The Awakening

 

Chapter The 188th, where the historical reenactment of a war is not very civil.

Plot:

Tegan's grandfather, Andrew Verney, is local historian in the English village of Little Hodcombe. His research over many years leading up to 1984 uncovers some truth in a local legend of a great evil called the Malus. Carvings of the Malus adorn the derelict local church, and there's a secret passage from the church to a village house, though whether they have anything to do with anything is not 100% clear. The Malus, though, is definitely a creature from outer space, walled into the church many years before. Verney tells the local magistrate Sir George Hutchinson his findings, and Sir George locks him in a barn, and arranges for a historical reenactment of an English Civil War battle, as it is the anniversary of 1643. Or else, the historical reenactment was already being arranged and Verney's information just caused Sir George to escalate things. It's again not 100% clear. Sir George investigates the passage and church and finds a lump of an alien metal called tinclavic that he subsequently carries with him everywhere. Whether this is helping the Malus to influence him is - you guessed it - not 100% clear. He's influencing the Malus in turn, as his "deranged mind caused its awakening", and the war games are feeding the Malus with negative psychic energy so that it grows more powerful. What caused Sir George's mind to be deranged before the Malus awakened is not 100%... well, you get it.

Everyone in the village bar the school teacher Jane Hampden is dressed up as Roundhead or Cavalier to join in the war games, and the roads into the village are blocked. The Doctor, Tegan and Turlough arrive to visit Verney and get mixed up in things, get split up, captured, escape and get recaptured, the usual. The Doctor confirms that the Malus came to Earth in a crash-landed spacecraft from the planet Hakol. Growing stronger, its giant head breaks through the church wall, and causes apparitions of various levels of solidity that roam the village scaring, killing or bag-snatching. It also brings a boy Will Chandler from 1643 into the present as it feeds on the confusion of adding another character when there's already too many people involved in the plot. Will confirms that the creature arrived in his time, making the civil war fighting worse. Turlough finds Verney in the barn. Tegan is forcibly dressed up as the May Queen, and Sir George plans to burn her at the stake as that's what they did in the 17th century apparently. This finally persuades one of Sir George's followers, Colonel Wolsey, that Sir George has gone too far, and Wolsey joins up with the Doctor, Tegan, Turlough, Hampden, Verney, and Chandler (and another bloke who I haven't got the time or space to go into) to defeat the Malus. This involves going into the TARDIS and throwing a few switches. Sir George is killed in the church, and a little apparition version of the Malus that had appeared in the TARDIS also dies, vomiting. How it got in there is not 100% clear, and neither is its vomit - looks a bit like Swarfega.

Context:

Watched both episodes in one go on a Sunday afternoon towards the end of April 2021 from the DVD accompanied by all the children (boys of 14 and 11, girl of 8). The youngest commented during the beginning title sequence that the face being formed from the stars was "Mummy's favourite". This is because the Better Half has recently been watching the early series of the original TV version of All Creatures Great and Small on Britbox, and has been particularly enamoured of the young Peter Davison as Tristan Farnon. Later on in the first episode, the eldest said that the crack in the church wall that the Malus would later peek through was "just like in Matt Smith", and the middle child sarcastically said "Ooh scary" when some ghostly person appeared with BBC Micro generated stars around them. All three children started to lose interest towards the end of episode two, but the youngest must still have been watching at the end as she exclaimed "Gross!" when the little Malus threw up green goo in the TARDIS.

First Time Round:

I remember first reading about the story and seeing photos of the Malus in both large and small versions in the 20th anniversary Radio Times special magazine. This came out in 1983 around the time of The Five Doctors broadcast but had previews of the stories to be broadcast the following year, including The Awakening. It looked very impressive, and when I sat down to watch the two episodes on their BBC1 broadcast on the 19th and 20th of January 1984, I was not disappointed. It didn't occur to me that nobody in the story had a realistic motivation, nor that the story didn't hang together. I was 11 and there was a big face spewing smoke and the Tereleptils (who were in a story I'd seen within immediate memory) were name checked. What more could one ask for? My other recollection was reading the novelisation, which I bought and took with me on holiday in the summer of 1985, when my sister and I went to Lloret de Mar with my Dad. The text version may have ironed out some of the issues, but I don't recall - unfortunately my only memory is it getting splashed as I was reading by the hotel pool. It was the only water-damaged book in my collection for many years, until I replaced it with a better maintained copy after buying a job lot of Doctor Who books from David (long term fan friend mentioned many times before on this blog) when he was trying to clear up some space in his house.

Reaction:

Creating a rod for my own back, in the last blog post about The Pirate Planet I wrote that I preferred it if  "a script or production was sometimes ambitious and tried to do more". The Awakening is only two episodes long and crams in a lot of characters and incident, but it doesn't work for me. What's on screen is mainly the uncovering of exposition without plot reversals; it's pretty linear. To jazz things up there's a lot of overcomplicated to and fro, characters moving between locations, and lots of shock effects - ghostly apparitions that are sometimes solid, sometimes not, and sometimes are real people pulled through time. Any script would struggle to find an internal logic and coherence for all of them, and Eric Pringle's script for The Awakening doesn't really try. There's evidence that script editor Eric Saward had some input into the story too; his creations, the Tereleptils, are mentioned, and the metal they mine, tinclavic, is a plot point. Saward mentions tinclavic repeatedly in the two novelisations he recently wrote of his Dalek stories (see the Deeper Thoughts section of the last blog post for some background), so it's obviously a preoccupation. By this time, I wonder whether the script editor was getting a bit jaded with the grind of working on such a demanding devourer of scripts as is Doctor Who. For, just as The Awakening lacks coherence on its own terms, it's also lacking in terms of the wider Doctor Who mythology, and that is ultimately Saward's responsibility. How else can one explain why five - five! - guest characters enter the TARDIS at the end, and not one mentions - nor even registers surprise - that it is bigger on the inside than the out. If the characters are taking the wonders of the show for granted, the audience might just follow suit.

Why are there two different versions of the Malus? Because they are both great visuals, perhaps, which is fair enough. It's hard, though, to reconcile them to the story. Was the big Malus behind the crack always that size, or did he grow? You wouldn't want to edit the giant Malus head from the script, as its emergence peeking behind the cracked wall is the defining image of the story. But is it just a head or is there a giant body hidden away tool? Whichever, it seems unlikely it could have been trapped in the church by humans in 1643. It would make more sense for the church to have been built around it, but Will confirms that he hid in the church to escape the fighting, so the church was around long before the Malus arrived. Unless Will mas mistaken and the Malus arrived before 1643 and had been hidden in the church long before the battle. The more one thinks about this, the more it undercuts the entire premise of the story. The Doctor warns that a recreation of the civil war battle will energise the Malus to the point where it will not be containable. But clearly it was somehow contained back in 1643 as it went to sleep for the best part of 350 years. If the actual 1643 battle couldn't liven it up, why would a pale imitation of the same thing? There's a major hole in the story where it skirts around exactly what happened to subdue the Malus in 1643.

The motivation of the Malus is at least clear, if not necessarily very interesting - it's a lifeform that's been genetically engineered to be a weapon. Unfortunately, the humans in the piece are not served even as well as that. Sir George would be a better character if it was clear whether he's deliberately and foolishly dabbling with the Malus for some perceived gain, or whether he's just come under its malign influence. If the latter, it would be good to understand whether this was because of a character flaw that made him susceptible, or whether it was just coincidence and he was unlucky. Just excusing any activity and behaviour by saying he's crazy is inadequate, and a bit offensive. Why are Sir George's supporters following him so blindly? If it's just the influence of the Malus, then why isn't it affecting Jane Hampden or Verney? Would the villagers really have watched on as someone was burned to death as part of a historical pageant? All of this is under-explored. Even the more relatable characters don't behave much like humans. Polly James as Hampden is supposed to be the grounded and skeptical voice of reason, but she screams "Doctoooooooooooooor!!!!!" at the top of her lungs on seeing something mildly scary, even though the Doctor's standing right next to her; it's almost as if she knows she's in a mid-1980s cliffhanger in TV's Doctor Who. Worse, though, is that she doesn't really have anything to do in the second half of the story, and all she does is the first half is ask questions.

It's not without its good points, though. The location film work is great throughout; the eerie deserted village is a Doctor Who mainstay, and this is a great example (though whether the village should be deserted based on the narrative is another argument). Production values are high throughout, with a nice make-up job on the bag-snatching ghost, great design and effects work on both big and small versions of the Malus, and lots more nice touches; the production is also able to afford horses, and to film them well at a gallop, for the arresting beginning sequence. There's the odd charming moment in the script, mostly involving Will Chandler, a sparky performance by Keith Jayne. Best of all, and possibly why the story as finally executed is so disappointing, is the strong concept. A historical recreation of a traumatic event awakening an old evil is a powerful idea, and has much potential. It needed a better plot to showcase it.

Connectivity: 

There is a brief mention of mining regarding the lump of tinclavic that Sir George uses as a stress toy (it's the fourth story blogged in a row to contain a reference to mining, something of a record). In both stories there are characters that grow more powerful because of psychic energy. Plus, John Nathan-Turner worked on both (as Production Manager on The Pirate Planet and Producer on The Awakening). 

Deeper Thoughts:

Targets (part 2) - newer adventures. In the Deeper Thoughts section of the Frontios blog post a few years back, I outlined my personal categorisation method for the many Doctor Who Target novelisations. By my reckoning, we are now on to the 6th great and bountiful Target phase. This has so far seen a number of new novelisations published in two batches (one in 2018, one in March this year) covering the annoying gaps in the classic series, plus some new series titles too. This has nothing really to do with The Awakening, alas, apart from linking to my memories of reading the novelisation mentioned above. This means the world is saved a treatise from me about the English Civil War or Tegan's extended family (you can all breathe a sigh of relief on that score). I'm covering the three new series novelisations in this second part of the review of the recent batch, and I'm doing it in reverse chronological order as I'd heard that Robert Sherman's Dalek was pretty special, so I wanted to end on that one. That means that my first is Joy Wilkinson's The Witchfinders, her adaptation of her script for the 2018 series. It's set only about thirty years before the Civil War, so there you go - another tenuous connection to The Awakening.

In the later years of the original Target run, the younger writers of TV stories were more and more taking the opportunity to novelise them, usually fleshing them out substantially with new material not seen on TV. This is certainly true of Wilkinson's work here. Her style is solid and unobtrusive, and she has a great handle on the four regulars appearing in the story. Little touches like Ryan's worrying about keeping his trainers clean in the 17th century mud, or Graham's over-eagerness to play at being the Witchfinder General, are fun. But, despite it at first glance looking like a 'celebrity historical' about King James, this is really all about the women. There are insights into the Doctor's thinking as she has to navigate the difficulties of being in her latest body during this primitive time, which leads to her being marginalised, patronised and - later - put in danger. Yaz is given more backstory connecting to the events depicted in the later story Can You Hear Me? Wilkinson's creations, the Morax Queen, Becka Savage and Willa, are all expanded out from their TV versions with neat backstory too, and all come to life on the page even without the good performances of the TV cast. There are little continuity references to both classic and new Doctor Who throughout (to tales like the The Satan Pit, and Trial of a Timelord). The other interesting addition is a framing device of an older Willa facing persecution as a witch again in Charles I's reign, and hoping for the Doctor's help once more. This gives the book a dramatic ending, and a satisfying coda which ingeniously connects to more Doctor Who continuity. I haven't covered The Witchfinders for the blog yet, so haven't watched it recently; when I get there, I'll have to see if I change my mind, but right now I think the book is significantly better than the TV show. 

Mark Gatiss also adds more material to his prose retelling of The Crimson Horror, the only one of these three books based on a story I've already covered for the blog. He clearly decided, though, that a key selling point of the story is its rapid-fire energy, so rather than risk slowing things down by going deeper into characters thoughts and memories, he takes an epistolary approach, structuring the novel as a series of brisk journal entries and accounts from various characters (regulars Strax and Jenny, and guest characters Ada Gillyflower and Jonas Thursday provide most of the material). Like Wilkinson, he manages to make the characters come alive on the page despite missing the powerhouse performances from the TV version. There's even a chapter taken from the Doctor's diary which reproduces the flashback sequence from the TV version with similar verve, and gives us a glimpse into Doctor Eleven's messy but brilliant mind. The extra material is a 60-page beginning which covers a completely different investigation by the heroes of The Crimson Horror (the Doctor, Jenny and Vastra, but minus Strax as it occurs before he became part of their group). It's in keeping with the main part of the story in terms of its tone - a joyously strange and saucy Victoriana that's firmly within Gatiss's wheelhouse - but it's only very loosely connected in terms of plot. Nonetheless, the whole is very readable, with all the fun lines from the screenplay intact, and a few more for luck (I particularly liked, and empathised with, Strax's feelings about Parma violets, for example). So, overall it's enjoyable but lightweight (not that there's anything wrong with that), much in keeping with the source material.

Clearly, the challenge when adapting a fast-paced 45-minute new series story is the need for additional material. Unlike a shorter classic series one like The Awakening (of around the same length once the two sets of credits are removed), such a story cannot move at too relaxed a pace as prose. Robert Shearman uses a structure that I'm surehas a literary progenitor, but as I'm not clever enough to know what it is I'm calling it the Reservoir Dogs format. The action is punctuated at appropriate points with a short chapter giving the backstory of each of the key players in the story. These vignettes are almost self-contained, and are satisfying in their own right, but also add much to the ongoing narrative in the underground base in Utah. I'd say that they broaden out the narrative as seen on screen, but it's almost the opposite - they bring the story inward. Shearman has done quite a radical, though subtle, reworking of his 2005 script, to turn what on TV looked most like a glossy actioner into much more of a character piece, with most of the significant action now taking place in the characters' heads. This includes the Dalek, and some of the most interesting sections of the book involve some concrete and some more abstract methods of letting the reader see things from the Dalek point of view. Every character becomes more three-dimensional on the page. Unlike the other two books covered here, the novel doesn't just equal the performance by the TV actor, it surpasses it for every character, even down to tiny roles like the two guards that help Rose escape from the Dalek early on. It's not perfect; Shearman likes his characters lives and personalities to be a little too much on the dark side for my taste, but if you were only to choose one of these new Target releases to read, I'd recommend it be this one.

 

These three books mark the first time new series stories by anyone other than the showrunners Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat have been turned into novels. There are quite a few episodes and writers that I'd like to see in future. Paul Cornell, for example, novelised Twice Upon a Time in the earlier new Target batch, but it would be great to read his adaptation of his 2005 story Father's Day, or even - if it isn't too shocking a suggestion, as it started life as a very different original Who novel - Human Nature / The Family of Blood. Any two-parter would be interesting, as all that have been tackled so far were single episodes or specials. Also, it would be nice to see a story novelised from the tenure of a companion that hasn't been covered yet, like Martha, Donna or Amy and Rory. Whichever they choose to do, however, I hope these aren't the last Targets to come out.

In Summary:

Displays signs of Malus Before Thought.

The Pirate Planet

 

Chapter The 187th, which covers a Doctor Who story that amazingly was written by Douglas Adams. Douglas flippin' Adams. That there is even one such a thing should never be taken for granted.

Plot:

On the quest to collect and assemble the Key to Time, the Doctor, accompanied by Romana and K9, attempts to land the TARDIS on the uninhabited and inhospitable planet Calufrax to find the second segment; but, something in the space-time vortex blocks his way. Romana tries a second time and meets no resistance, but the planet that she lands on is not Calufrax but Zanak. Meeting some locals, they find out that the planet is ruled by a half Cyborg Pirate Captain who lives up a mountain on the 'bridge', and is feared and loved by the general populace for bringing new ages of prosperity on a regular basis, and also for his saving them from the tyranny of the planet's previous ruler, Queen Xanxia. The Doctor and friends ally themselves with a couple of rebellious youngsters and a group of telepaths called the Mentiads. They discover that Zanak is a hollow space-jumping planet that materialises around other planets so they can be mined until they are reduced to super-compacted rocks. A new age of prosperity is the arrival at a new planet. The resultant energy release when a planet is mined, affects any psy-sensitive youth, bringing the Mentiads one by one into being. The latest planet to fall victim to Zanak is Calufrax  and the jump coincided with the Doctor's attempt to land the TARDIS.

The Captain is secretly controlled by Queen Xanxia, who is posing as his nurse. She rebuilt him when he crash-landed on Zanak many years before, and has been using him to mine the planets to provide the necessary energy to prolong her life. The real, aged Xanxia is frozen in her last moments by Time Dam technology, and the nurse version is a projection that has almost become solid. The energy needs of the Time Dams increase exponentially however, so the Queen can never achieve corporeality. The Captain has meanwhile been building a superweapon from the shrunken planets to destroy the Queen. Attempting another jump to mine Earth, the Captain and Xanxia find they are blocked by the Doctor, materialising in the same time and place as Zanak as he did earlier. The Mentiads use their psychic powers to blow up the planet's engine room just before the Doctor's TARDIS falls to pieces under the strain. The Queen kills the Captain. The Doctor adapts the Captain's plan to bring the Queen's life finally to its natural close, and then blows up the bridge. The remains of Calufrax turn out to be the second segment in disguise.

Context:

Watched an episode a day with a couple of days off across a short period in April 2021, from the Australian version of the DVD (see the First Time Round section of the blog post here for an explanation of why I own the Aussie box set). I was accompanied for the first episode by all the children (boys of 14 and 11, girl of 8) but they all had better things to do for the other three parts. The Better Half sat down with me for the final part, the first time in a good while that she's watched an old Doctor Who episode. The children watched the first episode in complete quiet, with no restlessness, usually a good sign that they are enjoying it, so it was a surprise that not one of them was interested in seeing any more. The Better Half's only comment was at the end, when the bridge is destroyed. She said "That's a rubbish model"; I think this is terribly unfair - it's a decent model and a good explosion.

First Time Round:

In 1995, BBC video started the release of the 1978/1979 season of Doctor Who. Usually, like this blog, the Doctor Who VHS range jumped around randomly month on month to give the buying public a choice of the many different eras and Doctors in the show's long history. This time, though, it released a batch of stories in chronological order of broadcast. This is because the six stories of the season have a loose overarching plot, each seeing the TARDIS team searching for another disguised segment of the Key to Time; this was an experiment by the producer of the time, Graham Williams. The season and the idea has been criticised over the years, but I rather like it. Each week, as well as the usual story, there is the additional mystery of what exactly will turn out to be the disguised segment and how long it will take the Doctor and friends to find it. The videos themselves played on this collecting theme, with the spine of each designed as a jigsaw-piece like sliver that, once all six tapes were collected, formed a picture of what could be the Key to Time itself floating over the surface of a planet, with some coloured shapes floating above it and birds and a couple of TARDISes (it's not clear what it's supposed to depict if I'm honest). So, the first two stories came out in April, the middle two in May, and the season was completed with the final two in June. Buying up and watching them all (it was the first time I'd seen any of the six stories) was enormously enjoyable. I was a few months into my first job after finishing university, working in Worthing. On the day of release, 3rd April 1995, I would have either walked into town at lunchtime or after work and bought both The Ribos Operation and The Pirate Planet in Volume One (a video and book store in central Worthing which was my chief supplier of Who stuff in those days).

Reaction:

The consensus view of the story structure of The Pirate Planet is that it's a bit of a mess, the work of a talented writer at the beginning of his TV career having trouble fitting all his many leftfield ideas into a coherent whole. I, on the other hand, think it's the best plot Douglas Adams ever wrote. I don't mean just for Doctor Who, either. It is clear from his later career that he never found it easy to fit his many leftfield ideas into a coherent whole. His cleverness in creating Hitch Hiker, in its many different versions in different media, was that it was an episodic structure held together by a loose web of top-drawer jokes (both cosmic and otherwise) that allowed his stories to wander however he wanted to from event to event. I don't mean to take anything away from how much intelligence and graft it took to get this right. The picaresque approach is the perfect fit for the material, and when attempting to impose a different structure to Hitch Hiker, as in in the third novel Life, The Universe and Everything where Douglas reused the plot of an early unused Doctor Who submission, it didn't work nearly so well. It also explains why it was so difficult to create a Hitch Hiker movie; films need a stricter structure than radio or novels. And so do Doctor Who stories. The other big contender for the top slot in his Doctor Who work is City of Death, but the plot structure there had already been provided by David Fisher before he had to abandon the story, and Adams was free to develop it by adding what he was best at, ideas, dialogue and jokes. Outside of Who and Hitch Hiker his fiction work is limited to two Dirk Gently novels and fragments, and one of those novels reused structures from past work (including bits of City of Death) too.

So, now that I've dismissed all the other contenders, I better justify this decision. What do I think it is that makes The Pirate Planet the best? It's only four episodes, yet it contains four or five highly original concepts and three interesting and effective plot reversals (and, to be fair, one slightly less effective plot reversal too). I'll go into more detail on all these in a moment, but just in terms of volume this is much more plot than could be expected in a classic series story (including six-parters). The usual rate for a Doctor Who story would be maybe one or two concepts and reversals, and lots of running around. Now, some people might believe it is a weakness to have so much going on, but it's fine as long as it coheres. It likely took a lot of work by the script editor and Adams to get it to this point, but The Pirate Planet definitely achieves coherence until near the end. By end, I mean the resolution; the climax of the story - the race to get to Earth first, and the Doctor using his TARDIS to block Zanak from materialising, even as it threatens to destroy his ship - is jolly exciting. It's only after that when things aren't optimal, with all the loose ends tied up a bit too abruptly. I'd rather, though, that a script or production was sometimes ambitious and tried to do more rather than always playing it safe.

Those concepts then: first of all, and not to be overlooked or taken for granted, is the idea of doing sci-fi pirates in the first place. The archetypes come straight out of a Peter Pan panto but are given a chrome, plastic and silicon chip makeover. The Captain, as played with gusto in a compelling turn by Bruce Purchase, is Long John Silver without a wooden leg but with a cybernetic arm and eye patch. Smee is spliced with a uniformed Death Star assistant henchman to become Mister Fibuli. The Captain's parrot is a robot! There's a plank and someone is forced to walk off it! Children of all ages must have loved this at the time. Second, there's the idea of a hollow planet that materialises around other planets and sucks them dry, a large-scale and original villain methodology for Doctor Who, or indeed any larger than life adventure fiction.  Bubbling under: a group of telepaths brought into being by the vast explosion of energy created when destruction happens on a planetary scale, compacted super-heavy tiny planets set in a perfect balance to be used as a weapon, and making a planet a disguised segment of the Key to Time. Little touches elsewhere like psychic interference generators and inertia inhibiting walkways are also great. It's an embarrassment of riches.

The reversals: first, the Captain is not what he seems. He is both more clever and more of a victim than he first appears, using his blustering persona to disguise his true nature and motives from his persecutor (and the audience). The moment at the end where he grieves over the dead body of Mister Fibuli, whom he'd spent the previous four episodes shouting at, is a nice character moment. Despite the billing, he's only the secondary villain of the piece. Second of the four reversals is that his meek-seeming nurse is the true End Level Boss, secretly a projection of a younger version of the aged Queen Xanxia. It's nice that the resolution of the part three cliffhanger (how can the Doctor survive walking off the plank) is where this reversal takes place, after much foreshadowing in the earlier episodes. The Doctor was using the same technology as her to project a version of himself. This means that the fourth episode stays interesting by changing focus, and the Captain and the Doctor are - sort of - on the same side. Third, the masterstroke of having the next planet that Zanak is going to surround and destroy be Earth, upping the ante for the denouement. The fourth and less effective reversal is that the Mentiads, who are feared by Zanak's populace, and look like they're evil, are actually the good guys. The script tries too hard to misdirect early on to the point where it's pretty much cheating. The Mentiads wear robes and chant in basements and talk about their having a "Vigil of Evil"; no nice group of people ever does this. Still, even that was a half decent stab. Nothing much is what it seems in The Pirate Planet and that keeps things interesting.

So. why isn't the story more well thought of? Story structure isn't everything, and originality without budget can misfire. Like Bob Baker and Dave Martin, a pair of writers who also started working on Who early in their career, and who also had too many and too big ideas to quite fit into its format, Adams really needed million dollar budgets to do his scripts justice. The production values are wanting in places, and the location filming doesn't merge seamlessly with the studio work. Some things were out of everyone's control, like Tom Baker's scabby lip which is a bit distracting; he'd been bitten by a dog, so the injury had to be explained in the narrative as the result of his banging his face against the TARDIS controls. I suspect, though, that the main problem for people is one of tone. Adams writes some great names (Bandraginus Five, Oolian stone, Magnifactoid Eccentricolometer, Madranite 1-5) but to some they are just silly names. Adams writes great funny dialogue like "It's an economic miracle, of course it's wrong", "I save planets mostly", "My biorhythms must be at an all time low", "Newton's revenge". There's also one of my favourite dialogue exchanges in Doctor Who between the Captain broadcasting his words over a tannoy to his guards, and an interjecting Mister Fibuli: "Someone is using a counter-jamming frequency projector - find it and destroy it immediately." / "Captain, do you suppose any of the guards know what a counter-jamming frequency projector looks like?" / (Beat) / "Destroy everything!".  But, to fans that maybe take their favourite programme a smidge too seriously. there is no room for gags in Doctor Who. To them, this embarrassment of riches just seemed like an embarrassment

Connectivity: 

What is it with Doctor Who and mining operations turning out to be evil?! This is the third story in a row covered by the blog which has that theme. The Pirate Captain's remote-controllable cyborg limbs are a little like the intelligent spacesuits from Oxygen controlling their occupants too.  

Deeper Thoughts:

Targets (part 1) - plugging the gaps. Doctor Who fans, on the whole, hate gaps in their collections; alas, our favourite programme has a few built in, i.e. the missing episodes. One might think, though, that if one collected the Target books, a set of popular paperback novelisations of the classic series stories for which the existence or not of video tapes or film reels wasn't an issue, that one's book collection could at least be complete. Again, no. All the stories missing from the archives were turned into novels before the range completed, but - for one reason or another - four surviving stories weren't novelised. This has finally been rectified over the last couple of years, with the two Douglas Adams penned broadcast stories (City of Death and The Pirate Planet) and Eric Saward's two 1980s Dalek stories (Resurrection and Revelation of the Daleks) having been published, in addition to some of the stories shown from 2005 onwards too. Three of these four stories finally became available in a recent batch of paperbacks published in March this year on the Target imprint, with retro covers by Anthony Dry. Also in this batch is a novelisation of the Paul McGann TV movie (previously available as a paperback but not on the Target imprint) and three more modern stories. I've just read all seven, and will share my thoughts on them in the next couple of blog posts. As two of this set of seven were written by the same author, I decided to space them out to allow as much variety as possible. Hence, I started with the first of the two by Eric Saward. Unfortunately, it was Resurrection of the Daleks, which is my least favourite classic Who story.

Saward's text addressed a few of the issues I had with the story (as detailed in its blog post here); some of the more brutal moments have been removed or reworked, and Saward has fleshed out some motivations with detailed characterisation. Throughout, though, there's use of an intrusive - and often flippant - authorial voice. The tendency to use a god-like view of scenes is also not as intimate or effective as would be centering scenes consistently within the POV of a character. The Daleks still don't have one coherent mission but instead have several sketchy ones. Stien's dual identities are still unreconcilable. The issue with the Doctor and Lytton never meeting is fixed by confirming that they already know of each other from some previous adventure(s), but other additions are downright odd: there's a scene with a talking cat (yes, really), an aside about Kurt Vonnegut, and several pages describing the many rooms of the TARDIS interior that smack of nothing more or less than Saward's needing to get his word count up; it reads like a teenage boy's idea of a rich person's house, full of amusements and collections, a private gallery, screening room, library, etc. I've never been convinced that Saward particularly understood the Doctor. He's an explorer, and at a push a hoarder of junk, but not a discerning collector in this way. I'm not even sure that Saward likes the Doctor, as he isn't a mercenary. The TV story's tone of relentless cynicism and hired killers is still omnipresent. Perhaps the one empathetic moment of emotion that existed in the TV script was Tegan deciding to leave the Doctor, aghast at the violence she's witnessed. This is unfortunately undercut when Saward adds a coda where Tegan maybe acquires superpowers (!); the book leaves her as she appears to be heading for some kind of sequel. But it's not one that I would care to read, alas.

Much better was Gary Russell's novelisation of the TV movie, despite his facing a similar challenge of making a somewhat illogical script work. This is a 2021 revision of the text that was published as a BBC book when the TV movie was first shown in 1996. The original text was written from the script in parallel with the shooting, so doesn't always match what ended up on screen; Russell has left things more or less as they were on that score (except for fixing some factual errors and character descriptions). The dialogue is a lot more old fashioned on the page than it ended up in performance, with the actors' input. Eric Roberts particularly sassed up the Master's speech, getting rid of the more old school version of the character as written, who keeps referring to Change Lee as 'my boy' and such. Russell makes some tweaks to make the story flow a bit better, but most of what he fixes is to make the TV movie fit better into the wider continuity of the series. References back to the 1963 to 1989 mythology that were cut in 1996 have been reinstated; the Doctor being half human is de-emphasised to the point where it can be written off as the Doctor's little joke. The prose style is not showy, and is all the better for that. There are much fewer characters in this story than in Resurrection, so it's more focussed, the story being mostly told from Grace or Chang Lee's POV. 

Best of the pre-2005 story novelisations, and linking nicely into this blog post, is James Goss's The Pirate Planet. Again, this is a new version of a book that's been previously published. A 2017 hardback of The Pirate Planet expanded out the story to match Douglas Adams's first draft scripts; these included a lot of material that had to be cut by the time the story reached the screen. This Target paperback version is instead faithful to what ended up on TV in 1978. Goss had previously novelised Adams's other broadcast Doctor Who story City of Death (which was published on the Target imprint in 2018) as well as the unmade Adams scripts for The Krikkitmen; he's well practised at emulating Adams's style. The book also benefits from being an adaptation of a good story, the best of the four 'gap pluggers' I'm writing about today, I think, gifting Goss good characters and a reasonably focussed plot with clever reversals, all of which are conveyed faithfully. Goss's improvements are mostly on the visuals - the Polyphase Avatron is much more mobile than the BBC prop featured in the TV episodes could be, and the cyborg Pirate Captain - whose costume was perfectly good on screen - is presented as a grisly full-sensory experience, the hissing and clanking of gears, the smell of his searing flesh... 

Finally, returning to Eric Saward's work, is his novelisation of the 1985 story Revelation of the Daleks. This is much better than his other effort, with the authorial asides kept to a minimum. It starts from a better place, as the TV version has much better characterisation and dialogue than Resurrection, and this comes over well on the page. The weakness of Revelation's story structure as a screen drama - that it is a collection of subplots all happening simultaneously by coincidence - doesn't matter so much in a novel, as there's less necessity for a strong plot through-line. Saward also improves things by adding another subplot (and a new guest character) to make the Doctor more instrumental in defeating the Daleks at the climax, and also sands down some of the rougher edges elsewhere. The imminent arrival of the president is more of a spur for some characters' actions, for example, which makes things more coherent. Given that the story had a literary inspiration (Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One), it's fitting that it works better as a book than a TV serial. It's also great that the classic series Target run is now complete. Well, nearly. There were three novelisations in the early 1990s (Power of the Daleks, Evil of the Daleks and an adaptation of the radio serial The Paradise of Death) that weren't published with a Target logo on their covers. Second-hand copies are now very difficult to come by. If there is to be another batch of Targets published in future, it would be good if these can be included as well as more novelisations of new series stories. Talking of those, there are three more books in this current batch to write about too, but that's for next time...

In Summary:

Not loved nearly enough given its quality; this pirate adventure has buried treasures.

Oxygen

 

Chapter The 186th, remember capitalism = bad, kids.

Plot:

Answering a distress call, the Doctor, Bill and Nardole visit a space station in the future. They are rapidly separated from TARDIS and sonic, and have to don spacesuits to breathe. These are smart suits that can walk around on their own and have some artificial intelligence built in, but they've gone wrong, Gromit! 36 casualties out of the 40 person crew are roaming the station: dead bodies having been electrocuted, animated only by their suits, trying to zap anyone still alive. The TARDIS team meet up with the final four survivors, whose suits were offline when the kill command came through (which they believe to have been down to someone hacking the system). Evading their attackers, with limited oxygen left, they have to take a space walk. In the air-lock when just about to be exposed to the vacuum of space, Bill's suit malfunctions, taking off her defective helmet. The Doctor gives her his helmet and survives the harsh conditions of space, but at the cost of his eyesight. They return to the interior of the station. Bill is then apparently killed, but it later transpires that there wasn't enough juice in her suit to do more than knock her out. Despite being blind, the Doctor works out that the suits have been deliberately programmed to kill everyone, so that the company running the station can dispose of an unprofitable crew. He wires something up so that any attempt to kill him or his friends will cause expensive damage to the station, so the suit zombies cannot attack. Back home, after dropping off the surviving crew, the Doctor pretends to Bill that his sight has returned, but confides to Nardole that it has not.   

Context:

Sat down on my own to watch the story from the Blu-ray on the Series 10 box set one afternoon during the long Easter weekend of 2021. I was soon joined by middle child (boy of 11) who watched through to the end. His sister (girl of  8) came in a few times and watched short sections too. Interestingly, there are no comments from them to relate, as whenever they were watching they were rapt and silent. You could hear a pin drop. This is usually a good sign that an episode is working for them.

First Time Round:

Watched this go out live on 13th May 2017 with all the family, not that the two youngest could remember that they'd already seen it on this latest watch. I'd published a blog post on previous story Knock Knock earlier that Saturday, but apart from that I can't remember much about that time. Based on my comments about the episode the previous week, I was enjoying the series as a whole, and Oxygen didn't stand out as being much different from Knock Knock in terms of quality. I was probably intrigued at the end as to how long they could keep the Doctor blinded, and I probably cynically expected it to be all sorted out by the following week, rather than, as it turned out, the week after.

Reaction:

It would be great to be able to do a pun and say that watching Oxygen was like a breath of fresh air (ho ho); but, it's too archetypal a story for that. It's not to say that it wasn't a fun watch both this time and when first shown, but it is written to be a straight-ahead action adventure in space, and it delivers on that promise. There's not much that's surprising. The only plot twist  - the cause of the spacesuits' malfunction - is screamingly obvious to everyone watching from early on. That leaves a linear progression through the expected story beats, with only the Doctor's exposure to the vacuum and subsequent blinding being in any way unexpected. What stops this from being dull is the conviction of everyone in front of and behind the camera. The space walk on the outside of the station, for example, shown in impressionistic gasps fading in and out, to depict Bill's POV as she drops in and out of consciousness, is a bravura sequence. In this part, and throughout, there is great production design and sound displayed, to sell the reality of the situation.

Another key element in selling the reality of the situation is the performances, and the best of them - an astonishingly powerful performance without being too showy - is Pearl Mackie as Bill. This is the first time the three main characters have been together for a full adventure, with Matt Lucas's Nardole having been kept mostly for cameos in the previous episodes. The new dynamic is good, Nardole and the Doctor are seasoned travellers taking all the dangers in their stride, demonstrating some of the glib, comedy super-heroics that the lead roles in showrunner Steven Moffat's era often tend to do. Bill, though, grounds everything, displaying a real and palpable fear without ever straying into the hackneyed old Doctor Who territory of the companion that needs to be rescued. Bill is a resourceful person put in an impossibly hostile environment. The scene in the air lock of rising tension as the small group is about to be exposed to the vacuum of space with one helmet too few is one of the best of the series; Mackie's heightened fear, but underlying bravery as she refuses to panic, is so well conveyed. The scene later on when Bill faces her imminent death, asks the Doctor to tell her a joke, and finally calls out for her Mum is wonderful too. The story's only 45 minutes long and there's lots of running around, so these great scenes come at the cost of leaving no time for the guest characters to be fleshed out. They aren't very distinct: there's the female one, the blue one, and two un-blue male ones that you can barely tell apart. One of those last two is given the tiniest of backstories (his girlfriend gets killed early on when trying to tell him she wanted to start a family, then they exchange a glance at the end), that's about it.

The satire at the story's heart is a bit toothless, but this probably doesn't matter too much: it's just a bit of window dressing really. The trouble, as mentioned above, is that the real villains are very obvious from the start. It's rare in the genre for any company running sci-fi operations not to be evil. If we were in any doubt, the early foregrounding that the company doesn't allow oxygen on the station, except that which it provides to its workers for a price, because it wants to keep that price high, is a hell of a giveaway. It might have been more sinister if the company was presented as caring and supportive right up until the moment when the team became less efficient, and then they kill 'em. The Doctor's solution at the end is a good one: he make's it unprofitable for the company algorithm to kill him and the other remaining crew members, thereby neutralising the danger. Capaldi gives it all he's got on the groan-some Dad joke line of "We're fighting the suits!" and it's almost a punch the air moment. It's also nice that there's a coda where the Doctor remembers the future history that the events we've witnessed are the beginning of the end for the company. Shades of the Duncan Jones's film Moon in that moment, I think.

Like most stories in this era there's good dialogue and great gags. I can't remember where I heard this, but I think the line "Some of my best friends are blueish" was ad-libbed by Matt Lucas; whoever wrote it, it's a funny line. The music is good too. All the elements are there, and it is effective in achieving its aim: excitement and some urgent, dramatic moments. It just doesn't achieve, but probably doesn't aspire to, anything more than that.

Connectivity: 

Both Oxygen and Colony in Space feature commercial organisations involved in mining that have a lax attitude towards the sanctity of human life. 

Deeper Thoughts:

It's like Alien never happened. There seems to be a constant refrain in Doctor Who interviews and articles where a member of the production team talks about the difference between science fiction's gleaming antiseptic environs and the grimy, dangerous realities of space exploration. I remember it being a particular selling point of some early new series episodes (The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit, for example) with the refrain coming from various production personnel on the Doctor Who Confidential making-of show. There's an echo of it in the beginning voice-over in Oxygen, with the Doctor stating that sometimes "we" take space for granted with its "suits, ships" and "little bubbles of safety". Did "we", whoever we are, really take it for granted? Did anyone ever imagine that space travel was safe and shiny? Were they given such an impression by the popular sci-fi of the time? I don't think so. I think the people talking about this are thinking of one source text only, Star Trek. At least in its original TV series, Gene Roddenberry's famous creation did present space travel as sleek and shiny and safe. It did that. though, as its dramatic focus was on exploration rather than survival; it would have changed the nature of the show if there were too many stories where a broken dilithium crystal, or whatever, caused half the crew to die. As the years went by and Trek proliferated in different forms and media, it did get darker, dirtier and more dangerous on occasion anyway.

All three series of the original Star Trek were made and first broadcast before man set foot on the moon. I'm tempted to therefore give them and any TV or films before them a free pass. Until that point, nobody really knew what it was going to be like out there, and so everything was speculative. Something like 2001: A Space Odyssey was informed by space race intel, and could be seen as the epitome of sleek, shiny and safe sci-fi. But, though it has commercial space flights elegantly docking with space stations like a well choreographed ballet, it also has famous scenes of terror and survival as a crew have to deal with the sort of intransigent AI also seen in Oxygen as it tries to eject them into cold, unforgiving space. A few years later, you have the film Dark Star depicting space travel as grimy, dark and haphazard, and this is more than thirty years before The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit. Even if one argues that not enough people saw Dark Star for it to have shifted perceptions, its creators refined this take in their next script, Alien. Nobody can argue that Alien didn't have cultural impact. Anyone in the 21st century saying that sci-fi presents too clean a vision of space travel has to ignore perhaps the most influential sci-fi film of the late 20th century. Even for the younger demographic that might not have been able to get into a cinema to see Alien, Star Wars has the broken down, grimy past-its-prime Millennium Falcon and lots of people getting blown up WW2 dogfight style.

In Doctor Who, these films and other trends, both fictional and based on real world space exploration, influenced. Sometimes it just made Who move in a completely different direction, as it couldn't compete, sometimes external influences did steer what appeared on screen, at least as filtered through tiny BBC budgets. In a show like The Moonbase, broadcast in 1967 when the production team were learning from ongoing news about cosmonauts and NASA, there are reasonably realistic spacesuits and weightlessness, but the moon's atmospheric pressure can be kept out by a thin plastic tray. A couple of years later, The Seeds of Death has a dangerous rocket journey to the moon which could give Apollo 13 a run for its money (ish). Even in the very first season of Doctor Who in 1963/64 there is a bleak and reasonably graphic depiction of our heroes succumbing to sickness on a radioactive planet as early as the second story, as well as visiting a more Thunderbirds / Dan Dare efficient spacecraft in the sixth. It could and did do both extremes of story, and all the permutations in between. Any debate seems to be based on a false premise; in fiction and in Doctor Who, space can be shown as safe and sleek and shiny or it can be shown as dirty and grimy and hazardous. It just depends entirely on what story is being told that particular week. Long may the show continue in all its inconsistent glory.

 

In Summary:

Not quite a breath of fresh air, but it will make you gasp in places.