| Chapter The 188th, where the historical reenactment of a war is not very civil. |
Plot:
Tegan's grandfather, Andrew Verney, is local historian in the English village of Little Hodcombe. His research over many years leading up to 1984 uncovers some truth in a local legend of a great evil called the Malus. Carvings of the Malus adorn the derelict local church, and there's a secret passage from the church to a village house, though whether they have anything to do with anything is not 100% clear. The Malus, though, is definitely a creature from outer space, walled into the church many years before. Verney tells the local magistrate Sir George Hutchinson his findings, and Sir George locks him in a barn, and arranges for a historical reenactment of an English Civil War battle, as it is the anniversary of 1643. Or else, the historical reenactment was already being arranged and Verney's information just caused Sir George to escalate things. It's again not 100% clear. Sir George investigates the passage and church and finds a lump of an alien metal called tinclavic that he subsequently carries with him everywhere. Whether this is helping the Malus to influence him is - you guessed it - not 100% clear. He's influencing the Malus in turn, as his "deranged mind caused its awakening", and the war games are feeding the Malus with negative psychic energy so that it grows more powerful. What caused Sir George's mind to be deranged before the Malus awakened is not 100%... well, you get it.
Everyone in the village bar the school teacher Jane Hampden is dressed up as Roundhead or Cavalier to join in the war games, and the roads into the village are blocked. The Doctor, Tegan and Turlough arrive to visit Verney and get mixed up in things, get split up, captured, escape and get recaptured, the usual. The Doctor confirms that the Malus came to Earth in a crash-landed spacecraft from the planet Hakol. Growing stronger, its giant head breaks through the church wall, and causes apparitions of various levels of solidity that roam the village scaring, killing or bag-snatching. It also brings a boy Will Chandler from 1643 into the present as it feeds on the confusion of adding another character when there's already too many people involved in the plot. Will confirms that the creature arrived in his time, making the civil war fighting worse. Turlough finds Verney in the barn. Tegan is forcibly dressed up as the May Queen, and Sir George plans to burn her at the stake as that's what they did in the 17th century apparently. This finally persuades one of Sir George's followers, Colonel Wolsey, that Sir George has gone too far, and Wolsey joins up with the Doctor, Tegan, Turlough, Hampden, Verney, and Chandler (and another bloke who I haven't got the time or space to go into) to defeat the Malus. This involves going into the TARDIS and throwing a few switches. Sir George is killed in the church, and a little apparition version of the Malus that had appeared in the TARDIS also dies, vomiting. How it got in there is not 100% clear, and neither is its vomit - looks a bit like Swarfega.
Context:
Watched both episodes in one go on a Sunday afternoon towards the end of April 2021 from the DVD accompanied by all the children (boys of 14 and 11, girl of 8). The youngest commented during the beginning title sequence that the face being formed from the stars was "Mummy's favourite". This is because the Better Half has recently been watching the early series of the original TV version of All Creatures Great and Small on Britbox, and has been particularly enamoured of the young Peter Davison as Tristan Farnon. Later on in the first episode, the eldest said that the crack in the church wall that the Malus would later peek through was "just like in Matt Smith", and the middle child sarcastically said "Ooh scary" when some ghostly person appeared with BBC Micro generated stars around them. All three children started to lose interest towards the end of episode two, but the youngest must still have been watching at the end as she exclaimed "Gross!" when the little Malus threw up green goo in the TARDIS.
First Time Round:
I remember first reading about the story and seeing photos of the Malus in both large and small versions in the 20th anniversary Radio Times special magazine. This came out in 1983 around the time of The Five Doctors broadcast but had previews of the stories to be broadcast the following year, including The Awakening. It looked very impressive, and when I sat down to watch the two episodes on their BBC1 broadcast on the 19th and 20th of January 1984, I was not disappointed. It didn't occur to me that nobody in the story had a realistic motivation, nor that the story didn't hang together. I was 11 and there was a big face spewing smoke and the Tereleptils (who were in a story I'd seen within immediate memory) were name checked. What more could one ask for? My other recollection was reading the novelisation, which I bought and took with me on holiday in the summer of 1985, when my sister and I went to Lloret de Mar with my Dad. The text version may have ironed out some of the issues, but I don't recall - unfortunately my only memory is it getting splashed as I was reading by the hotel pool. It was the only water-damaged book in my collection for many years, until I replaced it with a better maintained copy after buying a job lot of Doctor Who books from David (long term fan friend mentioned many times before on this blog) when he was trying to clear up some space in his house.
Reaction:
Creating a rod for my own back, in the last blog post about The Pirate Planet I wrote that I preferred it if "a script or production was sometimes ambitious and tried to do more". The Awakening is only two episodes long and crams in a lot of characters and incident, but it doesn't work for me. What's on screen is mainly the uncovering of exposition without plot reversals; it's pretty linear. To jazz things up there's a lot of overcomplicated to and fro, characters moving between locations, and lots of shock effects - ghostly apparitions that are sometimes solid, sometimes not, and sometimes are real people pulled through time. Any script would struggle to find an internal logic and coherence for all of them, and Eric Pringle's script for The Awakening doesn't really try. There's evidence that script editor Eric Saward had some input into the story too; his creations, the Tereleptils, are mentioned, and the metal they mine, tinclavic, is a plot point. Saward mentions tinclavic repeatedly in the two novelisations he recently wrote of his Dalek stories (see the Deeper Thoughts section of the last blog post for some background), so it's obviously a preoccupation. By this time, I wonder whether the script editor was getting a bit jaded with the grind of working on such a demanding devourer of scripts as is Doctor Who. For, just as The Awakening lacks coherence on its own terms, it's also lacking in terms of the wider Doctor Who mythology, and that is ultimately Saward's responsibility. How else can one explain why five - five! - guest characters enter the TARDIS at the end, and not one mentions - nor even registers surprise - that it is bigger on the inside than the out. If the characters are taking the wonders of the show for granted, the audience might just follow suit.
Why are there two different versions of the Malus? Because they are both great visuals, perhaps, which is fair enough. It's hard, though, to reconcile them to the story. Was the big Malus behind the crack always that size, or did he grow? You wouldn't want to edit the giant Malus head from the script, as its emergence peeking behind the cracked wall is the defining image of the story. But is it just a head or is there a giant body hidden away tool? Whichever, it seems unlikely it could have been trapped in the church by humans in 1643. It would make more sense for the church to have been built around it, but Will confirms that he hid in the church to escape the fighting, so the church was around long before the Malus arrived. Unless Will mas mistaken and the Malus arrived before 1643 and had been hidden in the church long before the battle. The more one thinks about this, the more it undercuts the entire premise of the story. The Doctor warns that a recreation of the civil war battle will energise the Malus to the point where it will not be containable. But clearly it was somehow contained back in 1643 as it went to sleep for the best part of 350 years. If the actual 1643 battle couldn't liven it up, why would a pale imitation of the same thing? There's a major hole in the story where it skirts around exactly what happened to subdue the Malus in 1643.
The motivation of the Malus is at least clear, if not necessarily very interesting - it's a lifeform that's been genetically engineered to be a weapon. Unfortunately, the humans in the piece are not served even as well as that. Sir George would be a better character if it was clear whether he's deliberately and foolishly dabbling with the Malus for some perceived gain, or whether he's just come under its malign influence. If the latter, it would be good to understand whether this was because of a character flaw that made him susceptible, or whether it was just coincidence and he was unlucky. Just excusing any activity and behaviour by saying he's crazy is inadequate, and a bit offensive. Why are Sir George's supporters following him so blindly? If it's just the influence of the Malus, then why isn't it affecting Jane Hampden or Verney? Would the villagers really have watched on as someone was burned to death as part of a historical pageant? All of this is under-explored. Even the more relatable characters don't behave much like humans. Polly James as Hampden is supposed to be the grounded and skeptical voice of reason, but she screams "Doctoooooooooooooor!!!!!" at the top of her lungs on seeing something mildly scary, even though the Doctor's standing right next to her; it's almost as if she knows she's in a mid-1980s cliffhanger in TV's Doctor Who. Worse, though, is that she doesn't really have anything to do in the second half of the story, and all she does is the first half is ask questions.
It's not without its good points, though. The location film work is great throughout; the eerie deserted village is a Doctor Who mainstay, and this is a great example (though whether the village should be deserted based on the narrative is another argument). Production values are high throughout, with a nice make-up job on the bag-snatching ghost, great design and effects work on both big and small versions of the Malus, and lots more nice touches; the production is also able to afford horses, and to film them well at a gallop, for the arresting beginning sequence. There's the odd charming moment in the script, mostly involving Will Chandler, a sparky performance by Keith Jayne. Best of all, and possibly why the story as finally executed is so disappointing, is the strong concept. A historical recreation of a traumatic event awakening an old evil is a powerful idea, and has much potential. It needed a better plot to showcase it.
Connectivity:
There is a brief mention of mining regarding the lump of tinclavic that Sir George uses as a stress toy (it's the fourth story blogged in a row to contain a reference to mining, something of a record). In both stories there are characters that grow more powerful because of psychic energy. Plus, John Nathan-Turner worked on both (as Production Manager on The Pirate Planet and Producer on The Awakening).
Deeper Thoughts:
Targets (part 2) - newer adventures. In the Deeper Thoughts section of the Frontios blog post a few years back, I outlined my personal categorisation method for the many Doctor Who Target novelisations. By my reckoning, we are now on to the 6th great and bountiful Target phase. This has so far seen a number of new novelisations published in two batches (one in 2018, one in March this year) covering the annoying gaps in the classic series, plus some new series titles too. This has nothing really to do with The Awakening, alas, apart from linking to my memories of reading the novelisation mentioned above. This means the world is saved a treatise from me about the English Civil War or Tegan's extended family (you can all breathe a sigh of relief on that score). I'm covering the three new series novelisations in this second part of the review of the recent batch, and I'm doing it in reverse chronological order as I'd heard that Robert Sherman's Dalek was pretty special, so I wanted to end on that one. That means that my first is Joy Wilkinson's The Witchfinders, her adaptation of her script for the 2018 series. It's set only about thirty years before the Civil War, so there you go - another tenuous connection to The Awakening.
Mark Gatiss also adds more material to his prose retelling of The Crimson Horror, the only one of these three books based on a story I've already covered for the blog. He clearly decided, though, that a key selling point of the story is its rapid-fire energy, so rather than risk slowing things down by going deeper into characters thoughts and memories, he takes an epistolary approach, structuring the novel as a series of brisk journal entries and accounts from various characters (regulars Strax and Jenny, and guest characters Ada Gillyflower and Jonas Thursday provide most of the material). Like Wilkinson, he manages to make the characters come alive on the page despite missing the powerhouse performances from the TV version. There's even a chapter taken from the Doctor's diary which reproduces the flashback sequence from the TV version with similar verve, and gives us a glimpse into Doctor Eleven's messy but brilliant mind. The extra material is a 60-page beginning which covers a completely different investigation by the heroes of The Crimson Horror (the Doctor, Jenny and Vastra, but minus Strax as it occurs before he became part of their group). It's in keeping with the main part of the story in terms of its tone - a joyously strange and saucy Victoriana that's firmly within Gatiss's wheelhouse - but it's only very loosely connected in terms of plot. Nonetheless, the whole is very readable, with all the fun lines from the screenplay intact, and a few more for luck (I particularly liked, and empathised with, Strax's feelings about Parma violets, for example). So, overall it's enjoyable but lightweight (not that there's anything wrong with that), much in keeping with the source material.
Clearly, the challenge when adapting a fast-paced 45-minute new series story is the need for additional material. Unlike a shorter classic series one like The Awakening (of around the same length once the two sets of credits are removed), such a story cannot move at too relaxed a pace as prose. Robert Shearman uses a structure that I'm surehas a literary progenitor, but as I'm not clever enough to know what it is I'm calling it the Reservoir Dogs format. The action is punctuated at appropriate points with a short chapter giving the backstory of each of the key players in the story. These vignettes are almost self-contained, and are satisfying in their own right, but also add much to the ongoing narrative in the underground base in Utah. I'd say that they broaden out the narrative as seen on screen, but it's almost the opposite - they bring the story inward. Shearman has done quite a radical, though subtle, reworking of his 2005 script, to turn what on TV looked most like a glossy actioner into much more of a character piece, with most of the significant action now taking place in the characters' heads. This includes the Dalek, and some of the most interesting sections of the book involve some concrete and some more abstract methods of letting the reader see things from the Dalek point of view. Every character becomes more three-dimensional on the page. Unlike the other two books covered here, the novel doesn't just equal the performance by the TV actor, it surpasses it for every character, even down to tiny roles like the two guards that help Rose escape from the Dalek early on. It's not perfect; Shearman likes his characters lives and personalities to be a little too much on the dark side for my taste, but if you were only to choose one of these new Target releases to read, I'd recommend it be this one.
These three books mark the first time new series stories by anyone other than the showrunners Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat have been turned into novels. There are quite a few episodes and writers that I'd like to see in future. Paul Cornell, for example, novelised Twice Upon a Time in the earlier new Target batch, but it would be great to read his adaptation of his 2005 story Father's Day, or even - if it isn't too shocking a suggestion, as it started life as a very different original Who novel - Human Nature / The Family of Blood. Any two-parter would be interesting, as all that have been tackled so far were single episodes or specials. Also, it would be nice to see a story novelised from the tenure of a companion that hasn't been covered yet, like Martha, Donna or Amy and Rory. Whichever they choose to do, however, I hope these aren't the last Targets to come out.
In Summary:
Displays signs of Malus Before Thought.
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