The War Machines

Chapter The 197th, presents a surprising new setting for a Doctor Who story - contemporary London.

Plot:

The Doctor and Dodo materialise in London, 1966. The Doctor senses an energy emanating from the recently completed GPO Tower, so he talks his way in, mistaken for one of a number of experts invited to the launch of a new computer called WOTAN. WOTAN is a prototype of Siri essentially, but it hypnotises people and wants to destroy humankind. So almost exactly like Siri then. WOTAN controls Professor Brett and other members of its engineering team. They contact more people using the telephone network and send WOTAN's hypnotic signal down the wire. One of the people taken over is Dodo, who takes the call at a nightclub where she's out with Brett's secretary Polly and a sailor called Ben. WOTAN knows all about the Doctor, or Doctor Who as it calls him, and instructs Dodo to bring him under hypnotic control too. He resists this, though, and Dodo collapses. The Doctor's new posh friend Sir Charles lets her convalesce at his country house, and the Doctor continues to investigate, aided by Ben and Polly. Meanwhile, the hypnotised humans are building war machines to attack London. With help from the military and Sir Charles, the Doctor captures and reprograms a War Machine and sends it to the GPO Tower where it destroys WOTAN. Later, the Doctor meets Ben and Polly and they tell him that Dodo has decided to stay on Earth. Curious, they follow him when he enters what seems to be a police box. The TARDIS dematerialises...

Context:

The random choice this time was a black and white William Hartnell story, so I decided to watch it on my own from the DVD. That sounds easy, but it instigated a protracted battle between me and my home viewing equipment. Both my Sony TV and Blu-ray player are quite old now, but both are also still decent and reliable. The problem is the remote controls. The Blu-ray one broke long ago; that didn't matter too much, though, as the TV remote syncs with the Blu-ray player for most functions. Some useful ones I do miss, like seeing how much longer is left to play of something. It's good to know when one sits down to watch, say, the studio footage from the recording of Time and the Rani whether it's a pleasant 25 minutes versus a gruelling 4 hour plus run time. Luckily, they've started printing the details in the booklets. And in the case of the Time and the Rani footage on the recent Blu-ray boxset it's the latter, by the way: more than four hours of material!!! I haven't been brave enough to try watching that yet.

Anyway, recently the TV remote also broke, so I got a new one online, and that only lasted a few months (even with new batteries it's only functional in brief spasms). I found another vendor that was selling a remote supposedly compatible with my Blu-ray player model, but it turns out not to be compatible, or it's a dud. I've tried some mobile apps that are supposed to work with Sony Smart TVs but my TV is clearly not quite smart enough. The unit itself has no controls that will actually make a Doctor Who DVD start. I was reduced to using the spasming remote, pressing the relevant button over and over, harder and harder, from different angles, all the time hopping up and down, and massaging the batteries with my other hand. Finally, episode 1 of The War Machines lurched into life. I couldn't trust that pause or rewind would work thereafter, so I had to watch the lot in one go without a break. 

First Time Round:

From Swinging London to Cool Britannia: in June 1997, The War Machines was the first Doctor Who VHS release after Tony Blair and the Labour Party formed the UK's ruling government following a landslide election victory. It was a time of excitement and change, and this went for Doctor Who home media too. After the launch of the Paul McGann Doctor Who TV movie in 1996, there had been a cessation in the VHS releases of older stories; after the failure of any Paul McGann series to get picked up, the releases resumed in January 1997. From around this point, the people involved in the range were more knowledgeable about the show than those who'd been running things earlier in the 1990s. This meant a lot more care was being taken. The War Machines was restored and was presented in as complete a version as possible with excised sections reinstated from other sources. In addition to this, there were extra tidbits too including a Blue Peter clip introducing the titular machines, an era-appropriate BBC globe ident, and an outtake film trim. In another couple of years, DVD would become a viable alternative to VHS and would allow much more of that sort of thing from the same team of people, but The War Machines VHS feels like the point where it all starts. More than 30 years after its broadcast, The War Machines was still innovating.

Reaction:

New producer Innes Lloyd and new script editor Gerry Davis had been credited on a few preceding Doctor Who stories, but The War Machines is where they first fully make their mark. The previous stories up to immediate predecessor The Savages, even though they were rewritten to greater or lesser degrees, were commissioned by the previous regime. The War Machines was the very first idea to come from Who's scientific adviser, Kit Pedler, who Lloyd and Davis had recently brought on to the show. He would go on to have a very fruitful working relationship with Davis, and the two of them were soon to create the Cybermen. The themes here are not too dissimilar to their more famous creation, highlighting the dehumanising affect of machine intelligence. Also in the tradition of cybermen stories, The War Machines sees a supposedly logical entity behaving in a slightly illogical way. Exactly why a networked supercomputer would develop hypnosis powers, or why it would want to get rid of human beings, is up for debate. What isn't debateable is that Doctor Who had no need for a scientific advisor who was going to provide sensible and rigorous themes derived from current research; luckily, in this case they managed to get someone imaginative coming up with B-movie ideas; Doctor Who can always use such a person.

The War Machines doesn't innovate much in its ideas, but where it does take the series off in a new direction is in its setting. From the outset it has been a show about exploration, about travel into history or to alien planets. Just those two for the most part, though: back in time on Earth, or to strange alien worlds. For a series where the main character had a time machine that seemed to visit Earth every other story, it's remarkable that in the first three years of the show there was only one story set on a future Earth (The Dalek Invasion of Earth, which looked a lot more like World War Two than anything futuristic), and one contemporary visit (Planet of Giants, which was all about the miniaturisation, and could really have been set at any time). When the Doctor and Dodo materialise at the beginning of this story after a sweeping panoramic shot of London, it's clear that we're watching something different from what's come before. Even before that, to be honest, when the beginning credits fade out and each episode has a bespoke title sequence, as if the story, writer and episode number were being printed out by WOTAN itself. That, and the generous amount of location filming, give away that some money has been lavished on this story. But once we're into the story proper, something else becomes clear: the contemporary setting is being fully embraced. The War Machines is set in 1966 with a big capital N, S and S.

Within a few seconds, we see the GPO tower (officially opened late in 1965 and the tallest building in the UK in 1966), then we meet Carnaby Street-clad companion Polly, and before too long we're in the hottest nightspot in town swinging along with Swinging London and working class hero Ben. There's an altercation over a "bird" where Ben gets to best a tough, people "dig" each other's "fab gear", there's Covent Garden warehouses, black cabs, down-and-outs just out of prison, murders that make the papers, people watching wider events taking place on a TV in a pub with a real life newsreader appearing (Kenneth Kendall): it's the best depiction of the real contemporary world seen in Doctor Who so far. In counterpoint to this, Hartnell's Doctor is also thrust into a slightly different but just as well depicted contemporary world that he's not been in before, of establishment authority figures in London clubs (Sir Charles), scientists, and later having a lot of military hardware and personnel at his disposal. The Doctor as visiting expert is a new take on the character. Writer Ian Stuart Black brings all these elements together in a coherent narrative that flows efficiently (I had to watch this all in one go - see above - which would be tough for some black-and-white Who stories intended to be seen episodically, but The War Machines barely drags at all). Director Michael Ferguson and crew get some great looking shots both in studio and particularly on location, and the storytelling is refreshingly visual.

Ferguson can't get his trademark shot, the sun flaring behind the monster as it looms in the foreground, this time; that might have something to do with the War Machine prop being so enormous it blocks out the sun! It's solidly put together, but perhaps a bit too unwieldy and too boxy to be too frightening. This is one of the only flaws in how the production is put together, everything else is pretty glossy. The biggest issue is a script one, and something imposed: writing out the companion character Dodo. Dodo had been introduced a few stories earlier as the new 'with it' voice of youth, but fashions change quickly in youth culture, and that causes the somewhat slower-paced plodding animal, the BBC producer, to make knee-jerk reactions. Jackie Lane, playing Dodo, also had the disadvantage that she had been hired by the previous producer. In uncomfortable scenes in the first episode, Dodo has no lines and just stands watching the new duo of Ben and Polly interacting in a scene, like she's Dodo's frumpy younger sister who's insisted on coming out with her. She then does get something slightly more interesting to do: act hypnotised, and betray the Doctor. That lasts for a few scenes, then she's rendered unconscious, leaves the action, and never comes back. She is absent in the second half of the story. At the end, her replacement runs up to the Doctor and tells him that she's decided to stay put. She had appeared in 19 consecutive weekly episodes, and there would have been some young members of the audience invested in her character. It's a shabby thing to do to those viewers for the exit to be so perfunctory.

The final contracted actor on the show that Innes Lloyd inherited, the star of the show, had only two more stories left before he'd be given the push too. The myth that William Hartnell was flagging in the role is comprehensively busted by this story. He's on blisteringly fine form in every scene. An outstanding moment is the cliffhanger of episode 3; the Machines advance, but the Doctor stands his ground while behind him soldiers flee. The house style of reprising the cliffhanger at the start of the next episode, often recreating the moment in studio as that was easier than editing in a recording, means we get to see it twice, and it's even better second time. Maybe Hartnell was difficult to work with (a charge that's been consistently levelled by multiple people over the years, albeit when Hartnell was long gone and unable to counter) but none of that was showing on screen, and it seems a shame that he only had a handful of episodes left. His final story The Tenth Planet was another Kit Pedler idea with Davis tweaking the parameters of The War Machines' innovations. There was still an authority figure like Sir Charles, but they're more suspicious of the Doctor, who is again a maverick rather than slotting neatly into the establishment. Instead of roaming multiple locations, the action is set in one restricted and difficult to escape locale, meaning the adversaries can be stealthy early on to build up to the all-out action later. This would become the template for the next few years, and the next visit to contemporary Britain (where Ben and Polly would be perfunctorily written out in their turn) would be much more like The Tenth Planet than The War Machines. Things would evolve again by the time of The Web of Fear, the first story by Innes Lloyd's successor as producer. The Yeti story is seen as the progenitor of the Pertwee UNIT era, but really it's just a retread of The War Machines, the true trend-setter. 

Connectivity: 

It must be a record! Five stories on the trot now that have featured a farewell to a regular or semi-regular character. Unlike the previous four, though, Dodo's leaving such as it is (sidelined partway through the serial and having her desire to stay on Earth relayed by her glamourous replacement at the end) cannot be described as an emotional goodbye. Both stories also touch upon the dangers of networking lots of computers together (WOTAN in The War Machines, and the financial globe connected up to every bank system in the galaxy in The Husbands of River Song).

Deeper Thoughts:

Exits and entitlement. Jackie Lane, who portrayed Dodo and who recently passed away, was one of the least accessible Classic Who stars who lived through the burgeoning of worldwide organised fandom from the 1980s onwards. In all that time, she barely attended any convention or signing events, and never appeared on screen or in the commentary studio for a DVD or Blu-ray extra. Many of the 1960s Doctor Who cast and crew missed out on the fan appreciation circuit as they sadly died before things really took off, but Lane was the only one who chose not to engage to such an extent. I can't really blame her after the shoddy way she was treated when she was on the show; it was also only a job she did for a few months more than 50 years ago, no matter how important it might seem to us fans. In some of the tributes to her in the recent Doctor Who Magazine, though, I swear I noticed an undercurrent of annoyance as well as disappointment. Having a fandom of any kind in one's brain, one is always at risk of a small idea snowballing into something more overblown; we all can get a bit carried away, and a bit entitled in our desire to know things about our favourite show. Examples of this snowballing fan entitlement phenomenon were prevalent last weekend in the usual nooks and crannies of social media. The reason for this was that - after a long period of time with no news from the production team and stars making Doctor Who - there was an online panel Q&A as part of Comic Con.

The panel featured showrunner Chris Chibnall and stars Jodie Whittaker, Mandip Gill and John Bishop. There was also mention ahead of time of a special surprise guest who would be joining the four of them. Now, the current Doctor Who marketing approach is much more cagey than it has been in the years before Chibnall took over. Story titles, guest stars, returning foes or friends, all have been held back until the last possible moment before wide dissemination, unlike in previous years. Because of that sense of fan entitlement, this has made some people very unhappy. They want to know every detail of what's coming, and they want to know it now!!!! I can empathise to a degree, but watching detached as said fans display this to the world online one obviously sees the ridiculousness. Long before the panel, there was a lot of grumbling about when the first teaser trailer was coming (honestly, I can't see fans of Silent Witness getting so bent out of shape). One or two people mused on whether such a thing - for Doctor Who, I mean, not Silent Witness - could be shown during the Euros cup final broadcast, as it is the sort of thing that's been done previously. Before you know it, multiple people pick this up, and it snowballs. It's now definitely going to be shown during the final, and everyone's speculating about exactly what it will give away (or spoil, depending on your outlook). When there is no trailer for Doctor Who during the final, as inevitably there wouldn't be, there is disappointment and in some places outrage.

As part of the Comic Con panel, there actually was a teaser trailer shown, only about three weeks on from the football, and so everyone was happy... you'd think. But no, not everyone. For every two people who were happy to analyse every frame of the trailer for clues (spoiler: there weren't any), there was one person still outraged. The reason for this was that special guest announcement, which had snowballed and then some. The favourite to pop up was David Tennant; second favourite was a tie between the Queen and God. The speculation was so intense and so unrealistic that there could only be crushing disappointment, and so it came to pass. The special guest was a bloke who'd been in Game of Thrones who was playing a semi-regular role in the upcoming series. Insert descending muted trombone notes here. Of course, these fans are being silly, but I do feel there's a tiny bit of responsibility to take by the people arranging this sort of marketing too. That level of casting decision is press release worthy at best. They had to give the panel audience something, though, and clearly they were desperate not to give anything. I didn't watch the panel, but caught up with the threadbare "What we learned from the Comic-Con panel" articles afterwards, and what we learned apart from Jacob Anderson joining the cast (for it was he) was that each episode of the series is going to form one linked overarching story, and there's going to be old monsters returning in it (though they wouldn't say which ones). Er. And. That's. It.

It didn't feel worth anybody's time turning up, particularly the members of the panel themselves. The irony was that they did have some pretty significant and immense news that they could have shared, but for some reason they held onto this for four more days and then issued a press release. I'm not an expert on marketing, but it might have been more interesting had they told everyone then and there that at least two of the people on the panel (the showrunner and the actor playing the Doctor) were leaving the show! I won't dwell on how I feel about Jodie leaving and a new Doctor coming along yet. There's plenty of time for that later anyway, as she will feature in that story arc (six episodes long as it turns out) later this year, then a festive special for New Year's Day 2022, and two further specials next year too. In the last one, to be broadcast in the autumn as part of the BBC's centenary celebrations no less, Whittaker will hand over the baton to a new Doctor Who. Being a fan, of course, none of this is enough, and I'm automatically thinking about what's going to happen in 2023, Doctor Who's 60th anniversary year. If that's going to be the first year for a new Doctor maybe it's not fair to weigh it down with any anniversary nostalgia. Alternatively, it might be the opportunity to persuade someone to be a one-night only Doctor, maybe someone who's too big a star to sign up for a series. They could do a big feature length adventure in November, maybe with a big name director helming. The doctor dies bravely at the end and regenerates into the next long-running Doctor to start in 2024. Now I've put all this on record, of course, it could very well snowball - in my head, even if nobody else's. Let's try not to be too disappointed if we don't get Hugh Grant directed by Peter Jackson, or whatever, in 2023.

In Summary:

Doctor Who has a change of (fab) gear.

The Husbands of River Song

Chapter The 196th, a (very) little bit of Christmas during a heatwave.

Plot:

The Doctor is hiding from Christmas celebrations on the planet Blah-blah-doesn't matter in the year Five Thousand and Arbitrary. In a case of mistaken identity, he is asked to perform surgery on the vicious but seemingly well-loved cyborg King Hydroflax to remove an expensive diamond from his brain, while all his people hold vigil and watch the operation on TV. Hydroflax's queen, who has organised all this, turns out to be River Song. She doesn't recognise the Doctor in his Peter Capaldi form, convinced that the Matt Smith version is the last ever one. River's pulling a con, planning to steal and sell on the diamond. She didn't want a surgeon to remove the diamond but rather to remove Hydroflax's head. As luck would have it, his head is detachable from his robotic body, so the Doctor and River escape with it in a bag. Getting a glimpse of how River is when he's not around, the Doctor accompanies her as she borrows his TARDIS and goes to a spaceship full of villains to sell the head, with the headless robot body following them. Unfortunately, the villains are Hydroflax's followers too. Finally realising who the Doctor is, River shares her escape plan based on her knowledge of future history: the ship is just about to get struck by a meteor. The Doctor, River and the TARDIS survive the crash, and have arrived on the planet Darillium, scene of their last ever date. The Doctor gives the diamond to someone to build a restaurant just so he and River have somewhere to go, and zips forward in the TARDIS to when it's been built. The Doctor and River enjoy their last night together. Luckily, the nights on Darillium last 24 years...

Context:

After a nice day by the beach during a spell of hot weather in the UK, we needed a bit of shade. Since my childhood, in such circumstances, I've found refuge in the living room with the curtains closed on the sun and the TV on. So it was this time. I was accompanied by a couple of the family (son aged 11, daughter aged 9 - everyone else was out) watching the episode from the Blu-ray in the series 9 box-set. They both enjoyed it very much, but were a bit disappointed early on. All the talk of the Doctor meeting River's husband set the expectation in both their minds that another version of the Doctor was going to appear, and they had a few fun moments speculating on which one before they found out that it was just Greg Davies in an oversized robot suit. The youngest thought the alien that could peel his head apart was "Yuk!"

First Time Round:

The Husbands of River Song was one of the earliest stories to be broadcast after I'd started this blog. As some long-term readers of the blog (pause for the obligatory "Hi Mum!") will know, I often have trouble remembering the situation of my earliest watch of such stories. You'd think, particularly as it was early on, that I'd have been minded to pay extra attention, but alas not. I think I can be forgiven for this one, though. There's always loads going on on Christmas Day. Based on the usual pattern of years around this one, on December 25th 2015 we would have had my in-laws round for lunch on the day, would have said goodbye to them around 8pm, then would have put the kids to bed before the Better Half and I watched time-shifted programmes from the PVR. This year, I think I probably bowed to pressure and let the BH watch the last ever Downton Abbey first. I think that made it too late to catch up with Doctor Who on the big day, so I would have first watched it sometime on Boxing Day with the rest of the the family.

Reaction:

Is The Husbands of River Song the least Christmassy Doctor Who Christmas special ever? Murray Gold has to put actual carol singers on the soundtrack for a few seconds at the start, or else the audience could easily miss the other couple of tiny festive references altogether. I haven't seen the following Christmas story The Return of Doctor Mysterio recently, but I seem to remember it was similarly unconnected to yule. Writer and showrunner Steven Moffat had clearly reached the point that John Sullivan did with Only Fools and Horses (which had a similarly long run of specials broadcast on successive December 25ths in the UK in the 1980s and 90s), sick of the tinsel and trappings (Sullivan started setting his stories in the Summer and didn't even pay the minimal lip service that Moffat does). Perhaps Moffat is also a bit tired of writing Doctor Who stories in general. He'd done five full years worth of episodes at this point, more than his predecessor Russell T Davies, and still had another series and two Christmas specials still to do. He has something of a break for this story. The jolliness of the season allows him to present what is essentially just a set of comic sketches, rather than a structured adventure story: a comic conversation with Matt Lucas, having to perform surgery in front of loads of people with hilarious consequences, River not knowing who the Doctor is much to his annoyance, larks with a head in a bag, japes with a headless robot. The whole thing is held together just about by a screwball energy and the chemistry between Alex Kingston and Peter Capaldi.

Like with any sketch show, one isn't necessarily going to enjoy every part equally, but watching it one knows that another gag will come along in a moment to replace the current one. There's some lovely moments; one of the best among them is the Doctor finally getting to do his own "It's bigger on the inside" speech upon entering the TARDIS and going full-on operatic with his overreaction. A lot of the best gags are quite dark too, like the exchange between the Doctor and River: "You're talking about murdering someone" "No, I'm not. I'm actually murdering someone." If you still weren't convinced, the selection of guest actors clues one in that the piece as a whole was intended to be a comic confection. Greg Davies doesn't get to do much other than red-faced angry shouting, but he does do red-faced angry shouting very well. Matt Lucas as Nardole is similarly underused here, but it can be seen as an audition. His cute and funny Nardole would return the following Christmas and throughout the subsequent series. Rowan Polonski, as the Uriah Heap-like insectoid waiter Flemming doesn't get much recognition, but his performance stood out for me on this watch. There's chases, a bloke whose head peels apart, spaceship crashes - what more could one want on a Christmas day?

Then, towards the end, the story takes another turn and the final part is tragi-romantic. The guest stars have dropped away and it's all about the Doctor and River and their last ever 'night' together. On my first watch I wondered whether people would get the relevance of this sequence. There are lots of echoes throughout The Husbands of River Song to a speech from River's first appearance in the David Tennant library two-parter: "Funny thing is, this means you've always known how I was going to die. All the time we've been together, you knew I was coming here. The last time I saw you, the real you, the future you, I mean, you turned up on my doorstep, with a new haircut and a suit. You took me to Darillium to see the Singing Towers. What a night that was. The Towers sang, and you cried." Moffat finally depicts this in all its detail, seven years on from the character's first appearance. This is great fan service for the faithful, but everyone else? I think they get it from River's references to her diary being full, and they'll see it as a nice romantic scene, but it probably lacks the emotional punch for anyone not well versed in the backstory. Equally, the moment the Doctor gets to turn the tables on River who finally works out who he is, appropriating her catchphrase "Hello sweetie!" would not be nearly such a good moment for the uninitiated. It might be a little bit too fannish (River makes an oblique reference to a boxset extra at one point), and the backstory is very convoluted (River meets the Doctor at least two more times after this in her personal chronology) but it's forgivable as this is the final appearance of the character on TV. That's presuming that she never returns to meet her husband as played by Jodie Whittaker. 

 

Connectivity: 

For the fourth story covered by the blog in a row, this ends with an emotional goodbye. The first one of this cycle, The Name of the Doctor, like The Husbands of River Song featured an emotional final goodbye to River Song. Husbands, though, looks like it is the definitive end for the character on TV; she was very much Steven Moffat's character, and it seems unlikely that his successor Chris Chibnall will bring her back (but you never know, I suppose!).

Deeper Thoughts:

A change is as good as a rest? Nobody writes articles on how tired Silent Witness is looking, and whether it should be reworked or taken off the air. It's a BBC drama show, and it's been made and broadcast consistently since 1996 (beating Doctor Who's false start attempt at a relaunch, the Paul McGann TV movie, to air by a few months and carrying on ever since). The show has a few million regular viewers and no doubt has its die-hard fans too. I don't watch Silent Witness, they do; but, I don't begrudge them their programme, and wouldn't understand anyone who would go to the trouble of writing an article beating it up. Nobody ever would write such a thing, though. Of BBC shows at least, Doctor Who is the only one that seems to get this treatment; maybe that's flattering in a way. The Guardian website has had a habit recently of putting up click-bait articles in what seems to be a series with the loose theme of "You know that thing you've liked since childhood, here's why it's shit". Martin Belam's piece this week is calmer and more thoughtful in comparison to the one in May that dumped all over Shrek, but I'm still a bit bemused why it exists at all. The early thrust of Belam's argument is that Doctor Who is not as good as US shows. Silent Witness might not be better than The Wire, but does that mean that the BBC should stop making it, or start to make it in a radically different way?

The article compares Doctor Who unfavourably to some specific shows (The Mandalorian, Loki and WandaVision), none of which I've seen. The "budgets and production values" of these shows are apparently "upstaging Doctor Who". Well, they are spin-offs of multi-million dollar movie franchises, after all. Belam also says that WandaVision's story-telling is in "a different league", but what does this mean? He enjoys it more, obviously, but beyond that? A single serial with a strong theme - meta sampling of broadcast tropes, specifically US sitcoms - WandaVision couldn't sustain in that format for long, and wasn't designed to do so; there are currently no plans for a second season. It's unhelpful to compare this with a long-running series that comes back year after year like Doctor Who. Belam is of course suggesting that Doctor Who should cease to be a long-running series that comes back year after year (he suggests maybe trying a feature film, or an anthology series featuring characters from the Doctor Who story universe); but he also complains that "the BBC’s production pace is glacial compared with its streaming rivals". It's not the only contradiction in the article. Belam moans that Doctor Who's production values are lacking, but also says that it "looks better than it ever has". He says that Who should avoid getting too involved in telling its "self-absorbed meta-story", but also says that when Chris Chibnall tried to do just that in his first series as showrunner, it felt too low stakes. The pace of production point, though, is just inaccurate. Loki and WandaVision have created one series of less than ten episodes each so far; the Mandalorian has managed two series, but its third run has been delayed. Star Trek: Discovery, to pick another representative example, has made 42 episodes from 2017 to 2021, Doctor Who in the same period produced 35, with 8 more coming soon. Any sci-fi or fantasy show currently being made by a streaming service is roughly made at the same pace as Doctor Who.

I don't think I'm the only one who hasn't seen those Disney+ shows either. They're very popular in online chatter, but are still quite niche products on streaming services that don't share their viewing figures in the same way as big network broadcasters like BBC1 do. It's hard therefore to make comparisons, but I'll go out on a limb and estimate that a programme regularly being broadcast on a big mainstream channel on New Year's Day is going to have healthy numbers compared to a major cult spin-off show on a relatively new subscription service. Of course, shows like WandaVision will keep finding new viewers coming to them, but so will Who through the BBC iplayer, and it has very healthy figures related to the people consuming the show through that platform. The article says that Doctor Who "is up against the giants of Netflix and Disney+" but it isn't really. It's up against whatever's on ITV when it goes out, and it has much more in common with Silent Witness to my mind than WandaVision. I think that Belam has made a couple of easy-to-make mistakes in his reckoning. The first is to imagine that twitter is real life. He talks about "legions of fans [in] a frenzy, taking to their social media and YouTube channels to shout about “lazy writing”" but that minority has always been and always will be there, and nobody should care too much what they think. The second mistake is to fall foul of a kind of group hypnosis that invidious capitalism has performed on all of us over the years: the whiff of the municipal pool that lingers over anything provided as a public service, like Doctor Who and the BBC's output. We've been programmed to think that the municipal swimming pool is inferior to the privately run spa, because the latter costs more money. It's very often not true, just as it isn't necessarily true of the BBC versus Disney+ or Netflix.

I don't necessarily disagree with Belam regarding enjoyment of the current Doctor Who episodes; I've been a bit underwhelmed recently too. It's interesting, though, to compare Doctor Who now to how it was around the time of The Husband of River Song's first broadcast. I was underwhelmed with the run of episodes in 2015 too, but change was around the corner. Like now, a new regular was set to arrive in the next run, joining the two existing members of the TARDIS team. In 2017, this created a new dynamic, and the run of stories with Bill and Nardole was much more enjoyable for me than the final year with Clara. It didn't need a change of Doctor, or a change of format, for the show to be rejuvenated. Maybe 2021's change will be as good as, or better than, a rest. Not long to wait now.

In Summary:

A Doctor Who sketch show for Christmas.

Warriors' Gate

Chapter The 195th, which features at least three lions and an escape to victory.

Plot:

The Doctor, Romana, K9 and Adric, trying to escape the e-space micro universe, find themselves in a white void whose only landmark is the frontage of a ruined building with a working door. It's called the Warriors' Gate, even though it isn't a gate, it's clearly a door. Also trapped there is a spaceship of human slavers, and their 'cargo' of leonine time-sensitives - the Tharils. One of the Tharils, Biroc, had been forced to act as navigator through the space-time vortex, and brought the ship deliberately to this place. Escaping, he took control of the TARDIS and brought it there too. The Doctor realises that the void's zero coordinates mean it is the point where one can go from e-space (negative coordinates) to his home universe of Gallifrey and Earth, n-space (positive coordinates). In order to keep the rest of the Tharils from escaping, the slave ship is made of super-dense dwarf-star alloy, the gravitational effect of which makes the void contract exponentially, putting everyone at risk.

The crews of both ships explore the area piecing all this backstory together. The Doctor manages to go through a mirror within the building beyond the gate / door and sees it in the past: the Tharils back then were the callous overlords until the people rose up and sent Gundan robots to attack and enslave them. Biroc tells the Doctor that he just needs to do nothing to escape. The captain of the Slave ship Rorvik has a mad plan to back-blast the ship's engines into the mirror, but this just destroys the ship. The crew are presumably killed, but the Tharils escape through the broken hull. Romana decides out of nowhere to stay with the Tharils to help them free their enslaved people throughout the galaxy. She takes K9 with her. The Doctor and Adric say goodbye to them, and escape in the TARDIS to n-space.

Context:

I scoured my overloaded shelves of Doctor Who discs to dig out the DVD of Warriors' Gate, and put the box by the player waiting for an opportunity to watch it. Before that moment came, after it had sat there for a day or two, I realised that I had Warriors' Gate on Blu-ray as part of the season 18 box set, and so got that down instead. Perhaps I should be selling all my old DVDs once they've come out on a superior medium, to avoid such confusion in future and save some space. I know a lot of people have made a little bit of pocket money from doing just this, but I just can't bring myself to at the moment. There's too much sentiment in every box and cover. The same thing happened during the long crossover period of VHS to DVD; I could have made a reasonable sum getting rid of tapes before they were released on DVD, knowing full well they would eventually come out on disc, but I decided against it. I still keep a folder of the sleeves for old time's sake, even though the tapes themselves have been consigned to the chronologically-arranged shelving unit in the sky. Anyway, when I finally got round to watching, I viewed an episode a day now and then over the course of about a week, culminating with the final episode on the 11th July, the day of the UEFA European men's football championship final (more on that anon). I was on my ownsome for the most part, though middle child (boy of 11) did wander in at one point, saw Adric on screen and said "It's him, it's... thingy. Didn't he die later?" Spoilers son, spoilers!

First Time Round:

My earliest memory of this story was seeing a clip as part of an item where Mat Irvine demonstrated the model effects work. This was on the UK Saturday morning kids' show Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, and must presumably have been shown in early 1981 around the time of Warriors' Gate's broadcast. I watched Swap Shop religiously in those days, but not Doctor Who. I wouldn't start watching the adventures of Gallifrey's finest for another 10 months, when a series of repeats was shown on BBC2 that got me hooked on the programme in time for Peter Davison's debut run at the start of 1982. About a decade later, I was coming to the end of my first year at Durham university; it was the year in which my fan friend David, mentioned many times before on blog posts here, was graduating. As something of a parting gift - though as you'll know if you've read those other blog entries we stayed in touch and are still watching Doctor Who together to this day - he gave me a number of his tapes of old stories to copy. I spent a good few hours with two VCRs linked together (neither of which were mine, so I must have required the beneficence of other parties too), copying from tape to tape many stories from Doctor Who's past that I hadn't yet seen. Warriors' Gate was one of that batch. Despite a crackly noise throughout that was added by dodgy tracking, I still enjoyed watching it thereafter. It would be another five years or so later, towards the end of 1997, when I got the less crackly version released by BBC video.

Reaction:

In keeping with the reverse coordinates of the E-Space trilogy which it concludes, Warriors' Gate is something of a Bizarro-world Doctor Who story. It's much more common for a story in the programme's long history to have a solid enough script that shines through any flaws in the execution. Warriors' Gate is the reverse. It's a beautifully well-made production, far better and more original visually than anything that had come before, even those earlier stories of the 1980/81 season that were trying hard in that department. This overpowers any difficulties with the script, and - boy! - are there difficulties with the script. They're not the obvious Doctor Who ones though. It doesn't have unactable characters or dialogue - it's got a great cast all performing well. It's not that there isn't much incident (stuff happens, not a huge amount of stuff, but there is some); it's not that it doesn't make sense (though it doesn't in places). I suppose the main problem is trying to work out whether the gnomic and impenetrable aspects of the narrative are deliberate or accidental, before one can work out whether they are appropriate or not. In the end, fathoming that out is too much of a cognitive load, and one's brain just capitulates and enjoys the spectacle. I think this makes it unique in the Doctor Who canon: it's not just a Doctor Who art film, which arguably had been attempted before in the 1980/81 series, it's a successful Doctor Who art film, slippery and defying categorisation.

Covering the story for the blog, I am going to have to decide on my own categorisation: accidental masterpiece, finely-tuned visual experience, or just a mess? I may be biased, though, by knowledge that another viewer of the story might not have: the interviews and articles over the last 40 years about the making of the story, and specifically the too many people who intervened in the scripting. Credited writer Stephen Gallagher has gone on record as being unhappy with the changes made by script editor Christopher Bidmead and director Paul Joyce. There were notes from executive producer Barry Letts to be incorporated too. The final scripts, though, with no time left to develop them further, did not satisfy Letts or producer John Nathan-Turner as they had rendered the story too confusing. My speculation is a lot of (maybe too much?) material was cut (Gallagher's original scripts were reported as being overlong). An example of a possible symptom of this is towards the end when Romana tells the Doctor she's leaving and Biroc chips in on behalf of the Tharils with "And we need a time lord." What? What for? Since when? Why haven't you mentioned this before? Why would you need a time lord? Doesn't your race have the ability to, you know, travel in time? Aren't you the least likely people to ever need a time lord??!! There's a brief exchange shortly afterwards to try and resolve all these uncertainties, where Romana talks about a plan to integrate the Tharils power with her time technology, but it's too little too late happening as it does in the dying moments of the final episode.

Maybe Gallagher's original longer scripts did not have more build up to this, or clarification of exactly how Romana was going to help free the enslaved Tharils, as that subplot was imposed by a regular cast member leaving so might be expected to be the script editor's responsibility. It seems a good bet, though, that his original scripts would have had more plot about the Doctor and friends helping to free the enslaved Tharils from the ship. Gallagher, after all, presents a classic Doctor Who set up: slavers being nasty to an alien race come into contact with the Doctor. The classic Doctor Who plot that would ensue practically writes itself: the Doctor and friends help to free the Tharils. In the finished show they just don't. They don't help at all; instead, they investigate -  a little about their current situation trapped in the void, but not much; the bad guys do most of the heavy-lifting investigating that. Instead, with timey-wimey transitions, the Doctor investigates the backstory of the Tharils, which is intriguing and unique for Who. They were enslavers before they were enslaved, but now they've been punished enough. Some of the best moments of the script dwell on this. The Doctor walking through an echo of a former time represented by Cocteau-style superimposition on black-and-white photographic backgrounds, the cuts back and forth from the banqueting hall in its prime to its future as a cobweb-strewn relic, the slow motion Gundan robot attack. Even a small moment like the Doctor filling up the goblet of wine until it's overflowing then knocking it over is magical. (I have been known, if ever I accidentally spill some wine, to follow that up with my best Tom Baker impression saying "This is no way to run an empire!")

If not about rescuing slaves, then maybe the story is actually about escape? Lots of Doctor Who stories are just about escaping calamity not necessarily about righting wrongs. But no; nothing doing there either. The TARDIS travellers don't do anything to escape, it just happens. The script makes something of a virtue of it, by hinting at pre-destination: Biroc has seen into the future and set in motion everything that needs to happen to free the ship's slaves and get the Doctor back to his own universe. Whether this is because the slave ship causes the void to vanish, or whether it's because the back-blast destroyed the 'gate', or destroyed the ship, or whether it's a combination of all these factors is not clear, but that doesn't really matter. It does, though, mean again that not much is happening in the story. It is somewhat apt, I suppose, in a story so focused on shifting time-zones that the traditional Doctor Who story material all happens either in the past or is hinted at for the future. In the here and now of the void, people wander about, get frustrated, bad guys threaten our heroes occasionally but not with much conviction, and people have lunch. This works as counterpoint to the grander moments, and is an effective depiction of the banality of evil in the down-to-earth crew talking about bonuses and cargo and scrap value when they're trading in and torturing sentient beings. It helps that the cast is uniformly excellent and work well as an ensemble. The comic double-act of Aldo and Royce are fun too.

Whatever the original scripts were like, it's hard to know whether the cuts made were aiming to simplify the plot but inadvertently had the opposite effect (which would fit everything subsequently known about the approach of Bidmead) or were deliberately obfuscating the plot to create that art film feel (which might perhaps fit the mode of Joyce, someone who stubbornly and heroically challenged the BBC crew to work in a different way to create Warriors' Gate, and was fired and reinstated during the course of its production). Maybe this doesn't matter, and maybe it doesn't matter that Joyce's vision and approach - or the massive studio overruns to which it led - meant that he never worked again on Doctor Who. The end product is ultimately what matters 40 years later, and it is very good indeed. Sets, costumes, video and model effects, music: every aspect of the production is sublime. Whether all the contributors agreed with Joyce's vision, or whether they just thought they were salvaging a doomed project, they managed to create something very special.

 

Connectivity: 

In Warriors' Gate and The Girl in the Fireplace alike there is a titular stone object that acts as a portal between different times and spaces; both stories feature a scene where robots come through the portal en masse attacking a set of nobles enjoying a celebration (banquet, ball). For the third story in a row there's an emotional goodbye at the end too.

Deeper Thoughts:

Here comes the future and you can't run from it, if you've got a bandwagon I don't want to be on it. The cliché of the Doctor Who fan as pallid wheezing nerd is no doubt unfair, even though it is true in my case. As I've said before on the blog, I am against sport and the causes of sport. Even I, though, was caught up a little bit in the palaver around the England Men's over 18s professional association football team's progression through the recent Euros competition, and specifically their somewhat historic performance in getting to the final of an international tournament for the first time in 55 years. I started writing this section of the post on the day of the recent Euros final before the match took place, and the tenuous "three lions" connection with Warriors' Gate briefly occurred to me. A rush of enthusiasm ensued, and I started to type, with the aim of completing and publishing the blog with a few paragraphs of Doctor Who's references to the game in time before the start of the match. Then, I stopped, and left it for a week before resuming again. The reason? I realised I would just be jumping on the footie bandwagon like any number of other reprobates had in the run up to the final. At that point, you could suddenly see all the politicians in their newly purchased squad strips, with the creases yet to be ironed out, snapped cheering on "our boys" in posts on social media, while clearly having no clue about the game. I didn't want to be like them; not one bit.

It's always the prerogative of politicians to try to hijack any national feelgood moment for their own ends, of course. The added hypocrisy here is that many Conservative MPs in England, including government ministers and the Prime Minister, had previously been very critical of this England squad, incensed by their peaceful protest of taking the knee at the start of games to highlight racial inequality and discrimination. These MPs refused to condemn fans booing the players as they made this protest, boycotted games, implied that the players were Marxist (tenuously and incorrectly linking their protest to a one-off comment by one of the original founders of the Black Lives Matter organisation in the US) and so on. It wasn't just politicians either but also the usual suspects from the right-wing talk radio / social media commentariat all spouting similar culture war-stoking nonsense. And most did the same volte face once the team were winning. What's most interesting about this is the lack of foresight displayed, at least by the legislators (I had no such high expectations of, say, an actor that once played a DS in a long running crime show). They didn't anticipate that the team might do well, just as they didn't consider that they might not be on the more popular side of this confected culture war. As the woes of the recently launched UK channel GB News seem to indicate, UK hard right-wingers are a very small audience, and nothing will ever be hard enough or right-wing enough for them (GB News viewers threatened to boycott when someone on this free speech advocating channel took the knee themselves this last week, so he was sacked).

It would have been difficult to put together my planned few paragraphs of Doctor Who's references to football anyway, as there are so few. Matt Smith - who played youth football and planned a professional career before an injury redirected his energies toward acting - displays some of his soccer skills in The Lodger and The Power of Three; 1980s companion Ace professed her fandom for Charlton Athletic, 2000s companion Mickey was keen on watching the odd game at the pub. That's about it. Such a paucity of material would be matched only by trying to find politicians in the past wanting to jump on the Doctor Who bandwagon. Even at its most popular, the show has never attracted politicians wanting to reflect in its glory. The closest was probably a Radio Times interview with the last UK prime Minister Theresa May where she mentioned Doctor Who amongst her faves - see the Deeper Thoughts section of The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe blog post for more details. The plurality of messages in such a long-running show, including Warriors' Gate with its resonant sympathy for the enslaved, probably make it too complicated for the bandwagon-jumpers. These sort of people can change their minds pretty quickly anyway. I watched the match, and when Marcus Rashford missed his penalty I instantly knew that he was going to come under attack because of his race, and because of his work for disadvantaged children. In but a few hours, I was proved correct on both counts. I truly believe, though, that the sort of people that do this are in a diminishing minority, their world and worldview contracting like the void around Rorvik and Co. Like Warriors' Gate, I have faith in the future even if the present isn't that great.

In Summary:

It's an accidental masterpiece and a finely-tuned visual experience, and also a mess. Somehow, this doesn't stop it being great.

The Girl in the Fireplace

Chapter The 194th, which features tragic star-crossed, and time-portal-crossed, lovers

Plot:

The Doctor, Rose and Mickey arrive on a spaceship in the 51st century; there's no sign of the crew, and the engines are running full pelt even though the ship is not moving. This is because they are powering various portals opened across the ship that lead to other times and places, space-time events along one specific individual's life; the person being Madame De Pompadour. The Doctor first enters her life when she is a young girl nicknamed Reinette via a revolving fireplace into her bedroom. A creepy clockwork robot is hiding under her bed, but the Doctor sees it off. After checking in with his travelling companions on the ship, the Doctor returns via the fireplace but finds that many years have passed for Reinette; she leaves for a pressing engagement but not until she's given the Doctor a big snog, and he works out that she is the famous historical personage, one day to become mistress of French King Louis XV. Underneath their masks, the clockwork figures that are stalking Reinette, and making life difficult for the TARDIS team too, are the ship's complement of wind-up droids. Their circuits a bit scrambled, they have repaired the ship using the only components to hand: the body parts of the crew who the droids have slaughtered previously.

The droids are wanting only one more part: the command circuit, i.e. the brain of Madame De Pompadour. Why her? The Doctor can't work it out, but he does know the droids are trying to find her when she's 37 years old as that's the same age as the ship. The droids disable all the portals to prevent the Doctor following, and attack the palace at Versailles when Reinette has reached the right age. The Doctor breaks in by crashing through the portal - a mirror - on a horse that had previously wandered onto the ship, and saves everyone. He's now stranded in the 18th century with no way back. Reinette shows him the original fireplace through which he first came into her life; she has had it transported to the palace years before, breaking its link with the ship meaning it was not disabled when the others were. The Doctor reactivates it. Through all their interactions, the Doctor and Reinette have developed some kind of mutual attraction, and the Doctor invites her to travel with him. Telling her to pack a bag, he - like an idiot - pops back to the ship. When he returns though, the obvious has happened: time has passed again and Reinette has died. He reads a letter she left him and is heartbroken. Leaving with his two 21st century friends, he misses that the name of the spaceship was the SS. Madame De Pompadour, explaining why the droids were focussed on her.

Context:

I watched this from the DVD on a Sunday afternoon with all the kids (boys aged 14 and 11, girl aged 9), with the Better Half coming in for brief stretches too. It's rare that everyone is present for a Doctor Who story any more, but this one has David Tennant who is usually a draw. It was generally a crowd-pleasing episode, with mostly hushed watching without comment throughout (always a good sign). The  scare near the beginning with the clockwork droid's arm snatching at the Doctor from under the bed made everyone - even the cynical teenager - jump. Everyone saw the sad ending coming; the youngest said "I think he waited too long - she's died" in advance of the scene that confirms this indeed to be the case. I believe the telegraphing is intended by the script, though: Reinette's death is presented as an inevitability to the audience, if not the Doctor.

First Time Round:

I first saw this the day after it was initially shown on BBC1 in May 2006. It was the first time since the series had returned the previous year that I had elected to miss the live broadcast of a new Doctor Who episode. I'd missed The End of the World, second episode of Christopher Eccleston's 2005 series, go out, but that was due to a holiday that was booked before the schedule had been published, and which I couldn't get out of (trust me, I tried). When The Girl in The Fireplace went out, I was having a nice meal in a London Pizza Express with the Better Half and another friend. The VCR (remember them?) was set to record, and dutifully did so. Back at home in our old place in Hove, the Better Half and I caught up with the taped episode the following morning. Maybe this was an early sign of the novelty of the newly returned series wearing off just a little bit, but I certainly watched live for the rest of the 2006 episodes; time-shifting only became more usual once we started to have young children to deal with (our first was "in the oven" and fairly well-done by the time of this Tennant episode; he was born between Fear Her and Army of Ghosts).

Reaction:

The Girl in the Fireplace brings together a lot of writer Steven Moffat's Doctor Who script preoccupations, many of them appearing for the first time: the Doctor meeting someone during their childhood then zipping forward in time to meet them when grown up and seeing his inadvertent impact, antagonists that appear to be evil but are just malfunctioning technology, visualisations of childhood nightmares including hands shooting out from under a child's bed, a temporally-twisted romance... They are still fresh here, and work so well that Moffat would revisit each of them a good few times in his subsequent years writing for and then running the show. The biggest selling point of the story is the fusion of all these points into an original and intriguing structure. Showrunner of the time Russell T Davies had given Moffat Madame Du Pompadour as a subject after learning a lot about her when researching Casanova; instead of doing the usual "celebrity historical" approach, Moffat instead creates an intricate construction linking together all these ideas and bridging the two contrasting locales of grimy futuristic spaceship and 18th century splendour; all that, plus memorable monsters and some great comic lines and moments.

With all that going on in 45 minutes, there isn't much room to go into anything about Pompadour's life or accomplishments (patron of the arts, patron of the philosophers of the enlightenment, etc. etc.) so Moffat resorts to giving David Tennant a big speech info-dumping some of that background in a few seconds flat, and the actor seems to find it difficult to make it sound real, which isn't surprising. It is one of a couple of small moments where Tennant overplays slightly, which are the only minor blemishes on an otherwise excellent production. Another big one is Tennant's drunk acting when he berates the clockwork droids for being "thickity thick thick". It's just the set up for a gag where, having revealed that the drunk act was a bit of misdirection so he could nobble the droids, they un-nobble themselves and he says "Ooh, that was a bit clever". Alas, the punchline is a bit too thrown away, so the set-up looks like what it is - someone play-acting as drunk unconvincingly and doing sub-Blackadder dialogue (Tennant could of course counter that it's the Doctor that's acting drunk unconvincingly not him). Elsewhere, though, he shines, particularly with the grandstanding moments that Moffat favours: crashing through the mirror on horseback and then winking; answering the question "What do monsters have nightmares about?" with a cocky "Me".

Tennant also excels at the romance scenes', but he's helped by a magnificent performance opposite him by Sophia Myles as the adult Reinette. The script would succeed or fail as a story based on the casting of Madame De Pompadour, and it was luckily perfect. The lack of detail of her famous life is more than made up for by the scenes later on of Myles turning the tables on the Doctor during the mind meld he does on her (not something he'd been known to do before this story), and when she breaks through from her world into the spaceship, ceasing to be a passive observed part of history and literally stepping into a new world putting her on equal time-spanning footing with the Doctor. Performance-wise, this story boils down to a succession of two-hander scenes between the Doctor and Reinette, and nobody else gets much of a look in. King Louis and Rose get one scene each to do a little more than feed lines and exposition, that's about it. Angel Coulby is wasted in a cameo. As a whole, it works, though.

Surrounding these scenes are particularly fine production values and beautiful touches: great music, great dialogue ("Must be a spatio-temporal hyperlink." / "What's that?" / "No idea; just made it up - didn't want to say magic door."). The challenge Moffat set of depicting the Doctor on horseback breaking through the mirror is a tough one (and he's on record as having fought for it when it was threatened with being cut), but the production crew rises to the challenge and creates a great moment for the story. The design is great too: the clockwork droids are a particularly fine creation, the look of them, both with the scary masks and without, is excellent, the ticking noise they make, how they move. Obviously, they have a couple of design flaws. Presumably, when they were programmed, they were instructed to continually wind each other up before they powered down, but nobody thought to tell them not to kill humans to use for parts. One would think it would be fundamental: don't slaughter humans and harvest their organs.

Connectivity: 

Both The Girl in the Fireplace and Dragonfire include characters searching for someone to decapitate as they need to retrieve something from inside their head; both stories end with a character having their plans thwarted by time, followed by an emotional goodbye.

Deeper Thoughts:

Wibbly-wobbly twisty-wisty. One of my favourite authors Raymond Carver wrote in Fires, a book of his essays and short pieces "I hate tricks. At the first sign of a trick or gimmick in a piece of fiction, a cheap trick or even an elaborate trick, I tend to look for cover", and added "Writers don't need tricks or gimmicks or even necessarily need to be the smartest fellows on the block. At the risk of appearing foolish, a writer sometimes needs to be able to just stand and gape at this or that thing - a sunset or an old shoe - in absolute and simple amazement." It probably doesn't need to be said that Carver and Steven Moffat come from opposing sensibilities. I have, though, had just as much pleasure from Moffat's works as I have from Carver's. Moffat does give the impression of striving to be the smartest fellow on the block, and he loves his tricks: non-chronological narratives, puzzle-box story structures, twists. The Girl in the Fireplace withholds until the very last shot a key piece of information - look away now if you want to remain unspoilered - the name of the spaceship on which the Doctor and friends have landed. Interestingly, this information is only revealed to the viewers, and the TARDIS team never find it out. This is very rare; in a show where the central character is supposed to be super-intelligent, he or she usually is a few steps ahead of us mere mortals in the audience.

Another person with possibly contentious views on story is Robert McKee. I attended this famous / infamous screenwriting guru's seminar in London in early 2000, and he outlined in a Q&A his feelings on good versus bad twists. He compared two films that had come out relatively recently at that time, Fight Club and The Sixth Sense. He felt the former's twist was better than the latter. I'm not going to reveal what either of said twists are, just in case anyone reading this hasn't seen them yet; I'm still smarting from reading DVD reviews of each of these films in a single issue of Empire magazine which blew both films' surprises for this unsuspecting reader before he got a chance to see either of them. The Sixth Sense's twist, according to McKee, doesn't change anything about the narrative in terms of characters' values or emotions. It's just a piece of information that's been withheld until a late moment, and - in his opinion - was more about the filmmakers showing the audience how clever they had been in concealing it. In contrast, the twist in Fight Club - which arguably a different set of filmmakers have teased in just as clever-clever a way - does make a significant change to the emotions and values of the characters. On thinking about this, it seemed to me that storytelling is ultimately all about choosing the right moment for the reveal. Fight Club's key scene happens with about half an hour of running time left, i.e. the point in which the narrative is propelled into the final act. The Sixth's Sense's shock revelation comes right at the very end - it's too late for it to have much impact on the story beyond a resolution scene.

The same is true of the final shot reveal from The Girl in the Fireplace. It would make no difference to the emotion or values that change for the characters in the course of the story if the name of the ship was shown in the very first scene rather than the last. Maybe there's a case for saying it has thematic resonance: there are things we'll never be certain about in this universe, just like the Doctor will never be certain about what would have happened had he managed to get back to Reinette in time. It's a bit of a reach, and I don't buy it: I just think Moffat wanted an extra little sting to keep people guessing right to the end. This isn't necessarily that negative a thing; McKee described The Sixth Sense style ending as a "Mindfuck", but then added that it was still a fuck and so had to be somewhat enjoyable. But if the revealed information is not going to lead anywhere, but is instead only going to send audience minds racing backwards analysing everything they've watched up to that point, it's not as effective ultimately. McKee is probably being a little unfair to The Sixth Sense, as its final scene does bring some closure for one character, unlike The Girl in The Fireplace. Besides being somewhat unlikely (the Doctor manages to find out the ship's age, would he really have found no reference to its name too?), the narrative thread is left dangling at the end never to be picked up, even though the story had a loose sequel in Deep Breath many years later.

In long-running episodic television, unlike film, a twist at the very end of a story can be taken forwards in future episodes. The big 'game changer' endings throughout Who's history usually just tee up the very next story or get paid off very soon after that. So, the reveals at the ends of stories like The Tenth Planet, The War Games, The Keeper of Traken, Turn Left, and The Ganger two-parter amongst others lead in to the next broadcast shows, and the arc plots of The Key to Time and Trial of a Timelord seasons, as well as all the more recent new series linking themes, like Bad Wolf and Vote Saxon all the way up to the Timeless Child, pay off in a season's finale. These sort of tricks would no doubt have sent Raymond Carver running for cover. Writing short stories and poems is perhaps not the same as television, and some more leeway should be allowed. I anyway think that Carver's point about writers just gaping at things in amazement is not the best advice. Carver's best work is focussed, incisive and lean, and when he starts looking at the world in wonder he's not at his optimum. I'd say the same is true of Doctor Who; it doesn't often stop too long to dwell on the times and places and strange vistas the TARDIS team visits before the plot kicks in, and whenever it does it gets quite dull quite quickly. With starts as well as ends, and with twists and pay offs wherever they come between those two points, it's best not to keep people waiting more than the absolute minimum.  

In Summary:

A plot that fits together like clockwork.