Can You Hear Me?

Chapter The 191st, Doctor Who and the Talking Cure.

Plot:

Two powerful, immortal beings with unmemorable names amuse themselves through eternity by torturing people. The inhabitants of two planets they have set to war against each other stop fighting and team up, managing (somehow) to trap one of the immortals in an orb bubble between two colliding planets. The other immortal (somehow) cannot undo this. The Doctor drops off Yaz, Ryan and Graham in Sheffield for them to have a short break from time travelling. The immortal gives them and their friends nightmares and visions. The Doctor misses all this at first as she's followed an alert in the TARDIS to 14th century Aleppo where the immortal bloke has created creatures from a girl's nightmares. This was just for shits and giggles though, as it doesn't appear to have much to do with the main plot, which is for the immortal to make the Doctor think that the person trapped in the orb is good and is being tortured by being fed negative mental pictures, whereas she's actually bad and enjoying them. The Doctor frees her and the two beings go off to Earth to feed off everyone's nightmares leaving the Doctor and friends imprisoned. Luckily, they haven't reckoned with... the sonic screwdriver in the Doctor's pocket. She frees the others and they trap both immortals in the orb. Everyone reflects on their own concerns. Yaz was saved by a police officer when she'd been in a dark place three years earlier; Ryan's friend misses him when he's gone; Graham worries about his cancer coming back.

Context:

I watched the story from the Series 12 Blu-ray boxset. It was the steelbook version, actually - I've got a couple of these limited edition steelbooks; not because I collect them, but because they were the only version I could find online when I pre-ordered. This doesn't bother me with regard to shelf uniformity - each example of new series boxset packaging is different from every other anyway - but it is difficult to extract the media from the narrow steelbooks, which have multiple discs on one spindle. Getting the disc with Can You Hear Me? on it out of the box without snapping it in half was a challenging and anxious process. Some people might say that this was the only dramatic moment in the whole experience of watching Can You Hear Me? but I would never dream of being so cruel. Honest.

First Time Round:

As Covid meant nothing of note happened for a long time after March 2020 when Jodie Whittaker's second series completed, it is relatively easy to remember details of the context of watching these episodes for the first time. Each crumb of memory of activities from that previous era - getting out of the house, travelling on public transport, being in big crowds of people - was fallen upon and scoffed up by my subconscious in the dull, samey months thereafter. Coincidentally, I was very busy then. I'd travelled on packed trains to London, and then been on multiple packed underground trains around London, about half a dozen times during the course of series 12's broadcast in early 2020.  This is half a dozen times more than usual for me in a ten week period, with or without a pandemic going on. I went to and from the capital on each of the three days preceding the Sunday when Can You Hear Me? was shown. The Thursday and Friday (the 6th and 7th of February) I was attending a training course for the day job, commuting in and out on both days from my home on the South Coast. I remember talking to the tutor on the lunchtime of the second day, and him telling me his concerns about how this Coronavius that was in the news was going to have a big impact, how it seemed to be very contagious and took people a long time to shake off if they caught it. This was no good at all for my hypochondria. It didn't help that I had a terrible, terrible cold at the time. I wouldn't have necessarily dragged myself in had it not been for it being an expensive course that it was too late to cancel. I remember a lot of internal reassurance, telling myself that the cough I had was definitely a chesty cough, not a dry cough, so I probably wasn't going to die.

Neither the tutor's warnings nor my cold stopped me from travelling again to London on the following day, Saturday 8th February. I was meeting with a number of friends from work to see The Room at the Prince Charles cinema just off Leicester Square. Watching this 2003 film is like a cross between watching Plan 9 From Outer Space and The Rocky Horror Picture Show - it's considered to be one of the worst if not the worst film every made (like Plan 9) but it has become a cult event to go to midnight screenings, throw things around the theatre and shout call and response in-jokes at the screen (like Rocky Horror). I'd never got round to seeing the film before, but a colleague at work is crazy about it, and arranged this trip. The creative 'genius' behind the flick Tommy Wiseau did a live Q&A and sold merchandise (I have a signed The Room T-Shirt now that I will probably never wear!). I had a few drinks afterwards before taking my still ill self home on the train. Over those drinks, one of the party got talking to me about Doctor Who pointing out that Spyfall's conclusion didn't make any sense: what use is turning all of humanity into hard drives? To whom is Daniel Barton going to sell this cloud storage if everyone's enslaved? This had not occurred to me, and I admit has undermined the story for me since. Ah well. Between all this activity, and the start of a new series of a favourite in our house, Endeavour, later in the evening, Can You Hear Me? was a pleasant enough but slightly forgettable interlude.

Reaction:

I remember a few years back when covering The Power of Three for the blog (see here) I went easy on its abrupt and perfunctory ending as I'd read that the production was beset with difficulties such that a workable plot could only be salvaged by an effort of editing. Since then, I've found out more about just how difficult it got (a key guest star refusing to give any kind of performance on the day, for example). I don't know of anything similar happening in the making of Can You Hear Me? but if I found out that it did, I wouldn't be surprised. The story is somewhat fragmentary and only coherent in terms of mood or - very loosely - its underlying theme. Without knowing anything about the circumstances in which the 2020 story was made, I'm going to have to assume that how it ended up on screen was what was intended by the writers, so am going to have to be critical. It's a bit of a mess. Clearly, this is a message story, and the message is important, so my being critical is going to seem like I'm kicking a puppy. Like another new series story which I didn't like that much Vincent and the Doctor it is one of a very small subset (unless I'm mistaken, only these two) of Doctor Who stories to be followed by a helpline number on screen with a voiceover informing anyone affected by what they'd seen to contact said number.

Tackling the complex subject matter of mental health for a family adventure series audience means that the script is somewhat tentative. This was true of the earlier story too. This will no doubt prove to be an unpopular view as Vincent and the Doctor is very well-loved generally within fandom and this Jodie Whittaker story not so much, but I think Can You Hear Me? handles things better. Yaz's suicidal ideation three years before the main events of the story is clear from the flashback sequence without having to be spelled out, and the sci-fi plot doesn't distract as much from the theme as it does in the Matt Smith story. Should it need to be this way, though? Does a Doctor Who story have to have a sci-fi plot at all if it risks distracting? Why can't the script be more explicit about its theme? I'll take those points in order, the first one being probably the most difficult to answer. I can't conceive of a version of Can You Hear Me? without the villainous eternal beings or the Chagaska monsters, even though they don't really take up much time or space in the plot. It could work as something like Listen, where there are hints of a monster that turns out to be in everyone's collective subconscious. But Listen's already been done, and the series would just be repeating itself. So, we're stuck with those elements, for better or worse.

Where they are better is in creating the mood early on. Ian Gelder as Zellin is very effective at looming in people's rooms to create dread. He and partner Rakaya are visually strong (they remind me of an older and skin colour swapped version of Marvel's Cloak and Dagger). The script goes to great lengths to position the pair within the pantheon of Doctor Who baddies, namechecking similar foes like the Eternals and the Toymaker. The grisly image of fingers detaching and sticking in people's ears, though it could have seemed risible, works too. The problem, though, is that Zellin's presence confuses things related to the main theme - how much is he creating their nightmares rather than just amplifying them? The narrative is structured in such a way that we don't spend any time with the characters before immortal interference, so we can't be shown this, and instead we have to be told. There's a monologue from Zellin about humans and "the cruelty of their own minds directed towards themselves; the doubt, the fear, the endless voices telling themselves that they're incapable and unworthy. Such an exquisite animal - built-in pain." It's great dialogue but it is still tell not show. And this problem is endemic: about sixteen minutes in after everyone's had individual visions, there's a scene where they are reunited and tell each other about the events we've already witnessed. Why do we need to see this? Cut it, and start the scene later. The backstory of Rakaya being imprisoned is presented as a bit of animation; it's nice, but this kind of tarting up can't hide that the material is still just exposition.

To the second question: should the writers tie themselves in knots avoiding being too explicit? The word suicide isn't ever used in the script, and the term mental health is used only once in relation to how it was treated in 14th century Syria, obviously safe at such a distance. The script talks talks talks about every other aspect of its plot, but the main theme is left coyly unspoken. Nobody wants to traumatise children, but given that the main thrust of the message in this message story is that talking about your problems can help, not talking about them directly in the narrative has got to damage that. The one character that is down to earth and specifically asks to talk about his issues is Graham at the end, worried about his cancer returning and the loss of his partner Grace, but the script bungles that moment by having the Doctor - our hero - not being able to think of anything to say. Of course, we are all sometimes socially awkward and don't know the right thing to say, and it's okay to put that on screen for people to empathise with, but maybe not by using the Doctor who is supposed to be better than that.

Beyond all these criticisms, there's a major flaw in the story, but I think it could have provided the opportunity to fix some of the issues above, maybe not everything but enough perhaps to have improved the show sufficiently overall that the other issues wouldn't matter. At a point roughly two-thirds of the way through the story, our heroes are at their lowest ebb. The Doctor and all her friends have been fooled, shackled and fed fears by Zellin. They're all plugged into this nightmare-scape by the accusing fingers of torment, and they might never escape to stop the two immortal baddies as they attack everyone on Earth street by street. It's a standard point in the drama plot structure, the point at which the hero has to find a last vestige of hope and rise up even though everything seems lost. But how? Well, this is a story the theme of which is that communicating with others to share one's fears can help. And everyone's connected to one another's mind - do you see? The nightmares of humans have been personified for the character of Tahira as terrifying monsters, and she's going to have to literally face them down and overcome them. It writes itself. The sci-fi subplot acts as a metaphor for what everyone needs to do in real life. Connected together, everyone isn't on their own with their nightmares; the Doctor's mental power can bring all their minds together so they aren't alone. This could be where we get flashbacks to their pain - imagine how energetic Yaz's three years earlier scenes would be if they preceded the climax defeat of the bad guys rather than followed it.

All the flashbacks to everybody's pain as they share it with the mind-melded group would culminate with Tahira facing the creature created from her own dark imagination, and - with everyone's help, facilitated by the Doctor - she would reach out and touch the creature and realise it was part of her, her ally not her damnation. Cut to: our heroes turning the tables on the baddies, helped by this collective experience almost exactly as it is in the story as transmitted. But what saved everyone in the transmitted version? Not a meeting of minds, just that the Doctor's sonic screwdriver happened to still be in her pocket. She waves the magic wand and all is well. It's not just a cop-out - it's the exact opposite of the message the story is supposed to be conveying. Tahira does face her fears, but in a scene off camera, and it just gets relayed afterwards. Pardon my loose language just this one time, but that is madness.

Connectivity: 

Both Can You Hear Me? and Planet of Giants feature a TARDIS team of the Doctor plus three companions. In both, there is at least one character that's finding it difficult to talk about how they're not feeling so great (Barbara keeps from everyone that she's been in contact with the deadly insecticide. and almost every character in this story is holding back about aspects of their mental health).

Deeper Thoughts:

Who and the history of the Blues. Doctor Who doesn't have a great history of its treatment of mental health issues. Many times during its history, particularly in the 20th century stories, characters are referred to as crazy or insane without too much reflection of the true meaning and impact of those words. The worst sin of the series is probably the use of a vague diagnosis of insanity by an unqualified character in the narrative to explain away a total lack of logic and motivation in the actions of the bad guy. This happens often; an example in a story recently covered by the blog is Sir George in The Awakening who behaves in an incoherent way but it's fine because he's doolally. The story has ample opportunity to blame this on the affect of mind control by the monster of the week, but - uncomfortably - the writer decides to go in a different direction, explicitly confirming that Sir George was "deranged" before the alien menace came on the scene. Of course, this means that Sir George is just as much a victim as any of the other characters in the piece, but he's not really treated as such.  This pattern reoccurs in many episodes. It's of course not unique to Doctor Who and is a staple of a certain type of genre fare of the time, but it's nonetheless a bit lazy.

The other main cliché that leads to a somewhat problematical position looking back is the "mad scientist" trope. Generally, though, I think Doctor Who of all eras manages this a bit better on the whole. "Mad scientists" in Doctor Who are generally not portrayed as suffering from any mental health problems but instead are making dubious but controlled choices as they are blinkered by some extreme passion or other (Stahlman desperate to get his mine gas from the Earth, Lazarus desperate to regain his youth, even - from last time's blog post - Smithers desperate to save the world from famine). This overzealous motivation isn't limited to scientists of course; any number of blinkered administrators, directors, CEOs and Colonel Blimps have featured over the years. In an interesting reversal of the 'blame it on their mental health' approach, Alan Barnes in the current issue of Doctor Who Magazine posits that the rigid, cosmically xenophobic General Carrington of The Ambassadors of Death - who is painted as a villain in the story - might actually be suffering from PTSD and more of a victim after all.

Another cliché that Doctor Who avoids is the autistic savant that has an superhuman ability of some kind. This is a bit patronising and insensitive; I quote Abed from the TV show Community's withering summary (in the 5th season episode Basic Intergluteal Numismatics) in full as I think it's informative: "I see a man using a social disorder as a procedural device. Wait, wait, wait, I see another man. Mildly autistic super-detectives everywhere… basic cable, broadcast networks… pain, painful writing. It hurts." While Steven Moffat may have indulged in a little of this in Sherlock, I think he was more restrained in Doctor Who, and this luckily is something that other eras have not stooped to either. The nearest is probably Tommy in Planet of the Spiders, who has learning difficulties and this stops him from being controlled by the forces of evil. Tommy's probably more like the equally clichéd holy fool archetype, though, and anyway Tommy's plot is - at least in my opinion - carefully and respectfully done, and one of the best and most affecting subplots of the era, so I'm giving it a free pass. In general, as it always turns out to be, truth is more subdued but more interesting than fiction. The motivations for people in the real world to spread misery seem to be quite mundane compared to the extravagant excesses of some fictions. If awareness of this stops mental health issues being used in a rather tasteless way then it can only be a good thing.

In Summary:

I can hear you, but you ain't that great. Thanks for asking, though. 

Planet of Giants

Chapter The 190th, which covers a time when dimensions were relative in space.

Plot:

The original (and maybe best) TARDIS team of the Doctor, Susan, Ian and Barbara finally arrive back in contemporary England, materialising in the garden of a farmhouse. Ian and Barbara cannot return to their homes and lives, though, as - because of a fault where the doors opened before the TARDIS landed - they are only 1-inch high. They don't have much time to dwell on this irony, as they get caught up in a murder and an ecological scandal. The farmhouse is the site of a lab where a scientist Smithers is working on a new insecticide DN6, which he's tested in the garden. Also present are his industrialist backer Forester, and a civil servant Farrow who is writing a report which will be key to the product's approval for use. Alas, DN6 is too destructive; at grass roots level, the TARDIS team find many helpful mini-beasts - ants, worms, a bee - all dead. Later, Barbara comes into contact with the insecticide too, and becomes ill.

Forester has sunk too much money into the project, so when Farrow tells him his report is unfavourable, he threatens and then shoots Farrow to prevent him filing it. Making up a story that Farrow was trying to block the use of DN6 to blackmail his way into getting a cut in the profits, Forester persuades the zealous Smithers to help cover up the murder; but, an attempt to impersonate Farrow on the phone arouses the suspicions of the switchboard operator Hilda, whose husband Bert is the local bobby. She's further intrigued when the TARDIS team, having trekked in from the garden, use all their strength to get the phone in the lab off the hook (this and blowing up a pressurised aerosol can with the lab's gas tap is all they manage to contribute). Bert turns up at the farmhouse to apprehend Forester, and the TARDIS team travel down a drainpipe and back through the garden to the TARDIS. Once the TARDIS has taken off, things from the outside world return to their usual size relative to the Doctor and his companions, so Barbara is safe and well again.

Context:

I did something different this time, and watched all three episodes of Planet of Giants, in one go on my own of an evening, streamed on Britbox (via an Apple Fire TV stick into the telly). The family recently started a subscription to Britbox (which essentially replicates the experience of watching UK Gold in the 1990s, containing as it does lots of archive drama and comedy including all the classic Who stories), and this saved me getting up to get the DVD off a high shelf. Well, for a while anyway, as I later needed to watch the DVD to investigate the missing fourth episode of the serial (see Deeper Thoughts section below for more details). This meant I had the incongruous sight of the original black-and-white beginning credits sequence of Who with a bright pop-up button saying "Skip Intro" (I didn't make use of this button, natch), and also that the end credits disappeared into a small screen within a screen while a countdown ticked before the next episode played. It may be possible to adjust the settings to stop this from happening, but I haven't investigated how - I doubt I'm going to make a habit of watching stories this way.

First Time Round:

Planet of Giants was never repeated on terrestrial TV; in the short time I had UK Gold on cable in the late 1990s, it was not showing black-and-white stories; I also never borrowed any other fan's taped copy. So, I had to wait for the official Doctor Who VHS range to make it available. This wasn't until 14th January 2002, in the end period of the range, when DVD releases of different stories had started up in parallel. I was commuting from Brighton to London for my day job at that time, and would often get Doctor Who releases from the MVC on London Bridge as I walked in to the City, or sometimes on the way back after work if the stock hadn't been put out in the morning. It's a long time ago now, and I may be misremembering, but I seem to think that branch was okay for DVDs, but didn't often have the videos. The Tomb of  the Cybermen DVD came out on the same day, and I would almost certainly have picked it up in London; for Planet of Giants, though, I would have walked down Queen's Road from Brighton Station when my train journey that day was over and picked up the video from the MVC in Brighton. It stayed open reasonably late as I recall, but there would have been worry during the commute home that my train should not be delayed such that I missed the opportunity to buy the video on its first day of release. To a slightly obsessive fan, even though he was old enough to know better, this was important at the time. Once back home, I would have had a glass of wine and watched the story in one big gulp, then moved on to Tomb. I may have rung up my friend Phil (mentioned many times before on this blog) who lived nearby and often watched Doctor Who with me of an evening in those days. I can't remember whether seeing two black-and-white stories would have been enough of an excuse for Phil to join me for Monday evening drinks, but I'm going to say: probably. 

Reaction:

Based on lots of bits and bobs I've learned over the years from reading Doctor Who reference books, I get the impression that early on in Doctor Who's life everyone behind the scenes was obsessed with doing a story where our heroes were miniaturised. The idea was bandied about before the series started, then was planned to be our heroes' first trip (before being replaced with a stone age setting). That would have been The Giants by C.E. Webber, which would have seen the TARDIS team's shrunken exploits in Ian's school laboratory (this probably dates from the development period before Ian was even called Ian, so I should strictly say Cliff's school laboratory). Another attempt was made by a different writer to script an adventure based on this idea a few stories later, but Robert Gould's work also stalled mid-development. Louis Marks's Planet of Giants was the third attempt, made towards the end of Doctor Who's first recording season but held over to be the first story of its second broadcast run. When the idea finally got to screen, it was just a shame that what emerges is a little hum-drum: a low key crime drama, with an ecological theme. Perhaps this was inevitable to an extent, though, as the germ was a visual - worse, really, a visual effect - in search of a story. Some choices made in the narrative box the story in too; because the TARDIS has caused the problem of the Doctor and friends' diminishment, they can't return to full size until they leave. As such, the story couldn't be very wide-ranging or there would no realistic way for a set of 1-inch protagonists to have any part of it. 

Marks does the best he can within the limitations, opening up the story by centering things around an environmental risk that could become a global threat, but where the impact could be seen at the micro level. It's the first time, but would be by no means the last, that real-world environmental concerns have been included in a Doctor Who story; the clear influence is Rachel Carson's seminal green tome Silent Spring, which had been published less than two years before scripting, so was pretty up-to-the-minute stuff. The plot undermines the message, though, because it doesn't stand up to scrutiny - the insecticide DN6 is just too destructive for it to be realistic; no matter how much Smithers is blinded by idealism, you'd still think he'd have realised before now that his invention is killing everything it touches. Even if it got as far as being sold, DN6 wouldn't need to be used for too long before discovery, so the threat would never have got to be global. At this point, questions would no doubt be asked about how such a chemical could get its government approval, and the disappearance of the scientist who wrote the report would arouse suspicion. It's hard to see how Forester could have hoped to get away with things when his plan is already detectable by the most amateurish of sleuths.

This is another way the story is opened up, by including some characters contacted by telephone, with the lifting of the receiver a Herculean task for the tiny time travellers. The nosey Bert and Hilda are fun characters, but can't help but seem a bit disconnected from the rest of the action. Everyone is working in their own separate section of the narrative: we don't see Farrow and Smithers together. Hilda never meets any of the other characters apart from Bert, Bert only arrives at the farmhouse in his final scene. And, of course, the four regulars don't interact with anyone else in the cast. This leaves them to have scenes only between the four of themselves, which is enjoyable, particularly as it's the last chance for it to happen (Susan leaves in the next story, during the course of which the regulars are mostly separated). There's only so many ways for any actor to register surprise at stumbling across an oversized insect / notepad / paperclip, but they all give it their very best. Jacqueline Hill as Barbara is the only one who gets something more to do, but it's not much: as in the well-worn trope of a zombie movie, she's the member of the hero party hiding that they've earlier become infected.

The real stars of this story aren't any actors, however. To a certain extent, it only exists for the set designer to have an opportunity to deliver something special and fun, and the late, great Ray Cusick does just that. Sets and props for the out-of-scale garden and lab are uniformly excellent. The centre piece is the magnificent lab sink set with shiny plughole and long chain down to the plug stopper that characters can climb down. One other point of interest is that this story sees the first incidental music score by Dudley Simpson; he, like Louis Marks and co-director Douglas Camfield (see below) would go on to have long associations with Doctor Who as composer, writer and director respectively. Their involvement, plus sterling work from Cusick, one of Who's behind-the-scenes founding fathers, is great, but feels a little wasted when it's in the service of this somewhat minor tale.

Connectivity: 

Following on from The Unicorn and the Wasp, Planet of Giants is another story featuring giant insects.

Deeper Thoughts:

The first ever missing episode. Doctor Who has many lost episodes. Almost all of them are lost because the original video master tapes were wiped for reuse, and any film copies made for overseas sales (that we know of, at least) were junked. The institutions involved - and the BBC wasn't unique in this at all - just didn't figure that the archive would have any value once a few years had passed since a programme's original transmission. The very first missing episode, though, never even made it to air; a decision about lack of public interest was made before it was shown. For Planet of Giants was originally intended as, indeed was written and shot as, a four episode story. It was the first story of a new season of Doctor Who, being broadcast after a few weeks' break in autumn 1964. Donald Wilson, then BBC Head of serials, did not think the story was enough of a grabber for an opener, and probably would have much preferred to swap and have the season kick off with following story The Dalek Invasion of Earth. But, as that saw Susan leave the show, the order couldn't be changed. To mitigate Wilson's concerns, the decision was made to cut a lot of material from episodes 3 and 4 of the story, and stich them together into one faster-paced third episode to conclude the story. The final episode, which was to have been called The Urge to Live, effectively ceased to exist and the footage excised from what would have been episodes 3 and 4 was consigned to the bin decades ago.

This might have been the right decision to make in 1964, but was a shame regarding the longer-term history of the show as part 4 was Douglas Camfield's first Who directing gig; he'd go on to direct many fan favourite episodes in the 1960s and 70s. The new final part, Crisis, obviously contained quite a bit of material Camfield shot, and the episode was credited to him, but the whole of his first episode for the show no longer exists (and not for the usual reasons). The 2012 DVD of the story goes some way to making up for this by including a special feature which recreates as closely as possible the original versions of episodes 3 and 4. Using the still extant scripts, audio for the excised scenes has been recreated by original companion actors William Russell and Carole Ann Ford (as Ian and Susan), with other actors playing the Doctor and Barbara, and the four guest cast members Forester (performed with relish by Toby Hadoke), Smithers, Hilda and Bert. Unlike other missing episode reconstructions, this audio is matched to illustrative moving footage rather than still images. There's some brief animations, but mostly it is recycled footage from elsewhere in the story (other scenes between Hilda and Bert or Forester and Smithers, say) meaning there's no lip sync. As I remember, at the time of the DVD release there was some fan criticism of this approach, but I think it works fine. In general, I feel this is exactly the kind of DVD extra that DVD was invented for, and it's some of the most interesting work for the range by director Ian Levine and Producer Ed Stradling. Kudos to them, and everyone else involved.

A lot of what was removed does indeed prove to be inessential; more scenes of Forester's scheming or the investigations of the suspicious Hilda and Bert don't enhance what survives of those subplots post-truncation. There are scenes of the full-size cast interactions that explain why objects like the notepad with the DN6 formula and the pressurised canister happen to be in the lab too, but in the final version they're just there and it doesn't seem too out of the ordinary (one would expect such things in a lab, to a certain extent). Other losses are more significant. There are a couple of excised sections where the farmhouse cat - which terrorises our miniature heroes early on - dies after coming into contact with the invidious insecticide. Smithers' discovery of its corpse with traces of DN6 on it is what finally pushes him to turn on Forester. Without the cat, there isn't sufficient reason for his volte face. Also gone is a nice moment for Barbara, where - despite suffering from the effects of the insecticide herself - she insists on risking her life as it's her duty to ensure that the world's environment is not threatened. It's a great character moment, but its removal does avoid a couple of plot problems. In her speech, Barbara comments on how they will never get her down the drainpipe and back to the TARDIS in her current state. But later, they manage to do this (somehow, off camera), so it would have been a bit of a plot hole. Too much focus on the heroes' duty also makes worse an issue with the story that's arguably still there in the three-part version: the TARDIS team leave without any guarantees that they have saved the world. The Doctor sees a policeman arrive in the lab, so can be fairly confident the murder won't go unpunished, but why does he think that will necessarily stop the insecticide's use?

Perhaps the most significant loss is from the original third episode where the Doctor takes a moral stand, saying that they can't all stand by when something terrible might happen (this is what prompts Barbara's similar moment detailed above, which would have happened in the original episode 4). This is significant as it marks the final stage of transformation in the Doctor's character in these very early Doctor Who stories from anti-hero to hero, from unwilling adventurer to righter of wrongs. It's probably more satisfying to have this moment, where the Doctor chooses to stand up against the baddies rather than get back to the TARDIS and escape as soon as possible, in a story where he's pitted against his biggest enemies rather than one unscrupulous bloke with a gun; it does, though, rob this story of rather limited scope (for all the potential global ramifications) of its one trailblazing element.   

In Summary:

A bit small-scale compared to usual. 

The Unicorn and the Wasp

Chapter The 189th, which concerns itself with the corpus of Christie.

Plot:

England, 1926.The Doctor and Donna gatecrash a party in a manor house held by its aristo owner, Lady Eddison, with Agatha Christie as one of the guests. Soon people start to get murdered in the manner (and indeed in the Manor) of Agatha's novels. There's also a jewel thief known as the Unicorn at large, and a giant wasp at very large. The Doctor and Agatha investigate, the former discovering a clue indicating an alien creature is involved. In the usual detective story fashion, there are many suspects, each hiding their own secrets. A few more people get bumped off and there's even an attempt to poison the Doctor. The murderer turns out to be the giant wasp, which can take the form of a human. In the end, the Doctor gathers everyone together in the drawing room and reveals who is the waspish one. They are the secret alien love child of Lady Eddison after a dalliance with a Vespiform 40 years earlier. A few days before the party, the grown-up child who coincidentally lives in the same area had recently been in a stressful situation which caused a genetic lock to be broken, and a meeting of minds with his mother aided by a telepathic jewel which also inadvertently downloaded the novels of Agatha Christie from Lady Ellison's head, hence the copycat killings. Agatha draws the wasp off in a car driving towards a nearby lake where the creature is drowned. Some more telepathic jewel flim-flam causes her to lose her memory, and a TARDIS trip takes her to the Harrogate Hotel 10 days later, explaining her historically recorded disappearance.

Context:

Watched the story on my own one lunchtime during a day working from home, viewing from the disc in the New Series 4 DVD boxset. As I started writing up this blog post, I wondered exactly when it was set in 1926 so googled the real life disappearance of Agatha Christie and found that it happened in early December. Anyone who's seen the story will know that its sunny garden party sequences weren't filmed in an English winter. This necessitated a quick double check by dialling up the story on the BBC iplayer (I'd put the disc back in its box and put the box back on the shelf by then) to see whether there was any cheating related to the specific date, and there's not really. The Doctor never says the date out loud and there's no close up of the newspaper. So, in the Doctor Who universe, either Agatha Christie disappeared at a different time or global warming is much further along.

First Time Round:

It was May 2008, and I saw The Unicorn and the Wasp accompanied by the Better Half live as it was broadcast. The length of time between then and my typing these words is about a year more than the the gap between The Unicorn and the Wasp and the Paul McGann TV movie, which is amazing... Actually, it's not that amazing, is it? Seems about right, to be honest.

Reaction:

This story is the final entry into a loose new series trilogy of Authors + Aliens celebrity historicals. After Dickens and ghosts (in 2005's The Unquiet Dead), then Shakespeare and witches (in The Shakespeare Code in 2007), Agatha Christie faces a giant wasp (!) that does mysterious murders. There's a bit of desperation here and there in the script to justify propping Christie up at the same level as those previous two heavyweights. She understands human nature, we're told, and she's sold a ton of books. It both over- and under-sells Christie, whose real talent was as a popular storytelling conjuror. She continually creates entertaining magic tricks, with plenty of misdirection that keep one wondering exactly how the thing is done. This is a great skill which produced enjoyable works that have given and continue to give a huge number of readers throughout the world much pleasure; it shouldn't be sneered at, even if some of the novels' trappings may seem a bit risible. Anyone doing a magic trick has to take things reasonably seriously, or it might fall flat. Therefore, doing something like The Unicorn and the Wasp, a gentle send-up of Christie's works, is a risky proposition.

Not that more standard takes of Christie (those without giant alien wasps) are immune. The 1980s and 90s series of BBC Miss Marple stories starring Joan Hickson are generally and rightly hailed as exemplary adaptations, supremely well cast and executed. The 21st century ITV Marple versions on the other hand did not take the source material quite as seriously (at least at first, anyway), and they are less successful and not thought of so fondly. Tonally, The Unicorn and the Wasp is somewhere in between the two. About half of the running time it feels right and we're seeing a nice Doctor Who take on the genre, and half the time it veers too hard into outright comedy, but not necessarily always very good comedy. I'd remembered the gags being better than they turned out to be on this watch. As a single 45-minute episode, the story is also too short to act as a straight murder mystery: it's essential in such a tale that suspicion falls gradually, that the spotlight moves from suspect to suspect, that there's time for red herrings (the alien menace should really have been a giant red herring rather than a wasp, shouldn't it?!).

Instead, what we have is a series of fast, fun scenes which riff on the genre's tropes - there's a nice moment with flashbacks inside flashbacks, for example - but there isn't the opportunity, let alone the inclination, to ever seriously wonder whodunnit. Like any Christie adaptation, it does provide the opportunity for a starry supporting cast to each get a showy role; things are obviously condensed here because of the brevity of the running time, but everyone still gets a chance to shine from Felicity Kendall through to Felicity Jones. Fenella Woolgar is inspired casting as Agatha (I was just a year or two too young to have caught Woolgar acting or performing in the revue at Durham University). The regulars are on good form too with most of the best of the jokes coming from the interplay between David Tennant as the Doctor and Catherine Tate as Donna. The scene where Donna and the kitchen staff help the Doctor with a home remedy to survive his cyanide poisoning is nice ("How is Harvey Wallbanger one word?!") as is the outrageous in-joke where Donna expounds upon the unlikeliness of encountering Charles Dickens surrounded by ghosts at Christmas (i.e. the plot of The Unquiet Dead).

Elsewhere, things are a bit more laboured. There's a writerly challenge going on, which also included input from showrunner Russell T Davies, to include as many Christie book titles in the dialogue as possible. It's not funny nor particularly clever, just a little bit distracting if you know the titles in question (and if you don't, would be missed altogether). I don't know who was expected to be entertained by this, but I can't see how it could be the audience. Unlike The Unquiet Dead, the script insists on giving an explanation for the coincidence of Agatha Christie being caught up in an Agatha Christie-style mystery, but it makes rather a meal of it with genetic locks and telepathic necklaces and the like. This is followed by the slowest car chase imaginable where the wasp pursues Agatha (for no readily discernible reason). I have to admit that during this I was looking at my watch wondering when it would be over. There's a minor subplot which seems to find the idea that two of the characters are homosexual side-splittingly funny (it's not); the writer and showrunner should know better than this, but maybe got a bit carried away. So, a mixed bag on the whole, but not an outright failure by any means.

Connectivity: 

Both The Awakening and The Unicorn and the Wasp feature a Doctor that wears trainers, and both have at their centre a being with alien powers trying to recreate something (the civil war and Agatha Christie's oeuvre respectively).

Deeper Thoughts:

The elephant behind the sofa. During the UK Covid lockdowns there have been many tweetalongs organised by one of the staff of the official Doctor Who Magazine - chances for fans to synchronise their viewing of a particular story and share their reactions on twitter - in which cast members, production team members and writers have often taken part. One of the latter ones that was announced but then rapidly cancelled was The Unicorn and the Wasp. This was because many fans on social media (so, the specific audience for these tweetalong events) are unhappy about some comments made by the writer of this story regarding gender. In this specific instance, I think the right decision was made. Given the nature of such an event, it would be impossible to control whether the author - who is still on twitter - was copied in to any tweets, which would not have sat right with a lot of the intended audience, and may in its turn have caused discussion of topics that hadn't got anything to do with the story at hand. Given that the primary reason for the tweetalongs is fan togetherness and celebration, it makes sense not to distract from that. To do otherwise wouldn't have been good for Doctor Who, nor its social media audience, and - whether you care or not about his sensibilities - wouldn't likely have been that great for the author either; so, everybody swerved a pothole there. The author also had a Doctor Who short story removed from a collection that came out shortly after his comments were made. That's a commercial decision made by the publisher, so I'll leave that up to them. But what about things I can control, like my own viewings of the stories he wrote?  

I have an opinion about the comments the person in question made, and the impact of them. I'm not going to voice it here, though. There are two reasons for this. First, I'm a white middle-aged cis heterosexual man, so my opinion isn't perhaps needed in any discussion on the topic. Second is that social media (and I count a blog as part of that) is not the best place to have these discussions anyway. When anyone tries to discuss anything of any importance on twitter it degenerates quickly into both sides (and no matter what the topic, two sides tend to emerge) screaming slogans at each other. My issue is less with the specifics, and is a concern that predates social media, indeed going back as far as media has existed: can one separate the work from the creator? It's obviously hard, particularly when the work is recent and the creator still with us. It may be easier to avoid engaging altogether. I have not been listening to any Morrissey solo albums recently, for instance - see the Deeper Thoughts section of this blog post for more background on that. It does feel like there's an elephant in the room with me as I'm watching something like The Unicorn and the Wasp. The reason I'm still prepared to watch the episodes is partly because there are so many other people involved in the making of a TV show, and everyone involved in The Unicorn and the Wasp bar one is pretty uncontroversial. It wouldn't seem fair to neglect the work of all those people. I wouldn't feel comfortable with that, though, if the subject matter of the piece in any way linked to the source of controversy (as arguably it does on occasion in those Moz solo albums). I've never agreed with this particular Doctor Who writer's politics (and he's not been shy about sharing his views over the years) but I have never once seen any kind of agenda pushed in anything he's written for Doctor Who.

After I started drafting this section of the post, news hit and then hit again of allegations against a new series Doctor Who actor. I know that many people found the comments of the writer discussed above to be hurtful and unacceptable, and I don't seek to diminish that in any way; but, this new situation was much worse. These were allegations of serious crimes, and multiple people had reported consistent examples of wrongdoing. In this kind of scenario, it is vital that those brave enough to come forward are given a full hearing and that the due process is followed, which means - whether one likes it or not, or thinks it is credible or not - a presumption of the actor's innocence. Things will play out, which will take a while, and I hope we see justice done. Compared to the worries of the people involved, any consideration of how it's going to impact the enjoyment of a family sci-fi show is of course of negligible concern, but that elephant is still going to be there in the room watching with me if I see a show including the actor. For now, I'll trust to the random nature of my Doctor Who re-watch to help me avoid that for a while (he's not in that many stories). When it comes to it, I'll watch and try to banish his behaviour from my mind. As above, it's not like the actor had any input into the writing (except for one episode of Torchwood and I'm not covering that for the blog nor in any hurry to watch it again), so there's no agenda to worry about. Plus, all the other talented people in the stories he appeared in should not have their work invalidated by him. 

Both the people mentioned above have shocked fans, I think, because we - perhaps naively, but I'd rather that than the alternative - think of everyone associated with Doctor Who as being part of one generally positive collective. Regular cast and crew have almost universally stayed close to the programme's fans after their time with the show. To use a well worn phrase, it's one big happy family. For the most part, this appears to be the case. But families can be more dysfunctional than they first appear. Let's hope there are no more shocks in store.

In Summary:

Not as funny or clever as it thinks it is, but no Three Act Tragedy either. Cards on The Table, I think it's a little on The Hollow side; I give it The Big Four out of 10. I'll stop now. Sorry.