Dragonfire

Chapter The 193rd, which features a quest for adventure, and someone venturing out after a long period of house arrest at risk of melting in the hot sun!

Plot:

3000 years ago, criminal masterminds Kane and Xana face capture on their home planet of Proamon. Xana kills herself to avoid arrest. Kane, upset by this as he was in love with Xana, is captured and imprisoned on the dark side of the planet Svartos. He needs a very cold climate to survive. The spaceship used to take him there is his gaol, with the power source removed and hidden in the head of a biomechanoid creature, armed with laser beams in its eyes. Presumably it's the same ship used to take him to Svartos, because otherwise why provide him with a spacecraft - albeit a deactivated one - that could help him escape? The biomechanoid disappears off into the depths of the planet beneath the ship and becomes the stuff of legend - a dragon. Over the centuries, Kane sets up a trading colony called Iceworld based in the iced-over ship, as one does when in prison. Space travellers visit Iceworld, and Kane recruits many of them to his private army; some help in the running of Iceworld, and some are in cryogenic sleep waiting for the day when he can take his revenge. He seeks the dragon, and plants a tracking device on a map to its location, then rigs a card game so Sabalom Glitz takes possession of the map, and confiscates Glitz's spacecraft so he is motivated to seek out the dragon's treasure.

The Doctor arrives on Iceworld having registered the tracking signal in the TARDIS, interested in an expedition to find the dragon. The Doctor and Mel team up with Glitz and a 20th century girl from Perivale called Ace who has somehow arrived in this future world in a timestorm. They find the dragon almost instantly. Kane sends a couple of his team who kill it and remove its head. There is a power surge booby trap that kills Kane's people so the Doctor takes ownership of the power source (or Dragonfire), but Kane has taken Ace as hostage. There's an exchange of Ace for the Dragonfire, and it is inserted into the circuitry; the ship breaks through the ice and takes off from Svartos. Kane's instruments betray to him that his home planet Proamon is gone, destroyed 2000 years earlier. Deprived of his revenge, Kane commits suicide by opening a screen on the ship and letting in unfiltered sunlight, which melts him. While all this has been going on there's been a massacre of all the people on Iceworld and Glitz's ship has been blown up. He takes ownership of Kane's ship. Mel decides to stop travelling with the Doctor and instead travels with Glitz. Ace joins the Doctor, who promises to take her back to Perivale by the scenic route.

Context:

I watched this on the big screen of NFT1 at the BFI Southbank; they had a Doctor Who event to launch the Blu-Ray boxset of season 24 that's being released at the end of June with a screening of Dragonfire (see the Deeper Thoughts section below for more details). It was the first time for 15 months that I've taken a long journey on a train or spent a day in the capital (or anywhere so far from home). That last time 15 months ago, was - perhaps not entirely coincidentally - the last time the BFI were able to arrange a Doctor Who event, for The Talons of Weng-Chiang. One shelved resolution I had for 2020 was to use my BFI membership to watch a wider variety of things than just Doctor Who, but clearly these events are the sort that motivate me to get out the house. The meaning and risk of getting out of the house has changed since early 2020, of course, and just as I did in March last year, I seriously considered the circumstances right up until the last moment before travelling up. I was watching with David and Trevor, fan friends mentioned many times before on the blog, and afterwards Chris joined us for drinks. All of us had had at least one and some both Covid jabs; there were also standard restrictions in place at the venue (it was at a third of maximum capacity, making little ol' Dragonfire the most select and quickest selling of these BFI events so far!).

My journey into London was quiet; there was space around me on every train I took. I decided to walk from Victoria rather than take the tube as it was such a nice Sunny day, one of the hottest of the year so far. Twice on the walk I was complimented on my bag (I was carrying my faux-retro Tom Baker and Dalek-festooned satchel that I got from the Earl's Court Doctor Who Experience many years ago). Once I was at the venue, I saw lots of other groups of fans meeting up for what was probably the first time in a long time. One of the best parts of the day was seeing that, and much more later as photos of happy young fans meeting up adorned my social media timeline. Pretty soon, we all were trooped in to the theatre through an outside door - they are operating a one-way system to get audiences in an out. Watching something with a larger (albeit reduced) audience is always a different experience. The feelgood factor of the event happening at all would probably protect the relatively unloved Dragonfire from too much of a mauling. But there were a good few laughs at events on screen that couldn't be called intentionally funny. The biggest was for Tony Selby's gritted teeth close-up in part 3 when he snarls "Kane!" A bit unfair that, as he gives it his best shot.

The sunny day continued after the screening, and many drinks were had outside for the whole evening afterwards. The BFI's Riverside bar doesn't get much sun, as all the outdoor seating is overshadowed by Waterloo Bridge, but that meant we didn't burn. We saw Derek Handley to say hello to, and had a drink with Ed Stradling and Phil Newman. A lot of conversation happened about exactly what's wrong with Dragonfire. Everyone enjoyed themselves at this screening, but the story we were watching was no more than a qualified success in people's eyes. I'm normally the most positive, but this time I found I enjoyed it a lot less than others, more on that below.

First Time Round:

I watched this live on its broadcast across three Monday nights in November and December 1987. I was 15 and had started my final year at high school, and remember a few weeks earlier during the broadcast of an early episode of the season going to a careers and further education fair at the local Masonic hall. This memory is in my mind as my eldest child is but a few months away from being in exactly the same point in his education, though he's already signing up for (still mostly virtual) open days. It may be that there's a lot more people going to Sixth Form than there were in my day 34 years ago so they have to start it all earlier. Anyway, this is obviously making me feel old, as is the simple fact of typing '34 years ago' just then. "I have started to say / 'A quarter of a century' / Or 'thirty years back' / About my own life"; just like Philip Larkin, I'm becoming more of a curmudgeon the older I get. When Dragonfire was first broadcast I thought it was the best story of the year; the music, visual effects and model work better than the previous three stories to my young mind, and the story overall more enjoyable. My reaction this time, though, was not so favourable, as I'll get onto next...

Reaction:

A curious thing happened to me during the BFI screening of Dragonfire. After the third episode finished, there were various clips from the imminent Blu-ray boxset, including many scenes from Time and the Rani. To say that his opening story of the 1987 run is unpopular is a bit like saying that Hitler is a little bit naughty; it regularly comes close to the bottom of every fan poll, and in terms of consistent fan dislike is beaten to the wooden spoon only by the first story of the previous Doctor Colin Baker. Dragonfire is not considered a classic by any means, but it consistently polls higher than Time and the Rani. I've always generally agreed with this consensus, so it was a shock to be watching the Rani clips on that big screen and finding them borderline enjoyable, and significantly better than Dragonfire. Now, at the time of writing this, the box set including Time and the Rani is still two weeks away from release. When it comes out, I'll watch all four episodes of the season opener, and may well change my mind. As of now, though, I need to unpack exactly what is so so wrong with Dragonfire; I'll try not to take all day, but - believe me! - there are many, many contributory factors. Of all these, Ian Briggs's script would possibly not be top of anyone's list; there are more obvious offenders. The more I think about it, though, the more it's clear that even if every other creative contributor was giving a career best, it still could only be okay, not great. This is because the story is so flawed.

Briggs merges two genre staples: bad guy revenge plot, and a fantasy quest with dragons and treasure. Normally, these would mesh together reasonably - the quest needs to be completed to facilitate the revenge. But Briggs creates two problems for himself. Firstly, in order presumably to bring some depth and irony to the bad guy's ultimate undoing, his home planet - and any hope for revenge - has been reduced to dust by the passing of time. To make this believable, the period of time elapsed has got to be reasonably lengthy; Briggs settled perhaps unwisely on an excessive 3000 years, but the problems would have been the same even if it were only say 30. It puts undue pressure on the quest plot to be extremely dramatic and harrowing and difficult, otherwise someone else would have found the Dragonfire in that long, long period of time. The quest already had to be wholly created within a studio in Television Centre, so that would be a tall order from the off; but, Briggs doesn't actually add much if any jeopardy in the quest plot. It's just a journey between different locations. There's one dead end that requires a climb down a sheer face of rock, but that's staged so poorly it has become infamous (the 'cliffhanger' sequence at the end of part 1). Aside from that, all the antagonism is borrowed from the revenge plot: cryo-zombies and guards are sent from Iceworld, the Doctor and Glitz go back to Iceworld and have confrontations with guards and exploding spaceships. This ease at which elements can go back and forth between the two genres - or two worlds - of the story fundamentally damages the quest plot. When one 'answers the call' to adventure, as per Joseph Campbell's lingo of quests, it's supposed to be an irrevocable decision. A protagonist isn't supposed to be able to commute back and forth from the new world of dangers and wonders.

It's so easy for the treasure to be discovered that it begs many questions. These are then exacerbated by Briggs's second main act of self sabotage: to make the setting for his adventure a trading hub for space travellers. The naff depiction of this as a being a Space Bejam isn't down to him as writer, admittedly, but even if it was realised by Ridley Scott with help from Moebius and H. R. Giger this setting still wouldn't make any sense for the story. Either Kane, a dangerous criminal prisoner lest we forget, has set all this up (why would he have been allowed to?) or it was already there and he took it over (but then, why exile him to such a place?). Why does he do it at all? Maybe to tempt people there so he can form his army. If so, though, why does he use them to continue his commercial enterprise for three thousand years rather than getting at least some of them to help him with his main project of escape? Many many spaceships visit Iceworld, and we know Kane can commandeer one quite easily. So, why doesn't he just use one of those to escape? Perhaps the dragon would have come out of hiding to stop him if he'd tried to escape in another ship. There's only one dragon, though, and in the end it only took a couple of Kane's troops to bring it down. It's plausible that Kane has to use the ship he's imprisoned in, as it's the only one that can keep him at the correct temperature. In that case, why not cut out the middle man and just send his own troops to find the 'dragon' and kill it. He's got a map. Why bother with all the subterfuge with trackers and rigged card games to get Glitz to do it instead?

There are loads of smaller questions. Who made the map? How did they do this, particularly as one thing marked on the map isn't a location but a living creature that can move around? Why has Kane not once in the last 2000 years enquired of any of the many staff and visitors to Iceworld about his home planet Proamon? Even if she was the youngest of her school year, how has Ace had time to start her A-levels, get expelled, work a job as a waitress, experiment with explosives, get caught in a timestorm, and then work another job as a waitress, but still not turn seventeen?  Why does everyone think that putting the treasure inside the 'dragon' is the safest place to stop Kane getting at it? The planet has a bright side to which he can never venture, so why not bury it there or send the creature there? It would make more, if not exactly complete, sense for the quest to take place in an environment that's really hot rather than cold. Kane likes the cold; why put the thing he's not allowed to access in a cold place? It's as wrongheaded as hiding something from Dracula not in a string of garlic but in a vat of blood. The final unfortunate culmination of all the script flaws is that Dragonfire has another thing in common with Raiders of the Lost Ark other than melting heads (see The Big Bang Theory episode The Raiders of Minimization for full details): like Indy, the Doctor and his friends don't do anything to contribute to the plot except make it easier for the villains to find the treasure.

I know that's four paragraphs of invective about plot holes, but I promise the script is not the biggest problem. My younger self was right about the music, visual effects and model work; it's all more than adequate by the standards of the time. The costume and production design are okay too. There's the odd bit that's out of the place - the treasure map, for example, is something straight out Pirates of the Caribbean (the amusement park ride, not the movie), whereas everywhere else has a futuristic aesthetic. TV at the BBC at that time was made on something of a factory line, project after project with pre- and post-production of other shows overlapping with whatever was in the studio that week; the departments didn't have the time for tone meetings, so some inconsistency was always a risk. There was comparatively generous amounts of rehearsal time, though, so there's no excuse for the wild inconsistency in the acting. This is the real weakness of Dragonfire. Everyone's pitching their performance in a different register, as if they are all appearing in different shows, and there's no cohesion.

This is doubtless in some cases down to the experience of the performer. Sophie Aldred comes over as a lovely person, and certainly improved in the role of Ace, which she started here when new to TV and very inexperienced. In Dragonfire, though, it pains me to say that she is mostly unwatchable; the script is doing a good job of showcasing the auditioning companion favourably in comparison to Mel: one screams, the other doesn't; one's a bit prim and won't sit on a big pile of clothes in a messy room, the other's down to earth and real. This is undermined though by the artificial performance of Aldred, which seems to reach the levels of an Eliza Doolittle pastiche: "I ain't got no Mum and Dad, an I never 'ad no Mum and Dad, not nor nuffin' nor nye-ver, up the old Kent Road, apples and pears". But seasoned performers like Tony Osoba don't fare much better; he delivers his (admittedly pretty thankless and expository) lines in a stilted manner throughout. McCoy has some good moments (the scene where he tells Patricia Quinn's Belazs that he doesn't think her debt can ever be repaid is an early standout of his time in the role, and a lot of his clowning also must work as it got people laughing in the BFI). 

Elsewhere, even down to the small roles, nobody seems to know how the story as a whole is being pitched on the realistic to theatrical, or drama to comedy, or kid-friendly to horror scales. There's a massacre sequence that has a certain energy and fear displayed, with a little girl put in danger; but, a couple of scenes later, the girl's Mum breezes in wondering where she's been, still performing in the light sit-com style of an earlier scene she appeared in when she had a milkshake tipped on her head. McCoy has told an anecdote over the years about how he came out of rehearsals thinking everyone was going to act slipping and sliding on the studio floors to sell their iciness, but then found that he was the only person in the studio doing it. In episode 3, there is a derivative sequence ripped off from Aliens where two guards hunt the 'dragon', but it's intercut with a scene of other characters sitting around bored playing I-Spy. (Also, and I know this is back to script problems again, but why kill off Patricia Quinn and Tony Osoba's characters in episode 2 of 3 when you need a male and female villain team in episode 3 to do the alien hunt? Couldn't Kane's sadistic revenge on the characters after they've betrayed him be to send them on this suicide mission rather than kill them swiftly? That's got to be better than losing two more experienced actors and bringing the subs on.)

 

To me, the job of making all these contradictory performances cohere falls to the director, so most of the blame for how Dragonfire turned out should be levelled at Chris Clough. It's a pattern I've noted in his other Doctor Who productions of this era. I think he clearly was a good guy and wanted to give it his all, but his focus was probably more on the technical than the cast. He might have been okay with a small number of players (as in The Ultimate Foe), but the tendency once script editor Andrew Cartmel took over was for larger casts of different characters spread out through the narrative: this is the model for not just Dragonfire but all Clough's stories for Sylvester McCoy and they (Delta and the Bannermen and Silver Nemesis particularly) suffer from the same issues with consistency of performance . It's not all bad: Quinn, Edward Peel as Kane and Tony Selby as Glitz comport themselves with something approaching dignity, bar the odd duff moment. And ultimately, the end of Dragonfire delivers the Doctor and Ace, a partnership of promise that will act (much better) as the engine driving the final two years of classic series Who.

Connectivity: 

Both Dragonfire and The Name of the Doctor are the final story of a season of Doctor Who that consists of 14 episodes (the latter being the 14th episode of a run starting with Asylum of the Daleks and including The Snowmen Christmas special that was broadcast in the middle of its interrupted run). Both see the Doctor make an emotional goodbye at the end to someone he's travelled with (Mel, River) and both include a scene of the Sylvester McCoy Doctor hanging off an ice face with his umbrella (it's the same clip reused in the later story, of course).

Deeper Thoughts:

Planetary Archives Criminal History Segment 93-12-0-4; BFI Dragonfire Screening, 12th June 2021. The biggest worry I had was whether my glasses would steam up with a mask on for several hours in a cinema, but it did not come to pass. Once the assembled crowd were settled, the first person that I saw on stage through my unmisted vision was Justin Johnson, our usual host for these events in the Before Covid Era. He got a lot of negatives out of the way up front in his introduction. As with the Talons screening last year, the ongoing pandemic impacted attendance by guests with Sophie Aldred and Patricia Quinn wanting to attend but being unable to make it. He also mentioned that they'd tried very hard to get an event together earlier this year to show Terror of the Autons when the season 8 Blu-ray boxset came out, but lockdown prevented it. Current restrictions mean no audience interactions, so the traditional quiz where people shout for Dick to answer Doctor Who trivia questions and win a DVD could not take place. All this was disappointing, but Justin cheered up the audience when introducing Dick Fiddy by saying "I haven't seen Dick in over a year" which elicited applause as well as laughter from the assembled fans who have no doubt missed this particular double entendre.

"I haven't seen Dick in over a year!" Johnson (L), Fiddy (R)

Before the first episodes were shown, a guest was invited on stage: William 'Bill' Dudman, film cameraman on a number of Sylvester McCoy stories; for Dragonfire, a story shot in the studio with video cameras, this meant that he was involved in shooting the work of the model effects team. He came prepared with a few notes for a technical but interesting talk, with the odd question being asked by Messrs Johnson and Fiddy. A lot of the tricks of the trade for shooting space miniatures (Dudman was involved in filming the magnificent model work for Star Cops shortly before starting on Doctor Who, so he's got form in this area) were familiar - shooting at high frame rates, suspending models on their side or upside down to avoid displaying gravity; but, he also discussed more subtle techniques. The shots of the planet Svartos were shot through a high-quality pane of glass that William had edged with an anti-flare paint; this was to give the illusion of the planet's atmosphere. He also revealed that in his role he would deal mainly with the effects designer not the director, and would never see a script. When doing the filming of the story before Dragonfire, Delta and the Bannermen, that meant his not knowing the context for why a Sputnik-a-like satellite should be colliding with a bus in space. A final anecdote involved his work on the series much earlier in his career on the Patrick Troughton story Fury from the Deep. The climax with the weed creature (actually an effects assistant in a suit) was supposed to involve said creature bursting through the door into the main set. When they came to shoot it, the man in the suit discovered that the hinges on the set door had been put on the wrong way round, so on the first take the fearsome creature had instead to open the door slowly and politely step through, no doubt waving a frond in greeting.

(L to R) Johnson, Fiddy, Dudman

The first two episodes of Dragonfire were shown next, and after that a brief interview with Russell Minton, the executive producer of the Blu-ray boxsets. He has been mentioned many times on this stage at previous BFI events, and I think has been in the audience, but has never before been coaxed up onto the stage. He confirmed that every episode of the Season 24 series has an extended version included in the package, so it's really a 28-episode boxset. He talked about his original pitch for the range being like a set of encyclopedias of every year of the classic series; this aim for comprehensiveness of coverage drives which Value Added Material is created where there are "Still stories left to tell". For example, there was no sign of Patricia Quinn on the DVD release of Dragonfire, so an interview feature was created for the Blu-ray. What archive material exists is also a factor: there is enough studio and location footage from the making of season 24 to fill up multiple sets, so they have had to be selective, but there's still an extensive amount on the boxset that comes out later in June. Covid is still having an impact on shooting the accompanying features. The lockdown that started in December 2020 in the UK kicked in a few days before a couple of shoots; this time, it was still possible to do the work with restrictions, but there is also the question as to whether the contributors feel comfortable. Luckily, everyone did. Throughout the work on the many features for the range, everyone contacted has been happy to be involved, even if some were bemused at first as to why they were being asked about jobs from long ago, and everyone is generous with their time. The current Doctor Who office does not get involved editorially, but there is some discussion about timing of announcements so they don't clash.

Fiddy (L), Minton (R)

Following Russell, there was the final episode of Dragonfire followed by a highlights package of the boxset's Value Added Material. We were treated to long clips or clip selections of the following: the Behind the Sofa watch of Time and the Rani; The Doctor's Table with Sylvester McCoy, Sophie Aldred, Bonnie Langford and Clive Merrison enjoying a meal while answering questions; Holiday Camp, a new making-of documentary about Delta and the Bannermen; a career-spanning interview with Patricia Quinn which looks to be a highlight of the set (that segment got a round of applause in NFT1); Matthew Sweet in Conversation with Sylv; and the amusing '24 Carat' trailer for the set. All of it was very enjoyable, and I'm very much looking forward to watching every one in full. Once this was finished and the lights came up, the final interviewee of the day was invited onto the stage; this was Ian Briggs, the writer of Dragonfire, who was softly spoken and thoughtful throughout. He talked about working at the BBC Script Unit and receiving a stand-out script by a young writer called  Andrew Cartmel, then meeting with him; they hit it off immediately. Around this time, Briggs was interested in writing for Doctor Who (one of his "bucket list" jobs) and had already had a meeting with mid-1980s Who script editor Eric Saward that came to nothing. A little later, Briggs left the unit, and the tables turned: Cartmel, who had since replaced Saward, invited Briggs to send him a writing sample, and from that he was commissioned for the story that became Dragonfire.

Johnson (L), Briggs (R)

Briggs shared interesting and amusing glimpses of  writing Doctor Who at that time, for example how he had learned to limit his sets and indicated how they could be reused with different lighting to represent the lower and lower levels of Iceworld as our heroes journeyed downward. An anecdote recalled that producer John Nathan-Turner had been concerned that the main villain being called Hess (as he was until a late stage) might cause Rudolph Hess (Nazi war criminal who was then still alive, imprisoned in Spandau) to sue the BBC for defamation of character! The replacement name had to be four letters long as the scripts had already been typed out, and this allowed them to just tippex out 'Hess' and type over it with 'Kane'. When discussing the infamous cliffhanger of episode 1 - something you get the impression that Briggs has explained many times over the years - he talked about getting the balance right in a script between giving enough information versus being patronising to the creative departments working from the script, or cramping their style. For the cliffhanger moment, the climb down the ice face was supposed to be the only option open to the Doctor to proceed, but this was not reflected in the set that was created. It didn't help in Briggs's opinion that set building had to happen in parallel with rehearsals, meaning any learning from the actors and director blocking movements was too late to have an impact on the sets. It also wasn't supposed to be the cliffhanger; the episode was supposed to end with Mel and Ace coming face to face with the dragon creature. 

Briggs briefly talked about writing for the Doctor; he only had a 90-second screen test to go on in terms of tailoring the material to Sylvester McCoy; he thought of the characterisation as being something like a male Mary Poppins. More discussion centred on Ace, a character that Briggs created as a prototype companion. Until very late in the day it was unclear whether Bonnie Langford would be leaving or not in season 24, and which companion would replace her if she did. Briggs had prepared two endings with either Mel or Ace going off with Glitz and the other accompanying the Doctor. Ace and Sophie Aldred were a big hit during the production, so when that late decision was made, Briggs had to give up his copyright in the character. He said this was an easy decision to make: he wouldn't have made anything financially either way - if he hadn't surrendered the character to the BBC, the character would not have become a regular. As such, it was the only option to allow Ace to live on, and he was happy to do this and happy to develop the character further in The Curse of Fenric.

Returning to Doctor Who was something that at one point Briggs was not sure would happen: on Dragonfire, a problem had been reported up from the crew to the producer which entailed the cutting of a particular speech. Briggs had been briefed that the producer would ask him whether he was okay with this, but this was just a courtesy and he couldn't say No. If he played "silly buggers", word would get round that he was difficult and he would not work in TV again. When the moment came in the control room, though, he asked for the speech to be kept as it contained a vital piece of information for the audience. The room went quiet, the writer was telling the producer what to do, and this just did not happen; Nathan-Turner stared at him for a long moment, then said "The speech stays". Briggs speculated that Nathan-Turner's instincts would have been to agree because Briggs had been playing ball up to then, to the point of giving away the rights to one of his creations, so a sudden uncooperative decision must have been for a good reason. Briggs ended the interview with words of effusive praise for the much maligned 1980s producer of Doctor Who, telling us that he'd have gone to the ends of the Earth for John Nathan-Turner. It was a nice note of positivity on which to end a much welcome return of these events. I hope we see the next one very soon.

In Summary:

How close were they to creating a coherent production? Cold, getting colder, FREEZING!

The Name of the Doctor

Chapter The 192nd, which contains compound colliding continuity.

Plot:

The disembodied Great Intelligence, with his scary faceless nursery-rhyme spouting Whisper Men goons, feeds information to a murderer in 1893 as part of a plan to trap the Doctor. This is revenge for all the times the Doctor has thwarted the Intelligence (presumably including their couple of skirmishes in the 1960s when it wasn't played by Richard E Grant as it seems to be able to time travel now). The information prompts Vastra to hold a seance cum conference call communing across time with Jenny, Strax, Clara and the version of River Song stored in the Library hard drive after her death. The Whisper Men kidnap Vastra, Jenny and Strax (Jenny's dead for a while but nobody stays dead for long in a Steven Moffat script) and take them to Trenzalore, site of the Doctor's future grave. The Doctor breaks the rules about crossing his future timeline and lands there too.

Clara is still linked to the conference call and can see and hear River talking to her on Trenzalore even though nobody else can. River helps Clara and the Doctor enter the TARDIS, which is acting as the Doctor's tomb. His corpse is a wibbly vortexy tear in the fabric of space/time or something, and the Great Intelligence jumps in and rewrites the Doctor's history undoing all the good he's done. Clara jumps in after him and undoes all the undoing, fragmenting herself into different versions (explaining why the Doctor had met her before twice but she died both times). The Doctor has always been able to see River, and talks to her; her being still connected to Clara gives him the hint that Clara's still alive, so he jumps into his timeline to save her. He finds her, and they see a... memory? projection? of another mystery Doctor played by John Hurt who apparently did something bad and wasn't worthy of the name any longer. To be continued....

Context:

Watched the blu-ray from the series 7 box-set with the two youngest children (boy of 11, girl of 9) on a Sunday afternoon at the end of their half-term holiday. The Better Half also came in and watched sections of this as it played out, as she couldn't remember seeing it first time around. The children wanted to watch The Day of the Doctor immediately after watching this story, which I guess is what it's built to cause. The Better Half was a bit more dismissive about the end "They're just trying to recreate the end of Rose and David Tennant every time - it's been done". She left the room before I could confirm whether she meant the separation of Doctor and companion in wibbly time thing (Doctor and Clara) or the emotional goodbye when one's kind-of a hologram (Doctor and River), but there are certainly echoes of both.

First Time Round:

I can never usually remember much about my first experience of Matt Smith stories. I would have watched this on the evening of broadcast, probably time-shifted as the children were very young so we'd likely have been putting them to bed during Who's broadcast slot. As has become a habit in these circumstances, I will instead share a Doctor Who related reminiscence from a different time. This one is from near the beginning of the so called wilderness years, when Doctor Who was not being made as a ongoing series. It is the story of how I rediscovered my fandom at a time where I could have done without such distractions. The final BBC series starring Sylvester McCoy had finished broadcasting in early December 1989. Though I had still watched the show assiduously towards the end of the 1980s, and was starting to collect the sporadic VHS releases, I had stopped reading Doctor Who Magazine in 1987. The family had been paying for the magazine to be delivered from the newsagents alongside the papers until the price went up and they knocked it on the head. I could only pick up news about the series from said papers, and sometimes the Radio Times (though we didn't often get that publication), so my fan awareness reduced to its lowest level since I'd got into Doctor Who in the early 80s.

In April 1990, over four months after the series had last broadcast when it was becoming obvious it wouldn't be back for a while, I was in a shop in Bognor Regis when visiting my Dad. I saw a copy of Doctor Who Magazine issue 160. It had a good quality artwork cover and the content within seemed much more detailed and interesting than what I'd been reading a few years earlier. This, plus the videos starting to come out more regularly (with important stories like An Unearthly Child and The War Games having been released that February) rekindled my deeper interest. Before too long, I had become a member of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society, was subscribing to Doctor Who Magazine and was enthusiastically sourcing back copies of the issues I'd missed. This re-found obsession wouldn't have been a problem except that I was supposed to be revising for my A-levels at the time. I did disastrously, and had to do another year of sixth form and retake the exams. It was nothing ultimately to do with Doctor Who, of course; that was just a symptom of my underlying dissociation, which with hindsight could have been stress or anxiety or depression, but we didn't talk of such things at that time (or nobody around me did anyway). It turned out fine; that third year - where I went from being the youngest in the year to one of the oldest - was enormous fun, and Durham University kept my offer open. Doctor Who Magazine and the VHS range went from strength to strength into 1991 and throughout the 1990s, as I've touched upon in the blog passim. 

Reaction:

Nothing much happens in The Name of the Doctor, or at least nothing much in the real world. The action is mostly in various dreamscapes or almost worlds. A long sequence takes place in what's referred to as a literal dream by the characters (the conference call), more takes place in the Doctor's timestream and is then undone and redone, meaning things return to their original state; sometimes this timestream appears as a dreamscape too. Even the events on Trenzalore, which seem imbued with deep meaning as it is the site of the Doctor's death - are in a possible future branch that, as we find out two stories later, never comes to pass as the Doctor does not die after all on Trenzalore.  What's left? Aside from the uncovering of some information about various ongoing arc plots, this is essentially the tale of Vastra doing a prison visit, and Clara receiving a letter. The Doctor says an emotional final farewell to River too, of course, I'm being a bit unfair not including that; but, he does give an emotional final farewell to River in - what? - two or three other stories, so it's not that special. This is the major flaw with a lot of writer and showrunner Steven Moffat's finales; they are too caught up in progressing the overarching narrative - often just by colouring in some exposition dolled up with clever dialogue and occasional pyrotechnics - to develop the scenario of the episode itself or have anything significant change in the characters' lives. You might get revelations, but no revolutions.

At first glance there seems to be a lot going on, I'll grant you, but perhaps this is itself the problem. By my reckoning there are four overarching plot lines that have run across multiple episodes and in some cases multiple years that continue or end in the space of the 45 minutes of The Name of the Doctor. Did any one of them have much chance of weight or significance in such a crowded space? In addition to the four - and its a useful example to touch upon - there's a scene just before the credits that acts as a taster for the anniversary special story that would follow it a few months later, The Day of the Doctor. This last scene has literally nothing to do with the rest of the story, it is tacked on. The fact that it doesn't seem that way is because of a clever bit of wordplay on Moffat's part. The confrontation between the Doctor and his previous self has a brief dialogue exchange where Matt Smith tells John Hurt that his actions were "Not in the name of the Doctor". The story up to that point has been about the Doctor's real name (well, a bit, anyway) and the words spoken are the title of the story - cha-ching! The coherence achieved by this slight of hand doesn't bear much scrutiny - give it much thought and the story of the week seems even more slight as it just looks like a bunch of filler material before a trailer for the main event to come. There's also a slight awkwardness in making a big deal that John Hurt's character, though the same person, is not called the Doctor, then emblazoning the screen with "INTRODUCING JOHN HURT as THE DOCTOR". But it would be petty not to let this casting coup be celebrated.

The first overarching plot line to feature is the 'impossible girl' thread which comes to an end having started in the very first story of this season broadcast in 2012 (Asylum of the Daleks). The positive here is that the solution to the mystery (Clara's split into lots of different people living different lives throughout the Doctor's adventures) allows for lots of clips of old stories where Clara appears, inserted into the archive Trials and Tribble-ations stylee; it's a little indulgent, but like the aforementioned Star Trek Deep Space Nine episode it was being broadcast as part of an anniversary celebration year. The inclusion of Clara aiding the William Hartnell Doctor in his stealing a TARDIS to flee Gallifrey is audacious, and I'm sure ruffled a few fan feathers at the time; now, of course, we know the moment was just a little interlude in the many long lives of the Timeless Child - how far we've come! Additional meta fun for fans is the ability offered by this for any continuity slip or visible crewmember in the history of Doctor Who to be explained away: it was probably Clara's helping hand holding down Sutekh's chair cushion, for example. Such boons are for a niche audience, though. Beyond them (us), did anyone care how the impossible girl stuff panned out? It's a self-defeating concept, really - the character keeps dying and coming back, so the sacrifice she makes at the end has no real weight as a) it's inevitable, so not that brave and b) by definition can't be final as it makes death have no meaning. No confusing references to leaves or "Run, you clever boy and remember me" or "soufflé girl" can change that.

It's a similar state of affairs with the second overarching plot, the face-off between the Great Intelligence and the Doctor. This plot started with the most recent Christmas special, The Snowmen, in December 2012, and its culmination is supposed to be the main point of this specific story; but it falls a little flat because there hasn't been that much of a build up. There's a sequence where they both confront each other in The Snowmen, but that's at the Intelligence's initial creation, so they don't have any history; the Doctor doesn't meet the Intelligence in The Bells Of Saint John and doesn't learn that it was behind the events of that story, and most of the way through The Name of the Doctor they're kept apart. Apart from one moment of nastiness where the Whisper Men threaten to stop the hearts of the Doctor's friends, there isn't much antagonism at all. The Intelligence does a bit of monologuing and then jumps into the big wibbly story exit device. We're told that's the end of him, but then we're told that it'll kill Clara too and it doesn't, and we're told that there's no way the Doctor could rescue Clara from it and he does. Again, the nerdier watchers can factor in the two Patrick Troughton Great Intelligence stories to make this plot a bit more epic, but there's very little actually there in the script if one doesn't come to it laden with that mental baggage.

There's a bit more emotion in the elements of the final two overarching plots, which makes them a little weightier; these are the Doctor's journey to his death in Trenzalore, and his interactions with River Song. Both of these plots have run since at least the beginning of Matt Smith's time as the Doctor and would both continue after The Name of the Doctor. When the Doctor is told where he must go to save his friends, he breaks down in tears. Smith performs this very well but it doesn't convince because it's such an abstract thing to get upset about. He's only ever heard it rumoured that this is his final resting place. Perhaps if his breaking down happened later when he saw something more concrete, like his own grave (and if it was perhaps a more traditional depiction of a grave) it might help to sell it. Finally, there's the Doctor saying goodbye to River as mentioned above. This is the most successful of the four plots, but is subject to diminishing returns as the character can always come back at an earlier time in her timeline, and indeed does. There are some other pleasures too. The Paternoster Gang are always good value, and between them get all the best lines. I particularly liked Strax's "Surrender your women and intellectuals" and Vastra's reply to Strax as he comments, when nursing her wife Jenny, that the heart is a simple thing: "I have not found it to be so."  These little moments stayed with me much more than the confusion of plotlines that surrounded them.

Connectivity: 

Both feature at least one other version of the Doctor appearing in something of a flashback (the Doctor sees her younger self the Timeless Child in a nightmare during Can You Hear Me? and The Name of the Doctor is chock full of glimpses of other Doctors within the weird vortex-scape of the Doctor's timeline). Both also have the Doctor helped by an unusually large team (five apiece - Clara, River, Vastra, Jenny and Strax with Matt Smith's Doctor; Graham, Yaz, Ryan, Tibo and Tahira with Jodie). 

Deeper Thoughts:

Mythology 101. I remember an early interview or column from Russell T Davies before he brought Doctor Who back to our screens in 2005, on the topic of how to handle continuity. It must have been in Doctor Who Magazine, I'm guessing, as nowhere else would have showcased material quite so geeky. He commented something along the lines of continuity being a possible problem, but not if you treated it as the more interesting mythology. I believe he made a reference to Harry Potter, but as someone who has read and enjoyed the HP books, but still struggled through some dull passages like the lengthy, detailed descriptions of each and every member of the Order of the Phoenix, I think I need to understand more what exactly is the difference. Concentrating on Doctor Who and its relationship with its long history, some patterns emerge regarding stories which look back. Mostly, writers in all eras look back less for inspiration and more for window dressing. A script might include a mention or two, or an in-joke - the so-called 'kisses to the past'. This doesn't normally cause a problem unless it's overdone and even the fan watching feels bombarded (so who knows how someone in the audience who isn't aware of the meaning of these references must feel). The worst example that comes to mind is the start of the Paul McGann TV movie which crams the Master, Daleks, Skaro, Time Lords, the concept of the regeneration and its limits into the first two minutes of the pre-credits sequence. The Name of the Doctor - already laden with a lot of old clips - also contains tiny references to obscure characters like Solomon the Trader or the Valeyard.

Another common approach is the sequel, of course, but a variant specific to Doctor Who is the story cobbled together from bits and bobs that have happened - or just been mentioned - in other stories. As it's a time travel show, it can go back and revisit events from different perspectives, or go back further and do a prequel. The Great Intelligence as featured in the Name of the Doctor is a villain from a couple of 1960s Patrick Troughton stories, who recently had got its own origin story in The Snowmen. The best / worst example of this type is probably 1985 Colin Baker tale Attack of the Cybermen that fashions its plot from a handful of moments or asides from 1960s Cybermen stories including that The Tenth Planet, the first ever Cyberman story, is set in 1986, twenty years on from its broadcast. Attack was shown and set the year before with the shiny Cybs trying to avert the destruction of their home planet from taking place as depicted in The Tenth Planet (it sounds better than it is, if you haven't seen it!). You didn't necessarily have to have seen that story, or The Invasion or The Tomb of the Cybermen which were also inspirations, but it might have seemed needlessly detailed and convoluted if you hadn't.

Attack also fits another common story type: bringing old things back only to get them wrong. The Cybermen in the sewers and tombs in Attack of the Cybermen are presumably the same ones from those 1960s stories. So, why do they look nothing like them but instead look exactly like the 1980s models? If the classic alien monster you're bringing back doesn't look or act the same, is there very much point in calling it a 'Silurian' or whatever? It's great that previous TARDIS stops Spiridon and Metebelis 3 are namechecked in more recent stories, but if they're going to be pronounced wrong, it undercuts it a bit. Ultimately, the common denominator of all the failures is that the focus of the story is something that it's unlikely anyone would care about. I mean, was anybody ever, even the most die-hard fan, calling out in 2012 or 2013 for a rematch with the Great Intelligence (but without the iconic Yeti creatures that it was linked with in the 1960s)? I don't think so. The bits of The Name of the Doctor that work (like River and the Doctor saying goodbye) are where we care. In other words, what I've found out is that mythology = continuity + emotion.   

In Summary:

Superficially entertaining; but, for something with so much going on, nothing much really happens.