Robot of Sherwood

Chapter The 159th, which is all about a mythical character (or two).

Plot:

Despite the Doctor's protestations that it is impossible for Clara to meet Robin Hood as he doesn't exist, the TARDIS takes them to late 12th-century Sherwood Forest, and there he is, large as life. The Doctor is suspicious that this can't be real, but Robin has the full contingent of Merry Men: Little John, Alan a' Dale, Will Scarlet, Friar Tuck. He's only missing Marian, whose whereabouts is unknown. This has made Robin a little sad, but he disguises it with lots of theatrical laughing and banter. The Doctor takes exception to this. Clara and the Doctor accompany the Merry Men to the legendary archery tournament - and obvious trap - set up by the Sheriff of Nottingham. The prize is a golden arrow. As is customary in tales such as these, Robin Hood fires an arrow into the bullseye that splits the Sheriff 's arrow to claim the prize, but then the Doctor splits Robin's arrow, and it escalates with everyone showing off. The Sheriff's knights turn out to be robots; the Merry Men make off with the golden arrow, but Robin, Clara and the Doctor are captured. The Sheriff locks up the three of them, and keeps them observed to see who is the ringleader; as Robin and the Doctor spend all their time bickering, he assumes it is Clara. Out of the cell to have dinner with him, she cleverly gets the Sheriff to explain his plan to her: the Robots crashed down from space, and promised him power and glory and all the usual. He's helping them rebuild their spaceship using plundered gold and captured peasant labour.

The Doctor and Robin have meanwhile escaped, and found the spaceship. The Doctor examines it, and discovers that it has insufficient gold plating to survive take off, and will blow up, destroying the surrounding area. He also conjures up an unlikely theory that Robin Hood is a robot too, designed by the Sheriff to give false hope to the masses. Robin resents the suggestion that he and the Sheriff are in cahoots. The Sheriff enters with Clara, and some swordplay ensues. Robin and Clara get away, but the Doctor is knocked out and wakes up in the dungeons to find he's with the other prisoners working on the spaceship. He befriends a woman, escapes his bonds, and with her help foments a rebellion, with the prisoners using polished surfaces to reflect the robot knights' blasters back at them. The Doctor catches up with the Sheriff as the countdown to take off has been instigated. Robin and Clara arrive, and more swordplay ensues. The Sheriff is killed, and Robin injured. They all rush out into Sherwood Forest, as the unstable spaceship starts to rise. The golden arrow will be the last crucial part of gold to seal up the ship and stop the explosion, but it needs to be fired at a precise point on the ship. Robin can't fire an arrow with his injury, and the Doctor reveals he was cheating during the tournament, using tech to improve his aim. So, Robin, the Doctor and Clara have to work together and between them manage to fire the arrow, hitting the target and saving the day. Saying goodbye to Robin, the Doctor has to concede he's been wrong all along, and Robin Hood is real: an ordinary man pretending to be a legend. The TARDIS leaves, and Robin is reunited with the woman from the dungeons, Her name? Marian.

Context:

All the family (The Better Half, and three kids, boy of 14, boy of 10, girl of 8) watched this with me one Sunday afternoon, all sat in the living room watching the TV as the story played from the Blu-ray (as part of the series 8 box set). Everyone was silent throughout, which is always a good sign, and afterwards all said they enjoyed it.

First time round:

Watched with the Better Half time-shifted on the Saturday evening of its first UK broadcast on BBC1 in the autumn of 2014, then again on the following Sunday morning with the children. I was enjoying the series very much at this point having been somewhat underwhelmed by most of the stories shown the previous year. I very much liked the first five or six Capaldi stories, coincidentally the same episodes whose early edited assemblies were leaked on the web a few weeks before the series started. I had resisted any temptation to view those versions, so this was my first appreciation of this story.

Reaction:

Some people don't get on well with the more light-hearted Doctor Who stories commonly known as romps. Robot of Sherwood might just be the rompiest of romps, and is authored by Mark Gatiss, who since writing for the new series from its return in 2005 had carved out the role of the Rompmaster General. We the audience are left under no illusions as to the tone and shape of the story from the off: the Doctor himself tells us it's all not to be taken seriously, undermining the very possibility of the story's concept within the first minute; and, Robin when he first appears gives a bloody great wink to camera. Subtle this ain't. It is genuinely funny, though, and earns its comic status. The swashbuckling is satisfying too, being shot and performed with efficiency and a light touch. Within the early sequences, we've had the Doctor best Robin in a swordfight armed only with a spoon, and seen both the Doctor and Robin end up bumped into the stream. This, plus a very rude joke bout Errol Flynn for good measure. It's sunny and charming, and it really works.

A lot of this is to do with casting. Tom Riley plays the ostensibly panto version of Hood with gusto, but the script allows him some quieter moments where he reveals to Clara that it's all a facade, and that actually it's the true character underneath the banter and bravado that is the one who is performing. It's deceptively nuanced. Ben Miller as the Sheriff has more latitude to perform without subtlety at all - that's the joy of playing the Sheriff of Nottingham. As with Riley, he grabs the opportunity (with both black leather gloved hands) and blazes through every moment he's on screen. The regular cast match them, and are not overpowered. Jenna Coleman as Clara is really giving her best here, being clever and perceptive, and getting to shake her head witheringly at the bickering boys around her, outwit the Sheriff, and be direct and no-nonsense and Blackpool at various points. Plus, she gets a stunning outfit too, one of the most striking of her time on the show. Peter Capaldi is adept at comedy, and works up a double-act with Riley instantaneously; it feels like they are old muckers, who've been bantering with each other for years. This may sound grating to some people - as the Doctor himself says, pretend grumpy about banter: "Do people ever punch you in the face when you do that?" - but I have a high tolerance for this kind of stuff if done well, and I enjoyed it enormously. 

The four star turns, all of them coming close to chewing the scenery in their own way, don't leave much of a look in for any of the other cast. It's a shame as it is a strong set of Merry Men; Trevor Cooper, for example, seems born to play Friar Tuck, and Rusty Goffe is a nice subversion of the usual Little John casting. One's left wanting more - I'd love to see these particular Merry Men have more adventures (perhaps Big Finish will get round to doing a series one day). Other positives: great music, good dialogue ("Shut it, Hoodie"), a cameo by Patrick Troughton (he's one of the images of Robin Hood the legend pulled from the spaceship's databanks - Troughton played Robin of Loxley in a 1950s BBC series). The only minor niggle is the reference to the series plot arc, that the Robot's spaceship is on its way to 'The Promised Land' (which was also the destination of the Half-Faced Man from Deep Breath two stories earlier). I don't think it was ever explained what this had to do with Missy's plot housing people's dead brains in a cyberspace reality, as revealed in the series finale - it's almost as if they were making it up as they were going along!

Enjoyable as it all is apart from that tiny flaw, it doesn't matter a great deal - the whole thing is essentially just misdirection. Gatiss uses the shape of a standard hackneyed device that Doctor Who had deployed before - explaining real world legends with sci-fi phenomena - then pulls the rug, revealing that the twist is that there's no twist. Hood is just the ordinary man from whose tale the legends grew. This allows the story to address the overall theme of that year's series, the heroism or otherwise of the Doctor as he struggles with his new identity, but in a clever and surprising way.  In a - probably inadvertent - foreshadowing of that year's Christmas special, Last Christmas, a bit of 'meta' positioning allows the characters to interrogate the Doctor's fictional status. The dialogue from Robin at the end gets to restate the Doctor and Doctor Who's credo in bold terms, and draw parallels with the older legend: "A man born into wealth and privilege" who finds "the plight of the oppressed and weak too much to bear" until... "one night he is moved to steal a TARDIS" and "fly among the stars, fighting the good fight".

Connectivity: 

You can't get better than this: The Crusade and Robot of Sherwood take place at exactly the same time: 1190 AD. Ish. Richard's away fighting the crusade, and John is on the throne, with tyranny - in the form of the Sheriff - abounding. As such, there is lots of swordplay, knights and horses in both stories.

Deeper Thoughts:

As originally broadcast? The concept of the special edition or 'director's cut' of a movie emerged in Hollywood in the 1970s, and gained ground in the 1980s and 1990s in sell-through formats like VHS, Laserdisc and DVD. By the turn of the century, it was an established practice to the extent that the idea of a definitive version of a film had become a point of contention. To pick a prominent example, whether your favourite version of Star Wars was the original, the special edition from 1997 or the DVD version (which George Lucas tweaked even more) was a matter of individual taste. Whether you could have a copy of your favourite version at home and watch it regularly, though, was less up to you. The initial theatrical versions of the original trilogy were for a long while unavailable on home video formats, which made some fans unhappy. Special Editions were usually of films, though. It was neither an opportunity nor an issue for TV shows as generally they are made with lower budgets than feature films, and that doesn't leave much scope for having unused footage for reinsertion into a new edit, nor of obtaining budgets for reshoots or new effects. One would be forgiven for thinking that Doctor Who, whose budget was even more constrained than other programmes of its type, would be even less likely to have this capability. Interestingly enough, despite this, it did prove to be something of a trailblazer in this regard.

As early as 1990, only a few years into the video range, the BBC started to work on releases for VHS that went beyond just repackaging stories exactly as broadcast; The Curse of Fenric tape, released in February 1991, was a new extended version with many minutes of newly inserted material. It wasn't quite as big and bold a presentation as those involved in it wanted, but it was a start. Such a thing was possible because the latter years of Who's production in the 1980s had a contingent of stories that ran overlong and needed to be viciously trimmed for broadcast slots, and also had a producer savvy enough to have realised that keeping all this additional material would come in handy one day. A number of other stories from the period got a similar treatment during the 1990s, and even some earlier stories had additional scenes or alternate versions of episodes released on tape, such as Inferno and Carnival of Monsters (they may have been presented that way accidentally, but it's definitely in the spirit of Doctor Who to innovate inadvertently as well as on purpose!). In the mid-1990s, the first VHS release to have a version with improved visual effects applied was The Five Doctors Special Edition (see here for more details).

That Five Doctors release was made by a loose group of individuals, known as the Doctor Who Restoration team, who came to have a bigger and bigger role as time went on in improving the pictures and sound of what went onto the Doctor Who VHS tapes. They were technical experts, but they were also enthusiasts, and their extra efforts elevated (and still elevate in the case of the Blu-rays which they are also involved with) Doctor Who for home purchase high above almost all other shows on disc or streaming service. As DVD became mainstream, they were allowed even more scope for presenting alternate versions. In general, these did not prove contentious, as - unlike in George Lucas's fiefdom - the originals were always on the discs alongside the altered versions. Instead, the arguments that there were centred more on the restoration work. This is also not an area for discussion unique to Doctor Who by any means - the line between what is acceptable and what is not is a blurry one. There can be no hard and fast rules, even when trying to stick to keeping things as broadcast: picture noise and video wobbles for example may have been there on transmission, but they don't have any aesthetic or dramatic value, so most people would have no problem with them being fixed (it wouldn't be much of a restoration with them left in, after all).

When does improvement turn into tinkering? The end credits on the 1960s stories were caption slides on a roller, which was manually turned, I believe. As such, on the original unrestored episodes they wobble drunkenly. For the DVDs, they were replaced with electronic lettering made to match as closely as possible, but running smooth. Much better, but for some watching they stick out as being a bit too good compared to what was achievable when the stories were first made. There was a medium-sized controversy, 'Spannergate', around changes made to the story The Pirate Planet in the default version, where an effect of a spanner flying out of an explosion was recreated and looked a bit different to, but a lot better than, the original effect. It crossed the line for some, but a few seconds of a superimposed spanner don't have a huge amount of aesthetic or dramatic value, really. So, does it just come down to trying to match what the nostalgic viewer first experienced at home? If one is strict about that, most of the Jon Pertwee stories would be in black and white, as colour televisions weren't owned by the majority of households. There has to be some thought given to the intent of the programme makers, I think. They didn't intend to have their captions wobble or their spanner effect misfire. 

Robot of Sherwood is another story where an alternate version exists, and where the intent of the programme makers is interesting to consider. Originally, it would have been made much more clear in the finished programme that the Sheriff of Nottingham has been robotised. During the final swordfight, Robin would have sliced the Sheriff's head clean off, only for it to keep talking, and for its headless robot body to walk over, pick it up and reattach it. The programme, though, was scheduled for broadcast soon after the Islamic State murders of hostages, including James Foley, by beheading. The scene was therefore felt to be insensitive, and was edited out. In this case, the version broadcast did not match the intent of the programme makers, but the change had been made at their instigation for a reason external to concerns of narrative. Had it not been for the leak of the episode's early rough cuts (as mentioned above), they may not have even felt the need to advertise the fact and nobody would have been the wiser. The Blu-ray release went with the shortened version, but then it was only released a few months later, so it was probably still too soon. Thus far, though, the full original version has never been released. Surprisingly, none of the stories from 2005 onwards, where the material and the budget probably could have been found, has ever had a special edition release. This seems odd, in stark contrast to the classic series whose stories are still getting upgrades (the latest being the enhanced CGI, including scarier rat, of The Talons of Weng-Chiang). Give it a few years, though, time enough for the Beeb to wonder about a revenue stream so far untapped, and we may yet see Rose: Special Edition, or Dalek: The Director's Cut, or even Robot of Sherwood Including Previously Censored Material... 

In Summary:

It's the epitome of the Doctor Who romp, but it's also a bit of a conjuring trick, an illusion, disguising it's underlying theme about heroism. So, a romp l'oeil? Anyone? Romp l'oeil? No? Please yourselves.

The Crusade

Chapter The 158th, in which there is a good knight with Richard not Judy.

Plot:

The TARDIS lands in late 12th-century Palestine during the time of the third crusade. While the Doctor, Ian and Vicki assist a party including Richard the Lionheart repel an attack; Barbara is captured by Saracens. One of the King's knights, Sir William des Preaux, pretends he is Richard to misdirect the attackers. He and Barbara - who Sir William pretends is Joanna, the King's sister -  are taken by their captor El Akir to meet the Sultan Saladin and his brother,  Saphadin, where the ruse is quickly uncovered, and El Akir is shamed. The others inveigle their way into the Lionheart's retinue to get help to rescue Barbara. Richard is stubborn and a little petulant, but comes round to the idea of sending a message to Saladin. He wants to offer the real Joanna's hand in marriage to Sapahdin to avoid war, so knights Ian and sends him off to the Sultan. Ian arrives and delivers the message but is too late to collect Barbara, as El Akir has already arranged for her abduction and taken her back to his house in Lydda. Barbara escapes into the streets of Lydda, and befriends Haroun, whose eldest daughter has been taken by El Akir for his harem.

Hiding in Haroun's house while he is out, Barbara gives herself up to searching guards to protect Haroun's younger daughter. Meanwhile, Joanna has found out from the Earl of Leicester about the plan to marry her off and is not happy, railing against Richard. Richard publicly blames the Doctor for breaking a confidence and telling Joanna; really, he knows it was Leicester, but does not want to blame him and risk upsetting his knights, as he fears he will soon need them to go into battle. Barbara has managed to give El Akir's guards the slip again and is being kept hidden in his palace by Haroun's elder daughter. El Akir finds her, but is killed by Haroun, who has broken in. Ian arrives at this moment, after having been briefly waylaid on his way to Lydda by thieves. Returning to the TARDIS, Ian and Barbara find Leicester, who's followed the Doctor, about to execute the Time lord as a traitor and spy. Ian persuades Leicester to let him execute the Doctor, and the travellers all escape into the TARDIS, and make off.

Context:

As this was a black and white story, with half the episodes missing, I did not bother trying to entice the family to watch. I watched the story on my lonesome in two sittings from the DVD on the 2004 Lost in Time boxset, which collected together all the then known orphaned episodes of 1960s Doctor Who. Mostly, the odd surviving episodes on this set are presented without any context, but a couple of stories including The Crusade are presented in full, or as close to full as they could do at the time. For The Crusade, this means that episode 2 and 4, for which the visuals were not - and still are not - known to exist, are presented as soundtrack recordings only, without any explanatory narration, static images, or animations (which have become the standard options for presenting such episodes subsequently). This made it a little difficult to follow occasionally - the end of episode 2, for example - but, as the story is primarily dialogue rather than action driven, this wasn't often. The other additions to help follow the plot were some in character inserts of Ian Chesterton, as played by William Russell, explaining about the adventure as an older man. These scenes are slight and inessential, yes, but were also rather lovely to see again.

First time round:

I first saw the third episode, The Wheel of Fortune, on The Hartnell Years, a VHS presentation by 1980s Doctor Who producer John Nathan-Turner which came out in June 1991. This was the first of a series of compendium tapes to come out in the early 90s which covered odds and sods for most of the actors who'd played the Doctors up to that point, with framing sequences presented by an appropriate, or inappropriate, actor. This one saw Sylvester McCoy in costume introducing the clips and episodes, including the third part of The Crusade, the only one known to exist at the time. I believe on reaching The Crusade for the blog I have now covered all the stories whose odd episodes I first watched on this tape (which I obtained and viewed as soon as possible after it came out that Summer, after I'd finished with sixth form and A-levels and was on my hols before starting at university). I feel in blog posts past that I have been a little unfair on this set of releases. Yes, they were naff in places - Keff McCulloch's "Latin" version of the Doctor Who theme and the rudimentary opening credits, for example - but they were also exciting for the long-term fan, as a chance to sample rare bits and bobs that wouldn't have otherwise seen the light of day. The Wheel of Fortune was by far the best thing on the tape, and is to my mind the best individual episode of The Crusade too. Having my first experience of this story be this single episode presented in isolation misaligned my understanding and appreciation of the wider tale, I think, but more on that in a moment.

Another exciting thing that happened related to this story, at the other end of the 1990s, was that the first episode, The Lion, was discovered. This was the first Doctor Who episode to be found since The Tomb of the Cybermen in 1992, and a lot of fans, myself included, had pretty much given up hope that we'd see any more of the old, lost stuff by then. It s release on VHS was highly anticipated. It was rush released a few months after its discovery in July 1999, alongside part 3, the aforementioned links by William Russell, a CD of the soundtracks of parts 2 and 4, a keyring, and The Space Museum. I was living in a shared flat in Brighton at that point in 1999, and from memory I was having a day off work as I remember going out to buy the set from MVC on the day of release and watching it in the early afternoon when my flatmates were out. 

Reaction:

One of the great, great scenes of early Doctor Who appears in the third episode of The Crusade, and there are no regular characters in it. It's the fight between Richard (played by Julian Glover) and Joanna (played by Jean Marsh) about the King's plan to marry her off to the Sultan's brother. It's a barnstormer, great dialogue, delivered by great actors looking like they're having a ball playing great characters, marshalled by a great - maybe the great - director, Douglas Camfield. I almost can't watch it without cheering, it's so good. The line "You defy me with the pope?!" and Glover's reading of it is a particular highlight. It was the big set piece of the only surviving episode, so it rather dominated the presentation on The Hartnell Years tape, which was without much in the way of description of the rest of the story. As such, it gives a false impression that the The Crusade is all about Richard and his court, which it isn't really. Richard is a presence in the narrative, but for the most part he is arguably background one. The main thread of the story is the quest to be reunited with Barbara, intercut with Barbara's exploits surviving in a tight spot, pursued by the villain of the piece, El Akir. Richard and the impact of courtly intrigue is a complicating factor for the rescue plot, and adds a lot of historical colour, but the overall shape of the story would be more or less the same if he did not feature directly. The same is true of Saladin and his brother too.

With that misinterpretation fostered by the Years tape fixed in my head after watching and rewatching that single episode many times over the years, the remainder of the story, once I got to experience it, didn't seem to fit and was underwhelming. Joanna doesn't appear in the final episode, and the King rapidly gives up on his plan to marry her off. Instead of the episode building up to a big final confrontation between the Doctor and the King, Richard knows all about the truth of who spilled the beans to Joanna, and sends the Doctor on his way in friendly fashion before the halfway mark of the last part's running time; he doesn't appear thereafter. Leicester hangs around until the end, but just to be a barrier preventing our heroes from leaving. I'm blaming The Hartnell Years for warping my view of what the story is about, and it is guilty to a certain extent (Sylvester McCoy talks after the episode about how the Doctor avoids being executed as a witch as if it's a major plot point rather than a one-line aside); but, the structure of the story contributes a lot too. A lot of the action forms those set pieces and subplots that are diversions from the simple through-line and don't have any lasting significance to the story once they are done. All of the light comic business between the Doctor and the trader Ben Daheer, for example. It can also be seen with characters. Des Preaux is a big presence in the first two episodes, but then disappears. Does he get released by Saladin to go back to Richard? It's not clear (maybe it would be with the visuals). De Tornebu similarly has a big presence early on but then disappears a few minutes into part two.

So, what we have here is the usual basic plot template of the time: our heroes arrive in a new place, get separated from each other or the TARDIS or both, and - in different subgroups  - explore the new locale, getting into scrapes, set pieces, character moments, and vignettes that are often somewhat disconnected from the main proceedings. This was the exact same format as the previous two broadcast stories, The Romans and The Web Planet. In The Crusade, Barbara being reunited with the rest of the TARDIS crew is padded out - and greatly improved, lest we forget - by lots of plot detours, a sort of exploration of history by accident. This was a time of transition for Doctor Who, the old model of the Doctor and friends being forced by circumstances to go on adventures rather than - as would more and more become the norm - choosing to do so. Writer David Whittaker clearly loves writing the Shakespearean stuff. It's a shame that this story didn't come later at a point when the TARDIS team didn't need an excuse to explore a historical period and stand up to bad guys, and the whole story could have been a bit less episodic and achieved the full-bloodied quality throughout that it did in some individual scenes.

All the regular and guest actors get lots of stuff to do, and all perform well. One aspect of the casting is problematical, though: white actors play characters of different ethnicities using make-up. For some reason, this is not commented on as much as the similar situation in The Talons of Weng-Chiang. It was broadcast ten years earlier than the Tom Baker story, but nonetheless it still feels at best awkward when watching it today. Obviously, the lack of visuals for half the story might disguise it for some, or might put people off watching altogether so they're unaware. The Crusade scores over Talons in one way, though, as the non-white characters are a much diverse and nuanced bunch, rather than the monolithic culture of villainy into which Talons' Chinese characters are all lumped.

Connectivity: 

Like The Doctor's Daughter, The Crusade sees the Doctor and friends landing during a conflict between two sides; he is based with the military leaders of one side, with whom he has an argumentative relationship, while one of his companions is separated from the rest of the TARDIS team and ends up captured by the other side.

Deeper Thoughts:

Lost and Found and Not Around. There's a rumour going round that the next Blu-ray box set to be announced will be the first black-and-white offering, and will be season 2, William Hartnell's second year. It would be the most logical choice, being the one of those first six monochrome seasons with the fewest missing episodes; it only lacks the two missing parts of The Crusade and is otherwise complete. Fans are hoping for animations of those missing episodes to be included, but as pointed out astutely in this blog post by Cyberdevil that might not be so easy. I would imagine that we'll get reconstructions using still images matched to the soundtracks instead. Given that getting any classic Who on Blu-ray, let alone 1960s Who with episodes animated, seemed an impossible dream only a few years ago, it shows how spoilt we've been by these releases! This has true for Doctor Who fans since the home video range began. Fans of any other shows in the 1990s weren't regularly getting compendiums of rarities, or rush releases of newly found archive material. Very few in 2020 have episodes of 50+ years of a favourite show available to stream, and even fewer are getting anything as good a range as the beautiful and comprehensive Blu-ray season sets on offer now (but then, they are limited editions that tend to sell out quickly).

This may be why I can sometimes be disproportionately taken aback when I find that something else non-Who is not instantly available to me. During lockdown, I have been seeking out some old things to watch that have fallen into this category. One of the extras on the recent Tom Baker  Blu-ray box set talking about 1970s Doctor Who producer Philip Hinchcliffe's later career made me eager to watch Private Schulz again. This was a 1981 comedy drama produced by Hinchcliffe, and was one of the first non-children's shows I absolutely fell in love with as a young TV addict. It's not on any streaming service that I could see, and the DVD has long ago been deleted. Around the same time, I thought it would be fun to watch all of Christopher Nolan's films in order, to lead up to the release of his latest, Tenet, in July. This plan was scuppered from the off, as his first film Following is similarly missing from streaming services and has had its DVD release deleted. These were pretty popular and reasonably mainstream pieces, so why were they so difficult to find in 2020, when one can stream - to pick a random example - The Sensorites effortlessly? What is the magical ingredient that means that some things never drop out of circulation? After much searching, in the end I found them both online for free, probably in violation of copyright laws. It wasn't obviously as exciting as someone finding episode 1 of The Crusade back in the day, but in my small way I liked finding something that had previously been missing.

Another recent example of a missing story return outside of the world of Doctor Who was delivered through my letterbox in the last few days: It Couldn't Happen Here. This is the 1988 film starring Pet Shop Boys, which grew out of an idea to do a long-form video stitching together visual interpretations of all the songs on their 1987 album Actually. These sort of videos were all the rage back in the late 80s. But It Couldn't Happen Here grew beyond that, became bigger, and more gloriously strange, and ended up getting a theatrical release. I was a big PSB fan then as I am now, and - because news travelled more slowly in those pre-web days - I scoured the local newspapers for weeks and weeks after the London premiere to see when it was showing near me. Little did I know that it had spectacularly bombed, been critically mauled, and would never again be exhibited at any Odeon, whether close or far away. It has never been shown on TV, and never been in any subsequent film festival or event. It got a VHS release in 1992, which I snapped up, but I haven't had a VCR for so long. Anyway, the wonderful BFI have released a 4K restoration on Blu-ray. If you haven't seen it before, whether a fan or not, or if you have and think it's a grand folly or crazy work of genius (I'm somewhere in between), I'd recommend giving it a watch. The Blu-ray has sold out already (the curse of the limited edition again), but it's on the BFI player.

In Summary:

Several great comic and dramatic set pieces as detours from a slight and simple main plot. But better than that sounds.

The Doctor's Daughter

Chapter The 157th, which stars a Doctor's daughter portraying another Doctor's daughter, who would eventually marry that Doctor, becoming the Doctor's Wife (but that's another story).

Plot:

The Doctor, Donna and Martha are brought to the planet Messaline by a malfunctioning TARDIS. A war has been raging for generations between the humans and the fishlike Hath, two races who originally came together to the planet to peacefully colonise and co-inhabit it - no one alive can even remember why the war started. Both sides use rapid cloning devices, and the Doctor is instantly plugged into one upon landing. The machine produces Jenny, his "daughter", extrapolated from a tissue sample, with military theory and tactics uploaded instantly into her head. The Doctor is appalled and rejects his offspring as she immediately starts shooting stuff. They get separated from Martha, who ends up with the Hath. Inadvertently, the Doctor reveals to both sides a hidden area of their standard electronic map. Leader of the humans General Cobb believes this shows the way to the Source - a mythical super-weapon that could end the war; he locks up the Doctor, Donna and Jenny, and takes his army off to find it. Martha goes with the Hath on the same mission.

The Doctor's party escape and make their way there too. They all converge on the original ship that the colonists arrived in, and the source chamber, which contains not a weapon but a terraforming device to make the planet habitable again. The war has only been raging a few weeks, the generations fast-tracked into life and death since they arrived. Everyone lays down their weapons apart from Cobb, who takes a shot at the Doctor, but Jenny jumps in the way and takes the bullet for him. The Doctor is not happy about this, but still preaches peace. After the TARDIS team leave, Jenny comes back to life with a burst of regeneration energy, and goes off to explore the universe.

Context:

The whole of the Covid-19 lockdown period has been notable for a reluctance in the family, and to a lesser extent me, to watch Doctor Who. I don't know why it is exactly, perhaps because we're inevitably watching a lot of other things - right now, work and play alike mainly comprise watching moving pictures on a screen. Consequently, there's always a long while in between stories I'm watching for the blog. On top of this, I am also watching the Tom Baker season 14 Blu-ray box set and recent Jodie Whittaker second series... very slowly. I think they will be the best value and longest lasting box sets I have ever had - I've had both for 6 weeks approximately and have only just got onto the second of many discs of each. So, when I popped on the DVD of The Doctor's Daughter one Sunday afternoon, I was surprised that all the kids (boys of 13 and 10, girl of 8) joined me. No sign of the Better Half though.  

First time round:

Would have been first seen on the day of its original broadcast on BBC1 in 2008, like all of this run, by myself and the Better Half. We had tried watching the start of this season with our eldest (and at that time only) child, who was 2 years old at the time. It was being broadcast slightly earlier on Saturday night than previous years, just before his bedtime. This was fine for the Adipose opener, but The Fires of Pompeii's lava monsters were too much for him, so we knocked that on the head, and he was definitely not watching by the time of The Doctor's Daughter a few weeks later.

Reaction:

A couple of months ago in the blog post for Hide, I talked about how the role of the Doctor can be a thankless one for an actor as it has no dramatic arc of value change - he/she has to be the unaltered hero eternal. My memory is that the writer of The Doctor's Daughter Stephen Greenhorn mentioned something along those lines in an interview with Doctor Who Magazine or Doctor Who Confidential around the time that his story of the previous year, The Lazarus Experiment, was broadcast. On hearing this, exec producer and lead writer Russell T. Davies decided to give him the challenge of writing a story where something did change the life of the Doctor, and the result was The Doctor's Daughter. The trouble is, the story as presented doesn't meet that brief. She's not really his daughter, of course, there was no way that was going to happen; but, a few episodes later Donna is given children who aren't really her children either - in the Library episodes - but it still feels like they are. At no point on this watch or first time round did it ever feel like Jenny is the Doctor's daughter. The scenario is too distanced from the real life analogue to be graspable on anything but an intellectual level, when it needs to operate at an emotional level to be successful.


The optics are also off: Jenny's too old, the actor who portrays her, Georgia Moffett, too similar in age to David Tennant for it to work as a parent / child relationship with the immediacy required in the brevity of the programme's 45 minute running time. They look - hardly surprisingly given the hindsight of later events in the actors' personal lives - more like a couple than father and daughter. Besides that, as the concept is that the Doctor's progeny has been produced at adulthood in an instant, and had an aggressive mindset imposed upon her with a military mental upload, the Doctor is absolved of any parental accountability for Jenny. He is neither responsible for her ongoing safety, nor her established personality. Aside from one jibe from Donna about his looking shell-shocked like a new Dad pushing a pram around, there really wasn't anything in the script that would have stopped the makers dispensing with the father/daughter concept, as it isn't really working. The theme is more about whether the Doctor and his clone are more similar than they'd like to think despite all the sci-fi nonsense of the latter's creation. Is the Doctor a soldier? Is there a residual trace of the Doctor's striving for pacifism in his copy? This is perfectly good stuff, but the title of the story is working against it. 'The Doctor's Clone' would be more apt and more interesting, as would casting a male actor similar to Tennant.

Of course, this is pretty much exactly what happens a few episodes later in the series finale, Journey's End - a new and more warlike Doctor (played by Tennant himself) is created from the Doctor's spare hand, and their differences and similarities are explored. Well, explored briefly. Like The Doctor's Daughter, there's so much else going on in that episode that there's no real time to look at such a theme in any depth. Despite the foregrounding of the Doctor's spare hand at the beginning of this mid-series episode, setting up that finale, I think this is coincidence rather than a coherent running thread of the series. A lot of the other stuff that's going on in Greenhorn's story is good, mind. Donna's smarts, working out the significance of the numbers she sees everywhere is a nice character moment, Moffett is good, and the twist - that the war has only been raging for a matter of days - is ridiculous but fun. It's slightly undermined by the actor playing Cobb, Nigel Terry, being far too old and grizzled to have just popped out of a cloning machine. He should only be slightly older than the boyish soldiers he leads - another example of a casting decision undermining the concept.

The script also has to make room for Martha, who was returning for a few episodes mid-series after leaving as a full time companion the previous year. Her inclusion in The Doctor's Daughter smacks of last minute addition to the script, as she is separated from the man action for the duration, shunted off into a sideline subplot. This does, though, give an opportunity for us to have a few scenes with the Hath, who are a beautifully designed alien race. All these bits, though, distract from what the title tells us is the main point of proceedings. This means that even if you disagree with me that the original brief - a story that changes the Doctor forever - has been met, it's only been showcased in something like 15 minutes of the running time, to make room for Martha, implausible twists, fish people, and gymnastics through laser beams. Sometimes, less is more.

Connectivity: 

Both stories feature the first appearance of a new character that has Time Lord abilities including regenerative capability.

Deeper Thoughts:

Nature versus nurture: a fishy tale. Though an enduring discussion point in philosophy and other dramas; Doctor Who doesn't have a consistent position with regards to nature versus nurture, i.e.whether human - or alien - behaviour is dictated more by environment or by genes. Often, because of the shows tendency to fall back on a foundation of folk tale good versus evil, it can be very simplistic. At other times, however, it can be more nuanced. The earliest two stories from the start of the show in 1963 - the cave-people one and the first Dalek one - featured, as The Doctor's Daughter does, battles between tribes. In neither, though, was either side painted in black and white, hero or villain. Kal is a nasty piece of work, but the others in the Tribe of Gum treat the Doctor and co. pretty badly too. The Daleks are not the ranting unthinking meanies they sometimes might carelessly be, or be assumed to be; instead, they are more frightened than frightening, and that only makes them more dangerous. For a show that's run so long, though, proliferating in many spin-off media, and creating hundreds of distinctive creatures along the way, it would be hard to keep up a high level of nuance without some lapses.

As different creators have made different stories over the years, the amount of justification required in using the word 'evil' has waxed and waned. The Troughton era for the most part has a roster of returning foes - Cybermen, Ice Warriors, Yeti - whose motivations aren't felt to need probing too deeply. What made them into monsters? Are they victims of their environment? Who cares?! Zap 'em! After that, the Pertwee era tried to be more thoughtful, including alien races whose antagonism came from a situation that the audience could emphasise with (Silurians, Draconians). As I pointed out last time (in the Deeper Thoughts section of the Terror of the Autons post) this thoughtful approach ran out where the recurring villain of the era the Master was concerned - he's bad to the bone, just because he is. Even as early as The Keys of Marinus, a few stories on from the first two 1963 tales mentioned above, and written by the same author that had given us multi-dimensional Skaro residents, baddies the Voords are a lot more simplistic. Marinus has no evil, it all having been absorbed by a machine called the Conscience, but the Voords are immune, and "rob, exploit, kill, cheat" - why? Just because they can, I guess.

Whether or not the makers of the show believe a race of creatures to be evil, one expects the Doctor to keep an open mind. But another watery foe is even more crudely drawn. The Pescatons were the baddies in a tie-in audio-only Doctor Who story in the 1970s starring Tom Baker and Elizabeth Sladen. They are half-man half-fish, but are worlds away from the sensitive Hath, or at least they are according to the Doctor himself. I just listened again after many years to Doctor Who and the Pescatons, as it is an extra on one disc of the aforementioned Tom Baker season 14 Blu-ray box set. I know it's only a spin-off from long ago, but nonetheless it is astonishing how different it is from Doctor Who's norms of any era. It's not just that the writer Victor Pemberton - who worked on Doctor Who in the Patrick Troughton era - has Tom Baker playing a piccolo, like Troughton played the recorder; he also has him be uncharacteristically mean towards the creatures from the planet Pesca. Sure, they are destructive invaders, but does that justify the Doctor referring to them - three times! - as evil during his narration of the tale. The worst of these is when he describes the battle between the humans and Pescatons as being between "Two great civilisations - one good, one evil". I'm not comfortable with the Doctor thinking any race is wholly evil, and I'm even more uncomfortable with him thinking the human race is wholly good! 

In Summary:

The Doctor's Clone, plus distractions.