Colony in Space

Chapter The 185th, which features a group struggling for survival while facing strange phenomena that may be faked, there's talk of a group of others from the opposite side of the area, and there's secret bases with hidden entrances.

Plot:

The exiled Doctor finally thinks he's got his TARDIS working, but it's being remote-controlled by the Time Lords. They send him and Jo to the planet Uxarieus to find a kind of Wild West re-enactment society: a group of frontiers people are trying to scratch a meagre life from the soil while being wary of the native tribe, and a group of unscrupulous strong-arms from a mining concern (IMC) are making trouble so they can take the planet instead. The Doctor helps investigate recent monster attacks, which look to have been staged by IMC. He also finds a secret underground city where the natives live with a priest caste and a Guardian super-being. They are remnants from an advanced society that long ago developed a doomsday weapon. The miners and colonists jostle for the upper hand, with attacks and ruses aplenty. An external adjudicator arrives, but it's the Master using an assumed identity. He's scheming to get his hands on the weapon, and - seemingly just for the giggles - finds in favour of IMC. The Master captures Jo to induce the Doctor to take him to the underground city. Meanwhile, the IMC team force the colonists to board their dangerously old space rocket to blast off from the planet. The Guardian helps the Doctor to destroy the weapon, which also destroys the city. The Master gets away, and the colonists sneak off the ship before it blows up after take off, and wrest control from IMC. A real adjudicator is sent for, and the one nice one among the miners joins the colony.

Context:

March 2021. A year into the UK's Covid-19 pandemic response, and the family and I are locked down still. Just as the last Doctor Blu-ray Who box set was a diversion from Lockdown 1 - a time in the UK of Joe Wicks and Baked Potato songs and hours spent waiting for grocery webpages to load - the latest box set has provided entertainment for the last couple of weeks of Lockdown 3. The episodes in question are season 8, Jon Pertwee's second year playing the Doctor, which introduced the character of the Master. The blog has already covered four out of the five stories over the years; so, to add a random factor I flipped a coin. The coin came up heads, which is why I'm writing a blog post on the remaining story Colony in Space. This means that season 8 is the second full season of Doctor Who I have completed for the blog. The first was season 23, Colin Baker's second, the Trial of a Time Lord year; this, I rounded off when its box set came out (see the post on Mindwarp for more details). Comparing these two seasons, it's interesting to notice they both have umbrella themes. Though they're not as often thought of in this way, 1971's stories link together to form one overall story just as much as Trial or 1978's Key to Time season. The decision to include the Master in each one of the five stories of the year has been criticised since, not least by the producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks who made that decision, but who later persuaded themselves they'd taken it too far. After this most recent re-watch, I'm not so sure I agree with them.

The inclusion of the Master is certainly something that wasn't done half-heartedly: Letts and Dicks go all out, committing 100% to the concept. There isn't exactly a paucity of imagination either, with just enough variety injected to keep things fresh: introduce the character in a story where he shares joint billing with a returning foe (Terror of the Autons), give him a full-on story where he is the main villain next (The Mind of Evil), tease our expectations over the next couple of stories (in The Claws of Axos, the Master is a helpless captive at first, and later seems to be helping UNIT more than is the Doctor), and finally round things off with a climactic confrontation where the character is captured (The Daemons). Because it was part of a box set, and to put the story in context, I watched Colony in Space 'in situ' as it were. Over a couple of weeks, I watched all the episodes of the season in order from the beginning, getting out my notebook for the fourth one. In Colony, the twist is that the script holds back, keeping us waiting for exactly when the bearded villainous one will put in an appearance.

During the few weekday evenings on which I viewed the episodes from the Blu-ray, I was mostly on my own, but the youngest two of my children (boy of 11, girl of 8) wandered into the living room occasionally. The elder of the two said of Jon Pertwee's Doctor, after watching the scene where he distracts a native with a magic trick before lamping him, "He's the best Doctor at hitting people on the head". The youngest didn't say anything but did keep coming back in to catch moments of the story and Blu-ray special features when I was watching them later. Ultimately, she requested that we watch The Daemons together, after being intrigued by the trailer on the Colony in Space disc. Accompanied by both her brothers (the eldest a boy of 14), we watched the omnibus version that comes as an extra in the box set. The boys lost interest quite early on, but she stuck it out and gave the story a big thumbs up at the end.

First Time Round:

By the mid-1990s, when the regular monthly releases of the Doctor Who VHS range were firmly established, BBC Worldwide started to use the final release slot before Christmas for something a bit more special than the norm. It could be a boxset of contiguous linked stories (The E-Space Trilogy set in 1997) or stories in special new versions (The Five Doctors in 1995) or stories with which additional material was included (The Ice Warriors, which was accompanied by a documentary about Doctor Who's missing episodes in 1998). By the end of the decade though, with more and more of the Who archive plundered, things got a bit more desperate and they fell back on something that they'd experimented with before in 1993, the 30th anniversary year: sticking a couple of random video cassettes in a tin. In 1999, they paired up the final two previously unreleased Dalek stories; in 2000, the final two Cybermen stories. 2001, the third year of this mopping up exercise, with the end of the range in sight, saw the final tin of the two stories that had not yet seen the light of day featuring Roger Delgado as the Master. It was perhaps not surprisingly called The Master Tin.

It was unfortunate that these two stories - The Time Monster was in the tin alongside Colony in Space - happened to be the two stories consistently found to be the least popular of Delgado's Who work (at least based on all the polls I can find to check online). Not surprising that these should be left to last, but unfortunate nonetheless. Despite knowing full well their reputations, I dutifully purchased the tin on the day of release, 5th November 2011, from the MVC in central Brighton. I then proceeded to watch all twelve episodes as urgently as possible on my own, in order; so, Colony would have been first. It wouldn't have all been on one night, but probably no more than two. Then, I put the videos on my shelf in their correct place, based on chronological ordering by broadcast date, natch, and hid the tin away in a cupboard. All would have been done and dusted before the second week of November got underway. Merry Christmas!

Reaction:

Doctor Who fan opinions do tend to get engrained, or at least they did in the pre-social media days. As communication between fans across the globe has become easier, I now see a more healthy plurality of views abound. Even in the badder older days, though, stories could get re-evaluated that had been damned before. The Pertwee years have found and lost favour, and then found it again, over the many years since the years of Pertwee. Releases such as this season box set are good opportunities for a retrospective, and previous ones may have contributed to that waxing and waning. Certainly a lot of assumed classics or assumed turkeys had some reputational reversals once the episodes were out for all to watch, rather than just being a few photographs and memories. Watching might not be enough on its own, though. As I'll go into in more detail below in the Deeper Thoughts section, which reviews the box set as a whole, I think this is the first time I've ever been close to not just watching the episodes of this season but seeing them, as they were first made and shown and meant to be seen, such is the impact of the restoration effort applied. Of all of the five stories, Colony in Space is probably the one that benefits from this most, as the Beeb's master tapes only exist in 525-line NTSC standard; the process used to revert the pictures to something approaching 625-line PAL for the DVD, though very clever, ultimately was not wholly successful, and the version using different techniques done for the Blu-ray is much better.

One day, new technology might improve things further; if so, I'll no doubt fork out again. As of now, though, with the currently best available versions of Colony's picture and sound available, what is it there to see? The first thing that strikes one is the exterior work. Director Michael E. Briant always gives good quarry, and this is definitely true here, in his first ever directing gig for Doctor Who. The Old Baal clay pit in Cornwall, used generously throughout the six episodes, is a great location with lots of different rock formations and areas that give scope for interesting camera angles, including some high angle shots. The time of year that they filmed also brings some drama, with a waterlogged hand-to-hand combat scene; two fit young men wrestling one another in mud is not something you see in Doctor Who every day. The landscape's all a bit of a dull colour, alas, but that fits the narrative of the planet's soil being polluted by the doomsday weapon's radiation. My previous view of this story has been that its colour palette was a bit drab as a whole, but the latest Blu-ray restoration makes the colour that is there shine through. The lower caste Uxarieans have never been so bright a green, and even the world of the colonist's dome has unexpected flashes of colour in amidst the grey and tan. Briant and the creative team around him add a few nice little details - the vehicles, mining machines, viewing screens and the geodesic dome interiors - to add reality to the Doctor's first off-Earth trip in the colour era.

The story is also not as drab as I have previously felt it to be. Writer Malcolm Hulke's structure is a strong one, borrowing from the land claim subset of Western movies. There's not much in the way of nuance in the colonists versus miners plot, but this isn't a bad thing. Captain Dent and chief henchman Morgan are boo and hiss-able sneering baddies, lying, killing and intimidating their way to achieving their aims. Bernard Kay has a nice role playing the only one with a conscience. It's a neat comment from Hulke on capitalism perhaps that the Interplanetary Mining Corporation crew only has one miner amongst roughly two dozen brutal security staff. The colonists are perhaps less distinct than their opponents: the firebrand one, the earnest leader one, the plucky young girl one. The latter, played by a pre-Coronation Street Helen Worth (she plays Gail in the long-running UK soap opera) leavens the dourness somewhat; it's nice seeing her and Katy Manning in scenes together. It's a shame that Briant had his casting decision to have a woman play the sadistic Morgan vetoed by the sixth floor BBC execs. The other female colonists get killed off or written out early on, and then it's just one group of blokes having periodic shoot-outs or punch ups with another. The Master is brought in relatively late, and his superweapon subplot (teased in the first scene of episode 1) held back until later episodes to give the six-parter a chance to sustain its momentum; but, it doesn't quite manage it.

One problem is that there's too much to and fro between the colonists and the miners, with each group see-sawing in the power structure from low to high and back again, without any sense of escalation until towards the end. To power this, people have to do some idiot moves so the other side can have the whip hand again. Nobody locks their spaceship, or locks up their stash of confiscated guns; colonists trust the person who's clearly an IMC plant; Jo sets off a trip alarm that she's only just been warned about in order to make the entire climactic sequence in the underground city possible. If it weren't for that, the story would finish an episode earlier (no sarcastic comments now!). I wouldn't say, though, that there isn't enough enough here for the narrative to fill six episodes, as there are some scenes that should be here that ain't, scenes the dramatic question of the piece begs.

The first is a scene showing the comeuppance of the main bad guy, Captain Dent, whose fate is left unclear in the broadcast story. The audience has to assume that he's being held somewhere and will face trial when the real Adjudicator arrives. He's been shown to be wily enough that he could escape justice again, though, and could even get the upper hand for IMC once more (imagine that - a 7th episode of Colony in Space!). As such, leaving that loose end dangling damages the story. An even worse omission than that, to my mind, is not showing the self-sacrifice of Ashe. The leader of the colonists is a key character all the way through the story; in the last episode, he pilots the rocket alone, knowing it's going to blow up, in order that the other colonists can survive. The scene isn't shown, but is related later in dialogue, and his daughter - for whom he was the only living relative on the miserable rock that is their new home - doesn't shed a single tear. Another draft to beef those bits up a bit, and maybe introduce a bit more mystery early on (we pretty much know exactly what's going on and that IMC are behind it in the first few minutes of the first episode) and the story would have been much improved, and - dare I say it - could even have achieved some level of greatness.

Other points of note: though UNIT are not part of the story, it's good to see Nicholas Courtney as the Brig cameoing in the first and final parts. It's hard not to feel for the actor as he says the line "Doctor - come back at once..." as there's an implicit "...for the sake of my career!" tacked on the end. This story, only three on from the start of the 'UNIT family' era is the beginning of its end. In subsequent seasons, trips into time and space would increase in number, and stories featuring the Brig and his men would consequently decrease. As part of the same process, Katy Manning gets to travel in the TARDIS, so moves from just being a member of UNIT to being a fully fledged travelling companion, and has her own 'It's bigger on the inside!' moment and everything. Her regular pay cheque, unlike Nick's, was assured. Delgado is his usual charming self, the model work is okay for the most part, the music's good, there are a couple of good lines. "I want to see the universe, not rule it" is a nice distillation of the difference between our hero and the Master. The title of the story may well be stupid as well as bland - the colony is on a planet in space, anything could be said to be "in space" if it's on a planet in space, The Daemons In Space, anyone? - but is nonetheless amusing if one misspells it and it's auto-corrected to "Colonoscopy In Space" as I did in a WhatsApp group chat causing - ooh - sheer minutes of hilarity. Anyway, with everything taken together, this story has lots of interest packed in, and is nowhere near the bore-fest that I assumed it to be before this most recent watch.

Connectivity: 

Both stories feature a wee fellah with surprisingly strong mental powers (George in Night Terrors, and the tiny Uxariean Guardian in Colony in Space) who are at risk of killing everybody towards the denouement. 

Deeper Thoughts:

Adjudicator's Report: Season 8 Blu-Ray review (but no BFI event, alas). If it weren't for the pandemic, I'd undoubtedly be writing here of a trip to London's South Bank for a BFI showing of the updated version of Terror of the Autons from this box set. If I hadn't managed to get tickets, then one of the usual group - David, or Trevor, or Alan - would have. Chris, the other person who normally attends these events alongside us, also mentioned several times before on this blog, wouldn't perhaps have needed a ticket, and might even have been interviewed on stage by Dick Fiddy or Justin Johnson. For it was the same Chris (Petts) and his partner Sally Clayton that did the CGI and compositing work that made this new version of Terror of the Autons a truly special edition. Their work is perhaps most impressive when you don't notice it. There's lots of green screen backgrounds that have been improved or replaced altogether, and expert smoothing has been done on the 'fringing' joins between the actors in the studio and the image keyed in behind them. These subtle improvements collectively have a transformative effect on the story. The more obvious new material is also great too, of course. All the sequences where the Master's plastic troll doll moves have been replaced with a CGI version that blends in seamlessly with the footage - he's never been so cute nor so sinister. The model and movement for the Nestene creature that appears at the climax was probably an even greater challenge, and what's delivered is great for the few frames it appears, getting close to what those who first read the novelisation saw in their heads (before they were disappointed several years down the line when they finally saw the bit of tinsel that appears in the show as broadcast in 1971). I don't think it's hyperbole to say that the price of the set is worth it just for this version of Terror of the Autons on its own - it's like seeing the story for the first time anew.

A scene from the Season 8 Blu-ray box set trailer

The other episodes without the special edition treatment are nonetheless similarly transformed. Of all the colour seasons, season 8 is the one where the very fewest episodes survive in their original broadcast format. Only three episodes in all, parts 1 and 4 of Claws of Axos, and part 4 of The Daemons, no whole stories. As impressive as the bumper selection of special features included on the discs is, it's the restoration of the episodes that is the biggest draw here for me. As I mentioned above related to Colony In Space, but it goes for all the stories, the work done (not forgetting Mark Ayres' peerless audio work either) makes it as though a gauze has been lifted that previously was between me and the episodes. Technology will of course eventually make a fool of anyone making a statement that these are the best that they could ever be, but just as of right now I believe it is the truth. Every episode in full colour (something that's taken decades of work to achieve) with fluid movement on video and film. It's a veritable miracle, and down to the hard work of some very talented individuals. With minimal remaining issues and artefacts blocking my enjoyment, and watching the season in order as a whole, it has gone up in my estimation enormously.

Another scene from the Season 8 Blu-ray box set trailer

Of those special features, a couple deserve a mention upfront. Matthew Sweet's interview with Katy Manning is more than up to the standards set by his previous interviews for the Blu-ray box sets. I call myself a Doctor Who fan, and I have read and seen dozens of interviews with Katy Manning over the years, but Katy has done so much in her life so far that dozens of interviews couldn't possible contain it all. Hence, I learned a new thing every minute of the running time. I don't know how I'd managed to miss hearing about Katy's very special celebrity childhood friend before now, for example. I won't spoil it for anyone who hasn't yet watched the interview, and is similarly in the dark. The other big hitter documentary is Terrance and Me, directed by Chris Chapman. This sees Frank Skinner celebrating Terrance Dicks, covering his life and his work including Doctor Who in script and novel form. You won't think before you watch it that you could get a tear in your eye seeing a group of writers talking about their favourite Doctor Who book, or two men in a fish n' chip restaurant toasting using slightly cold chips instead of drinks, or even just a simple panning shot around a working cubby hole whose every wall and surface is covered in books. But you will, trust me. Chapman provides another couple of documentaries where actors or directors revisit filming locations, and they're both as informative and entertaining, but not quite as touching as Terrance and Me. One side effect of my time in lockdown though is that watching all of these I had the same two thoughts rolling round my head. Namely: 'When exactly was this filmed?' and 'They're never two metres apart, are they? Maybe it's the lens, but they look like they are standing too close - tell someone!'

A frame of Frank Skinner in Chris Chapman's Terrance and Me doco

To work through all the material will, as usual, take one about a solid week. Commentaries and special features from the DVDs are included as ever; one of these is Living with Levene, an earlier Chapman doco, where Toby Hadoke spends some days, Louis Theroux style, in the company of Sergeant Benton actor John Levene. It has to be seen to be believed. Warning: you may need to hide behind the sofa. Talking of Behind the Sofa, the ongoing feature of that name, where Doctor Who people do a Gogglebox, is present and correct with some Covid-related tweaks. Former Doctor Who cute couple Katy Manning and Stewart Bevan have to have perspex between them, but current Doctor Who cute couple Anjli Mohindra and Sacha Dhawan don't. The other watching duo, Janet Fielding and Sarah Sutton, have to have a blanket each rather than share one as they usually do. Elsewhere, there are examples of trails and/or continuities for every story, though they get more difficult to source the further back before the video age the sets go, so are spottily distributed - though nonetheless interesting - here. There's location and studio footage, linked archive material (a fascinating BBC Television Centre studio tour of the period, and a documentary on an archaeological dig that partially inspired The Daemons). My favourite of the archive extras is a convention recording from 1991 of Jon Pertwee doing an Ask Me Anything session; Jon's always a good interviewee, and this covered a lot that I didn't already know.

The first two of the standard edition Blu-ray box sets to be released later this year

My doing any review of these sets seemed pointless until recently, as by the time I'd have written it, the limited edition set would always have sold out. To be honest, that's been true of anyone reviewing or even previewing the sets before now, such is the apparent disparity between demand and supply. There have been reportedly people who pre-ordered the last couple of sets that have been disappointed. There's no chance seemingly of a copy being available after the release date. That's changing, though. The BBC have decided to re-release the sets as standard editions with less deluxe packaging. This has been a long time coming, and is a good move, as ebay scalpers were the only people who can have been happy about the situation as it was. The first couple of seasons originally released are going to be available again in the next couple of months. So, if you haven't got a copy of the Season 8 set, and you liked the sound of it from my review, then just remember that until 2024, and you can snap up a copy. Can't say fairer that that. I'm really performing a public service here, aren't I? Aren't I?!!  

In Summary:

Not perfect, but definitely more fun than a colonoscopy in space.

Night Terrors

Chapter The 184th, Little George Tenza's Night of Terrors.

Plot:

Answering a message, seemingly from a young child, that somehow travelled through the universe into the TARDIS and arrived on the psychic paper, The Doctor, Amy and Rory visit a block of flats in an unspecified area of the UK in 2011. They split up to knock on doors looking for the sender. Amy and Rory use the lift, but it malfunctions, lurching downwards. They wake up to find themselves in an odd mansion house, being chased by life-size peg doll creatures. They should have worked out that they're in a dolls' house quite easily, but it takes them ages to twig. Meanwhile, the Doctor has located the child that sent the cry for help, George, who's alone with his Dad Alex in their flat. George is afraid of everything and - because he's really an alien that's got god-like powers - this is causing issues for lots of people around, including Amy and Rory. George is a Tenza, a cuckoo-like creature that assimilated itself into the lives of Alex and his partner Claire responding to their need for a baby that they could not have themselves. The Doctor realises that George has attachment issues, so he gets Alex to hug him and love conquers all: all the nearby residents, plus Amy and Rory, are returned from the dolls' house in George's bedroom cupboard (where his adoptive parents had told the young Tenza to put anything that scared him). 

Context:

Watched from the Blu-ray accompanied by all the children (boys of 14 and 11, girl of 8) on a Sunday afternoon. I don't know what it would take to encourage the Better Half to rejoin us for these viewings but she's not interested at the moment. The media-savvy kiddos anticipated much of how the plot was going to play out, more or less, with comments such as "Is he, like, an alien?" referring to George (and that was before the opening credits), and "The monsters in his head are coming to life!" and "They're being pulled into his nightmares". The youngest, who's the same age as George in the narrative, astutely asked "If he's that scared, why doesn't he switch his light on?". This is a very good point, and reminded me that George is 'TV series eight years old' which doesn't really relate to how a child of eight behaves in the real world. They have more agency, in my experience at least, than is depicted here, with George not consciously doing anything for himself in the story except for whimpering. He's really an alien, though, and projecting back the expectations of adults who wanted but could not have a child, so if he doesn't get it quite true to life, it's somewhat excusable.

First Time Round:

I have trouble remembering watching most of the stories in the Matt Smith era. I would have watched this on or slightly after its initial broadcast in early September 2011, and - as best as I can recall - felt vaguely dissatisfied. Anyway, as I have started to do lately in such circumstances, let me tell an anecdote unconnected to a particular Doctor Who story. It's a generally difficult time for one's mental health living through the latest Covid-19 lockdown in the UK; I have to console myself  on occasion that I'm lucky to be here at all; this is the story of how - on New Year's Eve 1985 - I died. Whenever I told the tale thereafter, I would always make the beginning as dramatic as possible by wording it thus, as Russell T Davies later did for the beginning of Army of Ghosts. Like Rose in that story, though, I didn't really die. I stopped breathing for a while and was resuscitated in hospital. As I mentioned in a recent festive reminiscence, by 1985 my parents were divorced, and my sister and I would spend Christmas with Mum, and New Year with Dad; he was living in Bognor Regis, and in later years I would find a lot of VHS releases in the shops when going to visit him. At that point, though, I had only just entered the video age. In the late autumn, my Mum had purchased our first VCR, which had allowed me to catch both the big Christmas day shows even though they clashed: ITV's Minder of the Orient Express, and the BBC's Only Fools and Horses special, To Hull and Back.

Doctor Who wasn't on TV over the festive period back then; in fact, it wasn't on TV at all. December 1985 was in the middle of the so-called 'hiatus', the roughly 18 month period after Doctor Who had been very nearly cancelled, when the production team were scrambling to plan a slightly different version of the show. The most recent Doctor Who story had been in August of 1985 when a radio story, Slipback, was broadcast, but I'd missed that. The next season would start in the autumn of 1986, and I'd make full use of the VCR to record those episodes to keep for always. At the end of 1985, Dad didn't yet have a VCR, but New Years TV wasn't normally that great. The three of us had watched the 1970s film Willa Wonka and the Chocolate Factory go out on BBC2. I was feeling a bit under the weather, my asthma troubling me, and went to bed eschewing watching the Whistle Test end of the year jamboree that would have taken us on past midnight. My sister was worried about me, and read to me for a while as I lay in bed. She then saw my face was turning blue ("like Violet Beauregarde"). The next thing I remember was waking up on a gurney in a hospital in Chichester.

I was on my own at first. My Dad and sister weren't there, as they hadn't accompanied me in the ambulance. Mum - who also travelled to the hospital in a rush that evening but also hadn't yet arrived - later tore a strip off my Dad for not coming with me, but he'd thought it would be too traumatic for my sister, then only 10, who had nobody else to look after her. With no one around to talk to the hospital staff at that crucial moment, I'll never really know exactly how close run a thing it was, but I was well looked after, and a few days into the new year, I was home. With the single-mindedness of youth, all thoughts of my mortality were ignored and I instantly reignited that early flirtation with video, catching up on the things I'd set to record while I was at my Dad's. If things had gone a different way, though, I would never have developed the enduring relationship with recorded archive media that I've honed since, and would never have started the VHS collection that would help me to experience every Doctor Who story. And this blog wouldn't exist, which would be a terrible shame, wouldn't it? (Don't all shout at once!) 

Reaction:

Forgive me those who think it's not a subject that should be broached, but in order to talk about Night Terrors, I need to talk about Fear Her. As discussed in my blog post on the story in 2018, Fear Her is the fans' new series whipping boy, usually coming at the bottom of polls, and a watchword for the nadir that the show can produce (just as The Twin Dilemma is for the classic series). As I said three years ago, I think this is unfair. It's not a perfect story by any means, but it has some great moments, and got perfectly acceptable ratings and appreciation scores when it first went out. Night Terrors is a more forgettable but more respectable mid-table placement, despite being exactly the same story as Fear Her. An ordinary looking child going through family difficulties manifests this through alien superpowers, making people in their neighbourhood disappear; in order to stop this, the child needs to feel loved and protected by their parent. What went so wrong in Fear Her that Night Terrors supposedly got right? The child actor performance is stronger in Night Terrors; Jamie Oram does well. A bad performance from the person playing George would have sunk the story. But it's not so many light years away from what Abisola Agbaje managed in Fear Her in terms of quality. It's an incremental improvement not the difference between night and day, and there are still a few awkward moments in the 2011 story.   

The other major embarrassment for fans watching Fear Her is where it overreaches by going big. There are only a few such moments, but they certainly leave an impression: the attempt to convey an entire stadium of people vanishing, the Doctor grabbing up the Olympic torch and lighting the flame, the heavy emphasis on a universal love required at the end to save the day. Night Terrors plays it much safer, and smaller (metaphorically and literally with scenes of our heroes miniaturised in a dolls' house). Instead of a mass love-in, it's just one Dad and his son, instead of a global disaster scenario, we have chamber horror: scenes of characters creeping around a dark enclosed locale, pursued by strange monsters. It's a safer bet for Doctor Who, being something that is easier to achieve than the aforementioned scenes in the earlier story. Is it better, though, not to aim big? Essentially, Night Terrors is just Fear Her with the lights turned down. And, though this approach might avoid some issues, it creates a few more. Gatiss has gone on record that the germ of the idea for this story came from his fear of dolls, and peg dolls in particular. The horror subplot with dolly antagonists, though, doesn't gel very well with a more grounded tale about one family sorting out their issues.

The way the script links the two incompatible-seeming strands is through the interface of god-like powers. Tenzas are explicitly confirmed by the script as able to assimilate themselves into any familial situation, and create massive psychic fields to prevent detection. They also appear able to telekinetically hijack lift mechanisms, create some kind of creature or force out of bin bags, make a person sink into a solid floor, miniaturise people, forcibly move people against their will, and turn people into dolls. It's possible but not spelled out that a lot of those scenarios may just be induced hallucinations. Are Amy and Rory really in a plummeting lift and scary dolls' house, or do they just think they are? It would be more consistent with a creature able to manipulate people's perceptions that it would be the latter; if it is, though, where are Amy and Rory physically while this is happening in their heads? Still in the lift? Possibly. The trouble is that's very close to "it was all a dream" for the stakes to mean very much. If we assume the threat is real, and Amy and Rory and the others have been physically transported (and the scene of Alex and the Doctor being pulled into George's bedroom cupboard does suggest this), then it's just as bad: if George is so powerful, and can do anything, is there truly any jeopardy for him? And, if there isn't, why should we care? 

The story seems to be pushing us to care by reflection of a family, and family worries, a grounded concept with which most of the audience can empathise; most of us have families, and have family worries at one time or another. The tone is so unreal, though, that it gets in the way of this empathy. Unlike Fear Hear's attempt (and your mileage may vary as to the success of the attempt, but it is clearly the intention) to create a normal-seeming domestic suburban setting for the story, even the scenes in Night Terrors in the quote unquote real world are stylised and starkly lit. George's life, even when he's not traumatised with out of control powers impacting everything and everyone around him, is a horror film. The Doctor leaves pretending it's a happy ending, but the family still has money worries, with an aggressive Dickensian cliché of a rent collector ready to come round again and demand his money (played by Andrew Tiernan, by the way, who's so wasted in this that I forgot he'd appeared in Doctor Who at all, though the scene where he moans about Bergerac still being on TV is fun). If irony or brutal realism was the point, it would be acceptable in a 'life's like that' way, but it's not. The story is set up as a fairy tale, but it doesn't have a conclusive happy ending.  

Connectivity: 

This is a toughie. Both stories see the Doctor and his friends searching for a specific person around whom the story revolves (George in Night Terrors, Davros in Destiny of the Daleks); both also feature at least one mention of the word Dalek (Mark Gatiss riffing on Gallifreyan bedtime stories has Matt Smith mention "The Emperor Dalek's New Clothes"). That's about it 

Deeper Thoughts:

Bad Dad Syndrome. Now I'm almost as old as my Dad was in 1985 and a father myself, I wonder what I would do in the circumstances of that New Year's Eve (see First Time Round section above for more details). He didn't have a car, and was looking after two children, one of whom needed to go to hospital for emergency treatment. There was no neighbour that he could have left my young sister with, he didn't know anyone well enough (and they may have been out anyway, it being New Year's Eve). His choice was to accompany me in the ambulance, taking her too, or to leave me to the professionals, look after my sister and sort something else out. It's hard for me to put myself in his shoes, as I'm together with the Better Half rather than on my own, but I think if I were him I would have insisted on going in the ambulance, and taken my sister along too. She would have got bored overnight in a hospital, yes, but that's better than leaving someone on their own when they are being treated in a hospital as an emergency. He chose instead to contact my mother, who was on her own, though further from the hospital, and had a car. She came along urgently that evening (and Dad probably would have guessed that she would do just that). I was told for many years after the divorce by my Mum that he was a bad father, and this was just one piece of evidence to add to many others for her. I'm not here, though, to excuse or condemn him. Parenthood is just a series of decisions, and one can't get them all right. Like anyone, I'm far from being a perfect parent and have made lots of mistakes.

In Doctor Who, the challenges of parenthood, and particularly fatherhood, became a theme picked up on in the early years of the 21st century series, after never having troubled the writers in the classic series years at all. This reflected changes in the wider world of dramatic works, of course, but for a few years it did feel like 'Bad Dad syndrome' was the province of Doctor Who. As well as Night Terrors and Fear Her, there are a few other stories in the first few years of the new series, like Father's Day, The Idiot's Lantern and The Curse of the Black Spot. Every one of the Russell T Davies era female companions is shown to have a father who's feckless or ineffectual too. It was probably a coincidence rather than a deliberate theme, but it did get noticed. I remember it being picked up and debated online at the time. Though the stories for a while after 2011 seemed to leave the theme alone, it came back with a vengeance in 2018, with Ryan's issues with his Dad becoming an arc plot that took a whole series plus a special to resolve. An interesting factor, though, of the brevity of the storytelling in rounding off a story in 45 minutes or so is that fatherhood is reduced to grand gestures rather than that unending series of small decisions.

Again, this is not a flaw restricted to Doctor Who, but does seem magnified in my favourite show because it has to cram aliens and excitement into those 45 minutes too. The reality of parenthood wouldn't necessarily make good TV, certainly not genre TV, but the alternative approach is over- simplistic to say the least. In Night Terrors, Alex just has to hug his child and say a few words to make everything all right. It's maybe not so bad here as Alex hasn't actually done anything that bad in the first place. He's made a slightly careless remark that George has overheard and that's caused an unlikely and overblown trauma (the Doctor jokes about how George will cope with puberty; on this evidence it'll be seismic). The other stories, though, follow mostly the same pattern, and the difference is just degree - Ryan's Dad just has to get taken over by a Dalek in exchange for forgiveness. Even if we excuse any specific work, collectively and cumulatively these kind of stories in western media let male parents off the hook too much, I think. Again, this might be indicative of real life, where males do seem to be held to a less high standard. In parenting, and in all else, men have to try harder. Don't say "Not all men" either. No matter how good or not we already are, we can and should keep trying to be better. We just shouldn't use Doctor Who stories as any how-to guide for parenting, that's all.

In Summary:

I prefer Fear Her, if I'm honest.

Destiny of the Daleks

Chapter The 183rd, where robots from the last days of Disco meet the Daleks and their creator; that actually sounds fun, but it isn't somehow.

Plot:

The Doctor and a newly - and sillily - regenerated Romana arrive on Skaro. They leave K9 in the TARDIS as the robot dog has - sillily - developed laryngitis. A spaceship lands nearby crewed by a bunch of silver disco robots called the Movellans. The Doctor and Romana don't realise they are robots at first even though it's blindingly obvious. They are silly. Anyway, the Daleks are back on their ancestral planet using enslaved humanoids from various parts of the galaxy to mine for something. They are using slaves even though they could do it much quicker themselves. This might be because they have, somehow, become coldly logical robot creatures exactly like they haven't been previously; but, they are manifestly rubbish at being logical. From his previous visit to the Kaled city, the Doctor remembers a short cut to what he thinks the Daleks are after: Davros. The Daleks' creator has been abandoned but kept alive by suspended animation technology in his chair for the centuries since the original Daleks thought they had killed him. This has clearly affected him a bit, as his voice is different and his face has changed so it looks like a mask that doesn't quite fit properly. Funny that.

The Daleks need Davros to help in their war with the Movellans, which is at an impasse because the fleets and battle computers of both sides are too logical to make any offensive move. The Doctor gets the slaves freed in exchange for letting the Daleks have Davros, then makes a break for it. With the help of the freed slaves, the Doctor and Romana defeat the Movellans (the robots have some serious design flaws). Davros's Daleks, each with multiple bombs attached for a suicide attack, approach the Movellan ship, but the Doctor goes back to the Kaled city and finds Davros, and uses Davros's remote control to blow the Daleks up before they do any harm. Davros is imprisoned to be taken off for trial. The freed slaves commandeer the Movellan ship, and the Doctor and Romana continue their wanderings through time and space in the TARDIS.

Context:

Watching the four episodes of Destiny of the Daleks from the DVD for the blog, I was not transported back to 1979 but to almost a decade later and the dark autumn weekday evenings of the late 1980s. The reason for this is that, despite its featuring what would seem to be the popular draw of Tom Baker with Daleks, I could not interest any of the family in watching with me. I had to find time when everyone else was out of the living room to catch up with each episode on my own. It was very reminiscent of how I watched every Sylvester McCoy episode in the 1980s when my family of that time were similarly not interested, somewhat furtively and definitely alone.

First Time Round:

I first saw this story from the VHS, which was released in early July 1994. This was around the time I graduated from university in Durham. I'd got my results and then stayed around, with all my stuff packed up, in a college room for a week or so between the end of term and the ceremony, which was held shortly after everyone else had gone home. It was an odd time as a graduand having nothing to do for a brief pause, except arrange the hire an expensive robe and hat and wait for another phase of one's life to begin. As such, I'm pretty sure I didn't buy and watch the story until I was back home in Worthing a little later. The one memory I have of watching it is not a memory at all but a lack thereof. Either I was tired or I'd had a little too much shandy while watching, or - just maybe - the story itself contributed in some way to this effect by numbing my brain - but I watched it, thought 'yeah, okay', then the next day could not remember how it ended, specifically regarding the fate of Davros. Had he appeared again for a resolution scene at the end? All I could remember was a blur of wonky Daleks with garlands of bombs round their domes squawking and blowing up. I had to fast forward to watch the last few minutes again, for which I had previously zoned out.

A clearer memory was my first reading of the novelisation. For some reason, a friend of mine, Andrew, invited me to meet him in Portsmouth for a day out. We went there a couple of times, as I remember, and this visit must have been sometime in the spring or 1988; I recall seeing a poster advertising Morrissey's first solo album Viva Hate when we went to the shops there. I travelled on the train to meet him, and read the Destiny of the Daleks novelisation on the way. The trip there and back was sufficient time to complete the slim volume. Both of us lived in Worthing at the time, so I've no idea why we went all that way and why we didn't travel over together. Perhaps he was staying with family for a visit and wanted an excuse to get out of their house for a while. That would fit. I don't want to get too Marcel Proust about it, but aside from Terrance Dicks's prose, I can only remember fleeting impressions: that Morrissey poster, Strawberry Switchblade playing at a funfair on a green by the seafront, and my buying and eating a roast almond Yorkie. They don't make the almond version of this UK chocolate bar anymore, and it was a favourite of mine at the time. Anyway, the book was much more exciting to read than the screen version was to watch years later. 

Reaction:

If I had to summarise Destiny of the Daleks in a word, I'd be torn between a choice of two: 'tatty' or 'threadbare'. I'm not talking about the production design though, I'm talking about the script. Some of the production design doesn't help, that's definitely true. Where they are saving money by reusing old elements, it shows: the original Davros mask from Genesis of the Daleks four years earlier is showing signs of wear and tear; it also doesn't fit actor David Gooderson, replacing the original Davros actor Michael Wisher who proved unavailable for the recording of Destiny. The Dalek props too are aged and could do with refurbishment. The Movellans are well turned out, though; whatever you think of the choices involved for hair and outfit, which look they might have been made for some high concept Hot Gossip routine, they are done to a high level of quality. The Movellan ship set too is gorgeous. The sets for the Kaled city on the other hand look like the money had run out; perhaps it had all been spent hiring the Steadicam, used here for the first time on a Doctor Who, giving us a few stand-out gliding shots. Even the more conventionally filmed location sequences are excellent, though, with Winspit quarry in Dorset being well used to give some interesting landscapes. The hit rate of the look and feel then is about on a par with any other story of the period. The script though...

Whoever was responsible for the story that ended up on screen (see Deeper Thoughts for more details), it contains much that doesn't work. The central conceit that the Daleks and the Movellans have reached a logical stalemate, each side anticipating the other's every move and therefore locked into immobility, is an interesting one, but is a bad fit for Daleks. They aren't emotionless robots, and have never before been characterised as such. It's heavily implied that they are no longer organic creatures in protective shells, but have dispensed with the organic component altogether. The Doctor and Romana both refer to them as being robots, which is just not the case before or since this story. Even if one accepts this is somehow true, or at least metaphorical (they have got so used to their way of operating that they act like robots, say), I'm still not sure that the stalemate idea hangs together. Couldn't one side or the other just use a random number generator subroutine to choose what to do? How would the other side anticipate that? The scene where the Doctor, Romana and the Movellans play Scissors Paper Stone to demonstrate the difference between machine and human intelligence is cute (goes on a bit, though), but doesn't really make sense. The game involves making a random choice between three options, with no factors to dictate any particular order to favour one of the three options over the others, so there's no reason for a machine to play them in the same order as another machine.

The script also has problems of logic, and lack of follow through typical of other Nation stories. In one episode, the Daleks find the concept of self-sacrifice so illogical as to be unbelievable, in the next episode, a platoon of them have been easily persuaded to strap bombs onto themselves and do a kamikaze run at the Movellan spaceship. In the first episode, it's established as vital that the Doctor and Romana take regular does of anti-radiation drugs, and the Doctor sets a timer for when they'll need the next dose. By the time the timer goes off, they have been separated. The Doctor takes his pills, but can't give any to Romana who by that time has been captured. Romana shows signs of being ill and swoons. But the faint is a feint: Romana's just pretending to be dead as part of an escape plan. She's successful, and meets up again with the Doctor. He doesn't give her any drugs, she's perfectly fine anyway, and it's never mentioned again. Sure, I can tell myself they must have taken the necessary medicine later off screen at some point, but that's a hell of a cop out. The fuss about the levels of radiation set up at the beginning also begs the question of who's giving tablets to all the Daleks' slaves, either before or after they're freed? Why do the Daleks need the captured humans at all, except to provide the Doctor with a rebel fighting force later? It can't be a logical decision; as Romana points out, they'd do the job a lot quicker with machinery. So they're doing it out of spite? If so, how does that stack up with them as robotic slaves to logic? 

Even scripts with lots of plot holes can have exciting action moments. Here, though, Destiny also fails to deliver. The Daleks are portrayed too often as weak. The Doctor jokes about them not being able to climb, he puts his hat over one Dalek's eye stalk and it has a hissy fit. The pepperpots talk a good game, endlessly chanting their repetitive slogans, but there's hardly any extermination. They only kill one character in battle, and a couple more prisoners are lined up and zapped. Davros is literally pushed around by various characters. As he is essentially a wheelchair user, the optics of this did not look so good to me on this latest watch. I know he's evil and all, but he should be allowed to be in charge of his own propulsion. The Movellans are a bit of a pushover too; you just remove their easily accessible power source and they do a bit of community theatre spaced-out hands in the air acting, and then kark it. Peasy. Again, one wonders where a non-robot race could place its most vulnerable point that would be more illogical than the super logical Movellans managed. None of these flaws on its own is that big a deal, but they mound up until they blot out the light of anything good. If there was a bit more pace then maybe one would not have time to think about it: take out an episode's worth of padding and tighten it up a bit, and switch your brain off, and a three-parter Destiny of the Daleks would be an engaging enough, though superficial, season opener.

Connectivity: 

Both stories that open a new season of Doctor Who and feature an alien race landing on a fairly barren celestial body in order to search for someone. 

Deeper Thoughts:

Adams Nation Damnations! In the Deeper Thoughts last time on Russell T Davies, Douglas Adams and Terry Nation were a couple of the contenders I considered but discarded as competition for Davies's crown as the biggest TV writer ever to work on Doctor Who. Destiny of the Daleks was the only time they worked together (in the loosest sense of the term as we shall discover), Douglas Adams as Script Editor, Terry Nation as writer. Well, maybe Nation wasn't the writer, even though he was credited as such. Adams later claimed that Nation did not deliver full scripts for any of the episodes, just what amounted to storyline notes, and Adams himself had to write the lion's share of the story. It's difficult to know how much this is true. Director Ken Grieve backed up Adams's version of events, putting the amount contributed by Adams at 98%; it is also not the first time in Doctor Who's history that the criticism had been raised of Nation's work needing heavy rewriting. Adams's reported woes are consistent with, if a bit more extreme than, those of a few script editors on Doctor Who working with Nation before. It seems unlikely though that the BBC would have had to pay Nation had he not produced actual screenplays for all four episodes, though they would likely still have paid him if they were slim and under-running. It's likely that some exaggeration has crept in to the telling of the anecdotes in the years since.

It's definitely on record that Nation's scripts came in late. The production team wanted to start the season that year with a Dalek story, the metal meanies' return with a bang after four whole seasons without them. Nation had agreed as long as he was able to write it, but he wasn't available to do this such that the story could be recorded first that year. It was dropped to third slot in the production order, making it a tight turnaround to get the episodes made in time for broadcast. When Nation's scripts came in later than expected even on that schedule, it must have necessitated that the in-house script editor had to do any rewrites rapidly rather than everyone wait for the back and forth of Adams' teasing the necessary changes from Nation's pen. It's definitely clear that Adams contributed some material. There is a sequence where the Doctor is reading a book on the origins of the universe by Oolon Colluphid, a reference to an established minor character from Hitch Hiker that can only have been put in by Douglas. Additionally, there's the sequence at the beginning where Romana regenerates. This is of course a standard thing for a script editor to do, writing the sections necessitated by cast changes in the wider production, unconnected to the story of the week provided by the commissioned author.

The sequence at the start of episode one annoyed lots of purist fans at the time, and probably has annoyed more such fans since and to this very day. Without being too po-faced about it, I do think these people might have something of a point. It takes what was one of the most dramatic and significant devices in the history of the show - regeneration, meaning the change of one lead actor for another, a significant and rare event in the show's history - and uses it for a throwaway comedy five minutes. Romana has been recast and this is played out as if the wearing of bodies for Time Lords is like the wearing of clothes for us mere mortals. If it was side-splittingly funny, it might be worth it, but it's smile humour at most, somewhat witty and whimsical but overlong. Crucially, it seems padded out. Other moments that one suspects could have been contributed by Adams are similarly drawn out and not that funny. He could have been having an off day, but - if Adams really did contribute 98% of this material -  I'd expect it to be a lot funnier and much more interesting.

Lots of the material, as mentioned when talking about the story above, is standard Terry Nation serial peril-to-peril plot, without any effort towards surrounding coherence or escalation. There's slaves, and radiation poisoning, and countdowns, and planet destroying bombs; all these crop up again and again in Nations's work, but seem too humdrum to be things that would preoccupy Adams's psyche. Then again, if Nation had written the basic storyline, one wouldn't have thought he'd base it on his creations being robots, nor continually refer to them as such, as he should know if anyone should that they aren't. Even the reason why K9 doesn't appear is contentious and up for interpretation; depending on who you ask, either it was because Nation didn't want the K9 to upstage his creations (which suggests that he was shaping the story as author), or that the production team believed use of the K9 prop would be a nightmare in the quarry location (suggesting that the script editor was dictating elements that could be used for practical reasons).

The final point that suggests Adams contributed a lot to the episodes is that Nation was reportedly aghast at what ended up on screen. I say 'reportedly', as I've seen it relayed as fact in many reputable sources, but I don't believe I've ever seen a direct quote from Nation to back it up. It's true that after his contribution to the 1979/1980 series, Nation didn't work on Doctor Who again, but the same is true of Douglas Adams. They both moved on to bigger and more lucrative things that would take both men eventually, separately, to the USA. If Nation's last Who script never reached the screen as he intended it, neither did Adams's (see the blog post on Shada for more details). And both men died in California after an insufficiently long innings (Nation was 66 years old at the time of his death, and Adams a heart-breakingly young 49). It's almost 20 years since Douglas's untimely death (the anniversary of that sad occasion will be the 11th May this year) and at the time of my writing this it's but a few days to the 24th anniversary of Nation's death (9th March). It doesn't therefore matter therefore exactly what part of the story was written by whom. Both writers contributed greatly to Doctor Who during its history, and I'd be tempted to watch a story by each to celebrate their contributions on those milestone dates. I just won't ever pick Destiny of the Daleks for either of them, that's all. 

In Summary:

Tatty script with some threadbare (and, to be fair, some good) visuals.