had generally been done before. A year later in 1991, with no sign of Doctor Who returning to TV any time soon, Virgin started publishing a range of original novels. They'd been producing novelisations of broadcast stories before then, but were rapidly running out of those that hadn't been done already. Aaronovitch was again one of a group of writers - with pedigrees either in professional or fan-fiction Who work - involved in producing these original stories, "too broad and too deep for the small screen" as the cover blurb styled it. The range was featured in a number of articles in this month's Doctor Who Magazine (I'm not sure why now, though - holding off until next year would have meant they could have tied in with the 30th anniversary of the first book).

I remember when that first book (Timewyrm: Genesys by John Peel, but not that John Peel) came out. It was the summer before I started at university, and I snapped it up from my usual supplier of all things Who, Volume One in Worthing. The excitement wore off a bit quickly for me: the book isn't that great. The title being two not-quite words connected by a hyphen was not a good sign, but things were just starting out. Anyway, I was still only a beginner fan when it came to viewing old episodes. I didn't need new worlds of Doctor Who's ongoing narrative to explore, as I was diving into its history by dint of the VHS releases. I've probably given the impression talking about collecting the videos in blog posts passim  that I had unlimited funds in those days. I was certainly lucky, but alas I still had to count the pennies to an extent, and videos came first; so, I was never exhaustive in collecting the New Adventures novels. Later in the Summer, I bought the second one (Timewyrm: Exodus by Terrance Dicks) because Terrance Dicks. Thereafter, though, I was choosy. I managed to find a few second-hand in later uni years, in a Durham sci-fi emporium, amongst the many, many Red Dwarf T-shirts (it was the early 1990s, what are you going do?!). Then, I bought a few more new when I was working after graduation, but by then the range was almost at an end. 

Like anything established in the world of Doctor Who fandom, the New Adventures soon became a battleground. The main fault line that cleaved fandom in two was the 'Trad versus Rad' divide. In summary, all that social conscience and innovative, dangerous subject matter (i.e. sex and swearing) was loved by a certain group of regular authors and fans, but the other group (writers and fans alike) just wanted to tell an engaging story of the kind that Doctor Who used to tell on telly. As usual for an awkward sort, I didn't feel at home in either camp; I liked some of the the Trad stuff and some of the Rad. Sometimes, the Trad stuff did get a bit stodgy, and the Rad stuff did disappear up its own space-time vortex. The range - never really settling down into one style or the other - lasted until 1997; the Paul McGann TV movie's launch the previous year had prompted a general reboot of BBC Worldwide's Doctor Who products, and they brought the ongoing original novels in-house to be published thereafter by BBC Books (there wasn't much sex and swearing after that).

Another battleground in fandom that's emerged since is in discussions of the legacy of the New Adventures, and particularly what impact they had on the series when it came back onto television screens in 2005. Russell T Davies is his usual perceptive self when interviewed about this in the magazine, and makes many good points, but he downplays any influence. He's right in his point that the relatively inexperienced writers had things made easier for them by being given free rein; writing books (or indeed TV stories) that would appeal to a wide audience without offending material takes more discipline. It is true though, that the writers of the first return Doctor Who season in 2005 bar one had all written for Virgin, including Russell himself who had a New Adventure published (Damaged Goods in 1996). And  later, possibly the most successful of the New Adventures, Human Nature was adapted for TV on Russell's watch. Anyway, Russell T Davies can't throw stones about the lack of discipline in writing something with adolescent sex and swearing. We haven't forgotten series 1 of Torchwood, Russell; how could we?! 

In Summary:

Like a Dalek hovering up the stairs, this one rises up above any competition to be one of the very best the series has to offer.

The Lodger

Chapter The 164th, the one that's basically a house share situation comedy.

 

Plot:

A time disturbance affects the TARDIS after it materialises in present day Colchester, stranding the Doctor, who'd just stepped out of the doors, and trapping Amy in the ship within the time vortex, unable to land again. The Doctor traces the disturbance to the upper floor of a terrace house, and moves in to the bottom floor as a lodger with existing tenant Craig Owens. The Doctor investigates, while trying to blend in as ordinary person. Craig meanwhile has been building up confidence to tell his friend Sophie how he feels about her, but the Doctor cramps his style. He outshines Craig on the football field and at his work, and even seems to have persuaded his beloved Sophie to leave Colchester and chase her dreams.

With Craig on the point of throwing him out of his home, the Doctor has to perform a psychic exchange with Craig (by headbutting him) explaining who he is. Voices and mysterious figures have been luring people up to the upstairs flat where a mysterious death befalls them. Realising the latest victim is Sophie, Craig and the Doctor rush upstairs in time to save her. The upper floor is really a disguised timeship whose autopilot software has been luring people in trying to find a new pilot. Craig is immune as he doesn't want to fly away - he has a reason to stay exactly where he is. Expressing this love for Sophie forces the ship to do an emergency shutdown, and it implodes. Craig and Sophie become a couple, and the Doctor and Amy get to travel onwards, but the ominous crack in time is still following them... 

Context:

Back to a random selection after a directed trip to a quarry and Kastria. One evening, at the end of a week's staycationing, in the middle of a period where - for various reasons - I was taking a bit of a rest from doing the blog, I popped the Blu-ray of the story on (from the Series 5 box set) and watched it on my lonesome, while drinking a couple of nice glasses of red. This is probably the best way to enjoy The Lodger, and certainly apt as it reflects Craig and Sophie's evenings of "pizza, booze, telly". I didn't have any pizza, though. I should have got some pizza in. Mmm... pizza. 

First time round:

I often don't remember my first interactions with TV showings of stories from this era; in 2010, the show had been going a while after its 21st century resurrection, so it wasn't such a novelty anymore, and generally things don't stand out in my memory. This particular story, though, I do recall, because the family was on holiday during its initial BBC1 broadcast. In 2010, my daughter hadn't yet been born, so it was just the Better Half, me, and the two boys (who were both quite small in those days). We'd hired a cottage in the Isle of Wight (it was not too dear), and indeed we had a ticket to Ryde, where the cottage was situated. We'd arrived on the ferry the previous day, and so the Saturday of The Lodger's debut was our first full day of holiday. As the boys were very young, though, we didn't have plans for the evening apart from putting them to bed and watching Doctor Who. We had booze as well as telly, and on that night I think we had pizza too: art imitating life or vice versa. Another element of unintentional immersive theatre was the occasional groans and cheers which could be heard from people watching football. This was apt as - uniquely for Doctor Who - a match features heavily in the narrative. In reality, the broadcast was clashing with an England game in the ongoing World Cup on the other side, and we could hear people in other places nearby watching en masse through the window.

My first interaction with a prototype version of the story was a few years earlier, in the pages on Doctor Who Magazine. The episode is a reworked version of a comic strip that writer Gareth Roberts wrote of the same name, which featured David Tennant's Doctor intruding on Mickey Smith's life with hilarious consequences, while Rose was stuck in the space/time continuum. I thought it was a funny little piece at the time, and Steven Moffat agreed - in his first year in charge of the show, he got Roberts in to expand it into a full TV story.

Reaction:

If one doesn't like James Corden, then - given how much he appears in this story, and how the narrative revolves around him - one isn't going to like The Lodger. I think that's self-evidently true, so I'm not going to go into too much detail on it here (though I will talk more about Who's history of eyebrow-raising casting decisions in the Deeper Thoughts below). He is clearly a polarising figure based on my experience of online and social media discussions. I like what he does here, and elsewhere, so this wasn't a barrier for me. Putting that aside, there's another barrier for a certain type of viewer, The Lodger is a comedy. In my experience, a lot of fans don't like too much humour in their Doctor Who, and that's going to cost this particular story heavily, as it is probably the purest, most straight-up comedy the show has ever done to this date.

There's no monster, the science-fiction elements are a minor subplot, and the occasional cut-aways to mild peril (the mysterious upper floor of the house tempting people in, an ominous patch of mould on a ceiling) take up so very little of the overall running time that they're practically not there. Writer Gareth Roberts' later scripts in a similar vein, Closing Time and The Caretaker, forming a loose trilogy, are more traditional, leaving The Lodger as the boldest experiment. And this isn't a barrier for me either; I don't know why it puts many fans off - most people rave about the much less funny and arguably less innovative The Romans, a William Hartnell story that was the series' earliest foray into out-and-out comedy (sampling Carry on Cleo as greedily as this 2010 story does Gavin and Stacey).

It's a sit-com, but it's also a rom-com. The dramatic question of the story is no more or no less than whether a couple will get together, and every part of it is perfectly put together around that. The main cast trio, Matt Smith, Corden and Daisy Haggard as Sophie are all adept comic performers, with very good chemistry with one another. There is some great dialogue and comic scenarios; I love, for example, the Doctor's reaction to Craig's proposal for how they can make themselves scarce when the other brings a date home: "I'll shout if that happens, yes. Something like, I WAS NOT EXPECTING THIS!!!!". There's also the wonderful moment where the Doctor goads Sophie into realising her own potential. Like a lot of the best Doctor Who stories, The Lodger mines the  juxtaposition of the everyday - football, call centres - with the mysteries of space (both outer and inner). In it's own small way, it's profound, but it doesn't make that big a deal of it.

So, a lovely little story with some lovely moments, well performed and put together.  It's not the most frightening or exciting story, but is comfortable and confident to be very, very funny. It's not "game-changing" in terms of the wider narrative, but it isn't trying to be. And Matt Smith, who was very close to becoming a professional footballer earlier in his youth before injury got in the way, gets to kick a ball about and be paid for it. It's a palate cleanser before the big banquet of the two-part season finale that followed it, and it succeeds on those terms. If, and only if, you don't hate James Corden, of course.

Connectivity: 

The Lodger and The Hand of Fear are both contemporary set stories which focus more than usual on ordinary humans doing their jobs. In both stories the Doctor is accompanied by a sole female companion, and one of this TARDIS duo is left behind on Earth while the other one disappears off into time and space. 

Deeper Thoughts:

(Cupid) Stunt Casting. Kenny Everett never appeared in Doctor Who, I just like name-checking his fantastically rude Spoonerism-named character. But, if it had indeed happened sometime in the mid to late 80s (he could easily have played the zany DJ in Revelation of the Daleks, for example), I don't feel anyone would have been that surprised. At that time, 'stunt casting', as fans referred to it, was causing ructions between the production team and its most vocal critics within fandom. Like a lot of metaphorical sticks used to beat the 80s producer John Nathan-Turner then, it's probably not entirely fair, but perhaps not entirely unfair either. Strict definitions are resisted to allow maximum range of ire, but it's generally taken to mean a publicity-seeking inclusion in a cast of someone more known for non-acting work, or - as we get to the more snobby end of the criticism - for performing in light-entertainment or comedy programmes. In the classic era, only Nathan-Turner era caught this flak - the 1960s and 1970s may have had casting decisions that led to a duff performance, or an over the top performance, or a racially insensitive performance, but there's no example I can think of for what fandom would call stunt casting. Even Nathan-Turner's first year never comes in for any criticism in this regard. Maybe the casting of the new companion that year, Adric, a role that went to a teenager who only had one acting credit to his name, raised eyebrows for different reasons, but the guest casts were a cross-section of the usual solid BBC repertory with nary a game show host or stand-up comedian among them.

It was the following year that this changed, but even then it was gradual. In that year Michael Robbins and Beryl Reid played a theatrical highwayman and a hard-boiled space captain respectively; they were more known for sit-com or light entertainment work at the time, but they had both done dramatic acting too. Robbins comports himself well, and Reid is perfectly fine if a little distracting - there's no reason why she shouldn't play such a role, but given it's not the focus of the piece, it does slightly bring one out of the drama every time one wonders "Why did they cast Beryl Reid?!". Given the fantastical elements of the programme, one is already suspending enough belief when watching without adding to it. From there it gathered pace slowly, with a Liza Goddard here, a Chloe Ashcroft there, Leeeeee John, of course, and Alexei Sayle hamming it up a bit (though maybe it's the character he's playing that's hamming it up) as the aforementioned zany DJ. Rumour has it that Nathan-Turner briefly attempted a kind-of reverse stunt casting in that same Dalek story, wanting to cast Larry Olivier as the rambling mutant in the first episode - the most accomplished actor of his generation stuck in scabby-face make-up and being clubbed to death in the snow after saying three or four lines. Luckily for all concerned, this never came to pass. There was even - according to fandom at least - the first stunt casting of a regular, with Bonnie Langford being cast as the new companion in 1986.

Next, Delta and the Bannermen in 1987 is perhaps the apotheosis of this trend, as almost everyone and everything in it seems to be included as some kind of stunt: Bonnie herself, Hugh Lloyd, Stubby Kaye, Ken Dodd, the costumes from Hi-De-Hi, the Incidental music composer and his doo-wop band...  After that, though, it still didn't stop until the show did, with Nicholas Parsons and Hale & Pace appearing in the final year of regular broadcasts of classic Doctor Who. Whatever the motive for their casting, though, even if it was more about column inches in the tabloids rather than expected quality of performance, the hit rate is to my mind no worse than casting by any other method. Parsons' sensitive performance as the vicar in The Curse of Fenric is generally felt to be much better than the scenery-chewing performance of Graham Crowden in The Horns of Nimon (I like them both!), but Crowden came in via a much less publicity-worthy and more standard casting route. This all links, I think, into a snobbery that goes beyond Doctor Who and seems to be pervasive in the entertainment business, the belief that the 'lighter' (like comedy) is easier to do than the heavier drama. Not only is this incorrect, but - based on my own experience and knowledge of the opinions of many other people I respect - it's arse about face. Comedy is much harder to perform and to master than straight drama - there's nowhere to hide. This is even more difficult within the confines of Doctor Who, where there is a very narrow scope of acceptable comic performance.

Stunt casting, or at least accusations of it, continued into the new series. Peter Kay, particularly, caused a bit of a fan meltdown, but quite a few others - including James Corden in The Lodger - caused negative comments online as well. One interesting aspect of the intervening years between John Nathan-Turner bowing out and a regular series returning in 2005, though, was speculation on who would play the new Doctor if the show came back. From the press during that time, it appeared that the ghost of stunt casting was haunting even the title role. All sorts of odd choices and non-actors were suggested, the nadir being Paul Daniels, who was confidently predicted to be picking up the keys to the TARDIS early in 2004. Only a few weeks later, an announcement showed that instead of a TV magician of yesteryear, a proper serious actor - Christopher Eccleston - would be the new Doctor; that put paid to all the silly speculation, seemingly forever, which shows that - when it really counts - Doctor Who tends to cast it right.

In Summary:

It's not exactly fine cuisine, but nobody wants that for every meal  - this is perfect pizza and booze telly.