Empress of Mars

Chapter The 166th, where the chances of anything coming from Mars are 1:1 actually.

Plot:

The Doctor, Bill and Nardole are (for some unstated reason) visiting NASA as a probe sends back its first image from Mars's surface, a vast message written in rocks: "God Save The Queen". Intrigued, the Doctor takes his two friends to Mars in 1881, the year his analysis suggests the message was made. Nardole (for some unstated reason) is transported home in the TARDIS leaving the other two stranded. They meet with a company of red-coated British soldiers and an Ice Warrior, who the Britishers call Friday. The soldiers, led by Colonel Godsacre, and his smarmy second-in-command, Catchlove, found Friday on Earth, defrosted him and helped fix his ship for the trip to Mars, where Friday has promised them riches await for the British empire to claim. The troops break into what looks like a burial chamber, but it's really the Ice Warrior Empress in suspended animation. She wakes and releases many more warriors. The Doctor, Bill and Godsacre try to keep the peace, but the hotheaded Catchlove takes over, discrediting his CO who has in the past survived being hung for cowardice. A lot of soldiers get killed, but Godsacre finds his bravery, offering himself in place of his men, and the situation calms down. The Doctor sends out a distress message, and they create the giant "God Save The Queen" message to help guide the rescue ships down. Nardole returns to Mars having got Missy out of the vault to pilot the TARDIS. The Doctor's worried, but Missy seems to have turned good. Can it be true?

Context:

Watched from the BBC iplayer by me and the children (boys of 14 and 11, girl of 8) one Sunday afternoon. The younger two stayed the course, but the eldest wandered off halfway through, never to return. He'd amused himself at the start, before the regular cast appeared, by trying to guess which Doctor's story this was (he guessed Tennant), but after that, nothing seemed to hold him. At the end of the pre-credits sequence, which features Matt Lucas as Nardole,  my daughter asked me whether I'd deliberately put on one with "the potato man" because he'd joined Bake Off that week. This was a coincidence however, as Empress of Mars was selected by the usual random process, though Matt Lucas had indeed joined the regular presenting team for Channel 4's Great British Bake-Off the previous Tuesday. Her reference to Lucas was not based on him looking like a potato, by the way, but instead because of his ubiquity on social media platforms during the UK's first Covid-19 lockdown singing his baked potato song. The arc plot elements of this story (the vault containing Missy that the Doctor and Nardole are guarding) confused my daughter a bit, and we had to pause the action for a brief explanation. Both the boys remembered it from having seen the story go out.

First time round:

I can't remember anything at all about watching this the first time round on its first BBC1 broadcast on 10th June 2017, so I will instead dredge up a completely unconnected anecdote, the story of how my favourite nerd place turned against me. The place in question (which has been mentioned many times before on this blog) was Volume One, an independent book and video shop in Worthing, the town where I grew up. I can't remember when it first sprang up in Montague Street, Worthing's pedestrianised main shopping area, but by the early 1990s it was a regular haunt. While not specifically sci-fi themed, it had large sections given over to such product, and was my most dependable and regular source of Doctor Who videos and books in the 1990s. My remembrance of the New Adventures last post reminded me of the one time I didn't feel completely at home there. As I said last time, I was never flush enough to be a regular purchaser of the New Adventures novels when the range began, as all my available cash went on buying the video releases instead; but, I would often be found in that section of the store, looking at front cover pictures and back cover blurbs, and maybe caressing the pages just a little bit.

It was just before Christmas in 1991. I was back in Worthing after my first term studying at Durham, and was particularly cash-strapped; I'd arranged to meet my sister in town to do some joint present buying for our parents. It's probably important to picture me at this point in my life: I had a long and shabby grey coat, very similar to the one Richard E. Grant wears in Withnail and I, shoulder length hair, and a couple of days stubble. Because my old watch had broken during term, and I didn't have the money to get it fixed, I also had a large alarm clock in my coat pocket so I could be on time. It was a traditional - and quite heavy - wind-up model with two bells on top, and it was weighing my coat down on one side, but needs must. I was a few minutes early when I got to town, so I went to Volume One, of course, to look at Doctor Who books I could not afford. Because of the season, there was a security guard on duty in the shop who was not employed there for the rest of the year. After a few minutes, I took a peek at the alarm clock, realised I needed to go, popped it back in my pocket, and rushed out of the shop...

...only to be grabbed by the security guard just outside the door. It was an understandable mistake. He'd seen me, in my tramp-like togs, staring at books for a while before pocketing something hefty and high-tailing it out of there. After being accused of shoplifting, I turned my pockets out in front of the guard and the store manager, with a particularly sheepish look on my face when I revealed my time-keeping mechanism. I was only a few minutes late in meeting my sister, and I would not have thought any more about it, except I'd mentioned it to her in passing. She told my Mum, and - because of how my Mum is, and to my utmost embarrassment - my Mum rang up Volume One to complain. This is where I felt a little bit of the warm glow towards this favourite shop diminish slightly: they claimed that they'd found a Doctor Who and a Star Trek book dumped in a display by the door. It had been an honest mistake up to that point, but I was a bit annoyed by that. I did not dump any books by the door, and the chances of someone else doing so at around the same time with two books in the exact section I had been looking at, seemed slim. To my mind, either the security guard or the shop had put them there themselves, or just made it up. I've never shop-lifted (too much of a scaredy-cat), and - as anyone who knew me at the time would have attested - I wouldn't have touched a Star Trek novel with a ten-foot pole.

I didn't feel bad enough to stop shopping there, though. I didn't have much choice, as nowhere else got the titles I was interested in so reliably. It continued to be a haunt for many years after, but I always made a point of leaving the place at a slow and unhurried pace thereafter. I was never accused again. I don't remember when Volume One folded. Towards the end of the 1990s, I'd moved to Brighton and was commuting to London, so the MVCs in Brighton and London Bridge became my default suppliers. By the early 2000s, the space previously occupied with Volume One had become a Bonmarché (as shown above). If you're ever there, there is one lingering hint of the place I used to love and used to spend quite a bit of money in (and on just one day, the place that accused me of stealing from them), the door handles at the front of the shop are shaped like books, even though now there are no longer any books for sale.

Reaction:

Towards the end of Empress of Mars, a character from Classic Who returns after more than 40 years off screen, still played by the same person. I won't give away who this is, just in case someone is reading this that hasn't seen it. What's wonderful and surprising about this is that it works within the narrative pretty seamlessly - it's so brief that I don't think it would seem odd to those who have no idea of the history of the character, and for those who do it works very well to fit Empress of Mars into the wider history of the Ice Warriors as seen in their various stories to date. This is typical of the efficiency of the story-telling. There's no subtext to speak of here. Maybe there's a little hint that the Ice Warrior Friday, in tempting the soldiers with baubles and trinkets, is behaving as the soldiers themselves would do to other native races, in their work as a colonial oppressive force; but, the time I took to type all that out is longer than the episode itself dwells on this. Most of the running time us taken up with action that could be summarised as Redcoats versus Ice Warriors on Mars, won't that be fun?!!! And it is. Early on, there a couple of wonderful reversals that set up that we're in for a roller-coaster ride rather than any treatise on colonialism: a scary figure appears in a strange space /diving suit, but it just turns out to be a Victorian bloke; another soldier sees the Doctor and the warrior, and the Doctor is the one to whom he levels his rifle.

The regular cast of this period is a particular favourite of mine, and by this story, which is quite late into their time together, they are working perfectly as a seamless unit. Lucas only appears for a couple of scenes before being written out (this was likely one of the scripts written before the decision was made to feature him in every episode), but makes his mark. He gets to fetch Michelle Gomez as Missy for an intriguing coda, to remind the audience about the season's overall plot arc. The rest of the time, though, it's just Peter Capaldi and Pearl Mackie, as the Doctor and Bill, and they do not disappoint. The Empress asking for Bill's counsel is a particularly good moment, as is her overlooking Godsacre's Victorian attitudes (as he happens to be Victorian) and Mackie plays them well. The Doctor's appeals for peace are nicely underwritten and well performed. The rest of the cast are uniformly good. I almost forget there are actors in the Ice Warrior costumes, the main two performers Richard Ashton and Adele Lynch inhabit the creatures so well. The two main human guest stars are very good too. Anthony Calf plays Godsacre with a perfect weary dignity, and Ferdinand Kingsley is having the time of his life playing an absolute dastard in Catchlove. 

The writer Mark Gatiss is having fun too. Victoriana is one of his hobby topics, and he's populated the piece with larger-than life characters with a succession of colourful names: as well as Calf and Kingsley's monikers, there's Sergeant Major Peach, Jackdaw, Vincey and Knibbs (echoes of  a Trumpton fire crew are no doubt coincidental). He also gets to stich together lots of Doctor Who continuity, as mentioned above, and finesse the mythology of the noble Martians for whom he must have a lot of affection (he's the only writer other than their creator Brian Hayles to write for them in TV Doctor Who). A particularly gruesome innovation is that their sonic guns now crumple anyone in the firing line into a human paper ball, with twisted limbs fleetingly on display. Underneath these somewhat superficial but nonetheless interesting trimmings, the story constructed is solid, straight-ahead adventure fare, and none the worse for it.

There was only one note of perhaps false controversy when this most inoffensive story was broadcast. The presence of a black soldier in the British army in 1881 caused a few comments to be thrown around online. A few were possibly concerned about historical accuracy, but in general it was the same tedious arguments from the same quarters about "wokeness", whether that was the specific term used back in 2017 or not. As it turned out, there was a historical precedent, but only one ever in history, and that person didn't disappear off to Mars presumably. I don't think it really matters, though. The recent film version of The Personal History of David Copperfield, also starring a certain Mister Capaldi, has demonstrated that 'colour blind' casting in a costume drama can not only work but can invigorate the subject matter. Someone could make the case that the Copperfield movie uses certain other artifices and alienation devices which distance it from any notion of accuracy, and this makes it more easy for the viewer to factor in anything that might otherwise take them out of the drama. Steerforth, for example, is cast as is traditional as a handsome white-skinned, dark-haired fellow, but his mother is played excellently by Nikki Amuka-Bird; they both just go for it, so any moment of dissonance is brief, if it happens at all. But Doctor Who isn't known for its documentary realism either, so there's no reason why it couldn't do the same sort of thing. More wokeness please. 

  

Connectivity: 

Both Empress of Mars and Remembrance of the Daleks feature a group of soldiers dealing with an A-list returning Doctor Who monster race. They both start with a pre-credits sequence that focusses on activity in the solar system near Earth. Both were written by people who also penned titles for the New Adventures range of novels in the 1990s, and neither story title begins with the definitive article, even though both could. 

Deeper Thoughts:

Coronavirus and hiding from the sun (reprise). Doctor who loves a return; in this story, the Ice Warriors are back for a rematch with the Doctor and the people of Earth, and for the last blog post it was the Daleks doing the same. In real life, something coming back again can be less welcome. Welcome to UK lockdown 2: The Revenge. At the time of writing, the UK Prime Minister has within the last few days announced further restrictions that will potentially last for another six months. Like any sequel, it's not going to exactly recapture the spirit of the original - they haven't got Joe Wicks back, for example. Schools, pubs and restaurants remain open for now, though they have to shut at 10pm (it's well known that viruses are only impactful after 10 in the evening, so this makes perfect sense). As I think it's obvious to any reader of this blog, I am given to nostalgia; I already look back on the early days of the lockdown with a great deal of satisfaction, as I was mandated by the government in my country to stay in, order takeaways and watch TV, which is pretty much my idea of heaven anyway. But can I improve on how I managed things first time round?

The key thing I'll have to do better this time round is to eat and drink less. It became a running joke in the media, social or otherwise, very early on last time, certainly before Easter, that lockdown was causing everyone to comfort eat and hit the wine more. This was definitely true for me. One shouldn't be too hard on oneself, as it was an unprecedented and psychologically tough period, and for a good portion of it there were severe limitations on how active one could be, and - I'm already forgetting - what kind of food one could get in the shops or delivered. But it's a shame. I remember mentioning in the Deeper Thoughts section of my blog post for Mawdryn Undead two years ago that I had lost some of the excess weight I'd previously been carrying around for many years. In the 18 months or so that followed, I kept most of it off, but 6 months on from the start of lockdown, and it's all back along with a few more pounds for good luck. Since the start of September, I have started to gradually up the exercise and decrease the intake. Slow progress at the moment, but I'll keep going. 

Another diet I'll be keeping a closer eye upon is my consumption of Doctor Who stories. It strikes me, looking over the last six months of blog posts, that lockdown has reduced my rate of posting a bit. More slow progress, but - again - I'll keep going. One would think I'd have more time on my hands, but there's always proved to be a lot of other things to watch. A great deal of these have been other Doctor Who releases. At the start of lockdown in March, I was still working my way through the last Blu-ray season boxset (season 26), and since then another classic season box set (season 14) has been released, as has the collection of the most recent Jodie Whittaker series, and three bumper-pack releases of animated stories (The Faceless Ones, The Power of the Daleks Special Edition, and Fury from the Deep). I've watched almost all the material on these now with just a couple of special features on Fury left to enjoy. When that's done, for the first time in a long time, I'll have no Who-related pile of discs backlog and nothing on pre-order either. This is almost certainly covid-19 related, the impact of the virus having caused a bit of disruption to BBC product releases; otherwise - based on previous years - there would have been another box set announced by now. Of course, this same disruption is going to mean the next broadcast series with Jodie Whittaker is likely to be delayed too. It does free me up to roam randomly through the Who back catalogue on my unending quest to cover everything on this here blog. But, if we all are going to be locked in for the foreseeable, it's a shame there's nothing shiny and new to see. I'll just have to do some keep fit instead!

In Summary:

Empress-ively solid fun.