The Savages

Chapter The 153rd, which captures the essence of Doctor Who, quite liderally, mate.

Plot:

The Doctor, Steven and Dodo arrive on a planet inhabited by a technologically advanced race, who are so superior they even know of the Doctor and have been tracking his adventures in time and space. They haven't been paying that much attention, though, as they should have realised the venerable time traveller would not look kindly on the dark secret of their society. Their skills and knowledge are bought at a price, and involve exploitation of an underclass, the so-called savages who live in the wilderness outside their city. Soldiers from the city capture savages to have their life essence drained from them, which is then injected into members of the elite populace. Steven and Dodo team up with the savages, while the Doctor is forced into the extraction process. His life force is injected into the lead elder of the city, Jano. He gets more than he bargained for, absorbing aspects of the Doctor's personality as well as his energy. With this new outlook, Jano helps the TARDIS team and the savages to smash the extraction equipment. Looking towards an uncertain future, and needing a neutral arbiter to help heal the divisions in their society, the combined populace of the planet ask Steven to stay on to lead them. Dodo and the Doctor bid him a sad farewell.

Context:

I'd decided to have a brief break from the blog, but it then occurred to me that - what with one thing or another - regular readers (Hi Mum!) may just believe I was unwell or worse. I am happy to report that this is not the case; myself and all the family are all still feeling well and showing no symptoms of the dreaded virus, on day 30+ of our lockdown experience. The break was instead because I was 'Whoed out' - I am still working my way through the recent Sylvester McCoy Blu-ray boxset (only have the final one of three separate versions of The Curse of Fenric to watch and then I'm done), and the three-disc The Faceless Ones animation. As well as that, I've watched with other fans on the internet for some - but by no means all, they're coming thick and fast - of the online tweet-a-longs of Doctor Who stories. All of them to date, though, have been for stories I have already covered for the blog. So, to prove I was still alive, I had to have another story to write about. It was a gift to get this one selected by the randomiser; it being one that is missing from the BBC's archives in visual form, I had to listen to it  - the version from the CD with narration from Peter Purves - which was a nice change of pace. 

First time round:

The stories that I first experienced in audio form never left as much of an impression as those I could see as well as hear. I have no strong memories of the first time I listened to The Savages, but I know that it was from the official BBC audio release, but it would have been November 2002 when it first came out, or shortly afterwards. Most likely I would have bought it in the Borders bookshop on the corner of the Churchill Square shopping mall in central Brighton, and listened to it on my discman once I got back home. Seems like a different age now, 2002. A decade or so after that, I saw the 'telesnaps' - offscreen photographs taken to record the production - published in a Doctor Who Magazine special, in picture book style. I remember The Savages being one story that I read in that format while also listening to the audio. Don't know why I chose it for that particular treatment, as I didn't make a habit of digesting missing stories in that way - my guess is that it was because I had no memory of the plot at all from first time round, so it seemed like the most fresh and interesting of the stories covered in that volume. Certainly, a key aspect of the story is visual: the difference between the riches of the elders, and the rags of those that they prey upon. This doesn't really land when all you get are the voices. 

Reaction:

This story is from a brief run that constitute the cusp between two very different eras of Doctor Who. It originated in the more thoughtful, ideas-led, and less action-adventure oriented era of the producer / script editor team of John Wiles and Donald Tosh, but was finally commissioned and made in the brasher, more crowd-pleasing and definitely more successful reign of Innes Lloyd and Gerry Davis. The production bears hallmarks of both teams. There is no monster, and the story forms a simple parable with historical and political themes about colonialism (the working title was The White Savages). Conversely, the story is kept simple, avoids too much speechifying, and progresses through the action sequences of chases and ray gun fights, culminating in the explosive destruction of the extraction laboratory. The new regime imprints itself in other ways too. This is the first story since the start of Doctor Who which dispenses with the individual episode titles - another decisive step towards the evolution of the show from being an adventure (singular) in time and space, visiting different places, times and genres every week, to being the series of multi-part big, scientifically informed monster shows into which Lloyd and Davis will eventually refashion it. The following story would see this evolution almost complete: The War Machines would bring in the ideas of the show's new scientific adviser Kit Pedler, and introduce more contemporary settings and companions.

As a necessity of that adjustment of the companion characters, this story features the first of Innes Lloyd's many abrupt writing out of regulars. It's not for another couple of years, with the departure of Debbie Watling as Victoria, that a cast change is properly integrated into the story and a beloved character gets a proper send off. Steven Taylor, one of my favourite companions on any era, perfectly played by Peter Purves, stays on to rule the planet at the end. He does at least get to do some action and heroics through the piece, and gets to lead, showing he's matured (though Purves always joked that Steven would turn out to be a tyrant after a little time had passed). But the ending still all seems to come out of nowhere in the last five minutes of the final episode. It's unfortunate that there are probably a couple of stories earlier in his time that would have been much better as swansongs, both because of the events of the stories themselves and because he was centre stage throughout to ease pressure on an ailing William Hartnell. In The Savages, though, it's all about the Doctor.

This is another subtle evolution of the show. In the second year of Doctor Who, the character of the Doctor had become more the hero, having started as a darker somewhat untrustworthy mentor character who assisted and sometimes complicated things for the true hero of season 1, Ian Chesterton. By the time of The Savages, this has developed so the Doctor is verging on turning from hero to superhero. In The Celestial Toymaker, two stories previously, we've seen the show's first super-villain, and for the first ever time found out from reported action of a previous tussle the Doctor has had with that super-villain we've not before been privy to, building up the mythical status of the Doctor's wanderings. He is fast becoming the righter of cosmic wrongs that he would continue to be ever after. This story goes a couple better. For a start, the elders are aware of the Doctor and awaiting his arrival like some expectant fan group ready for a personal appearance and autograph signing. Then later it makes a plot point of the Doctor's heroic character, giving Jano actor Freddie Jaeger a chance to do his best William Hartnell impression, showing that even just the idea of the Doctor can be as powerful as the Doctor himself - the show is eating its own aesthetic. It just about gets away with it here, but comes very close to self-parody.

Aside from these innovations and changes in the wider scheme of things, the story itself is pretty simple. It plays out in linear fashion with nary even a subplot. There's only the very sketchy star-crossed lovers scenes, where Nanina shows the soldier Exorse that her people are more than they seem, and he gradually comes round to her way of thinking. There's a hint of attraction, albeit downplayed almost to the point that you'd miss it, but I don't think it's enough to qualify as a romantic subplot. Aside from those brief distractions, what you have here is a straightforward tale, a through-line developing the fairly obvious set-up to its logical conclusion. Oddly, though, it never drags. The concept is just intriguing enough, and there are heroics and zap gun fights sufficient to nicely speed along the running time to its conclusion.

Connectivity: 

Both this story and Hide feature a misapprehension that characters are savage, when they are no such thing.

Deeper Thoughts:

But who are the real savages, eh, eh? Eh?!!!!! As noted above, The Savages is usually interpreted as a treatise on colonialism. This presumably means that the savages are supposed to be the native race on the (unnamed) planet, and the elders have come from elsewhere  - probably another planet rather than another continent - at some point, and taken over. This isn't spelled out, though. There's no dialogue about the elders coming from somewhere else, and there's none of the usual trappings of sci-fi colonial analogies, which Who did many, many times over the years. Jano and Co. should definitely be living in their original Mayflower-esque pioneer spaceship, if this story were to follow the template set by subsequent tales of a similar type in Doctor Who's long history. It's hard to tell from the surviving photos, but it looks very much like there's been some make-up applied to the city dwelling characters, which serves if not to black them up completely, to suggest a difference in skin tone between them and the savages outside the city. Even though they dropped the word 'White' from working title The White Savages, this still feels a little on the nose. Not as bad as the Star Trek episode Let That Be Your Last Battlefield (which has different races of characters with different halves of their faces daubed in charcoal or icing white greasepaint) but not far off.


Nobody in the usual Who commentariat seems troubled by this; certainly, it is remarked upon much less than The Talons of Weng Chiang's problematical make-up job. I don't think this is forgiven because of any right-on themes of the story, mind, I just think it's because the moving pictures are now lost to history, so no one knows about it. Even I'm not 100% sure looking at the small smudgey slides that remain available. It would be interesting to see what the reaction would be, if the film were ever to be found. As it is operating mostly in sound only, it means the themes can be more all-encompassing, though. The Savages doesn't have to have a purely racial subtext. As the story of an elite that rely for their wealth, status and leisure on a shunned underclass, who are marginalised even though they are vital, The Savages is a perfect analogy for capitalism itself.

A light has been shone on this recently by the impacts of Covid-19 lockdowns throughout the Western world; the National Health Service is being rightly praised in my country for its essential role in managing the Coronavirus cases, just as healthcare professionals are in every country. Beyond those heroes, though, there are groups of other workers who we now realise, if we didn't before, are indispensable and irreplaceable. And guess what? They're pretty much all groups we have denigrated, underfunded and zero-contracted before now: hospital cleaners, refuse collectors, shop workers, delivery drivers, care workers, to name just a few. My day job is less important than any of them. I know my place. I'm lucky enough that I can still work full-time remotely, as can many others. We do so, though, only because of the efforts of this important support network. The rest of us are not exactly as callous and parasitic as Jano and the elders, but it does strike me that we need to remember when all this is over how important these people were to our continued existence, and make some changes in how society rewards them.

Another sad fact brought to light by current events is that this virus is not the great leveller of romantic imagination. It has a disproportionate impact on the economically marginalised. Not only do those that society hasn't previously valued comprise a large number of the heroes of Covid-19. they also comprise a large number of the victims. And sadly, because of the bent shape of our society, that means it is falling harder upon black and minority ethnic people. The economical and racial are closely interlinked, which means The Savages works as a parable on all levels. Let's hope when all of this is over, we can learn to live and work together better; but who will be the great global leader, the "Steven Taylor" of this crisis? I don't see anyone shaping up to the role at the moment, but time will tell.

In Summary:

A straightforward morality tale with zap gun fights, and none the worse for that.