Genesis of the Daleks

Chapter the 278th, where critiquing one of Who's biggest stories ever is like critiquing Hamlet: nobody wants my opinion, and probably someone's said it before me anyway. Nonetheless, I'll try... 

Plot:
The Time Lords intercept the Doctor, Sarah and Harry when they are mid-transmat travelling from the Earth to Nerva Beacon. They have dragged them off course to Skaro in the past, around the time of the Daleks' earliest beginnings, to give the Doctor a mission to avert the creatures' creation. Skaro is towards the end of a thousand-year war that has destroyed the planet and transformed the people. Both sides, Thals and Kaleds, feel they cannot now stop until they've achieved the total annihilation of the other. Sarah gets separated from the Doctor and Harry, is captured by the Thals, and press-ganged into loading a missile with dangerous explosive. Meanwhile, the Doctor and Harry are captured by the Kaled military ("Why, that's an anagram of -! How interesting."). The military are not really in command on the Kaled side, as the power is held by an elite group based in a separate bunker away from their main dome, and the Doctor and Harry soon find themselves imprisoned there. The leader of this group is a scientist called Davros. The Kaled Elite have forecast that the mutations caused by the weapons of this war will only get worse. Davros's research has therefore focussed on building a travel machine that will be used by the mutated forms that the Kaleds will eventually become; he calls this machine a Dalek. He has created many mutated lifeforms to test these machines, but others in the bunker are worried about his work: instead of just accelerating the mutation, Davros has genetically-engineered the embryonic mutants to remove emotions and make them more aggressive, essential - as he sees it - to their survival.

One of the Elite helps the Doctor and Harry to escape, and they go to the Kaled government and persuade them to halt Davros's experiments. They then travel to the Thal dome to rescue Sarah. Hearing of his government's moves against him, Davros goes to the Thals and gives them a formula that will help their rocket destroy the Kaled dome. He would rather sacrifice every Kaled outside the bunker than stop working on the Daleks. The Doctor gets everyone out of the launch area and then tries to sabotage the rocket, but is knocked out by a guard. When he awakes, the Kaled dome is destroyed and the Thals are celebrating the end of the war. He helps a Thal called Bettan escape when Davros's new Daleks arrive and start exterminating the Thals. The Doctor goes back toward the Kaled bunker, meeting Sarah and Harry en route. On re-entering the bunker, the TARDIS trio are captured by Davros, but later released by the anti-Davros contingent of the Elite, who are now in the majority. While these rebels confront Davros, the Doctor wires up the embryo room to explode, but has second thoughts wondering if he has the right to interfere. The Daleks return from the Thal dome and exterminate all the rebellious members of the Elite, but they don't stop there. They also kill those loyal to Davros, and even Davros himself. Bettan leads a resistance group of survivors who blow up the entrance to the bunker, just seconds after the TARDIS trio escape. Travelling back to the TARDIS using a Time Ring that the Time Lords provided, the Doctor muses that even though they did not stop the Daleks from being created, that they didn't really lose as some good will come from the Daleks continuing existence, but he's fooling himself really.

Context:

I couldn't get anyone in the family interested in watching this with me, and then I had a couple of false starts when - after everyone had gone to bed - I pressed play on the blu-ray disc (from the very first collection box set for season 12, released in 2018) and after a few seconds of theme tune decided I was too tired and went to bed. In the end I watched it over a couple of late afternoons and evenings during a rainy week in late September 2023. The Better Half sat in for the first couple of episodes, but this was mainly because she was feeling under the weather and couldn't find the energy to leave the living room. Wrapped in a blanket, she sat on the sofa making the occasional comment. The most interesting was an observation that you never see electricians or plumbers at work in science fiction stories, but they must be needed. She has a point. I could only think of the one scene in The End of the World that contradicted her assertion, and that was a last minute addition to pad out the running time. I then started to wonder who does the plumbing for terrestrial military bases during conflicts. I'm guessing that they didn't get Iraqi contractors in to fix the toilets in the Green Zone, and instead it would have been members of some mechanical engineering corps or other, but I don't know for sure. Maybe this is a topic for future study. The reason why will become more clear in the Reaction section below, but it is instructive to understand that these musings only occurred to me during the early episodes; by the end, I wasn't thinking about plumbing.

Milestone watch: This post completes season 12, which is the 14th out of the current 39 series of Who new and old for which I've blogged all the stories. It's the fifth of seven Tom Baker seasons completed, with only two of his many, many stories remaining to cover. Gosh!

First Time Round:

In the early days of the Doctor Who VHS range, from its beginnings in the 1980s up to around 1991 (the year that Genesis of the Daleks was released), one could not guarantee that one would be able to find a shop stocking the tapes on their day of release. Just finding the things at all was reward enough, the timing was secondary. As the 1990s progressed and the range established itself, things became more reliable and - for this fan at least, and I suspect from behaviour of others that I've witnessed over the years that it isn't just me by a long way - obtaining the story as early as possible became very important. This is one of those things that fans get obsessive about maybe even despite themselves. Thinking back about the early 1990s, I am probably projecting myself indulging in this behaviour, which I was definitely doing by later in the decade, before I truly did. Reading old diaries I recently rediscovered (see blog posts passim) made it clear that funding and personal organisation did not always allow this. In early October 1991, Genesis of the Daleks came out in a double pack with preceding story The Sontaran Experiment, and on the same day another classic Tom Baker story The Deadly Assassin was also separately made available. And I didn't purchase them for months afterwards. The reason for this, and a broader explanation of some of the obsessive behaviour of fans, I will cover below in the Deeper Thoughts section.

Reaction:

As the anecdote goes, Barry Letts - the outgoing Doctor Who producer who commissioned this story before Philip Hinchcliffe took over in the role - read the initial storyline that writer Terry Nation had submitted, and in a script meeting said to Nation "It's great; the only snag is that you've sold it to us twice already". This refers back to a brace of Dalek stories Nation had written in the previous two years. Both were straightforward adventure tales where Daleks and Doctor would land on a hostile planet full of perils overcome one by one, with an arbitrary plot eventually foiled. It was the basic formula for every Nation-penned Dalek story after his first couple in the early years; only the locales would really change. This time, Letts wanted something different. To his credit, Nation took this with good humour, and he, Letts and outgoing script editor Terrance Dicks brainstormed together and came up with the idea of showing the Daleks' origins. Watching the early episodes of Genesis of the Daleks, I wonder whether some remnants of that original storyline made it into the final product, though. There are tell-tale signs of the sort of Saturday morning cinema serial plotting that Nation loved to sample, and which was a major inspiration for early Doctor Who. Such plotting is never very joined up. A wasteland features in episode one that's dangerous with explosions, gas and gunfire; by episode three and four, people cross it with ease. Soldiers talk about how they must conserve ammo, and then seconds later are spraying bullets all over the place. Sarah has to load a rocket with dangerous material that will definitely kill her one week, but when she's finished loading the rocket it resolutely doesn't kill her the next week. In fact, she suffers no ill effects at all, and that danger is never mentioned again.

This sort of logical inconsistency wouldn't matter as much if it was just a simple adventure plot. Indeed all those scenes work in isolation, probably because they are staged and shot with gusto by director Davis Maloney and the crew. From the opening sequence of a brutal slo-mo attack on masked soldiers onwards, Genesis of the Daleks looks and feels excellent. There's a very generous eight and a half minutes of film before the first studio set, and even what's in studio is made, dressed and lit well. Production fell to the new team of Hinchcliffe and incoming script editor Robert Holmes, and they gave Maloney the latitude to bring more darkness (both literal and figurative) to proceedings, as well as - presumably - a bit more money than other stories that year. This is essential, as the remainder of the script apart from the perilous adventure stuff needed to be treated more seriously than the brighter and more colourful house style of the Letts and Dicks years would probably have allowed. It is after all a story heavily influenced by the horrors of the Second World War that examines the morality of eugenics during a major conflict. This subtext is laid on so thick you could almost lose the sub- and just call it text, with the Kaleds wearing Nazi-style uniforms and giving Nazi-style salutes (Nyder even wears an iron cross in the earlier episodes, before someone realised that was a bit too much and it was removed). For many years, people believed such material was probably suggested (maybe even written) by Robert Holmes, so different is it to what Nation usually delivered. But Nation was a very good writer, he just tended towards a certain expediency when scripting Doctor Who. When given a challenge, he needed no help, and the character of Davros and the narrative of the Daleks' creation is his best work for the series.

If Genesis has a significant flaw, though, it is that mix between the external, environmental threat of the adventure stuff, mostly in the earlier episodes, and the interpersonal and philosophical threat of the later material with Davros and the Kaled elite, mostly in the later episodes. The story is equal parts Buster Crabbe and Josef Mengele. That's an odd mix to begin with, but then those logical lapses in the earlier material make it even less likely to gel by undermining the later material. If this is a dangerous story universe where Davros's experimentation needs to be taken seriously, then you just can't have a toxic material illogically turn out not to be toxic at all. It's also a bit tiresome - at least to an old and jaded viewer like me who's seen the story a number of times before - to have scenes of exciting escapes and chases that turn out to be pointless as escapees are captured again and put back exactly where they were. I accept this, though, as part of Doctor Who; it's exciting for people watching the first time, it provides nice cliffhangers, it makes the story reach its six episodes in length - fair enough. There's no excuse for the toxic material stuff, though. It's frustrating. Either it should have been removed altogether, or Nation ought to have worked in some antidote. Instead, he seems to just assume viewers will forget what happened the week before. Genesis of the Daleks gets away it, though, as it's just so well made, and the later material so good, that these inconsistencies are forgiven. While intellectually, I can see I might enjoy a four-part version of this story that just concentrates on the Davros material, I know in my gut that it wouldn't be nearly as popular as the poll-topping behemoth that the story became.

What makes Genesis of the Daleks so good that its flaws are forgiven, apart from the way it's shot and designed? The most obvious thing is the conception and character of Davros, and Michael Wisher's performance bringing life to the Dalek creator. Wisher's work has long been celebrated, and I'm not going to contradict what's obvious: he is superb. The soft, sly delivery when he's being a political plotter, the brittle terse exchanges when he's dealing with people he knows to be his intellectual inferiors, the ranting where he sounds more and more like one of his creations - all these choices are so good they look obvious in retrospect and set a template from which nobody who'd play the character later could possibly deviate; it is impeccable and indelible. The mask and make-up are first rate, and the ideas that underpin all this are perfect. The Dalek travel machines are based on a similar life-support and wheelchair he's designed for himself. He sees the Daleks as an extension of himself ("We - I - will go on") which makes the irony of the ending where they turn on him, as he's programmed them to hate anything unlike themselves, even more powerful. This wouldn't work if he was the hackneyed mad scientist character - the story and the ending works better because his point of view, although extreme, is rational: in order to survive, he feels the Daleks must be the apex predator of the universe, and cannot afford to have any qualms about that. What's also refreshing is that - probably uniquely in classic Doctor Who - Davros as the villain wastes no time in disbelieving the Doctor is who he says he is, a time traveller from another world, and instead turns it immediately to his advantage.

The interesting POVs provided for the characters facilitate another big strength of the story, some big scenes. Aside from the ending (which continues after Davros is killed with a magnificent BCU of a Dalek - the new power on Skaro - facing right into the camera, ranting its credo of universal domination), there are two that are rightly famous. Whenever they occur, it's similar to when a production of Hamlet reaches 'To be or not to be'. Firstly, the Doctor and Davros in conversation, with the Time Lord trying to persuade the Kaled that his creations are like a virus that will eventually wipe out all other lifeforms. Wisher has Davros picturing the scene vividly, and even chillingly acting out the holding of a capsule containing the virus "To know that the tiny pressure on my thumb, enough to break the glass, would end everything: yes, I would do it!" and snapping his fingers closed, already bringing about galactic devastation in his warped imaginings. The other scene is the Doctor poised with two wires to touch together, asking if he has the right to change the future. Just those would be enough to push this story to the top reaches of fan polls, but there are so many great lines and moments (my favourite is Nyder's line about the Doctor and Harry "We'll find out what's different about them... by autopsy"). The performances aside from Wisher are all top drawer: Peter Miles, Tom Georgeson, Dennis Chinnery, Stephen Yardley, Guy Siner...

The regular actors are solid too, though at this early stage Nation hadn't quite got a handle on their characters. Baker's Doctor as written is a bit more lightly rather than broodingly eccentric, and Harry is written as solid and intelligent, without the humorous ineffectuality he had elsewhere. These are minor things, though. A clumsier bit of scripting is that scenes towards the end have to be broadcast on convenient screens so that characters who aren't present can still be aware of what happened. This might have been okay once, but unfortunately Nation has to pull the same trick twice as he's written himself into a corner. The introduction of the Thal rebel leader character Bettan feels a bit tacked on; she should have been featured earlier in a slightly bigger role given how she becomes the leader of another significant alien race in Doctor Who history (it's interesting and important - for a fan at least - to see the origins of the other tribe that lived on Skaro too). The story is remarkable for slotting neatly into established continuity without contradicting what came before. The origins as retold in the very first Dalek story are consistent with what we see in Genesis, bar a misremembered name or detail; only that those very first Daleks couldn't move outside the metal floors of their city does not fit, and that hasn't fit with any Dalek story made since - Nation must have cursed himself for ever including that limitation in 1963. Anyway, minor continuity issues, clumsy moments of plotting, or sub-optimally integrated character introductions cannot seem to dent enjoyment of this story, nor its reputation,

Connectivity:

Both Genesis of the Daleks and The Witchfinders feature at least one character appearing near the beginning in a mask, and each story sees the baddies attempt unsuccessfully to execute the Doctor; that's about it.

Deeper Thoughts:

Blue about Blu - the emotional perils of collecting. Genesis of the Daleks is one of those stories that has been analysed rigorously over the years, both in terms of the content (was this the opening salvo of the Time War?!) and the making of. As such, I am going to concentrate instead on a topic I come back to again and again, probably as a form of self-therapy so apologies in advance: the mentality of the collector and the fan. In some ways, I think it is an addiction, and that I am an addict. Let me tell you the story of the Collection, the range of classic series box-sets, each containing one season of Doctor Who, on Blu-ray. This range started with Genesis of the Daleks and the other stories from season 12 coming out in an elegant limited edition box in the summer of 2018. This was obviously not the first ever range making Doctor Who available to buy. From 1986 onwards, I collected all the available Doctor Who stories on VHS tape, until the range was complete in 2003. By that time, it was also possible to collect them all again on shiny disc, most of them on DVD, but also a few more as audio CDs of the soundtracks, which existed even when the moving pictures were lost). Every classic story was released eventually, and many of them had included animated episodes to plug gaps, married to those surviving soundtracks. The DVD range petered out around early 2014, with only one single surviving episode that existed in the archives not yet released. In late 2015, when I'd started this blog, that final episode was included on the DVD release for The Underwater Menace. I wrote about it here, thinking it would likely be the last classic series physical media release ever (streaming and non-physical pay-to-own looked to be the models that would take over completely then).

There was a definite sense of relief. I'd already taken a big step in combatting my addiction by declining to collect a new and expensive magazine partwork that had started to come out a month before The Underwater Menace (see the Deeper Thoughts of another early post for more details). Would I finally be able to kick the habit altogether? In short, no. It took a year, but a new source for collectibles on shiny disc was found - wholly animated stories. The first full story to be animated was The Power of the Daleks and jolly good this new version was too. I collected that one, as it was something brand new and interesting; I also knew that any other stories animated in the future I would be compelled to collect, but there didn't seem much harm in that. Realistically, they weren't going to be able to produce more than one or two animations per year. In 2018, though, came the Collection. As well as one or two animations a year, there would be up to three box sets of full seasons on Blu-ray to buy. It would mean collecting all the classic series episodes yet again from scratch, on yet another medium. Did I have the stomach for it? Most of Who made before the 21st century was not going to look that much better on Blu-ray as it wasn't captured in high definition. It would give another opportunity for restoration, though, and techniques improved year on year. The episodes would look better even though it wouldn't be the sort of leap in quality as that between VHS and DVD. There would also be new extras. Was that enough to tempt me? I ummed and ahhed, and eventually the presence on that season 12 set of a feature with Tom Baker that had only previously been available on VHS swayed me (see the Deeper Thoughts section of this blog post for more details).

I might have left it that, but the next set (season 19) was a run of stories that was particularly close to my heart, so I plumped again. By then, the BFI events had started up that tied-in with each box set's release, screening episodes from the sets (often in special editions with updated effects) and featuring panels of people starring in or working behind the scenes on the sets. The events were always a fun way of meeting up with fan friends, so we would usually go. If I was attending, it seemed wrong somehow not to also get the set being advertised. This could just be an example of the addict making any excuse to indulge in his addiction; but, alas, I think it's worse than that. I actually do feel at some level that it would be cheating. It's a completely irrational thought and yet it's one I can't quite shake off; clearly it's part of my individual fan pathology, and it might just be me. Every fan's got something, though. As I touched on in the First Time Round section above, many of us get bent out of shape if we don't get our new Who purchases on the day of release. A glance down the social media feeds of fans on a release day will show you, barely concealed, a collective angst along the lines of  'If I don't get this shiny new thing now, and everyone else does and is watching it and commenting on it when I can't, I will die'. This scenario did indeed happen to many, myself included, for the box set release in the third week of September 2023.

After I had collected a few of the box sets, a tipping point was reached, and I was committed (at least in my own mind) to seeing things through. The sunk cost of purchasing every new set as they've come out since 2018 has made it increasingly more difficult to just stop. The sets are also limited editions, and at first there was no hint that they would ever come out as standard versions once the initial run was completed; this put even more pressure on me to get each new set ordered as early as possible. The sets are now being rereleased in less deluxe packaging, but I've collected 14 of the limited versions now; if you think that I'd be able to accept having a set in amongst them on the shelf that didn't match, then you possibly will never understand Doctor Who fandom (or at least my particular version of it). I hope some of this explains why on 18th September 2023, after having pre-ordered the thing before the ink was even wet on the press release announcing it was coming out, it was a far from fun experience when my Season 20 set did not arrive. Other fans on social media were reporting that they were going through the same thing, or worse that their orders were being cancelled altogether. Amazon were not helpful, and after talking to their Customer Services I became convinced that my set wasn't going to arrive at all. In a panic, with visions of a line of irregular spines looking ugly on a shelf, I ordered the set from another retailer, and now I have two. One has been left in the sealed wrapping so I can return it, but I've opened the other and started watching some of the content. A few extras feature the cast (Peter Davison, Janet Fielding and Sarah Sutton) just sort of mucking around, being friends joshing with each other, brought together by Doctor Who, and sharing some of that love and joy with fans. This is an indication of the more positive foibles of fandom.

Why did I wait so long in 1991 to buy Genesis of the Daleks? In October, I started at university in Durham, many many miles away from my home on the south coast. I travelled up with one suitcase of stuff (accompanied by friend and fellow Doctor Who fan Zahir). I can't remember the exact date term started, but even if it was after the videos came out, it would have not been worth buying them and carting them northward up the country, as I didn't know I'd have had anything to play them on (one of the first friends I made in college Mike was soon discovered to have his own TV and video and a single room, so viewings became possible later, as recounted many times previously on the blog). I also had new expenses I didn't have when living at home, and there were no more videos scheduled for release that year (the next ones came out in mid-January 1992). As best I can recall therefore, I would have bought Genesis when back home for the Christmas holiday, and would have left The Deadly Assassin until later (as another friend made in that first term David had lent me a home-taped copy of that later story). December 1991 was the first time I'd seen Genesis of the Daleks, as I'd somehow missed the summer repeat of it in 1982. I remember my friend Alex telling me all about it when we were back at school in September. It's no coincidence that memories of watching these stories is tied up in memories of old friends like Alex, Zahir, Mike and David. I hope that makes up somewhat for the ridiculous obsessiveness. A collection might seem like just a bunch of things, I know, but they're things that spark happy reminiscences.

In Summary:

Equal parts Buster Crabbe and Josef Mengele.

The Witchfinders

Chapter the 277th, here's mud in your eye!

Plot:
The Doctor, Yaz, Ryan and Graham arrive near Pendle in Lancashire in 1612, and witness the ducking of a supposed witch, grandmother Twiston. The Doctor tries to save the woman in the water, but is just too late, leaving granddaughter Willa distraught. Twiston was the 36th suspected witch killed in the village in recent times, all of these overseen by lady of the manor Becka Savage. King James I has come to visit at the same time as the TARDIS travellers because of this remarkable industry. Using the psychic paper to pretend that she and the fam are Witchfinders, the Doctor investigates. The mud of the village seems to be sentient, and floods into corpses, including Twiston senior, and reanimates them. The Doctor realises that this has something to do with Becka, and her reign of terror has all been to protect herself as she's been infected by the mud. The mud contains the lifeforce of the Morax, a violent, criminal group of aliens that were locked in a prison beneath Pendle Hill and released recently when Becka cut down an old tree that acted as the key to their prison. Becka turns on the Doctor, and pressures Willa to denounce her as a witch. The Doctor is ducked but saves herself with escapology taught to her by Houdini. The mud floods into Becka, taking her over. She and the other Morax incapacitate the Doctor and friends, and take the King, planning to make him the vessel for their own leader. For some reason, it takes them ages to get around to doing this, and our heroes wake up and use parts of the tree (to which the Morax are allergic) to defeat the baddies and save the King.

Context:

I started this randomly-ordered blogging endeavour with a lot of enthusiasm, and even more naivety. There was a lot of material to cover. That was in 2015, when there were 34 seasons of Doctor Who (26 old series, 8 new) and a smattering of specials to work my way through in random order. There have been another five seasons and quite a few more specials broadcast since. Even at my reasonably slow pace of covering each story, though, I am catching up, and the point where I run out of stories and meet up with the serially broadcast current Who will be within the next year or two. I feel that I'm reaching a tipping point and it is likely to be mainly blogging milestones from now on. The Witchfinders marks the completion of another season, the thirteenth so far (classic seasons 3, 7, 8, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 23 and 25, and new series 6, 11 and 13 are all now done). Jodie Whittaker is the first modern Doctor for whom I've completed two seasons, so she could well be a contender for the first Doctor's era to be completed (excepting Paul McGann, who - with only one story unless you count his recent cameo in The Power of the Doctor - was completed very early on). The story was watched one Sunday afternoon accompanied by all three of the children (boys of 17 and 14, girl of 11). Eldest has recently become enamoured of the works of Quentin Tarantino, so his ears pricked up at Graham's quoting of the very unbiblical Pulp Fiction version of Ezekiel 25:17. The youngest on seeing King James's first appearance in a plague doctor mask was reminded of the figure that appeared fleetingly in the background of King Charles's coronation earlier in 2023.

First Time Round:

The family (except the youngest child, aged 6 at the time, who was avoiding watching after being scared by Tim Shaw's face the month before in the opening story of the season) all watched the story go out live on BBC1 on Sunday 25th November 2018. This was just a couple of days after the 55th anniversary of Doctor Who, which passed without any fanfare. In this phase of its long history, Doctor Who was accentuating the new, and didn't go in for any remembrance-related frippery. Nonetheless, there was a bit of harking back, as this was one of the most traditional stories of 2018 (a little bit of history, a celebrity from the past, lumbering monsters, and a lack of any universes in the shape of frogs).

Reaction:

There's something just a little lacking in this story, and I struggled to put my finger on it. As I watched, I could see that at an intellectual level it contains many good elements. I loved the novelisation when I read it (which I thought was relatively recently, but turns out it was back in 2021 - see the Deeper Thoughts of the blog post for The Awakening for more details) so I don't think there's anything amiss with the characters or the plot. The concept and visualisation of the monsters is interesting: first, sentient mud attacking in tendrils, then filled-up corpses that stagger around as mud zombies. The rationalisation of this as being the consciousness of alien war criminals who've been trapped for years under the earth is neat, and the little details selling that are also nice, like the ancient tree, cut down and turned into a ducking stool, being an old piece of alien tech that acted as the key to their prison. Joy Wilkinson seems like a mensch (I don't know why she hasn't come back to write for the TV show since) and what she created was nicely traditional, allowing for a lot of mystery up front and a chance for the Doctor and her companions to investigate and piece together the backstory. The rarity of both the writing and directing being done by women (which has happened only a few times in Who's long lifetime) allows for fresher perspectives. The historical setting adds colour, and the performances are excellent too, from lesser known actors such as Tilly Steele as Willa, through the majestic Siobhan Finneran as Becka, and all the way up the scale to his largeness Alan Cumming as the King.

It should be impossible for a story with Alan Cumming playing a slyly saucy but also mercurial King James facing off against mud zombies to be anything less than exciting. Somehow, though, the final product lacks a bit of oomph. My theory as to why this might be requires a little background material to be understood: it's all about Paul and the pear. This comes from an episode of Weekly Wipe, a comedy news and reviews programme written and anchored by Charlie Brooker, now most famous for Black Mirror. In a 2014 edition, the character Philomena Cunk, played by the incomparable Diane Morgan, is reviewing the Peter Capaldi-starring TV series The Musketeers, and comments about swordfights. Though comic, I think that this is an insightful, precise and succinct summary of the issues of dramatic action that is staged without sufficient reason for audience emotion or engagement. Swordfights are just the most obvious manifestation. Some quotes from Cunk: "Swordfights are strange because, although they look exciting, they never actually are"; "When you think about what a swordfight is, you should be on the edge of your seat because it's, like, all sharp things". Philomena, a most Shakespearean fool, goes on to expound: "Once, my mate Paul was slicing a pear at a festival with his penknife, and it was just unbearably tense to watch, because he was really drunk and sort-of cutting it in the hand he was holding it in, and I could hardly stand to watch that ... but with swordfights, even though swords are bigger than penknives, and they really wave 'em around, it's like a dance routine or a metal squabble. So there's never the same sense of danger as there was with Paul and the pear."

I think anyone who wants to write action sequences should watch it a few times over (a quick google will find it, and it's much funnier - though no less informative - with Morgan performing it than it is written down). We all have seen action sequences on films and TV that are less engaging than would be the watching of a friend, while drunk, trying to cut up fruit without injuring themselves. From swordfights in old movies through to smash-up fights between CGI characters at the end of modern superhero movies, and in between - dare I say it - the sort of choreographed stunt action that the Havoc crew did for Doctor Who in the 1970s. If it's just so much movement, without any emotional impact, it won't mean anything. Ultimately, if we don't care, then we won't feel anything. The mud zombies in The Witchfinders lumber and loom, but they don't really do much that's meaningful. Perhaps this is because the true danger in the story is not the aliens but the humans. In the period depicted in real life, no alien intervention was required to make people turn on their neighbours. The story of the social-climbing Becka denouncing those who were once her friends and family resonates with this, but some other material is less connected to the theme. The best and most emotional moments in the story are in close alignment; for example, Willa betraying the Doctor out of fear and peer pressure, the Doctor seeming to be more and more powerless as she's assumed to be a witch and characters turn against her, and King James - the camera focussing on his eyes in extreme close-up - torn between mercy and the strictures of his religion when deciding whether a ducking has gone on long enough.

The Witchfinders is perhaps the only story of Jodie Whittaker's tenure that concentrates on the differences in how she is treated on Earth now she is a woman, and this was clearly a main reason for the story to exist. King James is in the story as the personification of patriarchy, rather than a heroic figure - no wonder it's hard to care at the end when he's being threatened by the monsters. That sequence also takes far too long - too much standing about when the story needs a speedier resolution. In general, I think the first couple of years' stories for Jodie Whittaker didn't make much use of the extra time a 50-minute slot provided, and instead it was mostly the same amount of content spread out over a slightly longer running time. A pacier version of The Witchfinders with five minutes or so snipped out would hit the spot much better, I feel. Another factor that adds to the spreading out rather than honing of action is the presence of so many regular characters. Graham and Ryan had their fans, and I like them in other stories; but, I can't help thinking a version of this story that focussed on the female characters, with the two male regulars having a reduced involvement, might have been more interesting, and more in keeping with the story's thrust. 

Connectivity:

The third story in a row to feature a real historical person, and the second to feature an English monarch. The Witchfinders is set only 13 years after The Shakespeare Code, and Shakespeare was still alive during the events near Pendle. Like that earlier story, this one mentions Elizabeth the First (the Doctor was aiming for her coronation but overshot), and both stories feature witches without actually featuring any witches.

Deeper Thoughts:

Jodie Erasure and the Big Discourse. Being a Doctor Who fan on social media - well, frankly, being anybody on social media these days - is becoming more and more of a slog. Aside from the activity on blogger, which you know about, I mainly use twitter (and yes, I'm calling it twitter as I always shall for evermore), but increasingly only in read mode. Avoiding the many adverts that have got more intrusive and are for dodgier and dodgier products the longer Space Karen owns the platform, I scroll through my self-curated timeline. It is mainly politics, Doctor Who and cat videos. Only the last of those isn't guaranteed to descend into septic online conflicts after only a few replies, and - quite frankly - I wouldn't put it past people not to drag the cat video commentary that way too. Even when it's friendly, I find the Doctor Who discourse mostly hard going. It might just be my age; most of the fans regularly posting are much younger than me. I've being thinking about and arguing about the minutiae of this one BBC programme for more than 40 years now; perhaps I'm reaching a limit. Obviously (I wouldn't have stuck with this endeavour otherwise) I prefer longer form criticism. The sort of Who hot takes anyone can cram into 280 characters are usually going to be one of three categories: bits of trivia that I already know discovered by the poster anew, bits of trivia so tiny or obscure that they possibly shouldn't be of interest to anyone, and moaning. Moaning about this showrunner or that showrunner, that overrated actor or this one.

Have I finally had enough of hearing about Doctor Who? Well, no, obviously - at the time of writing I'm partway through reading a non-fiction book about Doctor Who, and am looking forward to the imminent delivery of a Blu-ray box set that will be crammed with many documentaries about different aspects of Doctor Who. It's just when Who meets social media that I'm struggling. Maybe I'm not the only one. In the Doctor Who magazine that came out on the 14th September 2023, current Who showrunner Russell T Davies used his regular column to unleash a remarkable stream of consciousness at the reader. I haven't received my copy yet, but I know the contents thanks to a fourth category of irritating social media activity: cutting and pasting huge sections of print media onto the internet the minute one receives a publication. This time I'm glad someone did that, as the reactions Davies's words had elicited were already all over my timeline, and I couldn't understand exactly what he'd done to produce such a response. The column attempts to put one into the mind of Russell as he watches as a fan the first of the forthcoming 60th anniversary Who specials The Star Beast. There follows internal thought after internal thought touching on many of the obsessions of online fandom of recent years: why hasn't there ever been a release of the music from season 10 of the new series? When is the Doctor Who Experience coming back? How can Donna feature in the stories when if she remembers the Doctor she'll die? And on and on. He even throws in references to releasing "the Snyder cut" and "covfefe" to show his knowledge goes a pretty long way back, and isn't just restricted to Doctor Who.

Either Davies has someone who comprehensively informs him of what people are talking about online, or - more likely - he's been lurking there himself. He's nothing if not accurate, There's a section about the featuring of Jodie Whittaker's TARDIS exterior in the story, which means that "she has NOT been erased (and yet by not erasing her, are we erasing the argument that she's been erased and therefore this is an act of erasure, IS IT?)". There are lots of parentheses and block capitals used. Fans realising that he's paid attention to what they have said, and that he's then played it back to them in a slightly mocking fashion, have become a bit upset. I don't personally think it was intended to hurt. Any satire needs to start with an amount of empathy, before the comic exaggeration takes place. Davies is including himself in this heightened version of fandom. I think it's supposed to be an affectionate depiction of all our tortured imaginings, including Davies's own. The trouble for me was that it only highlighted how uninteresting most online preoccupations are. What it also highlighted, though, was how much more interesting this copy was than anything published in Doctor Who Magazine for a good while. It was provocative, and in recent years the magazine has sought to play things very safe for fear of offending anyone. The show had maybe been a bit like that too during the same period. Nobody sane wants to erase Jodie, but some of the perfectly good stories like The Witchfinders could have benefitted from being a bit less safe: more killings by the mud Zombies, more Saturday night and less Sunday evening. The magazine issue featuring this column from Davies is the first under a new editor, and The Star Beast is going to be the first Doctor Who story under new management too. It will be interesting to see if and how things develop. I just might not tweet much about it, that's all.

In Summary:

The Witch? Doctor consumer review: lots of good stuff in there, but it's not quite magic.

The Shakespeare Code

Chapter the 276th, which features the Greatest Hits of Shaky.

Plot:
The Doctor and Martha materialise in Southwark, London in 1599, near the Globe theatre. They go to see a performance and meet Shakespeare. The Doctor is intrigued that a famous lost play of the Bard's Love's Labour's Won is being performed the following day. Martha and the Doctor stay the night and some strange things happen: unexplained deaths, and Will finishing the play without remembering exactly what he wrote in the final speech. Martha sees a witch on a broomstick escaping from Will's London digs. The Doctor investigates and finds suspicious things about the construction of the Globe theatre; the architect Peter Streete went mad after it was built, babbling about witches. The TARDIS team, accompanied by Shakespeare, visit Streete in Bedlam. The Doctor pieces together that the witches are actually Carrionites, creatures whose science is based on words rather than numbers. They plan to harness Will's imaginative power when the words of Love's Labour's Won are spoken, amplified by the design of the Globe. When the final speech they have bewitched him into adding is read out, it will open a portal and all the rest of their kind will fly through to the Earth, and destroy all humans. A Carrionite arrives and kills Streete. Our heroes escape, with Shakespeare going to try to stop the play, and the Doctor and Martha to confront the Carrionites. All are unsuccessful, the plays final words are spoken, and the portal begins to open. The Doctor and Martha arrive at the Globe and tell Shakespeare to improvise his own words to undo the damage. He does, and the portal closes, pulling in every copy of the play so it is never seen or performed again.

Context:

Late August 2023, I decided to watch this one on my own as there was never a free moment to watch it with any of the family. I dialled it up on iplayer on my laptop and watched it one evening. I decided to view a streamed version rather than get the DVD box set down from the shelf as I wanted to double-check that The Shakespeare Code and all of new Who 2005 to 2022 was still available there (just because I was going to look a little at streaming and availability in the Deeper Thoughts section, see below).

First Time Round:

I watched this story as it was broadcast live on BBC1 in the UK on the Saturday of the Easter weekend in 2007. For some reason, the third run of the new series had started the week before Easter rather than on the holiday weekend itself, which was the usual form in those days. This meant we were lucky enough to be visited by friends two weeks running: Alex and Rachel, mentioned a few times before on this blog, came down to our old house in Hove after having visited us the previous week for the start of the season. That house was home for the family of three that we were at the time: me, the Better Half and our eldest who was not quite a year old. As I remember it, everyone around that day who was aged more than one year watched and enjoyed the story, while the little one enjoyed a kip.

Reaction:

As is probably inevitable, this episode is a showcase for the (condensed) greatest hits of Shakespeare. The opening shot in the pre-credit scene contains an allusion to Romeo and Juliet; there's regular quotes from his plays included in dialogue as a running gag (not as ostentatious as the similar inclusion of characters inadvertently mentioning Agatha Christie book titles in the same writer's story for the next season, The Unicorn and the Wasp); there's a reference to Hamlet and the similarity of that name to the Bard's dead son Hamnet; and, Will having an eye for Martha as his muse is a reference to the dark lady of the sonnets. The obvious big reference, though - as obvious as a story with Charles Dickens and he's surrounded by ghosts at Christmas - is the three witches from Macbeth, here played by three Carrionites. The story looks to be shaped like these sci-fi shenanigans will end up giving Will the inspiration for his Macbeth featuring three witches. Either by accident or design, though, Will never has a scene where he witnesses all three of them together doing witchcraft things around a cauldron - only the audience sees those scenes. Will sees one witch in the Bedlam cell, and the three Carrionites are together at the Globe during the climactic sequences. At that point, though, Will is on stage and they're up in the gods, and there's a distracting great portal to another dimension whipping up a storm between them. Did he ever clock them as a trio at all? Maybe this was a deliberate choice, to indicate that Shakespeare was creative enough to think of his own ideas without prompting. I can't help but think, though, that it was instead a loose bit of the story structure, that might have been fixed if it had been spotted before the final draft.

The other big historical Shakespeare inclusion is the famous 'lost play' Love's Labour's Won, and an explanation of why no copy of it has ever been found. This is a satisfying and fun addition (even though - spoilsport alert - it is most likely that Love's Labour's Won, as recorded in a couple of historical sources, is just an alternate name for another surviving play like The Taming of the Shrew or Much Ado About Nothing). Again, though, the script for the story reveals a lot more about this mystery than one might expect to the audience, with the characters playing catch-up. By approximately 10 minutes in, the viewers watching know that the Carrionites are using Shakespeare and his play to do some evil act. With five minutes to the end, the play is performed and the evil begins. In the 30 minute section in between, the story is treading water really, with not a huge amount going on except Shakespeare, the Doctor and Martha working out what we already know, plus uncovering the minor mechanics of how the plan works (the globe having 14 sides being significant, and so on) about which we don't really care. What keeps the action moving in that time is not really a set of well-ordered story beats, but rather a collection of different colourful or characterful moments that don't necessarily have much connection to the plot. There's moments of history / biography (the Bedlam visit, Peter Streete, Will talking about his son's death), the odd good idea (the Carrionites' science being based on words rather than numbers) or good gag (the physical business with Martha hitting the Doctor to restart his heart after he's attacked by witchcraft).

The other major engine the story has to propel it are the performances. Aside from the regulars, there are really only two significant roles, with everyone else appearing essentially in a cameo; these are Dean Lennox Kelly as Shakespeare and Christina Cole as the main Carrionite Lilith. Both give modern, sparky takes on the traditional idea of their characters. There are nice little touches like Shakespeare's being intrigued by the Doctor and Martha, and working out exactly who they are and where they come from; Cole too gets a nice confrontation scene with the Doctor and Martha. It's early on in the new dynamic between the David Tennant Doctor and new companion Martha as played by Freema Agyeman, so it's only right that there's a lot of focus on the two of them together. The Doctor being insensitive to Martha's feelings for him and his bigging up of Rose sticks out when watching now; it's a bit out of character for the Doctor to be quite so oblivious, and a little cruel of the writing to stick the knife quite so deep into Martha's emotions. It made more sense at the time to put something in there for fans of Billie Piper as Rose to show she'd not been forgotten: she'd only recently left the series, at a time when she was arguably more of the star of the show than Tennant. Perhaps that could have been done in a way that was kinder to the characters, though.

Other moments I liked: everyone in the Globe clapping once the sci-fi weirdness is over, thinking it was just very clever stagecraft; a Shakespearean style line from a 1960s Who story ("the eye should have contentment where it rests") being smuggled into the text of Love's Labour's Won as an in-joke; Elizabeth the First's reaction of seeing the Doctor, the time traveller somehow having upset her in the future of his personal timeline (a loose end that will be woven into Doctor Who's great tapestry in a few years' time); and finally, the rollickingly good trailer for Gridlock just before the credits, demonstrating that even the fun more throwaway stories at the start of a run can be stone-cold classics, and that this run of stories got better and better as it went along.

Connectivity:

Two stories on the trot that feature a real historical person, and the Doctor and other TARDIS travellers stopping over at least one night during the course of their adventure.

Deeper Thoughts:

The Very Missing Adventures. Doctor Who, unlike other similar TV science fictions shows like Star Trek, Blake's 7 and many others, is not complete - there are bits missing, as the show's archive was for a long time not seen as having value any longer, so a lot of it was junked. The full background to why this happened is too complex to go into here, and has anyway been definitively covered in Richard Molesworth's book Wiped (which I urge you to read if you have not already). We fans are lucky as various people have worked hard to find, restore or recreate those missing episodes. Nonetheless, we are used to scarcity and incompleteness, it's part of being a Doctor Who fan. It's probably paradoxically the reason why a lot of us fans are so obsessed with completion. We want everything to be available to us, every video, every audio, every book, CD, toy sonic screwdriver, you name it. Even if such an aim isn't fully possible, we live in hope like every collector. At least we can console ourselves that what exists is out there and available, and actions like the junking of old episodes could never happen again. Or could they? Though all of TV Who has been made available on different physical media over the years, and almost all of it is available on streaming services (Britbox / ITVX for classic series, BBC iplayer for new), it can't be guaranteed that this will remain the same forever, and there's much less guarantee when it comes to extended universe and tie-in material. Titles go out of print, or get deleted, and - though it's not happened yet with Doctor Who - sometimes episodes are removed from streaming services.

I'm sure there are people who are very angry about some comments made on gender issues in the past by the writer of The Shakespeare Code, and they may feel that his Who stories shouldn't be available for people to see on current streaming platforms. Anyone's free to hold this view, though it's not one with which I agree; it's not up to me, though. Companies and corporations can be sensitive about giving offence, and this can lead to decisions to exclude material. What if there was a call to remove The Talons of Weng-Chiang from Britbox because of its making-up of a white actor to look like someone from another ethnic group? Lots of different episodes and shows featuring the use of blackface make-up were pulled from streaming services when Black Lives Matter protests following the killing of George Floyd were in the news in 2020. Maybe this was the right decision for the companies and corporations involved, and maybe it was even something BLM protestors wanted (though I somehow doubt it was where they'd have chosen to start). In one case in particular, though, it looked like a knee-jerk reaction that hadn't taken into consideration the actual material. The comedy series Community's second season episode Advanced Dungeons and Dragons contained a comedic use of non-realistic blackface (it's brief, and it's called out multiple times in the narrative by characters including being referred to as a "hate crime") amidst a wider anti-bullying story (incidentally one of the very best episodes of Community IMHO). That episode is gone from Netflix with the numbering even altered as if it never existed. I don't think that was the right decision - maybe they should have just added a warning up front - but, again, it's not up to me.

This isn't another case of a middle-aged white guy ranting about cancel culture, I assure you. I have the Community episode (as well as The Shakespeare Code and The Talons of Weng-Chiang) on physical media. But what about those who don't? And what about other things that don't get physical media releases at all? It's a "tree falling in the forest with nobody around to hear" type question: if something exists but there's no way to view it, is that really any different from it being junked? I can think of three significant examples of intriguing Doctor Who products that have never been released (and that's just off the top of my head, there are probably more). The first I was reminded of by reading Doctor Who Magazine 594: a pop record of Doctor Who related music by bands such as Saint Etienne and 808 State. It was prepared around Who's 40th anniversary, and a three-track sampler CD was given out to attendees of the Panopticon convention in 2003, of which I happened to be one. I still have the sampler, but the album never saw the light of day. A reorganisation in the BBC stopped the project, though a full album was recorded and exists in an archive somewhere. The second was from 10 years later, a new audiobook version of An Unearthly Child, the first ever Doctor Who story, written by Nigel Robinson and narrated by William Russell. It was delayed by the distributor AudioGo going into administration, and then caught up in rights issues, and has never been heard (except by British Airways travellers when it was briefly and mistakenly included in their in-flight entertainment catalogue in 2013).

The final one of the three is Big Finish's 2021 Torchwood audio Absent Friends, which reunited John Barrowman's Captain Jack with the Tenth Doctor David Tennant. When news reemerged of some historical bad behaviour by Barrowman - see the Deeper Thoughts section of this blog post for more details - the release was shelved indefinitely. The Torchwood range has continued without Barrowman, and it seems unlikely the story will ever now be released, even though it contains a performance by one of the most popular Doctor actors in the show's history. These are rare examples, and it's not evidence of any wider pattern in the worlds of Doctor Who product, but there are worrying signs in the wider industry. Projects canned after work has started but not been completed (like Mike Schur's Field of Dreams series for Peacock where they'd actually built the famous baseball field, even though the funding didn't come), stories that are finished and then written off for financial reasons with footage destroyed (Warner Brothers' Batgirl movie), or finished and put on streaming services but without any physical release, so availability only remains at the whim of that streamer. I suspect if you're reading this that you may be the same as me and have a long backlog of things you want to catch up on. The Sex Pistols series 'Pistol' by Craig Pearce and directed by Danny Boyle was on mine. Unfortunately, it wasn't close enough to the top. Pistol is gone from Disney+ after only a year, and is likely never to come back. It feels to me that this is a repetition of that historical mistake of underestimating the value of archive, the exact opposite of what I hoped streaming would provide. If there's a moral here, it's hold on to your physical media where you can, and watch a lot more telly. And to people who work or have worked for BBC Audio and Big Finish, a one word entreaty: bootlegs!

In Summary:

Such stuff as lightweight, throwaway Doctor Who stories near the start of the season are made on.