Robot

Chapter The 68th, where Tom debuts in a Pertwee story.

Plot: 
The Doctor, as played by Tom Baker, dons his long scarf for the first time, and assists UNIT in investigating a series of break-ins of top secret establishments; the new medical officer Surgeon Lieutenant Harry Sullivan I.A.I. tags along to keep tabs on him in case of any post-regeneration complications. Turns out it's a robot that's doing it. Sarah Jane Smith meanwhile is actually doing her journo day job for once, interviewing for a piece on a scientific think tank where they are working on a mysterious secret project. Turns out it's a robot. What are the chances? The think tank is a front for an authoritarian group who want to hold the world to ransom, and use the robot to get access to nuclear weapons. After the Doctor sorts that out, the robot grows to giant size because science, and goes on the rampage. Also, it fancies Sarah. After defeating it, the Doctor, Sarah and Harry go off adventuring in the TARDIS, which is as it should be, and produced much rejoicing by everyone (except for Nicholas Courtney's agent perhaps).

Context:

I viewed from the DVD an episode at a time occasionally over the course of approximately a week, and was accompanied by all the children (boys of 11 and 8, girl of 5) who were surprisingly excited to watch. Either he's at a cynical age right now, or he was eager to be mentioned on the blog, but my eldest was full of commentary. A selection, just from the first episode: "Why doesn't he run away?" "Who shoots at a robot?" "The dog's run away, dogs have more common sense" "Are UNIT pretty much useless?" and a long discussion with his brother about how you can definitely see weird faces in Baker's slit-scan time tunnel effect credits sequences.

First-time round: 

( (Junior) Doctor Who and the Giant) Robot is one of those stories that always seems to have been around, at least for me. I think this is because my school - and probably every primary school in the country at the time - had the novelisation in its library. This was in the late seventies / early eighties. In fact, the school library had at least two versions of the story. I was always intrigued by the Junior Doctor Who edition of the book, but I never read it as I had read the X-rated adult version first. I josh of course, the Junior books did not exist to protect children from the extremes of sex and violence that would otherwise have been featured in Terrance Dicks' prose, but instead were easy readers aimed at a slightly younger audience than were the usual novelisations. I always wondered how much they differed, was it a page 1 rewrite job, or did they just edit out words and passages. I hope Terrance got paid twice, anyway.

The first time I saw the episodes themselves was when they came out on VHS in January 1992. This was when I was in my first year of university in Durham. It was usual in those days to watch a new release in my friend Mike's room, but for some reason we watched this one in David's room instead (David is my long-term fan friend, mentioned many times before on this blog). It got a good crowd too, maybe because Tom Baker was a nostalgic draw for everyone. There was much hilarity - and embarrassment on my part - when the Action Man tank is pushed on in the foreground at the end of episode 3; it's fooling no one. There was then equal hilarity when the same scene was repeated in the recap at the start of episode 4. 

Reaction:

Tom Baker's debut story is an odd one, as it's resolutely a celebratory swansong for an old era (his predecessor's) rather that the start of a new one more tailored to him; the first proper Tom Baker Doctor Who story would be the next one, The Ark in Space. As has been pointed out by many commentators before, this serves for four episodes to persuade any waverers in the audience that they're watching the same show, settling people in before there are even more radical changes. Nobody would begrudge outgoing producer Barry Letts staging this send off either; the last time there was a change of producer, that person also hung around to do one for the new Doctor. But Derrick Sherwin's Spearhead from Space was more about laying the groundwork for the new - colour, UNIT, Earth, invasions - than celebrating the old, and all those aspects Derrick originated would categorise Letts' era up to and including Robot. The coincidence of the same location (Wood Norton Hall) being used for both Spearhead and Robot further cements them as 'bookends' of this period.

Robot is successful as one last walkabout in a comfy old pair of shoes before they fall apart, but it's no more than that. It's not the deepest or most expansive storyline, and has significant flaws; but it does feature a big robot shooting at stuff, and UNIT soldiers running about and throwing grenades. The all-video look, which obviously isn't as classy as Pertwee's all-film debut, nonetheless is consistent and the robot is of a spectacular, if slightly impractical, design. In the location work, the sun is always shining, which is apt for how this story feels: it's a last bright and unchallenging Summer romp before incoming producer Philip Hinchcliffe brings in some more autumnal shades. Of course, it is very slightly of a type with what's to come, in that there is a horror movie pastiche in there (King Kong), an approach that would become more prevalent in later serials, but here it's only done half-heartedly, as something of a gag in the final few sequences.

For the rest of the running time, writer (and outgoing script-editor) Terrance Dicks is seemingly giving us his take on another classic, Invasion of the Dinosaurs. Like his buddy Malcolm Hulke's story aired in the previous season, this is a tale where the environmentalists (usually the champions of the Barry Letts era) are the bad guys, and end up threatening to wipe out the human race for the planet's own good, bar only a chosen few, safe in an underground chamber. As Dicks has less natural sympathy with their cause than Hulke, though, the characters never seem believable, so any dramatic edge is lost. With lots of other moments, such as his undermining Sarah's Women's lib credentials by showing her making sexist assumptions, Dicks gives the impression, in this last script for Barry Letts, that he's finally relaxing at no longer having to pay lip service to the hippy stuff he's been producing to please his boss up to now.

None of this explains why a rationalist scientific group who've planned every detail only checks they've got enough food and water to survive after they've started the nuclear countdown, nor why a disintegrator gun for some reason doesn't disintegrate the robot but instead makes it grow, like it's got an 'exciting denoument' setting. Kettlewell's behaviour in scenes in episodes 1 and 2 is so inconsistent with him turning out to be be the (spoiler) main bad guy that it's a major cheat on the audience. But, I don't think this is Dicks' error - it's in the direction. There are scenes that feel as if the director hasn't read to the end of the script, where he's showing Kettlewell keeping up the pretence even though there's no one around to witness it.

Connectivity: 

The first few minutes of both Robot and The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon contain a scene showing the Doctor regenerating; both stories are Earth-based and deal with an internal enemy rather than an alien invasion; the companion team in both is one male, one female bolstered by at least one significant recurring character. And both stories feature many ranks of armed public servants (at least in the Matt Smith story, the bullets have some effect).

Deeper Thoughts:
Human League B-Side. The people of Doctor Who are regularly referred to as a family, and I think I would broadly agree. I don't go to events or conventions that much, and it is there especially, but even in print and online, that you see a familial atmosphere between fans, between fans and the stars of the show, and even between the stars themselves: many actors from different eras have become mates from seeing each other on the convention circuit. There are family rows and feuds too, yes, but mostly it's positive. I'll admit I did shed a tear when Jon Pertwee died in 1996; he felt like a colourful great uncle that would never not be there, rather than just some bloke off the telly. Talking of great uncles, I'm sure I have some great uncles on one side of the family or the other, but I don't know anything about them. I do, though, know a substantial amount about the life and times of, say, Ian Levine. Is this healthy? And is it something that is unique to Doctor Who? Probably Star Wars and Star Trek convention-goers feel the same too; but there's one member of the Doctor Who family, a larger-than-life funny uncle, that no other franchise has or could ever emulate, and that is Tom Baker.

I remember the first point that I realised that Tom wasn't just any old actor, and was instead a true eccentric who is incapable of saying anything straightforward or uninteresting. I was reading Doctor Who Magazine when I'd started buying it again sometime early in the Nineties, when the series wasn't long off the air. I don't think it was an interview, just an article writing up a convention where he'd spoken, and I read some of his wonderful material for the first time. This was the story, which I'm sure he's repeated often since, where he's mistaken by a cab driver for Jon Pertwee, and strings the poor guy along for ages, as the driver repeats a comic refrain "You was always the most elegant, Mister Pertwee". In the end, horror of horrors, the driver asks 'Mister Pertwee' whatever happened to his successor in the role. Without missing a beat, Baker says he thinks he died drunk in a ditch.

I have met Baker once, accompanied by the Better Half, at a signing for his magnificent autobiography in a Worthing bookshop in 1997. The Q&A that preceded getting one's book autographed wonderfully demonstrated his art (an endlessly applicable one, if you can master it) of twisting the most uninteresting questions and answering them entertainingly by talking about what he wanted to talk about all along: himself, yes, but not in arrogant way; instead he uses that theme as his own unique philosophical window on the world. If I hadn't learnt from him the approach of stringing together random anecdotes in a semblance of coherence, this blog wouldn't exist. So, you know, he's to blame, is what I'm saying. Anyway, my copy of 'Who on Earth is Tom Baker?' is signed to me and the Better Half from him, which I consider just as binding and solemn as our wedding vows. We can never split up, the book says so!

Robot, whatever its good or bad aspects, will always be important, as it ushers in the most consistently popular period of Doctor Who to that point, and perhaps ever after, embodied in Tom Baker as the front man. For only seven of its 50+ years, Doctor Who featured a Doctor who wore a long scarf, but because of the indelible impression Tom left on the show, there are still a huge number of people out there now who if asked what the Doctor wears, will say a long scarf. He is the exemplar. Baker as the raconteur is only one aspect of a complex man; he's of course a bloody good actor too. But Baker as raconteur has had a place in the Doctor Who family far longer than he was playing the role. For almost all that time, Baker has fixated on his own mortality (he's had his own gravestone ready for at least twenty years). I think a lot of us are still banking on his turning out to be immortal, though, so we don't have to shed tears at what will be a great loss to the family.

In Summary:

Whatever happened to Sarah Jane? That Seventies Summer-dress frame...

The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon

Chapter The 67th, involves those who have - in almost the words of Sir Billiam of Idol - ties without a face.

Plot: 
A future version of the Matt Smith Doctor invites Amy, Rory, River Song and an old American guy to watch him get shot and killed by someone in an astronaut suit standing in a lake in Utah. The Doctor also invites his own younger self who turns up late and misses it all, but following up on some hints he takes Amy, Rory and River Song to meet the younger version of the American guy in the White House in 1969, where he's investigating a mysterious little girl who keeps contacting President Richard Nixon. The TARDIS team help him find the girl, which leads them to discover that a group of aliens, the Silence, are in control of the Earth, but no one realises this as they have the power to make you forget them as soon as you look away. This large, global organised group, who have access to advanced technology and mental powers, have secretly been manipulating humans for thousands of years as it is somehow easier than just building their own spacesuit. They have also been raising the girl as a child assassin who will eventually be the one in the suit in Utah that kills the Doctor, as this is somehow easier than just shooting him themselves during any of the dozen or so opportunities they have to do just that in these two episodes alone. They could at least have a crack; if he survived, he wouldn't remember who shot him, would he?!

Three months pass during which everyone goes to elaborate lengths to do, erm, something important, probably. Anyway, that means it's time for the moon landing; the Doctor cleverly uses the footage of Neil Armstrong stepping out onto the surface as a way to incite mass murder of the Silence for all eternity, which is just what you imagine Neil would have wanted. (The Silence killed one person and helped humans go to the Moon, the sentence for which is genocide apparently.) Despite many unanswered questions, and a possibly vulnerable possibly dangerous child on the loose, the Doctor decides not to investigate any more and goes off to have some unconnected adventures, like he knows he's just been in episodes 1 and 2 of the season rather than 11 and 12.

Context:

The whole family bar the eldest child (boy of 11) sat down to watch this one from the Blu-ray; we watched one episode per day over a weekend, and it must have sounded like fun as it attracted the final member of the family halfway through, who joined us to watch the second part on the Sunday. The Better Half got (justifiably) apoplectic at times with Moffat's plotting. 'What's the point of this? was said more than once.

First-time round: 

I can't remember whether I sat down to watch these episodes live in 2011, or - more likely - timeshifted them and watched them later in the evening. One thing that does stay with me, though, is a feeling I got watching the first episode, and the Doctor Who Confidential documentary that was shown alongside it, a feeling invoked by seeing the three leads - all played by thin beautiful people ten or more years younger than me - making a big deal about hitting America. The feeling was this: Doctor Who isn't mine anymore. Sure, the show had had blockbuster appeal at times before, and it had had a huge American following in earlier years too; but, one never thought those periods would last (and they didn't really). It's a silly feeling to indulge, like the reluctance as a fan you feel for your favourite indie band making it big; one knows deep down it doesn't matter, but it did feel like a loss. Forever after, the faithful would have to share their show with the viewers of BBC America, and an even wider international audience across the globe.

Reaction:

Steven Moffat's idea to launch his second year with a bang was to do a season finale style story - an expensive, expansive plot-heavy blockbuster two-parter - right up front. I mean, why wait, huh? Hmm. This approach could be summarised as "Skip the foreplay", which is never a good idea (so I've been told), except it's worse than that; it's more like "Do the foreplay afterwards" which is an easy way to achieve an, ahem, anti-climax. The story after this, just when we're engaged as to who River is, how the Doctor will avoid his fate, what exactly are the Silence's plans, and whether Amy is or isn't pregnant, doesn't talk about any of that; it's just larking about with rubbish pirates. An implicit promise has been made to the audience, and then broken. It doesn't help that the plotting of the arc - even just the bits in these two episodes alone - is crazy ape-shit bonkers. A finale engenders more forgiveness, as that's when all the Bad Wolves, Torchwoods or Pandoricas are finally explained, and the slate is wiped clean; there's no such luxury here - the slate is splattered in muck that's going to stay there for months; so, by The Wedding of River Song, the series is going to require infinite forgiveness, and no possible explanations are going to satisfy.

Moffat does get something in exchange for squandering this advantage, and that's spectacle and originality in the story and the season's shape. So, kudos to him for trying something new, it's just a shame it didn't really work. The positives then: there are some great jokes, Stuart Milligan is fun as Nixon. Canton is a great character as played by both the young and old Sheppards. The opening comedy sequences are nice enough, the American landscapes are vibrant and interestingly used (an astronaut emerging from a lake in the middle of a desert, for example, is an arresting image despite not making any sense in the real or story worlds). The early beats of the story pleasantly confound audience expectations, as suddenly the Doctor is older and has shared lots of adventures with River Song, and then - blam - he's dead. As a beginning it's hard to top unless you're the sort of cynical viewer who's automatically thinking "there's no way they can write their way out of that without it being a cop out". Okay, you got me, that was exactly what I was thinking; but a showrunner shouldn't be jumping through hoops to cater for any audience as cynical as me.

The Silence are a great design, and their affect on memory is a great concept. But, alas, the idea that they're scavengers that can only influence people to create technology and never create their own just stretches credulity beyond snapping point. And, worst of all because it was easily fixable in a rewrite, they just aren't shown to be evil enough. The Silence have just as much right to be treated as legal cohabitants of the Earth as the Silurians, say, and they haven't unleashed any plagues to wipe out mankind, but they get brutally offed. It just appears totally disproportionate, and that's just because all the horrors are presumably offscreen in the unnecessary three month gap between episode 1 and episode 2. Even if the TARDIS crew were shown some horrors though, they wouldn't remember them, so the mass killing ending would never feel justified.

Connectivity: 

As mentioned above, both stories feature villains in smart attire who haven't got much in the old boat race department. Also, both are set in the sixties and feature a space rocket.

Deeper Thoughts:
Simple enough for adults but complicated enough for children. It was around the time of The Impossible Astronaut and Day of the Moon's broadcast that articles became prevalent complaining of how the show's plots had become too convoluted. If this was not the case for the youngsters watching, it certainly was true for the adults; my commentary above, now I've read it back, shows me in this case at least to be quite surprisingly grown-up. These stories don't make a whole lot of sense, true. The criticism was probably overstated, though. It was easy enough with a modicum of concentration to keep up with what was happening, it just didn't - couldn't - add up. Watching Doctor Who in random order highlights things just as watching in the transmission order does. Some stories work much better with the weight of the preceding episodes as build up. But, some stories are undermined by revelations that you know are to be made in their future, and that is really what weighs the Astronaut episodes down. Taken on their own terms they form a nonsensical but visually stunning adventure romp. Once you know how it fits together with the future narrative, though, it can do your head in.

Some spoilers may ensue (but only if you haven't watched Doctor Who in five years) as I've got to get my head round this. So, the creatures that we see at work in Florida, are a violent breakaway group from a semi-religious order that wants to neutralise the Doctor to stop him from bringing the Time Lords and the Time War back to the universe on Trenzalore. They have foreseen that he will do this, and that will be bad, so they try to stop it by killing him at Lake Silencio. It's a matter of historical record that he dies at Lake Silencio, which might explain why nobody tries to kill him before that despite numerous opportunities. Except when they try to kill him at Demon's Run. Are they trying to kill him at Demon's Run, though, or is it just a diversion to get the baby River away? But, that would be a rubbish diversion as it would be one that involved leading him to the very place where the baby is for ages before they get it away, a bit of a risky manoeuvre. But anyway, they do get the baby away, and they train it to kill then put it in a spacesuit in a lake. They must know this is the foretold spot where the Doctor dies, not just because it's supposed to be a fabled fixed point, but also, why bloody submerge the suit in a lake otherwise; it would be a lot easier for it to arrive in a car. BUT if they know the Doctor historically, fixedly dies at Lake Silencio, which - as far as the Universe is concerned - he does, why did they ever think he was going to get as far as Trenzalore to become a threat in the first place? Their plan seems to involve them knowing for sure that he's going to die and that he's going to escape his fate. Simultaneously.

And, even though the Doctor is not dead, and is just pretending, the aged Canton says "That most certainly is the Doctor, and he is most certainly dead" and adds that the Doctor says they would need a can of gasoline. How does Canton know any of this? No one is in a position to tell him this in 1969. Maybe it's written on his invitation? Everyone else just gets a date and time and a map reference, but maybe his invite says a bit more. But how would the Doctor have known to write any of this to him? At the point, just after the story Closing Time, when he writes those invitations, he doesn't even know for sure that Canton was invited. He's only met the guy once, and his earlier self only gets told that the name.is relevant. Is there any way he could know for sure to invite him, let alone to add a note to the gist of "I'm really dead, make sure they burn the corpse". Also, given that he's inside a robot suit, it was a bit lucky the Doctor's friends decided to go the whole viking ceremony. If they'd burnt him on the shore, it would have been immediately obvious that he wasn't even getting singed, and his whole faking his own death would have been blown immediately.

Amy gains memories from the aborted timeline which is created and uncreated by spacesuited River's resistance to her mission, sometime between two moments by that lake in Utah; Amy mentions later that she can remember these events in The Wedding of River Song. So, when does this come to her exactly? The logical point would be right there at Lake Silencio. So, she's aware of Madame Kovarian and so on throughout the three months in America, and the pirate one and The Doctor's Wife, but just not mentioning it? Okay, maybe there's some kind of block because she's really a ganger at that point. So, she would remember first during the action at Demon's Run, and all through the Hitler one, and Night Terrors... but again would just not bother to mention it? Obviously, the time it must have occurred to her is post The God Complex, when the Doctors gone, and she can no longer make any use of the knowledge; but there's no logical reason for it to come to her then, except that it's more convenient for the overall confused jigsaw plot.

I have barely scratched the surface (why does River, knowing exactly who is in the Spacesuit, still shoot at it as it disappears under the lake? Who took the photo of Amy and her baby that is in the orphanage, when, and why? How does Amy make tally marks on her face so neatly without looking at her reflection?); but, I've got a nerd headache already. Undoubtedly, Steven Moffat was planning ahead more than any other Who writer of any previous era, but he was still almost certainly making it up as he was going along a hell of a lot too.

In Summary:

At the time I did Enjoy The Silence. But looking back, it was definitely a narrative rule Violator.