The End of Time

Chapter The 134th, a swansong for Ten.

Plot:

[Disclaimer: saying that The End of Time has a lot of plot is like saying Hitler was a little bit naughty: so, buckle up!] After a warning / premonition from the Ood about time coming to an end, the Doctor returns to contemporary Earth just too late to stop the resurrection of the 'Harold Saxon' incarnation of the Master, who has been brought back to life in a weird ceremony involving the cast of Bad Girls. The ceremony goes wrong, and he comes back with blond hair, a permanent hunger, and a penchant for impersonating Gollum every few minutes. He can also jump tall buildings in one bound, fire electricity bolts from his hands and keeps going all X-ray; this is burning up his energy apparently. The Doctor confronts him, but is interrupted by a bunch of pensioners, who've tracked him down on behalf of Wilf, Donna Noble's grandfather. Wilf wants the Doctor to help as he and his fellow oldies have been having mysterious nightmares.

The Doctor is suspicious, wondering why he keeps bumping into Wilf and his granddaughter as if there's some unfinished business between them (oh, what a giveaway!). He tells Wilf that he's going to die, and that it's been predicted that '"He will knock four times". The Doctor thinks this is something to do with the Master and the four-beat drum pattern that in his insanity the Master insists he can hear in his head. The Doctor leaves Wilf, and catches up with the Master again, and during a telepathic link realises it's not insanity, there really is the sound of drums in his fellow Time Lord's head. Before this can be investigated, the Master is kidnapped by goons in a helicopter. The goons work for a billionaire Joshua Naismith. Naismith has a piece of alien technology, the Immortality Gate, which he acquired from the ruins of Torchwood Canary Wharf after the Dalek Cyberman battle. He believes it will help his daughter live for ever. The gate is powered by a nuclear device which needs a operator in one of two paired radiation-shielded cubicles to operate it at all times, and that person can only exit one cubicle if someone enters the other one, one in, one out. This is explained in detail, so who knows if it might turn out to be relevant later on, what do you think? Anyway, the Master agrees to help and starts to repair the gate.

The Doctor meanwhile has tracked the Master to Naismith's mansion with Wilf's help. He and Wilf run into two of Naismith's technical team, who turn out to be disguised Vinvocci, green spiky faced aliens, who want to salvage the gate. They tell the Doctor it is a medical device for healing whole planets by sending a corrected body template that overwrites the current form of anyone on the planet. The Doctor rushes to stop things, but he's too late: the signal is sent and it turns everyone on the planet into the Master. This explains the nightmares they've been having, it was the Master in their heads (actually it doesn't explain anything really, as the nightmares were happening before the Master was resurrected, but it probably "echoed back in time" or something; things echo back in time a lot in Russell T Davies scripts). The only people immune are the Doctor and the Vinvocci, as they're not human, Donna who isn't fully human anymore after she became part Time Lord, and Wilf, who the Doctor puts in one of the radiation cubicles to screen him. Donna, chased by multiple Masters, starts to remember her adventures in the TARDIS, but a defence mechanism the Doctor put in her head knocks her out and zaps anyone in the vicinity. The other four hide out on the Vinvocci's spacecraft in orbit.

Meanwhile, the Time Lords led by President Rassilon are stuck time-locked on Gallifrey during the last day of the Time War, with the planet surrounded by Daleks. They realise they can create an escape route by manipulating the past of a Time Lord known to exist beyond the time lock: the Master. They put the repeated drum noise in the Master's head when he is young, and use it as a bridgehead to send a physical object (a Gallifreyan diamond) through time and space to Earth. The Master connects the diamond up to his machinery and sends a signal back to Gallifrey to guide them to Earth. The Doctor pilots the Vinvocci ship to England with Wilf manning laser cannons to destroy the Master's incoming missiles. The Doctor leaps out of the ship from high up in the atmosphere, and plummets smashing through the glass domed roof of the Naismith mansion, battered and bruised but still going. The Master is planning to use the Gate to make all the Time Lords into him just as he's done to the humans, but Rassilon puts a stop to that immediately, returning the humans to normal. Then, the planet Gallifrey itself appears next to Earth plunging the planet into chaos, and all the humans in Naismith's mansion flee.

Rassilon plans to destroy the entire universe, unravelling time, space and causality, until only the Time Lords are left, existing as creatures of pure consciousness. The situation is so desperate that it seems the Doctor will shoot one or both of the Master and Rassilon, but instead he destroys the machine sending the signal, returning Gallifrey back to the Time War. Before Rassllon can kill the Doctor in retaliation, the Master laser bolts the Time Lord president, angry at what has been done to him, and he disappears along with with the other Time Lords. The Doctor thinks for a moment that he's cheated death, but then he hears four quiet knocks on glass. It's Wilf, who got into one of the radiation-shielded cubicles to free a technician when everyone was panicking and fleeing. The reactor is going critical. The Doctor goes into the other cubicle, freeing Wilf, and absorbs all the radiation as it floods in.

He doesn't regenerate at first, though, and goes on a farewell tour / victory lap visiting old companions and tying up loose ends from previous stories. Finally, after he visits Rose Tyler on January 1st of 2005 (the year when she'll later meet him for the first time in his Christopher Eccleston incarnation), he sees an Ood again in the snow, who sings him to his rest. The Doctor has an explosive regeneration in the TARDIS in flight, and turns into Matt Smith just as his ship is crashing back down to Earth. Geronimo!

Context:

Watched from the Blu-rays in the Doctor Who The Complete Specials box set, the first Doctor Blu-ray purchase I ever made. Irritatingly, the two parts are on separate discs, so you can't watch them as one - long - continuous piece without getting up and switching the disc over. This didn't matter too much this time, as the family watched these on two consecutive Sundays, allowing a week before the cliffhanger was resolved (as per the original broadcast). The whole lot of us (me, the Better Half, boys of 13 and 10, girl of 7) watched both episodes, everyone enjoying it enormously.

First time round:

I can't believe it's been almost 10 years since David Tennant bowed out as Doctor Who. December 2009 saw snow everywhere across the UK, as I remember it, though it didn't quite last to the big day to make it a White Christmas. David Tennant was featured in every festive BBC1 ident, mucking about with reindeer and whatnot; it was if Doctor Who had taken over all Yuletide telly. Curious then that the story isn't really Christmassy at all. It's set at Christmas, but there's nothing thematically to link it to that period. You could easily erase the dozen or so references in the script (mostly in the first part, which aired on Christmas day 2009 - the second part, which aired on New Year's Day 2010 forgets all about it, having only one brief mention of Christmas in its hour-plus running time); it could therefore be transplanted to take place at any of time of the year without changing its shape at all.

Reaction:

Or could it? The End of Time is most definitely Christmassy in one way: it's as bloated and stuffed full of different flavours - sweet, savoury, rich, boozy - as the grossest gourmand's festive repast; it's also full of bright coloured tinsel and baubles, maybe some of them a little garish, that don't need to compliment each other too much, because it is Christmas after all. Doctor Who festive specials get a little leeway with regards to indulgence, as do the final stories of any Doctor's era, as do those that see a long-running production team waving goodbye. This story meets all three of those criteria, so the scope for excess is large, and the various call backs and plot tidy-ups and in-jokes multiply each other exponentially. Whether you can enjoy such a multi-ingredient pudding depends entirely on how much love you have for the actor and the behind-the scenes team exiting the stage. I adore David Tennant and the writing of Russell T Davies, but - in places - The End of Time might be just a little bit too much even for me.

The story pulls together plot threads from many previous shows; before the first episode was even finished, I'd noted down references to events in The Sound of Drums, Last of the Time Lords, Planet of the Ood, The Waters of Mars, Planet of the Dead, Journey's End, Doomsday, The Runaway Bride, The Sontaran Stratagem, and The Stolen Earth before giving up and setting aside my pen; there are many many more, particularly in the 'victory lap' section where Tennant visits every regular character of the previous four years. I'm sure a lot of viewers had had enough by that point, and I could understand why to an extent. I remember once reading a Doctor Who writer, maybe it was Gareth Roberts, describing Colin Baker's era - which I see, having just watched part of Trial of a Time Lord with it's scheming people in ridiculous headdresses, bears a lot of similarities to The End of Time - as becoming so gummed up with the series' own history and continuity, it was as unhealthy as the floor of a comic books store. But on first watch, and indeed on every watch up to this latest one, whenever I've started to feel that The End of Time was getting like that, there would quickly be a great scene with Bernard Cribbins, and my faith would be restored.

Cribbins' performance as Wilf, and his interplay with David Tennant, is far and away the best thing about this story. Tennant certainly doesn't slouch through it, but I think it's fair to say that all of his greatest work in the show's lead role is in earlier stories, and this is more an Elvis in Vegas greatest hits package than anything startlingly new (with the exception of maybe a couple of brief moments, one of which I'll cover later). There are so many notable Wilf / Doctor scenes, all of them magnificent in their quietude amidst the noise: the scene in the cafe, Wilfred in space, watching the sun rise over planet Earth, his reminiscences of his national service (based on Cribbins' personal history); best of all, there is the scene in the second episode where Wilf is offering the Doctor a gun to defend himself, and his voice cracks "Please don't die - you're the most wonderful man and I don't want you to die", and after that emotional climax the scene builds even further as - when the Doctor realises it's Time Lords that he's facing, he takes the gun after all. Magic. Although Cribbins is an ever dependable presence, it was still something of a gamble to cast him in such a key serial as the primary companion - a role normally played by someone much younger, and usually female. It pays off here, bringing a new dynamic into play.

Davies, as can be read in more detail in the collected correspondence of Doctor Who: The Writer's Tale: The Final Chapter by Davies and Benjamin Cook, struggled with what was the correct ending for Tennant's Doctor - giving up his life to save the universe, or to save just one individual. He in the end decided - much in the spirit of The End of Time's everything but the kitchen sink approach - to do both. That the individual is wonderful cuddly Wilf, and his brave action in saving someone else has spelt the Doctor's doom, is a beautiful irony.  Perhaps mindful of breaking up the sentimentality of the moment (particularly as he's going to up the sentimentality to great heights elsewhere), Davies has the Doctor initially kick against this fate, with a magnificently petulant speech, moaning about how life isn't fair. This is a very interesting choice, and one of the few moments I referred to earlier where Tennant gets to deliver something different and new - he isn't quite the perfect hero, but does what he has to anyway. It works, just about, because he wearily realises he's being a dick before too long, with the quiet line: "I've lived too long".

The saving the universe bits aren't quite so successful. Timothy Dalton is a good villain, though he - like much else in the story - is turning up his performance to way beyond 11 (see the spittle flecks leaping out of him during the speech at the end of the first episode). John Simm's final act of aggression, turning on the Time Lords as he - and we - realise that he has been made into a monster ties up his plot very efficiently, and probably explains why it was necessary to leave a lengthy gap before the character, and the actor, could return. The supervillain stuff - turning into a skeleton,  jumping high, firing energy bolts - is not so successful, either in terms of the quality of the effects work or the sense of it within the logic or emotion of the script. The bizarre black magic rituals used to bring him back from the dead are probably best forgotten altogether. Turning everyone in the world into John Simm, though, is such a wonderful idea, a wonderful visual and perfectly realised, that I can forgive any other missteps for the character. Getting a lovely groan-worthy Cracker level joke out of it ("There is no human race, there is only the Master race!"), is just the icing on the Christmas cake.

I don't mind the 20 minute victory lap section at the end, particularly on this watch. At the time, it was somewhat undercut by there having been a big reunion of most of these characters only a few months earlier (in The Stolen Earth / Journey's End - the two-part finale of Tennant's last full season), but watched in isolation, it feels warranted as the story marked the end of a significant era. If I was to cut anything, it wouldn't be that. The subplot of the mysterious woman appearing to Wilf (Claire Bloom), who may or may not be the Doctor's Mum, doesn't work particularly well for me, breaks the rules set up in the drama (nothing can escape Time War Gallifrey except through the Master's drumbeat signal), and doesn't have a proper resolution. As atmospheric as some of those bits are, I'd cut them all out. I'd also cut back on some of the messiness of the Master plot: the subplot with President Obama's international address, the homeless Master eating everything in a scary way, even the Naismiths - none of it really adds much. A bit more discipline there might have made for a less indulgent running time, and therefore the final few minutes wouldn't feel like they're it dragging out too long.

Connectivity: 

Time Lords, Time Lords, Time Lords! The robes, the collars, the portentous speeches, the treachery... plus, both stories include green aliens interested in making profit from salvage, and the main bad guy's mind being transferred into multiple other bodies. 

Deeper Thoughts:

The cents and pennies of an ending. A number of Doctor Who stories I've covered for the blog of late have backed up a theory that a lot of fans and commentators have - Doctor Who finds endings much more difficult than beginnings. This isn't surprising, really, as endings are in general difficult for everyone; I remember reading someone - maybe William Goldman - hitting the nail on the head by saying that endings need to be both inevitable and surprising. That's a hell of a trick to pull off. Another way of explaining the inevitability dimension is that a successful ending must be of a continuous piece with the drama that proceeds it, it can't be 'tacked on'; it isn't just a jarring change of story logic that can make something feel tacked on, a reduction in production values towards the end can do it too. Classic Doctor Who is particularly susceptible to this - the money has a tendency to run out, so even rather lavish productions such as the recently reviewed The Web of Fear end up with people standing about having tiny static squabbles in the studio to resolve what earlier has been played out on a much larger filmic canvas. Frontios - though it didn't have such budget or scale - has some grandiloquent speechifying at the start, with characters facing off in a satisfyingly theatrical manner, but still ends up with minor fisticuffs against clumsy monsters. For an ending that has no budget pressure, but seems to come from nowhere in a story logic way, then I don't think one needs to look much further than a frog on a dining room chair. 

Beginnings are much easier for Who, as the show tends to use mystery and intrigue, which are much cheaper to deploy than conflict and spectacle - a POV shot here, a glimpse of a claw there, shadows. This can be dangerous, though, as it sets up a debt that eventually should be paid back to the viewer, lest they feel short-changed. Sooner or later, there must be a reveal or at the very least explanation of what all the mystery and intrigue were about. If it's a giant woodlouse with the power to control gravity, then you're in trouble. The stories where explanations are not forthcoming - Midnight, say - are notable for being few and far between. Another where there are no immediate explanations, and also covered recently, is Mindwarp. Its ending is inevitable and surprising for the four episodes it rounds off, but unfortunately that's only episode 8 of 14. Sooner or later, there had to be some payback to the viewer about the truth of the Matrix evidence. Once that was delivered, Mindwarp's ending didn't fit within the wider piece, not really for reasons of story logic, but more of tone. Trial has a happy ending, and to have left Mindwarp's original ending unchanged would have been too bleak.  So, alas, the most dramatic thing to happen in fourteen weeks didn't happen at all. The Curse of Fenric has a similar issue, the ending is perfectly inevitable and surprising (Ace is one of Fenric's wolves as she - unknown to her - comes from the cursed area too) and the tone is right. But the efforts to fit this within the wider narrative of a long-running character arc are clearly tacked on (what exactly does the chess set in Lady Peinforte's study have to do with anything?!).

The End of Time has a different issue, and one it has in common with a lot of dramatic works of recent years. It has too many endings, and the cumulative effect is undermining. They're not really endings, of course, more resolution scenes after the plot climax has been reached. In its efforts to tie up years of story, it throws everything at the viewer and some of it is going to disappoint. Martha and Mickey are happily married and still fighting the good fight: yep I can just about buy that though it doesn't feel that inevitable for either character, as they'd not really met when we last saw them; Jack is sad what with living forever and everyone around him dying, but hooking him up with a hot guy will sort that out. Hmm, really? Donna was a better person when her horizons were expanded by travel, but she has lost all that, so she gets some material wealth in the form of a winning lottery ticket. Does that work? It could do, but I'm invested in the character enough that I'd like more certainty. That's key: if I'm invested in the characters, I'll forgive all this (and I did). If I'm not, as I wasn't particularly when watching The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King in the cinema, for example, with it's forty-seven resolution scenes dragging out an already bum-numbing running time towards eternity, then I'm less forgiving.

This is a modern malaise. It was definitely William Goldman who wrote - quoting his frequent collaborator George Roy Hill - "If you can’t tell your story in an hour fifty, you better be David Lean.” But that was referring to film-making in the 1970s; major releases now regularly breach the two and a half hour mark, let alone show 1 hour 50's worth of discipline. To pick a couple of random recent examples, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is 2 hours 40, and much as I love some of his work Tarantino is no David Lean. 'It - Part 2' is 2 hours 49 - two hours and forty-nine minutes!!!! And it is already the second part of a book adaptation divided into two films. Nobody can edit anymore, so if the films are expanding and audiences are forgiving, why not let the resolution scenes expand too. The film has effectively finished, but we can have five scenes tying up loose ends, why not? Well, because any decent script should be structured not to leave so many loose ends, or at least not to be too worried about them at the end. The best wrap-up of a film I've ever seen is North by Northwest. Hitchcock manages to save his protagonist and romantic interest character and marry them off in one cut and twenty seconds of footage, and he still finds time for a very naughty visual pun. I recommend it, and I hope modern directors can someday soon find some of the same economy of storytelling.

In Summary:

Overstuffed, yes, but it's no turkey!

Mindwarp

Chapter The 133rd, which features lots of people just watching stuff on a big screen.

Plot:

The Doctor is on trial for his life. He has been taken out of time by the Time Lords to face charges of meddling in the affairs of other planets, conduct unbecoming a Time Lord, and wearing a really terrible outfit (they have him bang to rights on the last one). Prosecutor the Valeyard presents a Matrix recording of events from around the period when the Doctor was taken out of time; the problem is, the Doctor can't remember any of these events very clearly. He and Peri had landed on Thoros Beta, home world of Sil and his kind, the Mentors. Crozier, a scientist working for the Mentors' leader Lord Kiv, is doing experiments in brain alteration. Also, they are holding captive a warrior king, Yrcanos, who SHOUTS a LOT BECAUSE he's PLAYED by BRIAN BLESSED!!! On the Matrix screen, the Time Lords in the trial room witness the Doctor being plugged into Crozier's mind-warping machine, and from then on he starts to behave out of character, siding with the bad guys, and turning against Peri and Yrcanos.

Is the evidence presented being falsified by the Valeyard? Did the Doctor's brain get scrambled by Crozier's machine? Is he pretending to be bad, just to outwit Sil and Kiv? Nobody knows. (Seriously, nobody does, to this day - it's not made clear to viewer, and the writer and script editor never really made up their mind.) Whatever caused it, the Doctor's behaviour changes back to normal towards the end, and he races to save Peri from having the Lord Kiv's mind transplanted into her body. He doesn't get there in time, though, as that's the moment the Time Lords choose to scoop him up and drag him off to the trial. Instead, Yrcanos arrives, but he's also too late - Peri's consciousness is gone, and Kiv inhabits her body. Yrcanos, who wanted to get married to Peri when all this was over, as improbable as that might seem, kills Kiv/Peri in a fit of rage - these events all being manipulated remotely by the Time Lords in order to destroy Crozier's research, as it would have had far-reaching consequences for the universe. This is a hell of an example of extrajudicial "meddling in the affairs of other planets", but the Doctor is too stunned by the death of Peri on-screen to make the point in his defence. The trial continues...

Context:

I have finished my first full season of Doctor Who for the blog! Obviously, if one watches Doctor in order from the beginning, this is not such a big deal; but when jumping about randomly, it's a reasonably important milestone. I have been blogging Season 23 AKA The Trial of a Time Lord since 2015, when I covered the finale story, The Ultimate Foe. Then, a few years later in 2018, Terror of the Vervoids and The Mysterious Planet came along within a few months of one another. Nicely, I did them all in completely the wrong order. The whole season is coming out soon on Blu-ray, the next in a series of very nice box sets that I have tried, with decreasing fortitude, to resist the temptation of buying. Needless to say, season 23, for which I have a particular soft spot, is pre-ordered! As with all the box sets so far, a story was chosen for a screening at the BFI to tie in. Luckily, it was the only one of the four that I hadn't blogged. I attended with all the friends that I have watched these BFI screenings with before over the last few years - David, Trevor and Chris -  the first time we've all four been able to attend at the same time for a while.  More details of the screening below...

First time round:

Every time I look back to the 1980s and watching Doctor Who, I see more and more ineptitude on my part regarding the operation of video recorders. Was it really that difficult? If I want to record something now, I just click a box on the screen display of an electronic programme guide, and forget about it. I hardly ever want to, though, and that's the clue. I record The Great British Bake Off for the family so that they don't have to deal with adverts using channel 4's catch-up service (you can skip them if you record it with the PVR). That's it. If anything else is on, even Doctor Who, I don't have to be that bothered: It Takes You Way, as demonstrated when I covered it for the blog last time, is still available on the BBC iPlayer nearly a year after it was broadcast. It's only possible to miss something these days if you try very hard. (An aside on that topic: it describes perfectly the Better Half's attitude to Russell T Davies's Years and Years - she cannot bring herself to watch it - far too traumatising - so she's running out the clock until it disappears from availability.)

In 1986, taping Trial of a Time Lord, the first story broadcast after my family obtained their own VCR, I very much was bothered. The episodes were unlikely ever to be repeated again, and the idea of the whole of the existing Doctor Who TV canon being released on VHS to buy was a pipe dream at the time. Maybe the urgency caused the ineptitude, but that first E180 tape on which I collected all the episodes of Trial was blemished early on. I somehow cut off the last minute and a bit of episode 5 (Mindwarp's episode 1). I remember - and, yes, I am ashamed at the obsessiveness of this - watching back and timing the length of the recaps of episodes 2,3 and 4 and taking an average, to see how much I was likely not to see the following week. Luckily, the recap on episode 6 (Mindwarp's episode 2) was on the lengthy side, I missed only a few seconds of dialogue, and could follow what was going on. That's how much it mattered to me. Familiarity breeds contempt, it's said, but maybe availability does too. Once everything can be gained at the touch of a button, is anything special? Or maybe this is the smokescreen of an old duffer, excusing why he couldn't bloody program the video. Anyway, the rest of the story was taped without incident, and then watched and re-watched over the next few years. I caught up with those missing few seconds in 1993, when the whole of the Trial season was released in a tin shaped like the TARDIS for some unknown reason.

Reaction:

The BFI showed the Blu-ray extended cuts of all four episodes of Mindwarp, with the first two episodes in 5:1 surround, but the last two only in stereo because of a fault that occurred halfway through. The sound and music were excellent throughout, but the visual quality of the initial scenes of the first episode was a little off to my eyes, fuzzy rather than pin sharp. This may have been something to do with the projection at the BFI, though, so I will be interested to see how it looks on a smaller screen at home. Starting with the few differences: most of the episodes have additional scenes, often ones in the Trial room: nothing earth-shattering, but it'll be nice to have them to view as an alternative. These versions aren't all about re-inserting cut material, though; as Mark Ayres explained on the day, the second 'extended' episode of Mindwarp is actually shorter than the broadcast version by two seconds: the discrepancy is caused by a different take being used for the scene of Yrcanos trashing the laboratory. Additionally, the incidental music has been re-recorded from scratch, as well as remixed, as it was the only post 1980-score that didn't exist as a separate recording. It's very faithful to the original, but I could definitely tell the difference (I'm a very big fan of this score, so know it quite well).

The story is a little slow to get going; the wash-up from the previous four-episode segment goes on too long, when one just wants the new plot to get underway. This four-parter integrates the overarching structure better than any of the others in the season, creating some moments of actual drama and intrigue in the trial room regarding the veracity or otherwise of the evidence being presented; it still, though, feels like it interrupts the flow of the Thoros Beta plot too often. This is the major flaw of the trial structure - it just gets in the way, and not just to insert any old innocuous scenes, but scenes where the viewer is told repeatedly that their hero is bad. Thank goodness then that the early material of the Doctor and Peri is so good, Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant playing their relationship with warmth and humour. It's just a shame that they only have an episode together before the plot separates them. Putting aside the unreliable narrator stuff that we only find out about fully later, and taking the scenes as presented, the last interaction they have is the Doctor torturing Peri. She then, almost despite herself, stops Yrcanos from killing him, and the Doctor flees, never to see her again. It's not the ending the two actors deserved, though Nicola's final scenes, and striking performance, are a great gift for her to play. I can't really criticise the decision to have the Doctor appearing to turn traitor, it does create the engine that propels the narrative, but someone should have decided what was the true version of events. As it was, it got left to the actors to find some sort of sense to proceedings, and the audience to make up their own minds about what was real and what wasn't.

Director Ron Jones continues his renaissance; after having started with some clunkers, his last two stories before this, Frontios and Vengeance on Varos, were good, and this surpasses them to my mind.  A diverse and interesting cast, all giving good performances, great sets and - a rarity on this era of Doctor Who - sympathetic lighting. I'd remembered the story's tonal shifts being a bit more jarring, but on this watch it seemed much more smooth. I'd recalled it veering from comic to dramatic all the way through. Watching with an audience, though, always highlights more comedy in a piece than one might notice when watching alone or in a smaller group at home. The laughs elicited from the BFI crowd by the blackly comic dialogue started early on, and they are all intentional. It doesn't veer at all, it's a black comedy from the very start ("Dirty old warlord", "I think it winked at Peri" "The skedaddle test"), with an ending that drops into dramatic territory, but that still finds time for funny lines until very close to the end (Sil's line during the tense final scenes  "If only you could have found a more attractive one" is expertly delivered by Nabil Shaban and got the biggest laugh of the day, but it's only seconds before Peri gets obliterated).

It is a real ensemble piece. Patrick Ryecart's restrained amoral villainy is very cool, and he's ace at deploying a withering look. Christopher Ryan and Nabil Shaban are excellent as the two chief Mentors; they inhabit their suits well, disappearing into the characters to the point where you forget they are acting at all. Bigger than all of them, though, bigger and louder than anyone or anything else is Brian Blessed. There is nothing small about the performance, but would anyone want it any other way?  The first episode, which his character spends lying on a bench, is good enough, but the energy rises up once Yrcanos does, and thereafter the narrative rushes to keep up with Blessed's insanely OTT creation as he rips through the scenes and devours the scenery. If you need someone to match Colin Baker for bombast, who else are you going to call? That this very powerful character doesn't sideline the regulars in any way, unlike what happened in some earlier Colin Baker stories, is testament to a nice balance achieved in Philip Martin's script - everyone gets a chance to shine.

Towards the end of the screening, I stopped taking notes as I was just getting caught up in the action; but one aspect of the ending proved problematic for me on this watch. The Inquisitor takes over the 'narration' during the scenes of Yrcanos caught in a bubble of time, being manoeuvred to kill Peri. It works dramatically - it has much more force coming from the supposedly neutral arbiter rather than the villainous Valeyard - but how does she know all this stuff? It's the Valeyard's presentation to her, and - we later find out - the bits she's reporting on never actually happened. So, who told her they did, to the extent that she could talk of them with such authority? The corrupt high council that's framing the Doctor perhaps? But, then, isn't she showing signs of prejudicial insight into the wider politics of what's going on by admitting it? Why not leave all the explaining to the Valeyard, as it's got to be less suspicious coming from him, being his evidence and all? And isn't she later revealed to be a goodie, and not involved in any of the plotting anyway? Like most of Mindwarp, we'll never know the exact truth.

Connectivity: 

It Takes You Away's Ribbons, a blackly comic grotesque, with an acquisitive nature and odd speech patterns, is not a million miles away from the character of Sil in Mindwarp. Additionally, both stories have at least one character forcibly removed from a space/time location by powerful forces. 

Deeper Thoughts:

 Matrix evidence for the Prosecution: BFI Mindwarp Screening and Q&A, 14th September 2019. It was a very pleasant September day, with the sun shining down as I made my way across the bridge from Embankment and walked along past the Royal Festival Hall. There followed a pleasant brunch in the BFI café bar with my fellow fans; the usual group of us has got larger, as we're regularly meeting up at these events with Dave and Tim too, lovely people and Doctor Who production royalty too, having worked on the show for many years of the post-2005 run. After rushing to get the waiter's attention to fetch the bill just in time to get our seats, the four hours of entertainment began. I am amazed at the love and care that goes into these events, making them very good value for money - you wouldn't get a 4-hour matinee for 15 quid anywhere else in London. In fact, my brunch came to just about as much as my ticket.

As our hosts Justin Johnson and Dick Fiddy walked on to stage, I took a glance around to check for anyone recognisable: Steve Ricks was in the same row as us, wearing his immaculate replica Sixth Doctor costume, and I spotted about four other people who were cosplaying old Sixie elsewhere; plus, I spotted Mark Ayres, Nev Fountain and Nicola Bryant nearby too. Justin introduced this as a celebration of Trial of a Time Lord, and it was indeed a wonderfully good-natured and positive event throughout. Things kicked off with a minute's applause for the late, great Terrance Dicks, followed by the usual quiz, with giveaways and many Dick jokes. The first two episodes were then shown.

L to R: Fiddy, Hartley, Ayres

After these, the first mini-panel concentrated on sound, with composer of Mindwarp's incidentals Richard Hartley, and composer, remixer, sound guy for the Blu-ray range and all-round maestro Mark Ayres interviewed by Dick. Richard reminisced about his first chat with 80s Who producer John Nathan-Turner, in JNT's office, which was camp and 'just like a set'. Richard was a great friend of 60s Who producer Verity Lambert, who laughed when she found out what he was working on, and told him horror stories about how difficult it had been to get the show off the ground in the early days. He'd taken the gig initially so he could record in the BBC's studio in Maida Vale, but then didn't get to use it (probably as Who was not thought of well enough to book the prestige places back then). Mark had approached Richard recently to see if he could re-record the music. The written scores still existed in the archives, so Mark dug them out, and Richard sourced the original equipment and sounds, trying to avoid the temptation to improve things. In the end, it probably took four times as long as it did originally, as "the BBC were very mean" back then, and only allowed him a week to write, and two days to record. This work allows all 14 episodes of the Trial season - and the extended versions of each of those 14 - to have 5.1 surround remixes. The box set also includes edits of the four Terror of the Vervoids episodes with the trial framing device removed, and these are also in 5.1. Mark, somewhat wearily, remarked that what had started off seeming like an easy job had ballooned, as in the end he remastered 32 episodes rather than 14.

L to R: Johnston, West

The plan was for the final two episodes to be shown next, but a few minutes in the picture froze. They've finally shut Brian Blessed up! They tried again, but then the audio sounded like it was emanating from underwater. They've finally made Brian Blessed quiet! While technical trouble-shooting ensued, Justin did an impromptu interview with Russell West, the actor that played the Raak (a top-heavy sea monster) in the first episode of the story, who was invited up from the audience. This was the most fun moment of the day for me, as West was so witty and energetic, and it's not someone who even a die-hard fan was likely to have seen interviewed before. He explained that he had a single day's rehearsal with the rest of the cast, he particularly enjoyed working with Nicola (who wouldn't?), that the costume was heavy but very fragile, and once he was down, it took three people to lift him up again. Best of all, he said, responding to the running gags thus far from anyone on stage about Brian Blessed's 'subtle' performance, that it really was toned down compared to what he did in rehearsals. The mind boggles. Reportedly, there was frequently a torrent of filth emanating from the booming bearded one, and he once introduced himself with "I'm Brian Blessed and I'll **** anything that moves!!!!". Lovely.

L to R: Johnston, Newman

The technical fault still continuing, Justin invited Phil Newman onto the stage, who unveiled another special guest - Lord Kiv. Phil had obtained the original foam latex costume at auction, and even got to wear it in Dimensions in Time, an anniversary skit from 1993 which involved a Doctor Who / Eastenders crossover and lots of old villains portrayed by costumed fans - "It's canon!" as Phil rightly exclaimed. The malleable Mentor stayed on stage  - Dick Fiddy remarked that he'd had a few people on that stage over the years that were harder to interview - as the remaining two episodes finally got going. Once the story was finished, there were some sneak peeks at some of the Value Added Material on the Blu-ray box set: the trailer starring Colin and Nicola, some very funny outtakes, Toby Hadoke getting to front a cookery show in documentary The Doctor Who Cookbook Revisited, and some clips of the latest Behind The Sofa edition, doing a Gogglebox on the Trial episodes. It all looks glorious.

The Lord Kiv

The main panel was next, with Doctor and companion actors Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant being their usual funny, self-facing, talented selves. The opening question was on how they felt when they found out that Doctor Who was going on hiatus in 1985 (the eighteen month period before Trial of a Time Lord was shown, when Doctor Who was off the air). Nicola's surprising answer was that she was relieved, but that was only because she found out from a journalist calling her to ask about "the death of the Doctor". Thinking this meant that Colin had died, she slammed the phone down then rang round everyone she could think of in a panic until she got hold of someone who put her straight, hence the relief. Colin was told by John Nathan-Turner, who tried to make him feel better by telling him that he'd signed his contract for the following year, so would still get paid. His eldest daughter had just been born, so Colin treated it as if the BBC had given him a year's paid paternity leave. He still got a call, however, from the "BBC Department of Not Giving You Money" who said to him that, if he were to find any work, he should inform them so they could stop paying him. Colin's answer, based on his training as a lawyer, was to say "I can arrange to call you every day, and ask you if you're making Doctor Who today, and if you're not, I'll go and do what I want, how's that?".

Talking of then Controller of the BBC Michael Grade's decision to take Doctor Who off the air in 1985, Colin outlined that it wasn't a financial decision at all (a lot of work already done for the following year had to be abandoned at much cost), and Doctor Who was just one of a raft of old shows Grade binned, just because he didn't like them; interestingly, another one was Come Dancing - another show, like Doctor Who, that's returned to prime time in the 21st century. Colin also recounted an anecdote that Grade, who after making these sweeping changes with the flick of a pen went on a skiing holiday, found himself haring down a slope alongside a man who turned to him and said "Oi, Michael Grade, I'm from the Sun - why do you want to kill Doctor 'Oo?". Both Nicola and Colin were shielded from the worst of the falling out between John Nathan-Turner and script editor Eric Saward; Colin knew they weren't getting on, but massively underestimated the size of the rift. Colin still seems a little bit miffed by Eric's comments (in an interview after he quit his job during the making of Trial when that rift went beyond mending) about disapproving of the casting and performances of Colin. From the comments Colin made, it seemed like Eric had been seen as a close colleague before that, invited to Colin's house and so on. Later, when asked about Slipback, a Saward-scripted radio Doctor Who story put on during the hiatus, Colin said "I'm so glad you asked me about that, I can't remember a thing about it". He did though have an inkling who wrote it: "Maybe that's why I elided it?!"

Nicola and Colin appear to be still very much the close-knit team after all these years; the only time they disagreed was talking about the very expensive opening model shot of the series. Colin thought it was a waste of money, and could have been replaced with a dialogue exchange along the lines of "Where am I?" "You're on a big space station". Nicola did not seem convinced by this: "It was state of the art" she said, and Colin replied without a beat, "So were we". They explained that the softening of the relationship of their screen alter-egos was down to the two of them; the script had the same hostile bickering as per the previous season. (Colin's theory was that incoming writers are mostly only interested in developing their own characters, so just look back at previous scripts or episodes to see what the regulars are like, and cut and paste that in to their scripts.) The two of them decided to play it as if their characters had got over all that, and were now gently joshing one another from a baseline of friendship and affection. After the first take doing it that way, they expected the director to tell them to go again, as it was supposed to be played as an argument, but that never happened. It breaks my heart that they didn't try this much earlier on. It was also revealed to be Colin's fault that Peri ended up "married to Brian Blessed". He had rationalised the Doctor's behaviour in Mindwarp the only way he could, that most of it didn't happen, but then asked the production team what had really happened to Peri if that was the case. The line added to the Trial finale marrying Peri off to Yrcanos was the hasty addition that resulted from that chat.

The Q&A turned at one point, inevitably, to Colin's sacking (after Trial, he was told that his services were no longer required). He retold the tale of being bold and insisting on seeing head of drama Jonathan Powell once he was told the news, and in that meeting Powell telling him that it was nothing about him or his performance per se, it was just that it was generally thought best to change the lead actor every three years. He was offered four episodes more at the start of the following year's batch, but Colin - wary of committing himself for months before getting only a small amount of work - asked for one more full year and then he'd bow out. Both men left the interview saying they'd think about it, and Colin never heard another thing, and hasn't seen Powell since. Colin said "I was being selfish in that moment, and I forgot about you" meaning the fans in the audience. He felt he had so much more to offer (and he was right). "Thank God for Big Finish" he added. The Radio Times picked up on the selfish line in a rather unfair online headline the following day, but I don't think anyone in the audience that day begrudged Colin thinking about his career in that moment.

One final Brian Blessed story to end on. Colin bemoaned the sort of thing he would get into trouble for in the studio, but which Brian seemed to get away with: it was nearing 10 'o clock on one shooting day, the time in the evening when recording stopped, and there was one scene to get in the can. Colin and Brian had to walk round a corner, and then Brian was to deliver the line "Right, let's find the Mentors". Brian could not remember the word 'Mentors' when it came to it. Mindful of some youngsters in the room, Colin let us imagine that the second most rude word in the English language was 'red', and the most rude one was 'blue'. What Brian ended up saying was "RIGHT, LET'S GET THE RED-ING BLUE-A-RONS!!" Wearily, as the clock struck ten, the production manager said, "Ok, we'll have to get that one tomorrow then".

In Summary:

This story is massively undervalued to my mind, and everyone should give it a re-watch when it comes out on Blu-ray. In other words: Let's. Do. The. Mind. Warp. Again!

It Takes You Away

Chapter The 132nd, which is as mad as a universe of frogs.

Plot:

The Doctor, Graham, Ryan and Yaz arrive in Norway in 2018, and investigate an isolated cottage, where they find a young girl has been barricaded in, alone. This is Hanne, a blind teenager who believes her Dad, Erik, has been taken by a monster that roams outside at night. Investigating, the TARDIS team find a mirror in Hanne's home that is a portal to another world. Leaving Ryan to look after Hanne, the others go through the mirror and find a world of dark and scary caves populated with strange creatures. They meet one of these, the only one with a lantern, who is called Ribbons of the Seven Stomachs. He offers to take them to Hanne's Dad in exchange for payment, but is trying to trick them, then falls victim of his own trap and is devoured by flesh moths. Meanwhile, Ryan finds that there is no monster outside the cottage, it's just a loudspeaker playing a recording.

The Doctor, Graham and Yaz escape through another portal that leads them to a mirror world where Erik is living with Hanne's Mum, Trine - but Trine died quite a while ago. Erik had boarded up the cottage and left Hanne alone, with the monster recording to make her stay safely inside. But he can't find any way of bringing her Mum back into our world. Trine isn't the only dead person somehow still alive in this world: Grace is there too. The Doctor realises that they are in a reality created by an ancient consciousness called the Solitract, which is incompatible with our universe but wants to engage with us; it has created versions of Graham's and Erik's dead partners to keep them in the mirror world, but it is already unstable due to the incompatibility and is breaking apart. Graham realises that this isn't Grace, and - heart-breakingly - leaves her behind, but Erik still wants to stay. The Doctor offers herself so that the Solitract lets Erik go, and she makes friends with it. Even with only the Doctor in it, though, the worldscape is not sustainable, and the Solitract lets the Doctor go. Hearing what he's been through in the mirror world, Ryan calls Graham 'granddad' for the first time.

Context:

Towards the end of August, after a rather marvellous break in Majorca, the family headed home on an evening Easyjet flight. I'm ambivalent about the budget air travel revolution of recent years. For many reasons, including environmental ones, our family avoided such travel, holidaying only in the UK for a period of about 15 years; this led to some inventive and fun breaks. That banked a bit of carbon, I hope, to allow some travelling more widely of late: the Better Half and I thought it was time that the children got to experience other countries and cultures, and relatively inexpensive flights are a good way for them to do that, as long as it's not taken for granted, and treated with the necessary respect. The other thing that I like about the no frills approach is that - if you're cheapskates like me and my lot - you get to personalise your journey. I don't think we could order a dull sandwich and short stack of Pringles from the trolley anymore, when we can make our own packed lunch (we snacked on rolls with choritzo and local cheese, pastries and Spanish oranges on our journey back to London Gatwick). The same homespun approach can also be applied to the in-flight entertainment, of course, and I had prepared by downloading this story onto my phone using the BBC iplayer app, specifically for the journey home.

First time round:

Watched live on the BBC1 transmission last Autumn, with the whole family except my youngest (girl of 7 now, but who was 6 at the time) who had taken against the new series at the exact point that Tim Shaw revealed his true face, including its additional sets of teeth, to the nation. We have been able to tempt her back to watch the odd few episodes, but she's not watched this one as yet. It's unlikely that she'd get past the scary monster sounds coming from the woods at the start, which is a shame as she'd probably like the bit with the frog.

Reaction:

In the last blog post on The Web of Fear, I mentioned that Web’s distinct phases of plot fixed around ‘islands’ of set piece action seemed similar to an approach Stanley Kubrick was reported to take in constructing his screenplays and films. I can picture It Takes You Away patiently waiting for its turn before boldly saying “Hold my beer”. If ever a story has shifted through phases, abruptly changing genres every few minutes of its running time, it’s this one. As an illustration of this, try an exercise: watch the opening scene of four travellers investigating a mysterious cottage in the wilderness, then watch the climax scene with a time traveller talking to a frog on a chair in a white void, then imagine writing a plot to join up those two scenes. The beginning of the story, and its conversational title, promise a chilly modern Scandi horror, where the scenario will be depicted naturalistically and menace will be unseen except in glimpses. And so it indeed seems to be for a few scenes, but then a magic mirror is found, and the adventurers and the plot enter a completely different genre altogether.

Stepping through the mirror, we leave naturalism and restraint behind (you don’t hire Kevin Eldon for naturalism or restraint, after all). With dark mysterious caves, a glowing balloon-like lantern, flesh-eating moths and an avaricious goblin, we’re into full on surrealistic monster horror with more than a dash of Grand Guignol. It’s OTT, but it’s just as good in its new way as what went before, and Eldon’s performance as Ribbons is ripe but rewarding, if you can go with it. That’s probably the challenge of any piece that makes such jarring genre shifts – it either feels a little bit wrong-footing or just plain wrong, depending on the individual viewer.

It’s obviously intentional though, as it isn’t long before things shift again. Now, if you’ve been enjoying Eldon’s performance – as I was – it feels like he’s gone too soon, just as if you’re a real fan of the style of the early scenes, you’ll be annoyed that the monster in the woods is revealed to be fake so early on. With this story, you can’t dwell too long, as it’s moving fast – you just have to hold on tight and try to enjoy the ride. On the other side of the mirror, we’re into yet another style of story -  more sci-fi, chilly again and much less gothic fairy tale, plus there’s big dollop of Tarkovsky’s Solaris. The attention to detail of the mirror world, with backwards T-shirts and hair parted on the opposite side, is good, but the real reason we’re here is for the emotional plot – building on themes for the whole season. I’ll come back to that in a moment, because even that’s not the final phase.

At this point, the script does some inventive heavy lifting, dramatically tying all the disparate phases together, and swinging us off into a new direction: it’s all a honey trap, and they have to get out of there. The script also makes a quite abstruse concept easily digestible to the audience: it’s a sentient universe that is destructive but not malevolent - it’s a kid with chicken pox that just wants to play. This sets up that final sequence with Jodie Whittaker speaking to the aforementioned frog. It’s magnificently, operatically bonkers, and I mean that as a compliment. This is challenging material for Whittaker, and she makes it look easy. It shouldn't be taken for granted just because it doesn’t have the feels of what Bradley Walsh and Sharon D Clarke get to do elsewhere, it’s just as excellent: a quiet sorrow at having made a new friend, but now having to say goodbye (like a holiday romance after the Doctor’s trip to a new universe… or maybe that’s just me finding connections with the circumstances in which I watched it).

Going back to the Graham and Grace plot, and, well, look... I…  I’m not crying – you’re crying!  Maybe it was the circumstances of my viewing affecting me again. If you listen to Kermode and Mayo’s film review radio show / podcast, you’ll probably be familiar with AALS – Altitude Adjusted Lachrymosity Syndrome – that many listeners have reported over the years. Apparently, it may even be scientifically plausible: the theory is that one is more likely to blub watching drama when eight miles high. I don’t know if it’s true, but I can report that I did shed tears as Graham has to say goodbye to his dear departed all over again. Then, I shed a few more when the Graham and Ryan’s long-running arc was resolved as Ryan finally accepts Graham as his Granddad.

It’s a very clever script to cover all that and keep things coherent while still finding room to feature a resourceful but not perfect teenage character, played by a blind actor (Ellie Wallwork), satisfactorily round off the emotional plot between Hanne and her Dad, and also round off a small subplot of conflict between Ryan and Hanne too. This is probably the aspect I’d lose if I had to lose anything: it’s reminding us of Ryan’s issues with abandonment by his own father, but it doesn’t significantly add to proceedings. Some of the quirky Doctor dialogue early on, where she eats soil and talks about sheep, could be snipped out too, and I wouldn’t be bothered.

Connectivity: 

Apart from the Kubrickian style, there's more disembodied forces taking the form of humans, including a human who's already dead, and a touch more being stalked by unrelenting monsters in the Flesh Moths sequences.

Deeper Thoughts:

Balearic Story Beats. The family were in the S'Arenal area of Majorca in August. I took a lot of Doctor Who related entertainments with me this time. Not just It Takes You Away and The Web of Fear, but also the novelisations of Rose and City of Death. None of it was particularly linked to the holiday locale, but to find something that was connected was a pretty tough task: there have been no Doctor Who stories filmed in Majorca or any of the Balearic Islands. If I had wanted to override the random selection and pick something close to being apt, there are quite a few now that have been filmed in Spain or Spanish territories. The closest I suppose would be Planet of Fire, which was also filmed on an island - Lanzarote; in the new series, Kill The Moon and the Zygon Invasion / Inversion were also filmed in the Canaries. I have, though, already blogged two out of those three and I'm in no hurry to see Kill The Moon again (is anybody?!). Mainland Spain - which is geographically closer - was the location for The Two Doctors, but I wasn't really in the mood for that one either.

Without my really registering it, in recent years several more stories have been filmed in Spain: Asylum of the Daleks, A Town Called Mercy, Smile and Demons of the Punjab. The production of Doctor Who has got more and more international as this decade has gone on, and the makers of it clearly like to escape to the sun just like me and the family do. Would any of these count, though? It would be silly to visit Spain and watch Demons of the Punjab or A Town Called Mercy, as Spain is masquerading as India and America respectively. And the other two stories use very specific locations as alien planets; there's no sense of that particular place in the narrative. The best Doctor Who foreign locations, to be honest, are the few classic era stories that in their excitement at getting away from Blighty revelled in this and splashed the location all over the screen. Unfortunately, I blogged Arc of Infinity, City of Death and Planet of Fire pretty early on in the blog's life from no further away than my own living room, before this idea of immersive location blogging occurred to me. I am just going to have to go to Seville at some point, and watch The Two Doctors. Someone has to do it, I suppose!

Enthusiasts carry their fandom with them wherever they go, anyway; Doctor Who is never far behind whenever I travel. It isn't particularly connected to the region, except that I was drinking a very nice Spanish Red and listening to some ambient chill-out music when the thought occurred, but reading a novelisation of Rose in 2019 is the equivalent of reading a novelisation of The Web of Fear in 1982, when Peter Davison was the Doctor and I became a regular viewer for the first time: it has been an astonishing 14 years since the series returned. It's massively impressive that the post-2005 run has endured long enough to have distinct eras of its own: the Christopher Eccleston series seems a world away from the Jodie Whittaker run last year. With all those years of success banked, no wonder they get to gallivant around the globe these days, though I'm not holding my breath for a story set in Majorca or Ibiza, with zombie podium-dancing ravers or something, any time soon.

My chilled out holiday couldn't last forever, and having avoided much in the way of news while we were away, being back in the UK and catching up was a hell of a bump. I realised very quickly that I was going to have to learn how to pronounce the word 'prorogue'. (I'll always be more anti-rogue when it comes to the UK's current prime minister - do you get it? Oh, you've heard it... oh well!) The more horrible the world seems to get, the more I am thankful for a little escapism, so my advice is: carry your fandom with you, wherever you go.

In Summary:

One of the most successful stories, and certainly the most value - as it's four stories in one, really - of 2018.