Terror of the Zygons

Chapter The 201st, which features a Cheviot, a stag and some black, black oil. And shape-changing orange embryo people. And the Loch Ness monster.

Plot:

Called back from his travels by the Brigadier using a space-time (plot) device, the Doctor along with Sarah and Harry arrives in Scotland. Something is destroying oil rigs in the area, and UNIT are investigating. A cast taken of damage to a recovered fragment of a rig seems to show it was inflicted by a giant sea monster. Harry is down by the coast looking for any survivors from the latest rig disaster, and finds someone washed ashore, but he is shot by a kilted sniper before he can tell Harry anything. Harry is grazed and knocked unconscious by a second shot, but is found and taken to the sick bay in the oil company's shore base. Sarah's at his bedside when he starts to come round; she phones the Doctor, but is attacked by a Zygon (who was disguised as a nurse - Zygons can transform into a copy of any human that they capture). Harry's abducted and taken aboard the Zygon space-ship, and learns that their plan involves a huge creature from their planet, the Skarasen, that lives in Loch Ness and has over the years been mistaken for the monster.

Disguised as Harry, one of the Zygons attempts to recover an organic homing device found on the remains of one of the rigs, and when they fail the Zygon leader Broton sets the Skarasen onto the Doctor, but Harry interfering with the ship's controls allows the Doctor to escape. Broton is disguising himself as the local Lord, the Duke of Forgill. When researching in the Duke's castle, Sarah and the Doctor discover a secret passage into the spaceship under Loch Ness. They rescue Harry, and the Doctor is then imprisoned in the ship for a while as it flies off for a new location (a quarry - where else?!). The Doctor sends a signal from the ship secretly, allowing UNIT to track him down, and sets off the self-destruct after freeing himself and the remaining captives that the Zygons held for duplication. Broton still lives, though, and his plan is to plant a homing device at an energy conference in London while disguised as the Duke, and get the Skarasen to attack the building in which will be many VIPs from around the world. The Doctor and his friends cleverly defeat Broton by having a fight with him, then shooting him. The Doctor throws the homing device into the Thames, the Skarasen eats it and satisfied swims back up to Loch Ness.

Context:

The Summer Bank Holiday towards the end of August in the UK is never far away from my birthday, which is nice - I get a state-sponsored long weekend to celebrate. I half remembered that 'last year' I chose a favourite Doctor Who to watch with the family as part of my celebrations, overriding the random choice and using a fair amount of emotional blackmail on the fam to make them watch with me or else spoil my big day! I was keen to turn this into a regular thing. However, when I checked, it turns out that it wasn't last year but three years ago that I last did this. On that occasion, I chose a new series story so this time I wanted a classic era one. I scoured the remaining stories and finally settled on Terror of the Zygons. It's not necessarily an overall favourite of mine, but it was the one favoured in that moment. Sat down to watch with the whole family (Better Half making a rare appearance in the living room for a Doctor Who watch, and all three kids - boys of 15 and 12, girl of 9) from the DVD. We split the story in two, watching two episodes a day. We coincidentally finished on August 30th, the 46th anniversary of the debut broadcast of the story's first episode. Early on, the eldest child asked "Is that the Downs?" about the filming location, and he's not far off: all the Scottish settings were filmed in Sussex, with the quarry where the Zygon ship hides being as near to where we live as the previous record holder for filming close to the family home, Brighton beach (as seen in The Leisure Hive and Mindwarp).

First Time Round:

I can't remember the exact circumstances of getting the VHS tape (though that is definitely how I first saw it). I often forget the specific action and emotion of watching more recent Doctor Who stories, and even some of the tapes that came out in the mid to late 1990s when the VHS range was going strong. Terror of the Zygons, though, was released very early on in the late 1980s, before regular and effective distribution seemed to have been established, and when each tape stumbled across in W H Smiths or wherever was like a gift from the heavens. The Zygons story would have been the 8th or 9th tape in my collection. The Talons of Weng-Chiang, which came out at the same time (November 1988) I remember very clearly getting as a Christmas present that year, but I'm pretty sure I didn't get the Zygons story at the same time. As such, I probably bought it for myself, either just before or just after Christmas (maybe the latter, funded by some cash given to me by another relative). It most likely would have been purchased in Smiths in Worthing (my regular home town supplier later, Volume One, had not opened then) or it could have been in Bognor Regis, if I saw it in a shop when visiting my Dad. I remember the feeling of the first watch, if not the details, enjoying the great visuals and its evocative score. As all stories were at that time, the VHS presentation of Terror of the Zygons was edited together as one feature length piece. The full version with end credits, re-establishing the magnificent cliffhanger of episode 1, did not come out until over a decade later in August 1999. I remember getting that (I was living in Brighton by then, so would have bought it in MVC), and remember watching and feeling a bit disappointed: I'd watched the old version so many times that just having the beginning and end credits re-inserted didn't feel that special. There was a nice little contemporaneous clip of Tom Baker on Disney Time included though. 

Reaction:

I met Dan Hall in a pub once, back when he was commissioning editor of the Doctor Who DVD range and I was still screenwriting. It was a writers and producers' meet-up, but a lot of those present were fans and talk turned before too long to Doctor Who. I believe, though it was a reasonably beery night and a long time ago, so I may be misremembering, that he confirmed there something that I'd heard rumoured, that Terror of the Zygons was being held back to be the final DVD release of the range. I've mentioned a few times in previous blog posts how the VHS release concentrated on the most popular stories upfront to such an extent that the final couple of years of the range were disappointing for a great many collectors. Obviously, they wanted the DVD range instead to go out on something more of a bang than a whimper. It came to pass, sort-of: it was the last complete story released of the planned range - a couple of stories that needed time-consuming animations or reconstructions to bridge missing episodes followed on after, and then there were a couple of previously missing stories recovered and released later too. The release of the Zygon story was in October 2013, though it was available slightly earlier in a limited edition luxury box "The Fourth Doctor Time Capsule" accompanied by a lot of old tat. Clearly, the story was thought of as something popular and special to merit this treatment. Indeed, that's what I thought too when I selected it for my Birthday watch. I was half right.

The first two episodes of the story are excellent. The script is solid, despite depicting an excessively twee, shortbread tin lid version of Scotland; the very first line of dialogue mentions haggis, someone called Willie, and someone else who "doesnae ken" something; a few minutes later there's bagpiping, kilts and talk of tossing the caber, and it carries on in that style. Perhaps there's no other way to script a story centring on the Loch Ness monster. Focussing on an oil company's rigs and shore base at least was a more up-to-date topic North of the border in the 1970s. What makes this story and particularly the first section atmospheric is the direction by Douglas Camfield and the score by Geoffrey Burgon. The combination of both can be seen in the incredibly effective sequence where a sniper aims at Harry and the man he's rescued on the shore, and the music and the tension builds and builds. Camfield gets some particularly spine-tingling moments in the can elsewhere too: the hayloft pitchfork attack by the vicious Zygon-Harry, and the wonderful studio moment where the bagpipe drone cuts out just as Sarah is mocking the landlord's extra-sensory powers, before the Doctor tells her that they'd been listening to a lament for the dead. The sudden shocking cliffhanger for episode one too: an abrupt first glimpse of a Zygon before the credits roll, only there for an instant but seared into the imagination of every child watching.

Costume designer Jim Acheson delivers one of his many many iconic Doctor Who designs, and perhaps his best, with the Zygon suits. All production departments are giving their maximum, in fact, which creates a consistent visual identity as seen in the globby organic sets and props depicting the spaceship technology. All the performances are top notch. It's Ian Marter's best work, in both his two roles, and up there for Tom Baker too - enigmatic and brooding, but also witty and fun. Liz Sladen has less to do, but does what she's given very well. Nicholas Courtney and John Levene provide stalwart support as ever. The guest turns are great too. Lillias Walker as the sinister Sister Lamont ratchets up to Nurse Ratched levels. Broton is a great character, and John Woodnutt is great at playing him, as well as the subtly different takes on the Zygon-Duke and the real Duke. All of this quality, though, is masking a logical flaw in the story's set-up, at least at first; but, it can't be concealed as the piece develops and more details come to light. From episode 3, as good as are the direction, sets, score and everything else, it still starts to fall apart. The body-snatching Zygons are conceptually spies - quiet, gradual stealthy infiltration their stock in trade. Their Skarasen pet on the other hand is a weapon of mass destruction. It can chew through oil rigs and can't be stopped by nuclear weapons. The script tries very hard to create a plan that can involve both these very different approaches through the clumsy creation of a homing device that needs to be planted on a victim, but it's not very convincing.

The Zygons key power of impersonation is simply not needed when they have a monster that can eat buildings. They want to terrorise some bigwigs meeting for a conference, so Broton assumes the Duke's form to get in to the building. But he could just drop the homing device on the doorstep, and the creature would destroy everything around. It didn't leave much of the oil rigs unscathed after all. The focus on the oil company, which seemed so important in the first two episodes, is dropped instantly that the second half of the story starts. A key character Huckle is helping UNIT with the investigations, but from episode 3 disappears and is never mentioned again. The destruction of the oil rigs turns out to be a red herring, just a test of strength for the Skarasen, If so, why on Earth destroy more than one if it's going to put the humans on red alert? Why bug UNIT? Why pretend to be a nurse in the oil company's base, or a ghillie, or a lord? Why shoot the survivor of the rig? You have no need for stealth, Zygons, get down to London and use your unstoppable cyborg to take over the planet. The effects work of the climax in episode 4, with a puppet Skarasen head in front of a photo of the Thames, is rightly criticised, but the real shame is the premise running out of steam rather than the production finally running out of money. A tussle with Broton in a dingy basement was not the grand ending implicitly promised by the earlier scenes of his and the Doctor's confrontations. It's a shame as there are so many possibilities in both the Zygon concept, and in a story explaining the truth of the Loch Ness Monster. Trying to do both in the same story meant the potential of neither was realised.

Connectivity: 

Both Terror of the Zygons and Planet of the Dead were stories broadcast after a short gap since the last regular run, and both feature UNIT battling creatures - the Skarasen, the "Sky-rays" - that are armoured cyborgs (or at least part metal, the origin of the Tennant story's monster is unclear) with tough exteriors that are difficult to penetrate with Earth weapons.

Deeper Thoughts:

Predictive Textual Analysis. Terror of the Zygons famously contains a scene in the final episode where the Brigadier answers a phone call from the Prime Minister, and says "Yes, Madam". The story was made and broadcast in 1975 just after Margaret Thatcher had become leader of the opposition in the UK, but was supposed to be set later than that (in 1980, if one believes the dialogue in Pyramids of Mars, two stories later). It would be four more years after Terror of the Zygons was broadcast before Thatcher had won a general election and become the UK's first ever female PM, and so she was in power in 1980. Whether the writer or production team had this particular politician in mind or not, it was a good guess. Unfortunately, in a story a couple of years earlier the Brigadier had a phone call with a different Prime Minister called Jeremy, and that has not proved correct (at least not yet). It's somewhat rare for Doctor Who to predict the future with the accuracy demonstrated in Terror of the Zygons, though it got off to a good start. In the very first episode, An Unearthly Child, the Doctor's time traveller granddaughter Susan tells her suspicious teachers that she thought the UK used a decimal system of currency, but then remembered that it hadn't started yet. Decimalisation would eventually come in for the UK in 1971. It was probably an educated guess: a committee of enquiry had been set up by the government and reported on the feasibility of decimalisation in 1963, the year that An Unearthly Child was made and shown. From then on, though, the show's hit rate became decidedly variable.

The UNIT stories normally ignored their setting a few years in advance of broadcast altogether (and sometimes contradicted it, e,g. a price in pounds, shillings and pence being mentioned in dialogue in Doctor Who and the Silurians); when they did, they got it right about as often as they got it wrong. The Daemons predicted that the corporation would eventually stretch to providing a BBC3 channel, but alas imagined its output would be documentaries about archaeology much more suited to BBC4's remit (and both those two channels would have struggled to get a programme budget to cover a live outside broadcast at night). Battlefield predicted a five pound coin, car-phones and that a round of drinks in a bar would get very expensive, but also imagined that the UK would have a King before the end of the millennium.  Different stories over the years have predicted more general things that would eventually come, again extrapolating from the thinking of the day: The War Machines in 1966 presaged the internet, The Green Death in 1973 predicted Quorn products, Vengeance on Varos in 1985 depicted something not a million miles away from reality TV. Fear Her looked a few years ahead from its broadcast to the London Olympics in 2012. Characters watch TV on their laptops a lot in that story, which looked odd in 2006, but was exactly how I consumed my Olympics coverage when the day finally arrived. Had an unauthorised someone bent to pick up the torch and run with it to the stadium as the Doctor does, though, they'd have been jumped on by security before they'd made it as much as a metre.

As with continuity errors, areas where Who differs from the real world's events give rise to all sorts of fan and official creativity to explain them away. The main proposed theory for the near future depicted in the UNIT stories is that it is a parallel version of our own world, where the interference of aliens has impacted. Technology from the Cybermen in The Invasion, for example, was harvested after their defeat to accelerate the UK's space programme such that our little country can send multiple rockets into space c. the mid-1970s (as seen in The Ambassadors of Death). This theory fits neatly because, well, it's the truth, isn't it? What are stories except descriptions of parallel worlds like our own, but where something more interesting is happening? Since 2005, the new series has generally followed this theory, going as far as to depict Earth people or institutions (Torchwood, Henry Van Statten in Dalek) salvaging alien tech for gain, and ordinary punters becoming more and more aware of alien invasions. Too much divergence risks the audience's empathy, though: who cares about the events on a world that's too different from our own?  The series tends to periodically clear the decks to avoid this; Steven Moffat created a crack in time that undoes previous events, so Amy has no memory of the Daleks recently invading her world; the events of Terror of the Zygons ("the Zygon gambit with the Loch Ness Monster") are hinted to have been covered up such that Ace and her generation are oblivious to them - as established in Remembrance of the Daleks). The point of Doctor Who is ultimately not to predict the future but to depict the present with just a little bit of exaggeration, adding monsters that wreak havoc, be they Skarasens, Zygons or the UK's first ever female PM (little bit of politics there for you, ladies and gentlemen!).

In Summary:

Either have the Terror of the Zygons or The Loch Ness Monster, don't try for both or you'll split the difference. It's testament to some excellent work done by everyone on the production that the story almost achieves greatness despite this.

The Zygon Invasion / The Zygon Inversion

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

Plot:

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

Context:

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

First-time round:

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

Reaction:

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

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

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

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

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

 

Connectivity: 

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

Deeper Thoughts:

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

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

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

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

In Summary:

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

The Day of the Doctor

Chapter The 76th, the Doctors' biggest birthday bash yet.

Plot: 
At the height of the Time War, three incarnations of the Doctor (current one Matt Smith, previous one David Tennant, and - as per the standard for these kind of shindigs - a Richard Hurndall-type stand-in played by John Hurt) are brought together by The Moment, a super-weapon with a conscience that looks just like that Billie Piper off the telly. They thought they were busy defeating a Zygon invasion plan in two time zones, but that was pretty easy stuff compared to their real mission, which is to ensure Gallifrey is never destroyed, but instead is tucked away in a pocket universe or some such. Pleasingly, there's time along the way to explain lines and in-jokes from previous years, have cameos from all the old Doctors, and have a sneak peek at the guy who hasn't even taken over yet. And it was in 3D, too, which was a bit of a waste of time: the BBC and everyone else pretty much abandoned 3D TV the minute after it was screened, but never mind.

Context:

Having enjoyed going to the BFI Southbank to see two Doctor Who animation projects unveiled (The Power of the Daleks in 2016 and Shada in 2017), when this screening of The Day of the Doctor was announced as part of a wider BFI John Hurt season, my fan-friends David, Chris and I got a ticket each (Trevor couldn't make this one, but with luck we'll all be reunited in ten month's time to see whatever Charles Norton's team are working on this year).  As it was not one of the special Doctor Who events per se, a few of the usual treats were not present: there was no quiz, no DVD giveaways, no 'shouting for Dick' (Dick Fiddy was in the audience rather than co-compering with the BFI's Justin Johnson), and - most surprising of all - no Frank Skinner involvement (it was his birthday, so he was understandably elsewhere).

Added to this, it was on a Sunday with no new product to show off; consequently, it was relatively low-key. NFT1 was more full than I expected, though. It's definitely a good one to watch on a big screen, which may have been a draw. No presence from super- or celebrity fans that I noticed, but a few good cosplayers turned up. And Chris did get to briefly introduce David and me to the very talented costume-maker Steve Ricks, who was resplendent in a Season 18 Tom Baker outfit. The BFI bar did us a nice brunch beforehand, but yet again it was too busy in there after the screening to hobnob, so we went a little way along the South Bank and had some cocktails, before getting the train home. A slight hangover ensued on Monday morning, but all in all a great day out again. Thank you BFI.

First-time round:

November 2013 was a rather wonderful time. I spent the week leading up to the Saturday of Day's broadcast in Paris for my day job. It was a warm late Autumn week, I got to travel there and back in style on the Eurostar, business class, the year's Beaujolais Nouveau had just become available, the work was not too taxing, and I had colleagues to go to nice restaurants with in the evening. It was 15 minutes on foot into the office from the hotel, so I walked it every day, feeling very sophisticated, as if I were a native. Lower on the sophistication scale, perhaps, I also had my bumper 50th anniversary edition of Doctor Who Magazine with me, which I would read over my hotel breakfast like a chic Parisian probably wouldn't.

I don't care about seeming sophisticated, though, really; case in point: I had as my laptop bag a rather wonderful faux retro manbag (pictured) that I'd picked up a few years before at the Earl's Court Doctor Who Experience. Coming home, I had just got through passport control at the Gare Du Nord on the evening of Friday 22nd November, with this bag over my shoulder, when I was freaked out by a uniformed local who stopped me, and said: "Your bag...". Oh my gosh! What was wrong with my bag?! I'd packed it myself, there were no sharp objects or liquids of volume greater than 100ml. I wasn't smuggling anything. Nothing to declare. Was I going to be detained and strip searched? "Your bag... is AMAZING!" I had been stopped by a fellow Doctor Who fan, who was admiring this neon logo adorned Tom Baker satchel. He proceeded to jump up and down on the spot with me in excitement at all tomorrow might bring. I love the wonderful unsophisticated French.

The following day, I was back home with plenty of wine and snacks. With my visiting friends Alex and Rachel, who've been mentioned a number of times before on this blog, alongside most of the family (me, the Better Half and the boys who at the time were 7 and 4 - our youngest child, a girl, was only 18 months old, so would have been asleep), I watched live as it was simulcast across the world. The story instantly became everyone's favourite, especially the two boys. Then they went to bed, and the adults would have watched  - no doubt at my insistence and to my shame - the After Party thing on BBC3.

It was so so awful: the sheer un-rehearsal of it all, and the various segments all competing to be the nadir: favourite companion actors being treated like props to be moved around a set (you could have powered a TV transmitter for a year using Fraser Hines' resentment alone), the sub-TFI Friday bar where schmucks got asked dumb questions, the stupid bit where they tried to find the best companion by getting all the actors who played them to stand up, and asking them questions, which was leading up to a stupid punchline but never really got there as nobody knew any of the answers to the questions, and they all really needed to sit down, particularly Bernard Cribbins, who as wonderful as he is is getting on a bit. Plus, the one good bit: where members of One Direction were regressed away into a squeal of white noise. I have only seen the thing once, more than four years ago, and I was pretty drunk by that point in the evening. For me to still remember it in such detail, it must have been excruciating. Luckily, I knew about the red button premier of Peter Davison's Five-ish Doctors comedy film later, and we finished the evening with that - perfect from start to finish.
 

Reaction:

If I had world enough and time or could be arsed, I would go back and look through the reviews of every Steven Moffat story I've covered for the blog so far to count up how many I've adored and how many I've slagged off. Despite it possibly feeling like I'm very negative, my gut feel is it would cleave at about 50:50, maybe 60:40, advantage on the love side. But, just because I don't like everything he's ever written for Doctor Who doesn't mean I don't understand he's a truly talented writer, a witty interviewee, and a wonderful ambassador for Doctor Who (which he'll probably be for ever more - it's a show that doesn't tend to leave one behind). All that talent, and any amount of good will, though, might have counted for nothing when it came to his writing a multi-Doctor anniversary show. It has defeated many a talented Doctor Who writer over the years, trying to write a good multi-Doctor anniversary show. That Moffat created something superb, with moral and emotional weight, as well as ticking all the fan service boxes, is testament to him. He's probably written a few stories that are better, but this will be the one that almost certainly proves the most memorable.

The plot has its author's usual level of complication - switching between multiple time zones and subplots, time travel back into earlier scenes, and so on - but uses deft touches to keep it all coherent and easy to follow. The visual spectacle is a triumph of production to get the very last penny of budget exploding onto the screen. Performances are strong across the board, with John Hurt dominating seemingly effortlessly as you would expect. The dynamics of the bickering Doctors is traditional, but none the worse for it, and handled well. And the little continuity tidy-ups are fastidious in their detail. In The Day of the Doctor we find extrapolations of dialogue from Doomsday in 2006: "I was there at the fall of Arcadia; someday I might even come to terms with that," and 2009's The End of Time "He still possesses the Moment, and he'll use it to destroy Daleks and Time Lords alike," and provides the punchline to a running gag - or more likely lots of random gags over the years - about Elizabeth the First that also featured in The End of Time plus The Shakespeare Code and The Beast Below.

Beyond the complications, though, there's real complexity. The Day of the Doctor picks up as its main theme a thread that goes all the way back to Rose and the first new series finale The Parting of the Ways, replaying the no-win scenario where an intervention to save lives costs millions of lives in turn. In short: coward or killer? There is something of a sidestep of the moral quandary ultimately: the Doctor refuses the choice, and is saved at the last minute by thinking of something clever; but that's Doctor Who, and a happy ending was obligatory in an anniversary romp. Anyway, mirroring this in miniature in the Zygon subplot allows for tangled repercussions of these sort of choices to be explored in future less rompy episodes, though I'm dubious as to at what level that sequel and the death of Osgood was all planned up front (as Moffat claimed in the later Q&A).

Tom Baker's walk-on at the end helps keep up the surprise factor, just when we thought it was all over; it makes sense too - just about - within the rules that the episode has set up. The only possible explanation of who Tom Baker's playing is a future incarnation of the Doctor re-wearing a favoured old face (which might go some way to explaining how the Gallifreyan paintings get to Elizabethan England too); if this is so, then it's been set up that, as the younger of the two, Matt Smith's Doctor can't properly retain the memories of their conversation. This would explain why in the next story he still thinks he's going to die at Trenzalore despite this strong evidence that he'll carry on. It would also explain why he doesn't do much following this to seek out Gallifrey, as he only remembers a last ditch gambit to save it, not the fairly resounding clue he was given that it did in fact survive. Obviously, he gets positive proof in one story's time anyway, and still doesn't do much to actively seek it out. But Moffat explained all that at the Q&A: the Doctor really hates the place.

My main quibble would be that David Tennant is not very well served during proceedings. Fans of his, like me, would probably be happy enough just to see him back in the suit again; but, it might have been nice for a bit more heroism and less out and out comedy. Also, Moffat has the Tenth do the same "I'm grandstanding with a big speech oops I've got the wrong end of the stick" gag three times over (once with the horse, once with the rabbit, once with the real Liz) to increasingly diminishing returns. Joanna Page is badly miscast as Elizabeth too, which further weakens this section. More minor quibbles: bad inhaler usage, which always ticks me off as an asthmatic myself, and finally: why would Coal Hill School have gone to the trouble of moving its location a few streets along, particularly if it meant that it was now right next to a junk yard? If the idea is it's always been there, then none of the first ever episode of Doctor Who makes any sense whatsoever - can I give you a lift home, Susan, in my car, to next door? No, I like walking 100 yards in the dark, it's mysterious. I'm sure nobody wants that: after all, that's where it all started.

Connectivity: 

They've both got a horse in them, and both show a city on fire (London in The Visitation, Arcadia in The Day of the Doctor). Both touch upon alien artifacts left on Earth in history being unearthed in the present day.

Deeper Thoughts:
Secrets from the Black Archive: panel with Steven Moffat and Marcus Wilson, Sunday 28th January 2018. It was nice to see Marcus Wilson interviewed again, he seems like a nice fellow, but the event was bound to be all about the Moff. Given that this is possibly his first public appearance since he officially stepped down from the showrunner role at Christmas, most of the interest (and all the audience questions) were for him. The most obvious thing, and for obvious reasons, is how relaxed he seemed. It's a very big weight that's been lifted, even though he hasn't left the world of Who behind quite yet. One of the first things mentioned was that he is working on a novelisation of The Day of the Doctor. I thought this was a gag at first, but it's true: Moffat is one of four writers producing Target-style novelisations for key post-2005 stories.

The rest of the panel discussion and subsequent audience Q&A garnered little that was new, but did offer up a few nuggets of interest. The idea of the War Doctor was born out of terror, when Christopher Eccleston declined to be involved. It was felt Eccleston was a good gruff Northern contrast to the other two "pretty-boys", in a way that Paul McGann, say, who was arguably the first modern dashing hero type Doctor, would not have been. The other obvious choice, but seemingly impossible at the time, was to get the first ever Doctor back. Without that option, the only choice was to find a missing wilderness years Doctor, someone famous enough during that period to conceivably have been offered the role. They only had John Hurt in mind, and if he'd turned it down "a glove puppet would have played it".

If Tom hadn't cameoed, the Moment would have come in at the end to talk to Matt. There was only ever going to be a subset of Doctors fully involved (as some just don't answer their phone anymore) which lead to Peter Davison's fan film being given a proper budget, as a good way to represent everyone. Moffat believes he achieved everything he wanted during his time as showrunner; if he had any regret it was only not using the Autons more, and not bringing back the Garm! He never planned a scene during Capaldi's era of his Doctor's POV of his eyebrows cameo - it's not a story. Moffat did not enjoy the After Party either; after the broadcast, he was, to quote him exactly: "So clenched, I could have snapped a proctologist off at the knuckle" All he wanted was a drink but instead he had to talk via video link to half a boy band of whom he'd never heard. He had nothing to do with Jodie Whittaker's casting, that was rightly all Chris Chibnall, but from what he's seen she is really funny, which he believes is essential. And finally, he sums up Doctor Who thus: "It's not about restraint, it's 'In Your Face' entertainment...we're not at home to Mr. Subtlety."

In Summary:

Call Lou Reed: this is as near as possible to a perfect 'Day'. (Geddit?! Also, please don't be surprised if you don't get an answer from Lou Reed.)