Boom Town

Chapter the 263rd, is set in a city not a town. (Did people online in 2005 call this a plot hole, and ask for RTD to be sacked because of it? Probably, the silly billies.)

Plot:

The Doctor, Rose and Captain Jack travel to present day Cardiff to charge up the TARDIS using energy from the time/space rift that runs through the city. Anticipating being there for a couple of days, Rose contacts Mickey who comes from London bringing Rose her passport in case she needs it on her travels with the Doctor. While hanging out, the four of them discover the new mayor is Margaret Blaine, a disguised Slitheen family member who survived the destruction of 10 Downing Street. Her proposed plan to build a nuclear power station near the city centre is really a scheme to blow up the planet and power her extrapolator device (space surf board) to escape the planet. The Doctor takes her into his custody, planning to return her to her home planet (where, she says, she will be executed). Jack connects the extrapolator to the TARDIS to speed up the refueling. With the evening to wait, the Doctor takes Margaret out for dinner at a local restaurant, where she tries to persuade him to let her go. Rose and Mickey go out on a date, the passport request having just been Rose's ruse to get Mickey to come to see her. It ends up in an argument as he is tired of her leaving him behind. There's an earthquake; the Doctor and Margaret rush back to the TARDIS, as does Rose, abandoning a glum-looking Mickey. Margaret had booby-trapped the extrapolator - it has connected to another power source (the rift energy pumped into the TARDIS), and she is about to surf to freedom on a wave of destruction. This interference causes the TARDIS console to open and the telepathic vortex force released links to Margaret's mind and gives her what she wants, a second chance at life, by regressing her to an egg.

Context:

Watched from the DVD (single disc version alongside the following two episodes rather than from the giant TARDIS box-set of the whole season). I was accompanied only by the eldest (boy of 16); the Better Half and the other two children having better things to do seemingly. The eldest couldn't remember ever having seen the episode before, but he definitely has at least once. At the end, we both agreed that it had made us want to carry on and watch Bad Wolf / The Parting of the Ways (but we didn't, as we then had better things to do seemingly).

First Time Round:

The first series of the relaunched Doctor Who was broadcast in the UK after the Better Half and I got married (which was on a day in late August 2004 when production had just got underway and the earlier Slitheen episodes were being filmed in Cardiff). Our first year of wedded bliss, we lived in Gillingham, Kent where the BH was teaching, but our parents and a lot of friends were all still in the Brighton area where both of us had grown up. Late in 2005, we'd move back there, the better to have support when starting a family. Before that, without any dependents to worry about, there was a lot of travel around to visit people for weekends during 2005, and - me being me - usually watching Doctor Who on the Saturday with whomever we were visiting. During the course of Christopher Eccleston's season, we visited Worthing (twice), New York, Telford, and Brighton. This final visit was to stay with old friend Phil, mentioned often previously on the blog, for the weekend of Boom Town's debut on BBC1 (on 4th June 2005). Throughout the Saturday I remember feeling more and more poorly with a cold. Boom Town perked me up a bit, but then the three of us went out for dinner and I remember almost falling asleep in my first course.

Reaction:

A criticism of some of the early Doctor Who relaunch stories in Russell T Davies' first year as showrunner was that they had Deus ex Machina endings. What does that mean? Well, literally it means 'god from the machine', and links to a practice in ancient Greek theatre to introduce an actor playing a god into a play at the end using some kind of mechanical device (winching them up on a rope suspended above the stage, say), to decide the fate of all the other characters. It has come to mean an ending that comes from nowhere, not resolved by the characters themselves, cutting through the knotty complications of the plot in a way that makes things perhaps simpler for the author. I don't think there are any endings truly like that in the 2005 run, but Boom Town comes closest. It's hard to see it as anything but intended (probably playfully): I mean, there is a machine, and a glowing force with god-like powers comes out of it and decides what happens to Margaret. It looks at first glance that Davies has side-stepped the Doctor's moral quandary about whether he's responsible for Margaret's capital punishment if he delivers her unto it. A magical get-out has seemingly made things easy on him. But watch closely at how Eccleston plays it: it's clear that the Doctor is a few steps ahead of everyone else, and he is actively choosing to let things play out, allowing Margaret to get her wish. In the end, he's decided to let fate, in the form of the TARDIS, decide. It can see into her soul, after all, and knows even better than he whether Margaret could be rehabilitated.

Eccleston is great at commanding a scene by doing very little, and the writing, perhaps responding to the way he's played earlier stories before, works with him. Future Doctors would be more active, and the endings would get more obviously un-Machina, but there is something interesting and strong about this Doctor who tends to influence people and events around him indirectly. We know that Davies wrote this knowing something of how Eccleston would play it, as he's on record saying that the story exists only because, when they were filming the earlier Slitheen story, Eccleston and guest actor Annette Badland as Margaret worked well together, but didn't have much shared screen time. Boom Town exists to give them the multiple two-hander scenes when the Doctor takes Margaret out for a 'last meal'. The surrounding material (implausible plans for nuclear power stations, local government cover-ups, brief pyrotechnics as Cardiff gets shaken up by the extrapolator and the rift) is just window dressing surrounding those scenes. And they are great, the two actors riffing off each other comedically and dramatically. Margaret's rejoinder "Only a killer would know that" is one of the great lines of this period, and another small hint about the background character arc of the Doctor's survivor's guilt over his destruction of his own planet and people. As well as that, there's the biggest reference to the "Bad Wolf" series arc tease, and the wonderfully grounded scenes of Mickey and Rose arguing about his hooking up with Tricia Delaney from the estate, a counterpoint to the unearthly goings-on.

Seeing this story in isolation probably does it less favours than the last story blogged The Lie of the Land. While that story worked better in many ways as a stand-alone, Boom Town might be a bit anti-climactic without progressing directly on to the big finale of Bad Wolf and The Parting of the Ways. Davies was here creating on the fly a format he'd reuse in future years, a more quiet and intimate prelude just before the big events kick off. Boom Town risks being a bit too quiet and intimate, with only one significant guest speaking role and lots of talky scenes. Director Joe Ahearne, supported by the crew, makes up for this by getting great performances out of everyone, and shooting things in an interesting way. The Slitheen costume (used sparingly in Davies's script, again learning the lessons from earlier in the season) looks positively scary in its appearances in Boom Town. The vistas of Cardiff are attractive, and nicely accompanied by a lovely score by Murray Gold with lots of mournful motifs played on the oboe, or probably on an oboe sample anyway. Boom Town is one of a very special set of episodes, the first season of Doctor Who's magnificent relaunch. With this blog post, I only have the one left to write about; Eccleston stories are precious and scarce. While this might not be the biggest or most showy of them, it's never less than watchable, and has some moments of greatness. It's also good to see the new series, only 11 episodes in, confident in revisiting its own recently-created mythology and doing something different with an established character.

Connectivity:

Boom Town, like the Lie of the Land, is a story that follows on from two earlier episodes in its season, with action taking place six months after the events of those previous episodes. Both involve aliens in a position of power over humans, using a false narrative about being a benefactor while they plan for their own nefarious ends.

Deeper Thoughts:

Fame! He's going to live (well, regenerate) forever! Around the beginning of April 2023, there was a spirited social media discussion about the relative fame of the different actors cast in the role of Doctor Who over the years. Someone (or maybe more than one person, I didn't necessarily catch the very beginning of it) stated that as he is a globally known star (I believe the term 'megastar' may even have been used), Ncuti Gatwa must be the one with the highest level of fame on first getting the job. This was around the time that the full trailer of Hollywood film Barbie, in which Gatwa appears, had been released. A lot of people disputed this professed opinion, with various levels of annoyance or rage; indeed, I suspect that tweets like this are designed to provoke such responses. There's no foolproof way of gauging relative fame, of course, particularly not across the changing TV and film landscape of the six decades the programme has existed. Nonetheless, I think it can be said with authority that the professed opinion is wrong. Gatwa is well known to those that like the only significant thing he's been in that's actually out and viewable, Netflix series Sex Education. It's hard to know the show's exact global reach as Netflix isn't fully transparent with its success metrics, but it's definitely done well with a certain demographic and not just in Gatwa's home country. Beyond that demographic, though, people did not know his name or his face, and if they do know either now it's likely because he's been cast as Doctor Who, not because of Sex Education. This isn't a bad thing: he's still very much the relative newcomer, and is young and talented - his future's bright.

I don't mean to express judgement saying Gatwa is not a globally recognised name, as I don't think anyone who's ever taken on the role of the Doctor has been a globally recognised name. John Hurt and Hugh Grant are the only possible contenders to my mind, and they both were cast as one-off rather than ongoing versions (and the latter in a skit for Comic Relief rather than the show proper). It's not that sort of part, I don't think - you don't want a megastar, you want a good actor who most people will see and think "Oooh, it's him / her". Having said that, a couple of the classic series Doctors were star names on taking the role, but in the UK rather than across the world: Peter Davison, definitely, and Jon Pertwee. Maybe William Hartnell falls into that category too. He'd had a long and prestigious career in UK films and TV before being cast as the first ever Doctor Who, but usually in supporting character roles, a little way (but not too far) down the billing. It probably depended on the household, but it was more likely than not that he was a household name to those watching in 1963. It's well before my time, but it strikes me that Patrick Troughton was well respected in the business, and audiences would have recognised him, but not necessarily known his name. Colin Baker had some renown based on a showy turn in a series called The Brothers, and Sylvester McCoy would have been known by younger audiences as he'd done a lot of children's TV, but probably wouldn't have been known to adults unless they had been fans of the Ken Campbell Roadshow.

It's only after the series paused in 1989, when Doctor Who ceased to be made as a multi-camera studio affair, that anyone would be cast in the lead role who had more global presence. Paul McGann when cast was regularly getting lead roles in UK TV programmes and had done a couple of Hollywood films. Matt Smith was young and had been in a few UK TV series, but wouldn't be getting Hollywood work until after he'd played the Doctor. Capaldi was similar to Hartnell but a bit more international, having done lots of good work over a long period of time in both films and TV. Jodie Whittaker was successful in UK film and TV (and theatre too, of course - I don't mean to diminish anyone's theatrical profile, including Gatwa's, but it doesn't really factor any longer into global fame, for whatever that's worth). Having considered all this, I think the most globally famous actor at the point of taking on the Doctor role is probably the star of Boom Town, Christopher Eccleston. When he started shooting the relaunched Who, he'd just finished a decade of high profile work, with leading roles in UK TV and parts in internationally seen films (starting with Shallow Grave, but including many, many titles like The Others, 28 Days Later, Gone in Sixty Seconds, Existenz, Elizabeth). The parts were of different sizes, but he was always recognisable, often burning through the screen with intensity. There's your answer.

If not the most globally famous, Ncuti Gatwa probably is the most up-and-coming. He's been cast in a hit series and a small role in a big Hollywood movie before Doctor Who, and everything looks nicely lined up for him to make a big impression playing the universe's favourite Time Lord. He's also young and exciting, and clearly has the potential to move on to greater things (hopefully not too soon). The previous Doctor actors he's most like in terms of profile are probably David Tennant and Tom Baker. Tennant took on the role when he was doing good work and had just had his first big TV role in Casanova, plus a small but important appearance in a major movie with international reach (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire). Sounds familiar. Baker was older than both the other two, but hadn't broken through, even though he had appeared in a few movies and TV shows. He needed something that was a good fit for his mercurial genius, and Doctor Who came along and proved to be just that. There's no foolproof way of gauging these things, but a lot of people would agree that Tom Baker and David Tennant are the most popular Doctors there have ever been. That may be a big thing for Ncuti Gatwa to live up to, but I think he's more than capable of meeting the challenge. I can't wait to see it.

 

In Summary:

Boom shake shake shake the Cardiff Bay area.

The Lie of the Land

Chapter the 262nd, where the people in charge are monsters who are lying to us (just an ordinary day in the UK).

Plot:

The Monk creatures have been humanity's benefactors since the first fish crawled out of the sea, helping us to evolve and develop, protecting us right up to the present day. At least, that's what the regular propaganda broadcasts by the Doctor say. Bill knows that it's all a lie, despite the Monks' transmission of some kind of mind control. She keeps alive her memories of Earth before their invasion by imagining a confidant in her mother, who died when she was young, and regularly having conversations with her. Nardole finds Bill and brings her with him on a mission to free to the Doctor, who is held on a prison hulk at sea. The Doctor, though, appears to have gone over to the Monks' side for the sake of peace and stability; an upset Bill shoots him and he starts to regenerate. This is all faked, though - a way to ensure that Bill was not a spy under the Monks' control. The Doctor has gradually broken the conditioning of his guards, and now has a team ready. He consults with Missy in the vault, who tells him the only way to stop the Monks' telepathic control is to kill the person who originally made the agreement with them to invade, i.e. Bill. The three TARDIS travellers and the guard team break into the Monks' pyramidical base in London where the controlling signals are being broadcast, amplified by the many statues of Monks around the world (really disguised transmitters). The Doctor cannot break the signal, and is knocked out. Bill ties him up to stop him interfering and plugs herself into the circuit, expecting to be killed. Instead, her strong memories of her Mum stop the Monks' control; without this, they rapidly leave the planet, and are quickly forgotten.

Context:

Watched from the box-set Blu-ray disc one Sunday evening with all the children (boys of 16 and 13, girl of 10). The youngest thought the Doctor's wide-eyed look into camera as he finishes his pre-credits pro-Monk propaganda speech was the most frightening thing about the story: "Why did the Doctor do that? I thought he was a nice guy." This was all about the sinister face-pulling rather than the propaganda, though; nobody believed for even an instant that the Doctor had really gone bad. The collective opinion from all three afterwards was that the story had been "pretty good".

First Time Round:

I watched this, with the whole family though none of the kids remembered having seen it before this latest watch, on the evening of its BBC1 broadcast on 3rd June 2017. I was very much enjoying the series at the time; the dynamic between the three regular characters was good, and the actors worked together with good chemistry. I was less enamoured of the linking of three stories including The Lie of the Land into a loose trilogy. I preferred the stories that were left standalone (more on that in the Reaction section below).

Reaction:

Often fans will embark on a viewing of all the older Doctor Who stories in order from the beginning; seeing the stories in this context can lead to insights that aren't obvious when watching single stories in a random order (as they appeared as repeats or came out on VHS and DVD). Could there be different insights doing things the other way round, though, as I'm doing for this blog? I thought when I first watched them that the individual Monk stories (Extemis, The Pyramid at the End of the World, and - particularly - The Lie of the Land) were hurt by being part of a trilogy, more than they were being helped by it. I was eager to see the final story of the three as a standalone adventure, and after this watch I do believe it works better that way. Imagine a cold open with a mysterious monstrous force never seen before (if The Lie of the Land had followed Knock Knock, say) suddenly in charge of Earth and claiming to always have been there. The audience would have been disorientated in exactly the same way as their identification figure Bill, wondering what they could rely on as real, particularly as the Doctor seems to be siding with the bad guys. I got a flavour of how that would have hit home this time watching a long time after I saw the preceding story (and just over six months since I last watched Extremis).

The ending is improved too. Once their mind control is switched off, the Monks nick off without a battle or even much fuss; as the end of a trilogy, this was an anticlimax. In the previous stories, the Monks have invested a lot, running simulations of every possible scenario of Earth's defiance, and working out a way that they could take control by fooling the Doctor and his friends. Would they really give up so easily? Without any of that stuff, the ending's still a bit abrupt but it works okay as the finish of just one 45-minute story. Standing alone, The Lie of the Land still has structural issues. The showdown between Bill and the Doctor doesn't convince, because it happens too early at around the 15-minute mark. A big climactic scene with heroes turning on another, and one of them appearing to be killed by the other, happens with 30 minutes to go. The action in that last 30 minutes is therefore a bit flaccid: how could anything else be as exciting as a fake regeneration? I wonder what the scene is doing there at all, really. There must have been a less explosive way to prove that the Doctor and Bill are still on the same side. Maybe it's to introduce the concept of regeneration for newer viewers, as the Capaldi Doctor is headed for his real one within a few episodes. Maybe it's to show that the Doctor's just as good at false narratives as the Monks are, but if so it's not capitalised on. More could have been made of that to build up the denouement and to make it clearer: the Doctor and the Monks' narratives fight against each other, before Bill's 'pure' narrative of her mother proves to be powerful enough to win out.

The imaginary Mum providing the method for the Monks' defeat is a nice note, and ties in to the memories the Doctor gave back to Bill in the first episode of the season by time-travelling back to get Bill the photos of her Mum that she never had. It doesn't quite come off, though - it's just a bit of technobabble and a separate emotional moment, rather than the two being well integrated. Between the climactic sequences at 15 and 45 minutes, there isn't much of note. For a supposedly global story, it is quite small and intimate. Apart from the three regulars and a cameo from Missy, there are no other real characters, just bit parts and background artists. Director Wayne Yip captures a couple of good action sequences. There's a nice darkly comic moment at the resolution when the people of Earth have already forgotten the Monks, believing that events were connected to someone filming some movie or something, constructing their own false narrative as a coping mechanism. The potential of such a strong idea feels a bit wasted, though. I think it would be better as a two-parter, starting with the Monks in control as it currently does, then telling the story of how this came to be in flashbacks as Bill searches for the Doctor and finds Nardole (I'd do it that way round, so Bill drives the plot more). The Doctor confrontation would be the part one cliffhanger, and the second part would be a much harder quest to infiltrate the Monks' base and defeat them. This would also mean throwing out Extremis and creating something completely new. This would have been too much rework for anyone to have considered it when on a tight schedule to complete the series, no doubt. But I can keep this imaginary better version of the story alive in my head nonetheless.

Connectivity:

The Lie of the Land, like The Mutants, is a tale of a colonising force oppressing the local populace of a planet. This time, though, human beings are the oppressed rather than the oppressors.

Deeper Thoughts:

A Theory on Conspiracies. Political leaders in our 'post-truth' era don't have the brainwashing tech of the Monks in The Lie of the Land, but that doesn't mean they aren't projecting false narratives. There was a time about 25 - 30 years ago of much optimism that the age of the World Wide Web would usher in honesty in all dealings, as it would allow access to information such that any fact could be looked up and checked with rapidity. It didn't work out like that, though. It's not explicitly mentioned in the story whether the Monks blocked or changed web pages to fit their big lie, there's just a couple of mentions of physical publications (a character who stashed their old comic books, another arrested for the manufacture of propaganda). It's not exactly clear, but I think the idea is that the Monks haven't made wholesale changes to the available information, they are just suppressing it to avoid it conflicting with what they're broadcasting into people's heads. Did they need to bother though? In our real world, there's no hypno-ray involved, but groups of people will still believe questionable narratives, disregarding any information that doesn't fit. It's the nature of an online echo chamber not that it has to be restricted only to believers, but rather that any non-believers are ignored, their counter-opinions already assumed to be false. Certain political leaders just lie and refuse to engage with the truth; they dare the sceptics to try and convince their followers with facts, knowing that facts don't usually win over beliefs.

I haven't got to it for the blog yet, but I recall that the Harold Saxon as Prime Minister plotline in The Sound of Drums is similar to the Monks' one in The Lie of the Land. The Master uses a hypnotic network of satellites instead of a hypnotic network of statues, but the result is similarly his being put into a position of power over humans. It would have been more interesting, and possibly more true to life, if John Simm's Master had been elected without such interference. People in the UK have had ample proof recently that it requires no techno-mesmerism to get unsuitable people elected to high office, and John Simm looks good in a suit. He'd probably have still been elected if he'd openly run on a platform of allowing an invasion from outer space and reducing the world's population by 10 percent. This is a logical flaw of conspiracy theories: terrible stuff happens out in the open, often without sanction, so why would anyone go to the bother of organising something more covert? In the words of Oscar Wilde, the true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. This hasn't stopped Doctor Who from sampling the conspiracy thriller genre often, of course. A couple of notable examples from Jon Pertwee's era are The Ambassadors of Death and Invasion of the Dinosaurs. There was clearly something in the air in the early 1970s, as there were real conspiracies (Watergate) and fictional ones in movies like The Parallax View around then. That film, and one from a decade earlier The Manchurian Candidate, influenced The Deadly Assassin in Tom Baker's era, where the Doctor investigates a conspiracy related to a political assassination on his home planet.

The real world of Doctor Who has its conspiracy theories too, often about the missing 1960s episodes. At one point around 2013, the so-called 'omnirumour' suggested that almost every episode had been rediscovered but they were being held in secret. It was many years before people stopped believing that; maybe some still do and are hoping any day now all those episodes will be returned to the BBC. A flaw of the conspiracy story is that it ends, unlike in the real world. In Invasion of the Dinosaurs, a cult of people have been brainwashed into thinking they are travelling to a new planet to colonise, a space Eden. When it's revealed to them that it's a trick, they seem far too grateful and accepting. Real world interactions with people who, for example, believe without any evidence that 5G masts or Covid vaccinations are being used to control people demonstrate that the people on that fake spaceship would have been much more stubborn and hard to persuade. There may be one or two still aboard today thinking that any day now they will arrive at paradise. It does feel that social media particularly enables people who are so inclined to believe any old nonsense, and facilitates their finding others that believe the same, or can be persuaded to do so, the exact opposite impact from what those Web optimists envisaged all those years ago. The truth can speed round the world as fast as a lie now, but the tools exist to help anyone who so desires to filter it out.

I'm constantly vigilant about this, as I know I'm not immune. I still think it's probable that the president assassinated the day before Doctor Who first started in November 1963 wasn't killed by a lone gunman. I don't think that the conspiracy necessarily went all the way to Lyndon Johnson or many other of the wild claims made over the years. It does though seem plausible that the damage done might not have been from just two shots; it also seems if not impossible then highly challenging for Lee Harvey Oswald to fire three shots in such a short space of time and have two hit target from his vantage point; it also seems quite compelling that many witness statements stated that they saw or heard shots coming from another position (the grassy knoll). I've put this out there on the internet now, so I'm no better than any other conspiracy freak. There's something about the Kennedy conspiracy that compels people; it keeps turning up in films and TV, often as a time travel narrative where people go back to check up on what really happened and end up part of the unfolding events. Perhaps it's more acceptable as it's a somewhat nostalgic conspiracy theory from long before the mess of the social media age. On TV, Doctor Who has only made brief mentions, but there is the 1990s Virgin novel Who Killed Kennedy by David Bishop, which I think is one of the best Doctor Who books from that period. Maybe in a few years time, when there's an even worse form of online social interaction, we'll look back more fondly on paranoid tweets about chemtrails, say, and someone will write a fun Doctor Who story about it. There's that optimism again, but I'd rather that than the alternative.

 

In Summary:

Some good ideas and moments, but the structure (of this story and of the trilogy of which it is part) means it doesn't quite ring true.

The Mutants

Chapter the 261st, It's... Marshal's plotting on flying Skybase.

Plot:

The Doctor and Jo are sent by the Time Lords to deliver a box, contents unknown, to someone, also unknown, on the planet Solos in the 30th Century (the box will only open for the right person). The planet's atmosphere is poisonous to humans during daylight hours, so the Overlords, as the colonising Earthmen style themselves, live on a space station called the Skybase. (They are all Earth - and Solonian - men, by the way, no women on Solos.) There seems to be a plague mutating Solonians into monstrous "Mutts", and a faction of the locals led by Ky are agitating for their freedom. Earth government has decided to pull out and grant independence, but the Marshal - who has been experimenting with a Professor Jaegar on how to make the planet's atmosphere suitable for humans - doesn't want this. He arranges the assassination of the colony Administrator during a meeting with the Solonians. Chaos ensues, and martial (and, for that matter, Marshal) law is declared. In the confusion, the Doctor passes near Ky, and the box starts to open. Before the Doctor can talk to him, though, Ky escapes to the planet's surface. The Marshal uses threats to Jo's safety to coerce the Doctor into helping Jaegar's experiments. There's lots of escapes and recaptures, and travel back and forth between the Skybase and Solos. The Doctor finds Ky and the box is opened to reveal ancient tablets. They find a scientist Sondergaard working in a hidden lab in some caves, and he helps to translate them. The mutations of the Solonians are a part of their normal lifecycle, but have been brought on prematurely by Jaegar's experiments. An investigator from Earth is en route to Solos, so the Marshal forces Jaegar to accelerate his work, but the Doctor is able to put right the damage done. Ky fully mutates into a floating, rainbow telepathic creature and kills the Marshal.

Context:

Because of a pre-existing commitment, I again had to miss a BFI screening and panel connected to the release of a Doctor Who season Blu-ray box set. This time it was a showing of The Sea Devils connected to the release of season nine (Jon Pertwee's third year in the role) in early March 2023. Two weeks later, the pre-ordered set popped through my letter-box. I did my usual randomly guided decision as to whether I would blog a story from the set (flipped a coin and it came up Heads) and which of the two stories it would be (it came up Tails this time, meaning The Mutants rather than Day of the Daleks, the only other story from season 9 that I haven't yet blogged). The Mutants doesn't have the best reputation for engaging an audience, so I didn't inflict it on anyone else. I watched it, as I watched all the episodes from the box set, an episode a night on average. There's 26 episodes in the season, and loads of extras that I wanted to view also to inform the overview (see Deeper Thoughts section below) so it took a few weeks.

First Time Round:

I saw a few clips of this story over the years between becoming a fan in the early 1980s and when I finally got to see the whole story a couple of decades later. It does seem eminently clip-able, perhaps because of the striking creature design or the moody location work in Chislehurst caves. Or maybe, if one were less charitably minded, one might think that short clips are the best way to experience The Mutants because anything longer than that is a chore. This impression, right or wrong, is probably why its release was put off until it was one of the last few Doctor Who stories to come out on VHS. It was released in the final year of the range, when other stories were already being re-released on DVD with regularity. I would have bought it on the day, 17th February 2003. Assuming I was at work, and I think I very probably was, I would have got the Doctor Who DVD that came out that day (Patrick Troughton tale The Seeds of Death) in the morning, as I walked from London Bridge station into the City of London for work. There was an MVC on the north end of the bridge that had the Doctor Who DVDs, but rarely the videos. At the end of the working day, after having commuted back down to Brighton where I lived at the time, I would have rushed down from the station to the MVC in the centre of town that did stock Who on VHS and snapped up The Mutants. I then would have gone home, probably called my friend Phil (mentioned many times before on the blog) who would have come and watched at least one of the stories with me. We would almost certainly have drunk wine as we did. This would have helped The Mutants go down better, I'm sure.

Reaction:

It's not that bad. In fact, it's pretty good mostly. I think every time I watch the story I'm pleasantly surprised, so awful is its reputation. As an example, Rick James comes in for a lot of flak for the quality of his performance, but he's perfectly okay for the most part. Then, every so often he stumbles over a line and. Delivers it as if. It. Has been punctuated. Randomly. It's unfortunate too, as Doctor Who didn't cast people of colour that often back then, that he's appearing in this colonial parable as a character called Cotton (this is picked up in the documentary on diversity from the DVD that's been ported over to the new Mutants disc, but was clearly inadvertent). Other actors are good, with the regulars on fine form, and Garrick Hagon great as Ky. The other performance that's a bit questionable is Paul Whitsun-Jones as the Mashal. I don't think this is his fault, the script just doesn't give him sufficient motivation for the enormity of his actions. In a way, George Pravda as his sidekick, the scientist Jaegar, has a better time of it. He's just obeying orders, so can play the banality of evil and be a bit more chilling because of that. The Marshal comes over as a one-dimensional panto villain; it's hard to underplay when your character goes to such lengths (he's going to commit genocide on a global scale and change a planet's entire atmosphere). The script eventually falls back on the usual Who stand-by that he's mad. Writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin do get a couple of nice lines in there related to this, "Madmen lose... I've won", but it means the actor can only go large.

The story would be improved with a more grounded and reasonable villain backstory, and it's there for the taking. The Marshal could realistically imagine he's being merciful, if he were presented as truly believing that the mutations the Solonians are experiencing would kill them anyway (at some points the script seems almost to be toying with this idea, but never develops it). The look of the monsters is perfect, costume designer James Acheson providing the first example of his stellar 1970s work on the series; the monsters are frightening, but also elicit sympathy. The design work throughout is strong. Jeremy Bear's Skybase interiors are innovative and solid-looking (the mould he made to create the Buckminster Fuller effect on the walls was reused in Doctor Who and elsewhere forever after). Most of the effects work is impressive, and there's a lot of film - director Christopher Barry shoots the caves well, and good dressing decisions on location from Bear sell this as an alien environment. The trippy interiors of the radiation cave filmed in the studio work for me too. No word of a lie, when it all comes together - scenes in the caves fighting off the mutant Solonians, chase scenes in the Skybase - this looked closer to Doctor Who doing a high-tech adventure like Star Wars (before Star Wars existed, of course) than anything from Doctor Who in the 1980s.

The only moment that really doesn't work visually is the end of episode four where various characters including the Marshal risk being sucked out of a breach in the Skybase wall into space. The blocking is wrong - the Marshal's too close to the breach so it's implausible that he could hang on; Whitsun-Jones can't really act fighting against the pressure escape from the position he's in, and doesn't really try; this looks a bit silly and reduces the jeopardy for our heroes who are much farther away from danger than him. The camera barely catches him moving away from the breach either, so when he turns out to be alive in the next scene it looks like a cheat. It's just one moment, though. The very first scene of episode one comes in for some stick too as it inadvertently looks like the beginning of an early episode of Monty Python - the elder Solonian rushing towards camera is a dead ringer for Michael Palin's "It's man" from the comedy series. This probably wouldn't have registered for the target audience at the time, though. The pacing, which is a big part of its negative reputation, was perfectly fine, even when watching at the accelerated rate of an episode per day. For the weekly episodic pace for which it was intended, the story has enough going on, presented well. If one were to watch it all in one go, the to and fro from Solos to Skybase and the running about would probably get a bit repetitive, but this is true of almost all stories of six or more episodes. The addition of the subplot of the Earth investigator for the last two episodes helps to keep things moving.

Thematically, The Mutants stands out from other Jon Pertwee stories in how seriously it treats its subtext. A lot of stories around this time use the trappings of colonisation and empire as window dressing, but here it is fully explored. This creates some issues, though; for example: because of the general structure of Doctor Who as a series, with a single titular hero, it inevitably becomes a "white saviour" story, with the Doctor - and to a lesser extent Sondergaard - the ones with agency, coming from outside Solos to rescue the natives from their fate. The script tries to make this work better, as the Solonians are just being reunited with their own history and culture, having lost sight of this because of the negative impacts of occupation. To make this plausible it requires the Earth empire to have been in charge for a number of generations (500 years is the figure given in the story). This feels like too long a stretch of time for the situation as presented in the story; the impacts of imperialism can still be felt after centuries, of course, but in more subtle ways than those shown in The Mutants, to my mind. I'm aware, though, that this opinion may be affected by my being white and aligned to the society of the oppressor rather than the oppressed. The same is true, though, of the writers, directors and producer of The Mutants. In the end, the colonised race turn out to be multi-coloured butterfly super-beings, so maybe any serious reading is undermined anyway. Generally, though, the story's heart is in the right place, and it's much more watchable than I remembered.

Connectivity:

The Mutants like Midnight features a floating enclosed space where squabbling humans are protected from a planet's harmful atmosphere. There's also a performance in each by an actor playing a professor who had previously appeared in the Troughton era story The Enemy of the World (George Pravda is Professor Jaegar in The Mutants and had played Denes in the earlier story; David Troughton is Professor Hobbes in Midnight and had appeared as a non-speaking guard in Enemy).

Deeper Thoughts:

Mutts, monsters and a Minotaur: Doctor Who - The Collection Season 9 box set overview. The two-person creative force behind the scenes during the Jon Pertwee era, producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks, inherited the earthbound format where the Doctor helped out a scientific and military organisation investigating the mysterious. They didn't like the restrictions this brought, and so every year they tweaked things a little bit more to move Doctor Who back out to travel the universe again. This is the middle year of their tenure and watching the stories in order, not that long after watching the set for season 8 (see here for more details), this process is very visible. Each of the new set of regulars established the previous year continues into season 9, the 'UNIT family' of Doctor, Brigadier (Nicholas Courtney), Jo Grant (Katy Manning), Captain Yates (Richard Franklin), Sergeant Benton (John Levene) and the Master (Roger Delgado). But, having realised they were overused in season 8, here they appear in different combinations, rarely all at the same time. This, plus having two stories off Earth (one more than in the previous year), means that UNIT have much less presence than before. As is pointed out poignantly in the new Making-of documentary for The Time Monster, partway through that finale's run is the last time all six characters would appear in the same episode.

Nice packaging

As both the UNIT stories at either end of season 9 involve time travel by some means or other, there's only one story for the year where the Doctor doesn't explore either a different time or a different world; this would remain the template for the following two seasons with Pertwee as the Doctor, and would stay more or less the same for the first two Tom Baker years (after which UNIT was written out completely). In Season 9, the one story where the Doctor doesn't escape Earth in the roughly contemporary period where he's been exiled still innovates. This is The Sea Devils, and it features the Doctor allied with military bods in blue rather than green uniforms, with significant help from the Royal Navy providing visual interest on screen. There's some nice bits of contemporary material from the filming included as special features (a radio interview with Pertwee who had served in the Navy, and cine camera footage made at the time) and most of the big new documentaries for the set are on the Devils disc, and are aligned to the story at least in part. The first is another in the Location Location Location series of docos by Chris Chapman, which sees Katy Manning meeting cast or crew at the locations used for filming The Sea Devils, as well as The Mutants and Day of the Daleks. She is also reunited with the three-wheeler bike featured in a chase scene in the Dalek story, and takes it for a ride (you can feel the documentary makers' insurance concerns burning through the screen during that sequence).

Defenders of Earth! The short used as a trailer for the set.

The other two documentaries are by Ten Acre Films, produced by Stuart Manning and Richard Latto. Both focus on career retrospectives of individuals, director Michael E Briant who's accompanied as he takes a sailing boat out onto the water, and stuntman Stuart Fell who visits a nice vintage cinema in Fordingbridge (if this is representative of each gentleman's hobbies then yours truly, who gets seasick in dry dock, is thinking he's more like Fell than Briant). Both are interesting and feature a lot of clips from other programmes (sometimes the same other programmes as both men's work coincided multiple times). The other main new features are five more episodes of Behind the Sofa, classic Who's version of Gogglebox. Here, Briant and Manning represent the people involved at the time, plus two other watching groups - Peter Davison (even more grumpy than usual) with his companion actors Sarah Sutton and Janet Fielding, and a couple of other randomly paired companion actors, Wendy Padbury and Sophie Aldred. It's as fun as ever. The restoration of the episodes is up to the expected standard (we're very spoilt, us Doctor Who fans). They can't do anything about the somewhat soft quality of a lot of the film inserts for Day of the Daleks (what happened when that film was first shot / printed, I wonder?) just as it can't make The Time Monster an enjoyable story to sit through. Apart from working miracles, though, this is the best these episodes have ever looked, and possibly will ever look.

With this set, 50% of 20th Century Who is now on Blu-ray

There's also an effort to provide every conceivable version of the stories that exists. A different restoration method was used for a number of the episodes presented in the set when they came out on DVD earlier this century. Any that only existed as broadcast masters in the 525-line video format used abroad (which is quite a lot of season 9) had that picture data put back in using a process called Reverse Standards Conversion. This is no longer favoured as an approach as it introduced different picture issues, but the DVD versions are included as extras. Additionally, there's the DVD special edition of Day of the Daleks with new effects, newly filmed sequences and redubbed Dalek voices, and recreations of edited omnibus versions of that Dalek story and of The Sea Devils that were shown as repeats in the 1970s. Day of the Daleks in 60 minutes is a bit choppy, but the 90-minute Sea Devils is a good, tight telling of the story that still retains the spirit of the episodic original. Rounding off the additional material are a couple of filmed convention panels. The panel with Ingrid Pitt interviewed in 1992 is very informative, unless you're interested in her work in Doctor Who as she can barely remember any of it - she talks a lot about Eva Peron, though. The date I published this blog post gives an indication of how long it took to enjoy the volumes of material on this set. I recommend buying it, if you can still find it, or getting the cheaper non-limited edition that'll come out before too long.

 

In Summary:

A metamorphosis is taking place: The Mutants looks better and better, the more I watch it.