Love & Monsters

Chapter The 162nd, which details how Blue Peter delivered a green Victor.

Plot:

Elton Pope narrates his home-made video journal about the Doctor. He was haunted by seeing the skinny, spiky-haired tennis shoe-wearing version of the Doctor visit his house years before, when he was a young child. More recently, he has experienced weird goings on (show window dummies coming to life, spaceships roaring overhead and crashing into Big Ben, even bigger spaceships hovering over London on Christmas Day). Online searching brings him to Ursula Blake's blog, where he sees a photo of the man he remembers seeing as a child; Ursula introduces him to a small group of like-minded enthusiasts all searching for the Doctor too. They become LINDA (the London Investigation n' Detective Agency) and meet regularly to compare theories about the mysterious figure. After a while they are having fun as friends without it needing it to be about the Doctor any longer. This lasts for a while, but then a new member - Victor Kennedy - joins the group, providing information to help LINDA track down their elusive prey, getting them back to their original focus, but sucking out all the fun in the process. Then, members of LINDA stop turning up one by one.

The group's attempts at searching lead Elton to Rose's mum, Jackie Tyler and the Powell Estate. His mission from Victor is to seduce Jackie to get information on the Doctor, but he can't bring himself to do it, as he realises he's in love with Ursula. He instead tries to cheer Jackie up; she's sad at being left on her own with Rose off travelling. Unfortunately, Jackie finds a photo of Rose in Elton's pocket, realises his ulterior motive, and chucks him out of her flat. Elton confronts Victor, leaves the group, and boldly asks Ursula on a date. Alas, all this is cut short when Victor reveals himself to be a green monster from the planet Clom (or possibly Klom) who absorbs people, including all the missing members of LINDA who are semi-digested, sticking out of his globby torso. He absorbs Ursula as Elton watches in horror. Running to escape the same fate, Elton runs into the Doctor and Rose (the latter has come to tell him off for upsetting her Mum). The Doctor encourages the semi-absorbed members of LINDA to pull in different directions; they pull Victor apart, and he explodes, dribbling down into the pavement. The Doctor reminds Elton of the day in his childhood when they met - it was the day his mother died; the Doctor wasn't able to save her from some invading monster or other. The Doctor also manages to partially resurrect Ursula, as a paving stone face. She and Elton now live together, and even have something of a love life.

Context:

Watched from the DVD by the whole family (me, the Better Half, boys of 14 and 10, girl of 8) one day when we were all enjoying a week's holiday at home (no air corridors or 14 days quarantine for us this Summer). This story has a bad reputation, which I'll talk about more below, but everyone loved it. The Better Half didn't even intend to watch it all, but sat down after watching the pre-credits sequence and stayed for the duration. Apart from a bit of scoffing at the idea that anyone would approach a mysterious police box ("You'd run away!"), there was nary a criticism voiced by any of them. 

First time round:

Watched live as it went out on its first BBC1 broadcast, Saturday 17th June 2006, accompanied by my heavily pregnant Better Half, who was expecting our first child (boy, of minus 2 weeks old at the time). This marked the end of a particular tradition of watching Doctor Who that I had indulged in for nearly 20 years: fumbling around with video recorders and tapes in anticipation of the show starting. Ever since 1986 and episode 1 of The Trial of a Time Lord, I had been attempting to record Doctor Who episodes, and Doctor Who themed programmes, as they went out. And missing the very beginnings of episodes, and taping over the ends, and causing all sorts of other accidental injuries to my home made and felt-tip labelled collection. From the next story after Love & Monsters and onwards to this day, I have used a PVR to capture the broadcast video onto a hard drive, and - despite the fact that the technology was in its relative infancy then - the automaton instantly managed to record each episode better than I ever could manually.

Reaction:

Peter Kay overplays it; not by that wide a margin compared to the tone of the work of the rest of the cast and crew around him, but he overplays it. I'm saying this up front as this is probably the only aspect of Love & Monsters I don't wholly adore, or at very least wholly admire. Curiously, when comparing notes with the Better Half afterwards, she thought that he was fine once he was revealed as the Abzorbaloff, but overplaying it when doing the Victor Kennedy persona; I thought it was the other way round. So, maybe both aspects are not a problem for some. That tone that I mentioned before is certainly heightened, though this is explained away by the script. We see the flat boring scenes of Elton's video diary, but much else is a depiction of his recall and - perhaps - his imagination. The script leaves us guessing as to how reliable a narrator Elton is, but hints very strongly up front - when Elton admits that he's packaging things up to be as exciting as possible - that we're not getting 100% verity of reportage. The script is even coy about how much of what we're seeing is actual footage - the cutaway to Elton John is something real Elton could have sourced online, but the pre-credits chase with the Hoix monster is unlikely to be. There was nobody making cine camera recordings during Elton's childhood, but what we see is presented in that format. Most likely, we're seeing the standard TV convention - illustrations of what is being narrated, as it runs through Elton's head, interspersed with shots of him at his desk.

Things move so fast that probably none of this occurs consciously to the audience on first watch. The cast would presumably have needed some direction though, on how to pitch it. This is where it's a shame that modern Doctor Who doesn't get extensive pre-shoot rehearsal as used to be the standard. The line between comedy and drama is a narrow one here, difficult to discern, but it's got to be walked with precision. Kay is just a tiny bit outclassed by the rest of the cast, who deftly balance things, at least to my mind. As an actor, Kay is obviously a little bit less experienced than the rest of them, and rehearsal would have ironed this out. One could watch the story and miss all of its subtlety and depth, just see a comedian in a silly green outfit who appears to be mugging for the camera, and write the whole thing off instantly. I think that's indeed what has happened with a lot of people who rate this show very poorly (more on that anon). But it's fantastic! Honestly it is. Clever and original, and plumbing emotions that Doctor Who normally never touches, and few other dramas that I can think of do either. Writer and showrunner Russell T. Davies uses the constraint of the 'Doctor lite' format to showcase an ordinary person, a little bit socially awkward, who finds a nice group of mates - that's the light side of it - and then loses them all as the group is torn apart - because there's a seam of darkness, chaos and melancholy too. (Side note: even without rehearsal, the five members of LINDA do come across as if they're a gang who've know each other for a while; it's lovely and seemingly effortless - particularly when they're all performing ELO songs.) 

Davies has to incorporate the ultimate in plot shopping list items, as he has to make room for a Blue Peter competition-winning monster, designed by a 9-year old. William Grantham's creation, the Abzorbaloff, is a fun villain with an original hook, and the costume and effects work to realise the creature efficiently delivers what was on the page. It's just that what was on the page was a bright green blob thing drawn by a primary school kid. If you don't know this - or if you do, and have an uncharitable stony heart - it might again cause you an instant knee-jerk reflex of distaste. Davies uses this, consciously or not, as a metaphor for that person that takes over, thinking he's making things more efficient, and absorbs all the joy out of any endeavour. This could be taken as just an extended in-joke about Doctor Who fans: Elton is hooked on the Doctor from when young, and then when older joins a fan group. The members of LINDA reflect different types of fans too: Ursula is the investigator (one can imagine her trying to track down missing episodes or production paperwork), Bliss is the younger fan who uses the show as a spur to her creativity, Mr. Skinner is the intellectual, coming up with theories, and Bridget is the sort of fan that likes the escapism, as it helps her deal with the sadness elsewhere in her life. To be honest, though, LINDA could be any kind of group. We've all known a Victor Kennedy at some point from childhood onwards; the guy who doesn't get it, and ruins the group dynamic. I've just never seen this put on screen before - or since. As the first, best and final words on a subject, it is refreshing and interesting.

Rumours have abounded about whether Davies had a specific real world model in mind for the Doctor Who fandom equivalent of Victor - the big guy who doesn't really get it, and stops things being fun - but it's neither here nor there. The parable applies universally. This is probably why it doesn't matter too much how the interloper is played. It was crucial, though, for the everyman central character to be cast and performed right. Marc Warren is a revelation; cast against type, as Elton is far away from the wide boys he tended to be playing at this point in his career, he shines in every scene. The love story with Shirley Henderson's Ursula is beautifully done too. I don't know to this day whether Ursula's resurrection at the end is a bum note or a stroke of genius. Either way, it's very dark, and the script doesn't shy away from that. The best performance though is from Camille Coduri as Jackie Tyler. Every scene she's in is a gift to her, as she gets to play sweetly conniving, faux naif, sultry seducer, mother dealing with an empty nest, and then finally to do the anger of the betrayed as she realises Elton's been using her all this time. I think this is her best story, and the performance she gives one of the best in the show's 50+ year history.

People who hate Love & Monsters, and there are many, will probably think I'm mad to give it this much due. It is undeniably experimental, though: whatever you think of it, you can't deny it blazes a trail for a new style of story that would later bring Blink and Turn Left to the screen amongst others. It is also something of a nexus point for these early years of the relaunched show in that it is the only one that contains a reference to Bad Wolf (the name of the virus that has supposedly removed references from the Doctor from databases), Torchwood (the source of the files of intel that Victor brings to LINDA) and Harold Saxon (who's mentioned on the newspaper that the Abzorbaloff hides behind).

Connectivity: 

Another Doctor Lite episode with very little material featuring the Doctor (or companion either, in this case), so the story could be 'double-banked'. i.e. filmed by another crew simultaneously with work proceeding elsewhere on another one (in this instance the Ood / Black Hole 2-parter). Both this story and The Girl Who Waited also both contain references to the planet Clom (the Abzorbaloff's home planet, and the site of a Disneyland which could be virtually experienced by patients stuck on Apalapucia).

Deeper Thoughts:

Polls and punctuation. I've mentioned before that the so called 'Marmite' Doctor Who story - one you either love or hate - is a mythical beast up there with dragons, bandersnatches, slithy toves and the crowned Saxe-Coburg. Despite the advertising, some people are indifferent to Marmite, and there's no such thing as a Doctor Who story that splits the audience evenly along a love/hate fault-line. A gut feel interpretation would point to Love & Monsters being the most likely candidate if such a thing were possible, but the numbers don't back this up. The appreciation index, a metric collected by the Beeb soon after broadcast, which gauges how much the people who are watching like what they see, was at a historic low of 76 for this story. Since the show's return in 2005, no episode has ever received a score so low (the appreciation index methodology for 20th Century Who was different so can't be directly compared). In the two official Doctor Who Magazine polls held since the story's 2006 broadcast, the "Mighty 200" in 2009, and the "First 50 years" poll in 2014, the story languished in the lower section - it also dropped significantly in the five years between these polls, only just avoiding a place in the bottom 20 in the more recent one. Obviously, some people adore it (it's not just me, there are glowing reviews from the time of its broadcast and since that you can find with a quick google), but it seems clear that a larger majority of people feel the opposite.

If there was a story that divided the lovers and the haters evenly, it would make mathematical sense for it to be midway down those poll results tables. But a quick look at the ten or so stories either side of the midway point in either poll shows no stories with particularly bad reputations, nor gives any hint of any discernible connecting logic between the stories at all; none of the middle stories is the same between the two polls. One can see a pattern looking at the bottom of the polls; there's usually something embarrassingly naff about them. Not necessarily a big thing, but if the rest of the story isn't of world-beating pedigree, it's enough to relegate it. Day-glo decor and Bonnie Langford impressions in Time and The Rani, for example; a bad performance by a child actor in Fear Her; day-glo decor and bad performances by child actors in The Twin Dilemma. But mid-table are the stories where there's nothing too offensive, but nothing particularly exciting either. Looking at the midway point of the stories in descending order of Appreciation Index makes even less sense: Fear Her, the post-2005 Who whipping boy, which always comes bottom of any poll, is squarely in the middle, alongside other stories with much better reputations - it's obviously more hated by fans than the general public, whereas Love & Monsters is disliked by both. The only sensible message one can take from this quantitative analysis is that a divisive story won't divide the audience evenly - it's more likely to be less loved.

Should programme makers hold off from taking risks and experimenting, though? Of course not; that way blandness lies. So, ultimately this was probably a pointless exercise (like most if not all attempts to quantify the artistic and subjective). More interesting to me as I scoured these lists of story titles was noting that - containing as it does an ampersand - Love & Monsters is one of very few that has a "special character". It's much rarer than I'd thought. A few stories have apostrophes (The Daleks' Master Plan, Father's Day) and numbers (Galaxy 4, 42, Orphan 55). Two stories in the history of Doctor Who have a hyphen - Time-Flight and The Talons of Weng-Chiang. The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe is the only story title with a comma, but at least one individual episode title in the William Hartnell era had a comma too (Small Prophet, Quick Return - part 2 of The Myth Makers). Then, there are three more special cases, each with their own unique use of punctuation. For many years, Love & Monsters was the only one, but in the last couple of seasons - one per season, so maybe it's part of Chibnall's master plan - a new one has been added. In Jodie's first year, Kerblam! claimed the exclamation mark, and this year Can You Hear Me? was the first to be phrased as a query. Think of that. For the whole of the 1980s, the Doctor had a question mark or two constantly on display as part of his costume, but it's taken until 2020 for one to appear in a story title. I will be disappointed if we don't get a story with an @ or a $ next time a series of Doctor Who airs.

In Summary:

I love Love & Monsters, but most seem to find it monstrous.

The Girl Who Waited

Chapter The 161st, where time drags during quarantine.

Plot:

Planning a holiday (which clearly he should never ever do), the Doctor takes Amy and Rory to Apalapucia, one of the most popular tourist attraction planets. Unfortunately, he lands in a period when a world-wide quarantine is in place because of a disease deadly to two-hearted beings like the Doctor. It kills within a single day. Luckily, the Doctor has only strayed into sterile areas, and disappears back into the TARDIS to stay safe. Amy is separated from Rory, even though they appeared to enter the same room. It turns out that, because of the cryptic symbols used to label things on this planet, Rory is in the visitors area, but Amy is in the patients' area, and time is running at different rates in each. The final day of someone who has caught the disease can be made to last a lifetime, and the visitors can watch this play out in safety. This is a kindness, apparently; though, that word may mean something different on Apalapucia as it seems to be universally used in a sinister fashion, not least by the hand-bots, faceless medical robots who hunt Amy to give her treatments that will kill anyone with a single-hearted human physiology. The Doctor and Rory tell Amy to stay put and stay safe, then use the TARDIS to break Rory into her time stream.

When Rory arrives, though, Amy has been waiting 36 years, in which time she's built her own sonic screwdriver (although she pointedly calls it a sonic probe as she can't be doing with whimsy). She's also disarmed (literally) a hand-bot, which she keeps as a pet, Wilson the volleyball stylee. She calls it Rory. Old Amy is very angry with the Doctor, while Rory (the human one, not the hand-bot one) is sad that they weren't able to grow old together. The Doctor has a plan to fold back time to allow the younger Amy to be rescued before the wait, but the older Amy refuses, as she will then cease to exist. Rory has to choose which Amy to save, the older or the younger. Older Amy wants both Amys to be saved, and the Doctor says it is possible. He links the two time-zones, and both Amys and Rory race to the TARDIS fighting hand-bots on the way. The Doctor was lying, though, and once the younger Amy and Rory are in the TARDIS, he slams the door on the older one. Rory pleads with the Doctor to save her too, but the Doctor tells him only one Amy can survive; so, the choice falls to Rory again. The older Amy, talking to Rory through the TARDIS door, makes the choice for him, sacrificing herself so that the younger Amy can have all the days with Rory that were denied to her. 

Context:

I watched this one on my own as the family have all been moaning about watching too much Doctor Who lately (probably as watching the last six episode story The Seeds of Death stripped over a week made it feel like it lasted forever). I watched it one afternoon, after working from home for the day had concluded, from the Blu-ray series 6 boxset.

First time round:

I watched this story on the day of its initial BBC1 broadcast in September 2011, probably timeshifted and probably accompanied by The Better Half and a sense of general disappointment at what I was watching (as was standard at the time). Probably because of that malaise, I can never remember anything about first watching the Doctor Who stories of this particular vintage. So, here's a completely unconnected memory: it's the 14th December 1989, a Thursday. The final Doctor Who story of the original 20th century run, Survival, had finished broadcasting a week earlier. I travel by lengthy Inter-City train from way down South up to Durham for an interview for my place at St. Aidan's College to study Computer Science; the interview will take place the following day. Amongst a small group of other candidates, I get shown around by some poor second year who had stuck around during the holidays for such a responsibility, and who I mainly remember moaning about the food (to be fair, the food was awful). In the evening, he took all of us shiny-faced youngsters for a light ale at the New Inn (which a quick google tells me is no longer called the New Inn, and this makes me sad). After a couple of drinks, I remember feeling a little squiffy - I was 17 and didn't go to pubs or drink alcohol often - and emphatically told all who would listen that the end of days must be soon as Jive Bunny were number one for the third time.

Before that, as we were leaving college to go for this drink, we walked through the JCR; Top of the Pops was on and Electronic were performing Getting Away With It, a song I loved to bits - still do - and already owned on 12" vinyl by this point. I was reminded of this recently as BBC4 have just broadcast that edition of the programme, the latest in their long-running sequence of weekly repeats of the pop show. It stuck in my memory at the time too, and when I subsequently was accepted into the college, I got a tiny bit superstitious about the song. For quite a few years afterwards, I would play it before every exam and interview, and - by and large - I have continued to get away with things since. Whether I get away with presenting this anecdote that has nothing to do with Doctor Who or The Girl Who Waited, I can only guess...

Reaction:

I seem to remember an interview with the writer of this story Tom MacRae around when this story was broadcast about how he had deliberately gone out to write the most timey-wimey script imaginable, the best to appeal to showrunner Steven Moffat. The premise is certainly convoluted, as was the style of this particular era of Doctor Who, but interestingly this doesn't get in the way of the real story being told. For it's not about time travel, that's just a device to illuminate the real theme - the relationship between Amy and Rory.  In fact, this theme could have had more running time if the set-up had been streamlined: where's a freak time-storm when you need one, eh? A freak time-storm could have done something to the TARDIS which created two versions of Amy ageing at different rates - bingo. Saves 10-15 minutes of preamble at the beginning to better use later. As it is, it feels like Rory, and the audience, have only just been introduced to the older Amy before pretty quickly saying goodbye. Even as things are, though, it achieves some affecting moments. Rory actor Arthur Darvill's line "I don't care that you got old, I care that we didn't grow old together" is lovely, and delivered well. There's also older Amy hesitating, looking down at the lipstick she's saved for nearly 40 years to wear when she was rescued, plus the moment where she and Rory laugh together - the first time she's laughed in all those years. There's even a few good jokes, like the Doctor's reaction to Rory's question about how it will work for the two Amys to coexist: "I dunno - it's your marriage".

The story has an actual intractable moral conundrum at the centre of the narrative; it's rare for such shades of grey to be explored in Who. The final decision is fudged, with the protagonist (Rory) being saved from making his crisis-point decision by the Doctor and older Amy deciding for him. This is probably a wise choice by the writer; their relationship would probably be fatally undermined forever after if Rory were more decisive here (he'd have to take young Amy, anyway, or blow the make-up budget for the rest of the series). Perhaps extending the earlier preamble scenes was a benefit in one way, as it reduced the amount of time Karen Gillan needed to be in that old age make-up. This kind of story passes or fails based on the believability of the older Amy's realisation. I think it was a good decision therefore not to recast the older version of the character. Even the best casting in the world couldn't clear the hurdle of the audience mentally comparing and contrasting, with the clear knowledge in their collective heads that it ain't Karen Gillan on their screen, and therefore ain't Amy. The make-up route that was taken, of course, means that the audience is mentally appraising a piece of technical craft, looking for joins, but that's the lesser of two evils to my mind. It's a great job of work in the main, and Gillan gives a convincingly different interpretation, with flashes of her younger self coming through as needed.

The make-up is just one part of a production that is exquisitely designed. It all looks gorgeous, and the late great Michael Pickwoad as production designer makes the most out of what's in the script, with the stark white facility interiors being particularly remarkable. There are lots of other nice visuals elsewhere too, like the weird gardens that Gillan explores, looking for all the world like Amy in (Tim Burton's) Wonderland. There are also memorable details like the giant magnifying glass, the green anchor and  red waterfall buttons. The hand-bots also, from their blank faces to the almost comical hands, are perfect. Visual effects are subtle but effective. This is even more remarkable if one assumes, correctly I think, that this story, with limited cast and locations, probably had less of a budget entitlement than others around it. 

This story gets the relationship of Rory and Amy bang on in a way that Moffat's scripts don't do so well, in my opinion. Aside from a couple of their final stories written by Chris Chibnall, I don't think the Ponds have ever been served so well by a script. Moffat had a lot of input into this, as exec producer and probably final rewriter, of course, so I'm trying not to take too much away from him, but - to pick a random example - Sally Sparrow and Larry Nightingale are a much more believable screen romantic couple from Moffat's pen than are Amy and Rory in any of the stories with Moffat's name on as writer. I wish that somehow this year's scripts could have been rejigged, and this were where Amy's baby plot arc was created. In my rewrite, the time-storm that split the two Amys would have left one pregnant and one not, and older Amy could impart before the end of The Girl Who Waited that at some point during the 36 years she was waiting the baby was kidnapped, leading to a finale that merges parts of the Moon landing two parter, A Good Man Goes to War, Let's Kill Hitler, and The Wedding of River Song. It needs work, but it would sort out the unintended callousness that the couple display towards their lost child (as it would have been created in an alternate timeline) and avoided them having to give up looking for her, and just carry on with adventures (as all this plot would be shifted towards the end of the series).

Connectivity: 

Both stories feature limited Doctor action in sections of the narrative - Matt Smith is mostly confined to the TARDIS so his scenes could be captured quickly while he was mainly working on some other story; Patrick Troughton is knocked out for the while of episode 4 of The Seeds of Death, so the actor could have a week's holiday.

Deeper Thoughts:

The Killing of Time. At the start of the Covid-19 lockdown in the UK (in the Deeper Thoughts section of the Hide blog post to be exact) I mused on a possible 'virus playlist', a set of Doctor Who stories one could binge watch for the period thematically aligned to what was going on in the world from which we were temporarily cut off. I completely forgot about The Girl Who Waited. It's a forgivable mistake; the plague subplot is easy to forget as it's not the main reason for proceedings, just a handy excuse why anyone would build a hospice in such a weird and convoluted way; but, the story fits perfectly. Amy is stuck inside self-isolating for a lengthy period and can't see another soul. She has to keep occupied, but there's not much to do that isn't a mere virtual experience. In 2020 in England, we don't have well-meaning robots trying to kill us, we just have the UK government (and they're probably not well-meaning, little bit of politics there, ladies and gentlemen). I'm glad this one came up at this time, though I suppose it's a bit late, as the lockdown is effectively over (at least for the time being) for me. I'm hesitant about this turn of events, and wondering if it's the right thing to do to emerge slowly into the wider world. Is it right to be erring on the side of safety? Or am I being overcautious? And is that because, if I'm honest, I rather like staying home more than going out. It will be a new preoccupation of mine from now on to muse on this.

Whether one self-imposes more stringent precautions than those that are mandated or not,  I still think all but the committed or foolhardy are going to have to find themselves further preoccupations to cope with the new new normal. Of course, some people will be going to the pub every night, or returning to whatever other patterns they had before Covid-19 as if nothing had happened and people weren't still getting sick. Most of us, though, will still be spending a significant amount of time indoors because of the sheer weight of the complexities in doing other things. I'd happily be in the BFI Southbank again when they reopen in September, to watch a film or Doctor Who event, wearing my mask and whatnot (assuming I could get a ticket with every other seat having to be unoccupied); but, will I feel comfortable getting on a train up to London for the best part of two hours each way as well in order to do so?  We'll see. If I try to see something in a cinema closer to home, will the extra hassle feel worth it, if I know that I can stream some great films on the BFI player or other services from the comfort on my own sofa? Time will tell. When Amy's quarantine was finally over and she was finally able to meet other people and step outside, it didn't exactly go well for her.

Anyway, if you are still cautious like me and looking for a new preoccupation, I can recommend the very addictive and infuriating Doctor Who game, Thirteen, if you haven't already discovered it. Full detail can be found in this Radio Times online puff piece. It's just a re-badged version of the game 2048, but - if my maths is correct - several orders of magnitude more difficult. In 2048, you start with tiles appearing with the number 2, which you can combine to make 4, and two 4s combined make 8, and so on, until you win by getting to 2048. That's 2 to the power 1 through to 2 to the power 11, so ten steps in all. For the Doctor Who version, two Hartnells make a Troughton, etc. But one would only win by getting to Jodie Whittaker, and John Hurt is in the mix too. So, that makes 14 steps, four more than the original version of the game, with each getting exponentially harder.  There was an unofficial Doctor Who version of the game produced a few years back, which I managed to finish only once after investing far too many precious hours into playing it; but Matt Smith was the Doctor and therefore finishing line then, so it was nowhere near as hard. Given the random factors involved in game play (you never know what position a new tile appears in on the four by four grid) I'm not sure it's even possible.

The game's been around a while now, and most people have probably moved on from talking about it online, so I haven't seen  anyone claiming to have won so far. I however am still hopelessly addicted. My best attempt was to build up to one David Tennant and one Christopher Eccleston (pictured), but I haven't been able to get further than that. I will have to stay inside just as much at this rate; I won't have time to do anything else. Anyway, whatever your current preoccupations, be they outside the house or inside, stay safe.

In Summary:

Not so much timey-wimey as relationshipy-welationshipy.

The Seeds of Death

Chapter The 160th, which is a milestone chapter, for a couple of reasons.

Plot:

Sometime in the 21st century, the Earth has become dependent on a instantaneous matter transportation system for goods and people called T-Mat. Space exploration has ceased and humans have traveled no further than the moon, upon which there is a base from where T-Mat is controlled. The Ice Warriors - led by an Ice Lord - invade this base as part of an Earth invasion plan. They kill most of the crew, but not before one of them knocks T-Mat out of action. Helped by cowardly Fewsham, the assistant director of the Moon's T-Mat operation, who just wants to save his own skin, the warriors work to repair the system. Meanwhile, the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe arrive at a space museum run by Professor Eldred. Eldred yearns for the lost days of rockets and astronauts, and to this end is working on a secret rocket project. His old colleague, Radnor, now in a senior management position on the T-Mat programme (which Eldred sees as the ultimate betrayal) arrives, with T-Mat expert Gia Kelly. The world is in turmoil because of T-Mat going out of action, meaning disrupted delivery of needed supplies (this is the problem with Just In Time supply lines). They want to use Eldred's rocket to go to the moon and investigate what's wrong. The Doctor Jamie and Zoe agree to be the rocket's three-man crew.

Despite many upsets and malfunctions on the way, the rocket reaches the moon but is too damaged to travel back again. Miss Kelly is also enticed up to the moon; when Fewsham finishes repairs on the emergency T-Mat link from Earth to Moon, she travels up and repairs T-Mat properly, only to find that the Ice Warriors have tricked her. She escapes and joins up with the Doctor and his companions, while the Ice Warriors send seed pods by the now fully-functional T-Mat to various population centres around the world. The seed pods burst and spread gaseous spore clouds into the atmosphere that create a foamy fungus that spreads across the Earth's surface, eventually to change its atmosphere to something more amenable to the Martians. The fungus is susceptible to water, so a Warrior is dispatched to London to attack the Weather Control Bureau there, to prevent the humans making it rain. On the moon, the Ice Lord has gone back to his ship to liaise with his invasion fleet; our heroes turn up the heating and incapacitate the remaining warriors. Fewsham sends Gia and the TARDIS trio back to London by T-mat, and says he will continue after them, but does not come. Instead, when the Ice Lord returns and turns down the thermostat, he pretends he was overpowered by the other humans. This is a ruse to allow him to broadcast the Ice Lord talking about his invasion plans, including the homing signal the Martians will use to guide their fleet to the moon

Fewsham gets killed for his troubles, but the signal has been recorded. Eldrad, Radnor and Kelly work on sending a satellite into space that will broadcast a fake signal to draw the invasion fleet off course. The Doctor follows Jamie and Zoe over to the Weather Control Bureau where they tackle a warrior and fix the rain-making machine it has damaged. Then, the Doctor, followed by Jamie, T-Mat up to the moon to ensure the Martian's signal device is deactivated. The fleet veers off course into an orbit around the sun, and the Doctor and Jamie manage to kill the last couple of Ice Warriors left on the moon. Rain comes, washing away the fungus, and the TARDIS team make a quiet exit, returning to the TARDIS and dematerialising off to adventures new.

Context:

Watched stripped across a week, an episode a night, from the 'Revisited' DVD edition. The whole family (The Better Half, and three kids, boy of 14, boy of 10, girl of 8) joined me for most of the episodes, each one of them missing one part here and there (they have no staying power, honestly!). The Better Half likes this story and imitated John Witty's distinctive computer voice when she first heard it "Moscow sending now, Tokyo receiving now, dispatch completed". She and the middle child were particularly obsessed with the sonic guns mounted on the Ice Warrior's claw hands, as they were - to their delight - just pen torches sellotaped to the costume. Other points of note for the fam were around the behaviour of the Ice Warriors, mainly that they could not possibly hope to ever win at a game of hide and seek, as they're so very slow to move they couldn't catch anyone, and anyway they have no peripheral vision; various characters escape capture by them by just standing nearby very still.  As this seemed to be the obvious secret of survival in The Seeds of Death, many of my viewing partners got a bit irate at the many characters during the story who make a pointless break for it only to get zapped by the sonic gun of an Ice Warrior and go all wibbly. Finally, the Better Half was bemused throughout with male fashions of the 21st century as depicted here, particularly the penchant for tailors of the T-Mat era to add gaffer tape detailing to everyone's standard issue boiler-suits to give the illusion of underwear worn on the outside.

First time round:

It's apt that The Seeds of Death happened to come up at this significant point (see Deeper Thoughts section below for more details) in my random and directionless journey blogging my way through the Doctor Who back catalogue. For this is the story where that journey started (sort of). I'd caught glimpses of the odd story here and there before the autumn of 1981, but never sat down and watched it. I'd enjoyed a curated set of repeats of stories towards the end of that year (the 'Five Faces of Doctor Who'), and had then watched avidly from 1982, Peter Davison's first year on the job. But all this was programmed for me, and I had no choice to follow along prosaically, story after story. It wasn't until home video recorders became affordable that one could set one's own schedule in some minimal way. The order of events was as follows: late 1985, my Mum purchased the first VCR our household ever had; about a year later, I taped (with various degrees of aptitude and success) the episodes of the latest series of Doctor Who off the telly, to save and rewatch ad infinitum. Alas, this was the year of The Trial of a Time Lord, so none of the stories were fully self-contained, and the latitude for peripatetic wandering of viewing was limited.

Sometime towards the end of 1986, or possibly early 1987, my school friend Dominic bought a copy of Revenge of the Cybermen on VHS, the first ever Doctor Who release on video. We watched it together many many times. It had been out in different versions for a few years, but this was a repackaged release at an affordable price, and it was at this point that building up a collection started as a possibility for those that weren't rich (i.e. me). I ended up buying that tape from Dominic eventually, but before that, I bought my first ever tape new in a shop with my own money. And it was The Seeds of Death. This was early in the summer of 1987, as best I can date it. My parents had been divorced a few years by then - they'd managed 20 years of marriage by the year before Doctor Who reached it's own china anniversary, but then they went on a rather more permanent hiatus than Doctor Who managed shortly after. My sister and I would visit my Dad every other week, travelling from Worthing to his place in Bognor Regis. The sliver lining was that this gave me two towns to regularly scour for Doctor Who purchases. Finding copies of novelisations or videos in those days was pot luck; nowhere I knew of in Worthing stocked the videos at all, but one day on a weekend visit I found that they were being stocked in W. H. Smiths in Bognor's high street.

They only had Revenge of the Cybermen and The Seeds of Death, and so I bought the one I hadn't seen already. I couldn't watch it straight away, though, as my Dad didn't own a VCR. I must have read the blurb on that video box a hundred times over that weekend, and examined every photo on the packaging until I could draw them all from memory. The goodies within remained locked up until I got back home on Sunday evening, when I'm guessing, as I can't remember, that I would have run into the house, put the tape into the slot without so much as a Hello to my Mum, and watched the whole thing before going to bed late (it's six episodes, so even edited together as an omnibus as it was, it was still around two and a half hours long). A few months later, though it seemed like years, I got Pyramids of Mars. A few months after that, though it seemed like forever, I got Death to the Daleks. The journey had begun, bouncing from Doctor to Doctor, era to era. I'm still on that journey now: 160 stories blogged, and counting...

Reaction:

This is an apt story as a first (both my first one to own, and the first black and white video release right at the beginning of the range), as it is the epitome of a particular type of Doctor Who story, common in the 1960s but one that has appeared throughout its history, the no-nonsense action adventure story. Exactly right to entice the curious would-be collector like my younger self. These tales channel large amounts of Jules Verne, and have lots of episodic scrapes as our heroes battle against environmental forces, or evil adversaries. They don't have much in the way of interpersonal drama or deeper subtexts to confuse the issue. Even the horror inflections that were part of the house style of Troughton's stories the year before are mostly gone. The odd scare moment in The Seeds of Death is more on the level of a Scooby Doo cartoon. In fact, this period of Doctor Who has more than a bit in common with the adventures of the Mystery Machine gang: fun characters, simple but engaging plot, a moment where the crazy kids investigate putting themselves in danger (Jame and Zoe going off to the Weather Control Bureau on their own), and a lot of slapstick shenanigans including a lame joke at the end. Every story couldn't be like that, but Who got into this groove for a few stories in 1968 and 1969, from The Invasion through to The Space Pirates, and it's a period I like very much.

This is not to say that the story is just archetypal and average, mind. There's lots of interesting ideas and moments in there to keep the interest up over a long running time. In an echo of writer Brian Hayles's story from the previous Troughton season, The Ice Warriors, which introduced the Martian meanies, there is a sci-fi exploration of impacts of technology and impacts to the environment. It's a little scaled down here compared to that earlier story, but it's quite clever to cover something as topical as a rocket trip to the moon in 1969 while simultaneously depicting this as something that's old hat in the world of the story. Also similar to The Ice Warriors is the subplot about professional interactions and intrigue. The  subplot about Radnor and Eldred is like the Clent / Penley interactions in the earlier story in miniature. More interesting for me here, though, is Fewsham's story. Terry Scully does impeccable work with the character: palm-sweaty desperation to avoid death early on, gradually turning to a resolve to redeem himself, with a brief and magical moment of sheer panic and terror midway when he thinks he has killed the Doctor. (The eldest spoilt this a tad by pointing out that the Ice Warriors have no way of checking that Fewsham has T-matted the Doctor into the vacuum of space, as they ordered, so he could have just sent him safely to New York or Tokyo or somewhere.) Frankly, Scully's performance is a bit too good compared to the exciting but somewhat superficial surrounding action, and the character is definitely my favourite part of the story.

A close second would be how the story sounds. The music and special sound for this story (by Dudley Simpson and Brian Hodgson respectively) are so distinctive, I think I'd be able to name the story from only a five second blast of either. Rather than score the episodes, Simpson has provided a library of cues to use and reuse through the story as a whole, which means there is much repetition, and occasionally the music could fit the action better, but each one is such a belter that even a few episodes of hearing them again and again is enough to seed them into your mind forever, Martian fungus style. Hodgson's bleeps and bloops are great too, with the homing signals for the human and Martian ships to follow being particular stand-outs. Director Michael Ferguson and the production team do not let the visual side down either, with some great shots, particularly those of the lone Ice Warrior stalking around London parks with the sun behind him.

Combine this with one of the most charming set of regulars in Troughton, Fraser Hines as Jamie, and Wendy Padbury as Zoe, and you have a great though undemanding tale. It isn't without minor flaws - it's a little unsettling, for example, given that future stories will delve deeper into their complexity, honour and nobility, to see how bloodthirsty is the script - and the Doctor - towards the Ice Warriors. Every single one is blown or burnt up without a second thought, and the mass murder of the fleet, as this cold-blooded group faces an unfortunate fate in an orbit close to the Sun, is pretty much laughed off at the end. Earlier in the story, many Ice Warriors are sent off to find the stragglers on the Moonbase and quite a few of them don't come back thanks to the efforts of our heroes, but the Ice Lord in charge doesn't seem to miss them. The story makes a big deal about how T-Mat has replaced all other forms of travel, but an automobile and satellite-carrying rocket are too conveniently found towards the end. These are mere quibbles, though, the main problem is that there just isn't quite enough material to stretch to 6 episodes without a few moments that drag. Troughton's last year was plagued with script troubles, planned stories falling through necessitating others to bulk up, adding extra episodes to meet the quota. One story after another from this era is a big, lumbering beast. The Seeds of Death comes close to managing to be fleet of foot despite carrying a lot of baggage, but it doesn't quite make it.

Connectivity: 

Both stories feature a space vessel that has some trouble just after take off, and both include other-worldly warriors in armour.

Deeper Thoughts:

One Hundred and Sixty High and Rising. Reaching my 160th randomly shuffled story for the blog marks an interesting stopping point on this long journey. If I'd decided at the outset to watch Doctor Who in broadcast order, the 160th story would have seen me complete the classic series, up to and including the final story of that run, 1989's Survival. Instead of the Patrick Troughton Doctor, Jame and Zoe rushing back to Professor Eldred's museum and taking off in the TARDIS, my latest scene watched would have been the Sylvester McCoy Doctor and Ace walking off into the sunset arm in arm, while he gives it the full elegiac voiceover treatment about fighting injustice and not letting the tea get cold, etc. etc. There is a little room for interpretation in terms of story numbering within the classic series. so I better show my working. The first 15 years or so are straightforward and generally agreed upon. The Stones of Blood is number 100. A planned but eventually cut scene in that story was going to see the Doctor and Romana celebrating the former's birthday, but this was really a codified reference to the programme reaching its story centenary. The chunks that the episodes of Doctor Who up to that point had been grouped into (episodes, lest we forget, that didn't always have an overall multi-part story title, and that had cliffhangers between as well as within) were all generally agreed upon, and the commercial releases of Doctor Who (videos, CDs, and DVDs) followed this pattern, with individual stories, not episodes or groups of stories, being the standard unit of delivery.

A year after The Stones of Blood, though, and a story is half-made but never broadcast (Shada), a couple of years after that and a spin-off story is shown (K9 & Company), and a few years after that The Trial of a Time Lord is broadcast, nominally a single 14-part story, but also considered a collection of four stories under an umbrella title. How does one account for them? When Dragonfire was broadcast in 1987, some pre-publicity - I remember a Radio Times advert, but it may have been mentioned elsewhere too - described it as the 150th story. It's not legally binding or anything, but it must have been in someone's head, so what exactly did it mean? Probably that they, whoever they were, were discounting Shada and K9 & Company, and counting Trial as 4 stories. That then promotes Dragonfire to the 150 spot. I seem to remember an alternate fan theory expressed by maybe a letter writer into Doctor Who Magazine at the time that it could be that they, whoever they were, were counting Trial as only one story but including Shada, K9 & Company and... Slipback, an inconsequential radio thing starring Colin Baker that had aired on Radio 4 during the 18 months Doctor Who was off the air for its Michael Grade imposed hiatus. It is a bit of a stretch, though,  that Slipback would have been on their mind, whoever they were.

I am certainly not counting Slipback, as it wasn't on the telly. I didn't at first intend to cover Shada or K9 & Company for the blog either, but circumstances dictated that they came up, which is fair enough, as it's all supposed to be random and unplanned. And I've counted Trial as four different stories, or else I'd have burned my way through Colin Baker's era even quicker than I have done (he only stars in eight stories in total if Trial only counts as one). The extra two stories bump Dragonfire to position 152, and the eight further stories in Sylvester McCoy's reign leading up to Survival take the total to 160. That puts me just over half way through after five years of blogging, as I make it 140 further stories remaining. The post-2005 batch is not without its points of contention over story groupings either, and there's no option to follow the DVDs either, as they were never released as single stories. Suffice to say, I count Utopia as part of an epic three-part story along with The Sound of Drums and The Last of the Time Lords, but Turn Left is standalone. I also don't count Scream of The Shalka, even though it got a DVD release in the official range. By my reckoning, that means that The Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children is story 300.

Notwithstanding the new stories that will be produced (whenever filming will next be able to take place), I should catch up in roughly five years. What a prospect! Of the stories I currently have left to cover in that time, there's a reasonably even split between classic and new series stories, 68 to 72 respectively. Of the older segment, there are 21 remaining stories in the black and white format of the first two Doctors, and of them 10 have some or all of their episodes missing (though some have animated versions to plug the holes). It's probably going to be too packed a schedule for me to change my mind about Scream of the Shalka or Slipback, but give it five years, and you never know!

In Summary:

A fun, solid space adventure story that has loads of good stuff in it, almost enough to fill six episodes. Almost.