Planet of the Dead

Chapter The 200th, the Mighty 200th chapter.

Plot:

Lady Christina, an aristocratic cat burglar (exactly like you get in real life) steals priceless relic the Cup of Athlestan from a museum and is chased by police. She escapes by getting on the same London bus as the Doctor who's got a homemade machine that is tracking a nearby wormhole. The bus passes through this and ends up on the barren sandy planet San Helios. The planet was fine a year ago, but a swarm of stingray-like flying alien beasties devoured everything. This swarm then circles the planet at increasing speed generating and expanding the wormhole, so they can fly through to repeat the process on the next planet: Earth. UNIT arrive and establish a link through the wormhole with the Doctor, who talks to their current scientific adviser Malcolm to work out how to close the wormhole once the bus is back through. The bus runs out of petrol, meaning everyone will be stranded. The Doctor and Christina explore nearby and find a crashed spaceship with two Tritovores (creatures like giant flies that stand on two legs) that just happens to have exactly the right equipment to attach to the bus and make it fly. The Tritovores both get killed by a lone stingray-like creature trapped in their ship that made it crash in the first place. The bus flies back through the wormhole, along with a couple of the creatures that UNIT then do battle with. The Doctor won't take Christina travelling in space and time with him, as he's tired of losing people, but he helps her escape the police in the flying bus. One of the passengers, an old wise black woman with second sight (exactly like you get in real life) makes an ominous prediction that the Doctor's going to die soon because someone will "knock four times".   

Context:

A small cheat: I swapped this story and the previously blogged The Sun Makers around, so that this would be the 200th story post. I couldn't resist it: the episode was touted when it came out by Doctor Who Magazine as the 200th televised story, with an accompanying poll launched to get the readership's views of those 200 tales, and a big poster depicting each one with a thumbnail. Picking up on this (if memory serves it was that way round, the magazine's interviewer Benjamin Cook telling showrunner and cowriter of Planet of the Dead Russell T Davies of the milestone), the production team put in an allusion in the programme, with the bus being the number 200. The only problem is that it might not be the the 200th story at all. Some of the divisions are somewhat arbitrary. To get to the total, The Trial of a Time Lord, fourteen weeks of programming constructed as four linked tales with a framing device, was counted as one story; Shada was not included, as it was never completed or shown, and Utopia was included with The Sound of Drums and The Last of the Time Lords as part of one three-part story. Different people have different views on these judgement calls, including Davies himself who said at the time he personally saw Trial as four stories, and would separate Utopia from the following two episodes (making Midnight the 200th story for him).

For the blog, I am going to do Utopia together with the other two episodes when I come to it. I've already covered Trial as four separate blog posts, and somehow managed to also blog Shada and spin-off K9 and Company too. As such, Planet of Dead is number 205 on my list, and my 200th story is Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead. Anyway, however it's numbered - and I'll return to this nerdy theme a bit in the Deeper Thoughts section below - the story was watched with all three of my children (boys of 15 and 12, girl of 9) on Blu-ray from the David Tennant Complete Specials box-set on a Sunday afternoon (the standard day now that they indulge their old man in watching old television). The Better Half wandered in and watched for long stretches too. She wondered why Michelle Ryan's career didn't take off quite as it looked like it might around the time of this story's broadcast. Middle child wondered what the swarming creatures were called; I didn't know (and subsequent online research found nothing either), so he dubbed them Sky Rays as they looked like stingrays but flew. I didn't tell him this was also the name of a Walls ice lolly that had a Doctor Who connection in the 1960s.

First Time Round:

I remember watching this live or very slightly time-shifted on its debut BBC1 broadcast during the Easter weekend of 2009. The Better Half and I still only had one child back then, though another was on his way. It seems like yesterday; it seems like a lifetime ago. The weekend was quite good for British TV sci-fi fans. As well as the return of everyone's favourite Time Lord, there was a comeback for another series that had been previously been made by the BBC as a multi-camera show in Television Centre, but was now being made in a more modern way and in HD for the first time: Red Dwarf - Back to Earth premiered on the UK channel Dave episodically across the weekend. I remember at the time thinking that this new Red Dwarf was slightly more enjoyable than the Doctor Who special.

Reaction:

Was Russell T Davies ever planning to leave after delivering the big finale to his fourth series in charge (The Stolen Earth / Journey's End)? This was a rumour that I heard around that time, and it certainly fit the big celebratory, loose-end tying up nature of that story, with many many characters from his time running the show returning. It would also explain how come only a few stories later when he did write his last story, he essentially pulled the same trick at the end, to diminishing returns. It's not corroborated online anywhere, though, and doesn't fit my reading of The Writer's Tale, a book which collects Davies's email correspondence of the time to Benjamin Cook. If not, if Davies always intended to stick around, there must be another reason why Planet of the Dead feels so rushed. The production was infamously rushed. Shooting started not that long before transmission (presumably this was because of David Tennant's availability - they had to wait for him to finish performing Hamlet with the RSC), and had a few issues on location in Dubai with the London bus shipped over there getting damaged in transit, and sandstorms wiping out many of the limited hours available for filming. The crew also had to contend with the challenge of upgrading to HD for the first time on Doctor Who. None of this, though, is any reason why the writing appears to have been rushed too. Unless, that is, Davies commissioned it late because he was indeed planning to leave before it was needed.

As anyone who's read the aforementioned Writer's Tale book will know, Davies's scripts were always rushed, so busy was he on all aspects of the show. Here, though, he had co-writer Gareth Roberts writing the initial drafts. Somehow, the script has still got into a tiny bit of a mess. It's mainly around characterisation. The point of an episode like this, or at least it would appear to be the point at the beginning, is who out of the rag tag group of people thrown together randomly by fate will survive, and how. The characters, though, don't have much time to develop; most are very down to Earth to the general standard of Doctor Who of this era. The one that gets most of the screen time, though, Lady Christina - the try out companion, auditioning for a role by the Doctor's side exploring the universe - is utterly unbelievable. Christina is a modern young aristocrat who does elaborate heists using Mission Impossible style gear for the thrill of it, and has a backpack with lots of equipment in, so she's prepared for any circumstance. She is a character out of a camp OTT caper movie, and she sits very oddly against the rest of the bus travellers which the script goes out of its way to highlight as 'Chops and gravy, watching TV' ordinary. Yes, there's one other character in the bus that's also somewhat unbelievable (and clichéd, older black woman = secretly mystical seer) but it's not enough to make it seem intended rather than a mish-mash.

When it comes down to it, it's not a tale of survival at all: only one person (the bus driver) dies near the beginning and after that there isn't much jeopardy for any individual, just the ticking clock of the approaching swarm; none of the Dubai cast's combined efforts, or the setbacks they encounter, make any difference to their eventual escape, as instead a way out is provided by a set of magical techno plug-ins the Doctor and Christina find on some alien fly-people's spaceship. It feels wrong that the Doctor just lucks out stumbling across them. The narrative idea of a plucky band of mismatched characters surmounting impossible odds is fatally undermined: they don't surmount the odds at all. The resolution scene where the Doctor suggests that a couple of them might be head-hunted for positions in UNIT therefore doesn't work as they haven't really had to do anything. There's a fig-leaf towards making this convenient ending seem earned by Christina having to give up the Cup of Athlestan to make the bus fly, but seeing as she stole the thing in the first place, that's not much of a sacrifice. The fly people themselves are not characters but plot devices, there only to provide the way out, plus a bit of background exposition, and then get killed off so they can't complicate things any further by returning to the Earth with everyone else.

The scenes on the other side of the wormhole in the UK are better. Lee Evans playing the Doctor Who fanboy scientist is great throughout, and Norma Dumezweni is a welcome return, playing UNIT Captain Magambo, last seen in Turn Left. The two of them have the best scene of the piece towards the end: a stand-off where the Captain wants to close the wormhole immediately to protect the Earth, but the scientist wants to get the Doctor and bus passengers through first. Rarely for Doctor Who, they both have a legitimate point of view, and the scene is presented with economy and urgency. Like everything in Planet of the Dead, though, it comes to nothing. Events overtake them so no decision has to be made, and there are no consequences. Adam James is wasted in a thin role as the bumbling police officer always failing to catch Christina, but he performs what he's given by the script well. The character is denied his arrest at the end, as the Doctor helps Christina escape. This also didn't feel right to me, as Christina hasn't earned a reprieve, and she comes across as a bit smug. The Doctor rejects Christina as a new companion near the end, not because she's an unrepentant adrenalin-junkie criminal, but because he's sad about losing people close to him (Donna being the most recent). Given it was always going to end that way, perhaps it would have better not to waste so much time earlier with all the bits highlighting how good a companion she'd make (a lot of it being very tell not show anyway). The rest of the story is a similarly mixed bag: Murray Gold's score is excellent throughout, but the CGI bus looks terribly fake. An early performance from the now very famous Daniel Kaluuya is great, but some of the other characters / performances are quite forgettable.

Connectivity: 

Both this story and The Sun Makers see the Doctor ally himself with at least one thief, and both have a theme of aliens that exploit planets until their natural resources are exhausted before moving on to do the same on another planet. The Usurians and humans in the Tom Baker story do it a bit slower than the alien metal stingray things in Planet of The Dead, of course.

Deeper Thoughts:

To the next 100. Normally, in the Deeper Thoughts section of a post in late December, I look at my overall progress in the Sisyphean mission of covering every televised Doctor Who story, old and new (including the ones that have been shown since I started this madness). Reaching the milestone of my 200th story has made me reflect a little earlier in the year. As I mentioned above, I've covered a few extra bits and bobs, so I currently make the total number of stories currently making up the blog's "canon" (up to and including the last broadcast story Revolution of the Daleks) at 301. This means that I only have to blog two more stories and I'll pass a significant psychological barrier, where I only have a double-figure total of stories remaining to do. Of these, there's a healthy mix of all the Doctors left to cover, with the exception of Paul McGann whose entire televisual oeuvre (one TV movie) was the third ever blogged story when I'd just started out in 2015. There's a slight bias towards post-Eccleston new series Doctors and Tom Baker, because they had more broadcast stories (in Baker's case this is because he was in the role so long, for the more recent Doctors it's because the majority of their stories are only one episode long). If I continue blogging at roughly the same rate as I do now, I would get through all these in three more years. I hope that I won't just be mopping up the remaining Baker or Matt Smith (or any specific Doctor's) stories by the end, and that it stays varied.

The obvious thing that will make it take longer than three years, and might well entail that I do end up towards the end blogging only one Doctor's stories (albeit one that may not yet have been cast), is the programme enduring as an ongoing production (thank goodness!). The number of episodes being produced per year is lower than it used to be, and additionally impacted this year by Covid, but has never reached the rate I am able to blog anyway (30+ stories a year would be great, but isn't a realistic dream). I was always going to catch up at some point, and its exciting to have uncertainty about the future of the blog because it is inextricably linked to the future of the show itself. What do we know about the latter? It's public knowledge that there will be a series of 6 episodes this year, and three specials next year. Beyond 2022, though, who knows?  Not Chris Chibnall according to his column in the latest Doctor Who Magazine: decisions about the next Doctor will be made above his pay grade apparently, but he heavily hints that they are going to be made at some point soon. The first two specials next year are planned for New Year's Day and then sometime in Spring, and both were part of the 8-episode batch that has currently wrapped its filming. What he also confirms in print is that the final one of the 2022 specials was a relatively recent extra commission, and hasn't been filmed yet. This will be the special where Jodie will bow out that is going to be broadcast as part of the BBC's centenary celebrations. Such a commission has to be taken as a vote of confidence in the show, and must mean that it is going to continue after 2022. It wouldn't be too celebratory, not a good way to mark 100 years of the Beeb, to kill it off or leave its future uncertain.

So, there will be a Doctor after Jodie, I feel sure. When their name will be announced, when they'll film their first post-regeneration scene (if there is one), and when their own episodes start shooting, is all up for happy speculation. I don't know whether I should blog all three specials given their importance, or just the big one in the Autumn, or use a random factor to choose. I'll decide next year. As for this year, I'm hidebound as usual by the lack of information coming from advanced marketing. Exactly how self-contained the six episodes are going to be (even though we know they will somehow form one long tale) is unknown. I will probably have to watch them first and decide whether I have to blog one (and which one it will be) or all six in one go. If it's the latter, if it really is one serial told over six 50-minute episodes, then it will rival The Daleks' Master Plan as longest ever Doctor Who story (if, like me, you don't count Trial of a Time Lord - see musings above). It would certainly be the joint longest story this blog would ever have to cover. When I blogged that 12-week Hartnell monster, I said "Unless Chris Chibnall were to take things in a very unexpected direction in 2020, Master Plan is going to be the longest story with which I will ever wrestle." I was asking for trouble, obviously! It's taken him until 2021, but maybe he's done just that. Time and Time Lords will tell.

There is a much more important thing that this lack of information makes unclear: what exactly is the 300th story of Doctor Who going to be? The blog has already set a total higher than 300 for me to work towards, and depending on a lot of different judgement calls (see Context section above for more details) you might feel we've reached the 300th story already too. It's generally going to be unclear and inconsistent whatever one thinks. There's not much doubt that The Stones of Blood, Tom Baker story, third in the Key to Time season, is number 100. At the time they went out, Dragonfire and Planet of the Dead were celebrated by the BBC as the 150th and 200th stories respectively, but there's no possible system that could be applied to fit both those numbers. If we agree that Planet of the Dead is number 200, and make lots of assumptions about potential ambiguities in stories broadcast since (Heaven Sent and Hell Bent are two different stories, the three 'Monk' stories in Peter Capaldi's last year are a linked trilogy but still count as three not one), then the most recently broadcast story is the 296th in Doctor Who's televisual history. If the six episodes to come in 2021 are truly one epic tale, then the 300th story will be Jodie Whittaker's swan song, which is neat. Or it could be partway through the 2021 run, or it could already happened. These sort of questions will always be asked, as will another: will Doctor Who ever celebrate its 400th story? As ever with my favourite show, one could argue about it forever, and it still wouldn't ever be important.

In Summary:

A bit of a mess, but never mind: there'll be another story along in a minute.

The Sun Makers

Chapter The 199th, which depicts some taxing times for the Doctor. Taxing, see? Tax? (I couldn't resist it, sorry.)

Plot:

The Doctor, Leela and K9 land on Pluto, finding it mysteriously habitable because of artificial suns in its orbit. The humans living there are controlled by a civil administration, represented in the story by the Gatherer, which works them and taxes them hard on behalf of a company run by aliens, represented by the Collector. The Doctor and Leela persuade low level worker Cordo not to kill himself because of his debts, and join him and some other more unsavoury rebels in overthrowing the regime. The company (from the planet Usurius) found the Earth made uninhabitable by the humans, and did a deal to rehouse them in the solar system using its artificial sun technology to make other planets habitable. Having exhausted the resources of Mars, they moved again to Pluto. As well as by crippling taxes, the populace is also controlled by anxiety-inducing gas pumped into the atmosphere. By a lucky fluke, the Doctor is thrown into contact with a couple of people who know lots of information about this gas, and who help him to shut it off. The newly emboldened humans rebel, and the Doctor does some clever financial tinkering wrecking the company's profits, and making the Collector revert to his true form, a green puddle of liquid. The Gatherer is summarily executed by being thrown off a skyscraper, which seems a bit extreme but there you go. The TARDIS team leave the humans preparing to make a journey back home to Earth.

Context:

Having been forced to watch the last classic Who 4-parter in one go without pausing or rewinding (see the Context section of the post here for more details), and having enjoyed that story seen in such a way, I thought I'd experiment with that approach again for The Sun Makers, even though I have obtained a new functioning remote control for the TV and Blu-ray player now. With the family abed late one Saturday evening, and with a chilled glass of a rather nice white wine to sip, I embarked on The Sun Makers. I managed to the end of the first episode before I stopped things. It no doubt had something to do with the wine and the late hour, but I couldn't watch any more without a break. I watched the next three episodes back to back when feeling fresher on the Sunday morning. I'm not by any means saying that this story is too difficult to follow; the opposite, I think: it's so generic a plotline that my brain, emboldened with a little dutch courage, rebelled at the thought of having to watch more than 25 minutes. After that, I went on holiday for a week to Oxford (no Doctor Who story was ever filmed or set in Oxford, or even had any kind of link to the place, so I didn't pick a Doctor Who story to view and contented myself with watching a couple of Inspector Morses to say "I've been there" whenever a dreaming spire was on screen). Once I was back home, I had the Web of Fear Blu-ray to watch as I wanted to talk about it in the Deeper Thoughts section of this blog post (and I do - see below). The storyline of The Sun Makers was confirmed as simple enough for me to remember it clearly when writing this a couple of weeks after the fact.

First Time Round:

The Sun Makers has the distinction of being the final Tom Baker Doctor Who story I caught up with during my years of collecting and watching classic Who. I'd missed Tom's tenure altogether when it first aired, as I didn't become a fan and regular viewer until Peter Davison had taken over. As such, the main source of catch-up was the VHS range, and it was very generous with Tom Baker titles from early on. There's a lot of them though, and they form a few discrete phases, some of which are more popular than others. His first three years are well regarded, as is his final shiny season when Doctor Who fully moved into the 1980s; but there's felt by some fans (by no means all, but sufficient to have influenced the release schedule) to be a slump in the middle. The VHS range favoured the bookend years of Baker over two of the three years in between. This was the period produced by Graham Williams, and excepting his second year in charge (the Key to Time season, which came out on video relatively early on in 1995), his stories are rightly or wrongly seen as those where there was a reduction in quality both in scripting and production values; subsequently, most of these stories came out later, in the arse end of the range. Before the VHS range got to these ones, the satellite and cable TV channel UK Gold showed them, cycling through all Baker's stories multiple times over the years. For a brief period in the late 1990s I had the channel as part of my cable package and managed to watch other Tom stories that I hadn't seen before. I'd just missed the Sun Makers, though, and I got rid of UK Gold before they cycled round again. So, it was in 2001 when the VHS was released that I finally got to see this story (and I remember nothing about that first watch). All those other underwhelming stories I'd seen from UK Gold came later in the range, though. So The Sun Makers is either seen as the worst of the good 'uns, or the best of a bad batch.

Reaction:

The possibly apocryphal tale is that writer Robert Holmes received a big tax bill, which prompted his writing of this story. He was at the end of his long period as Doctor Who's script editor, handing over to successor Anthony Read, so I would have thought he'd have only just stopped being a salaried BBC employee on PAYE rather than a freelancer where there might have been any doubt about the amounts in his tax return. I'm not au fait with his contractual status or financial situation, though, so perhaps it is true. Otherwise, he was just reaching for an innovative and interesting hook for another Who story after having written so many in the years since his first contribution to the show in the late 1960s. Tax anyway seemed to be an obsession in the UK in the 1970s, maybe it's an obsession in the UK all the time. The basic percentage rate of income tax was in the mid thirties at the time; it seems high from the vantage point of 2021, but historically, it wasn't particularly outstanding a figure. I am one of those do-gooder lefties that thinks of taxation as a good thing, as long as it's not regressive (which in The Sun Makers, of course, it most definitely is). Perhaps with people like me in mind, Holmes - or the production team around him influencing him to tone his ideas down -  hedges his bets.

The big villain of The Sun Makers is a global (multi-global, in fact) company which has the civil administration in its pocket. So, whatever political wing you are looking on from, you aren't alienated and can find a root cause of the issues that meets your own prejudices. Dictatorships purporting to be democratic governments with disastrous and destructive fiscal policy could emerge from both left and right leaning ideologies. Where, then, is the satirical searchlight of The Sun Makers aimed?  Is the Gatherer the main one to blame? He is an official who leads a civil administration, so he is supposed to represent the people. Instead, he makes an elite strata of the society rich (including presumably the security staff we see keeping people in line) at the expense of all the others, who are kept in place with anxiety-inducing agents in the air, and kept working because of excessively regressive taxation. But the Collector is the Boss Bad of the story, and he confirms that his company is responsible for fiscal policy, so he sets the tax rates. The Collector has the power, and the Gatherer is merely enacting policy that's passed down. Tax is only as bad as the things it pays for, of course. On Pluto, it is paying for the artificial suns that make life possible, as well as the profit margin, and the running costs are high. Without that, everyone will die. So, no matter how badly it is being managed, the taxation is essential. Is the message of the story that major utilities should be nationalised rather than managed by private enterprises, and anyone wanting to make a profit out of such utilities should be treated with suspicion?

Or maybe the people themselves are to blame for making the Earth uninhabitable in the first place, leaving them at the mercy of the company's "commercial imperialism". Environmental concerns and metaphors for colonialism had been mainstay themes of Doctor Who stories throughout the 1970s, so maybe the stuff about tax is just window dressing. The satirical searchlight roams wildly throughout The Sun Makers and doesn't stay too long upon any one element; it's not really making any particular point. The story mechanics show this: at heart, the story has a boilerplate 'rebels overthrow tyrannical regime' plot and it doesn't deviate from it. What the tax and corporate stuff does bring is some spots of wit here and there. Referring to the Collector's personal guard as the "Inner Retinue" is particularly clever. Then there's "Perhaps everyone runs from the taxman", and the Gather's presumably more sci-fi vehicle called a Beamer, and the P45 corridor (another theory about this story is that it's Holmes's barbed farewell to the corporation that he'd been overworked by in his years as script editor, having just received his own P45 on leaving the role). It also allows for a fun ending, where the company - and its boss - literally goes into liquidation.

The other way that Holmes spruces up his plot is more questionable: a gleeful embracing of the dark, nasty and sadistic. Five minutes in and a character's attempting suicide, and the criminal rebels (including Michael Keating effectively auditioning for the part of Vila in Blake's 7 that he was imminently going to fill) are a cut-throat bunch. The acting throughout is good; Tom Baker's having a great time, but not at the expense of the audience, and the addition of John Leeson as K9 in his first regular appearance after his introduction earlier in the season is keeping things fresh. Director Pennant Roberts does less well visually than with performances, though. This is where The Sun Makers could have done with a lift to rise above its plot - wordplay and black humour only getting it so far - and it unfortunately is not served well. The locations - high rooves and long corridors - give it some scale, but they are a bit drab. The set design goes for a somewhat empty aesthetic - defined shapes and large blocks of colour with little maybe Inca-inspired touches of a sun motif here and there - but the money was clearly running out (see the obvious monochrome photo blow-ups of circuit boards pasted on to blocks in lieu of a proper computer bank prop) and it all looks a bit dull ultimately. It's a shame, because there is definitely potential for greatness here, despite the generic plot. 

Connectivity: 

Both stories see the Doctor trapped in a small space in the cliffhanger at the end of the first part (a cubicle in The Sun Makers, the Pandorica in the news series 5 finale). That's about it. The Usurians - one can scarcely believe it - failed to be namechecked as one of the many baddies in the alliance in The Pandorica Opens, but I suppose they could have been in a ship up there somewhere, whirling about above Stonehenge.

Deeper Thoughts:

It has a character called The Collector in it, so... I went into the politics, such as they are, of The Sun Makers as much as they require above. There aren't are other deeper thoughts inspired by the story. So, instead I'm going to use this space for some mini-reviews of some Doctor Who product I've been consuming recently, all of it connected to the second Doctor, Patrick Troughton. I was going to wait until the next Pat story came up to blog, but that's going to be The Evil of The Daleks when I see the imminent animated version. As I've been lucky enough to acquire tickets to the BFI screening of said story, I will want to write up that event, which will not leave room to talk about these other things I've collected. It's a shame, as one of them is the novelisation of The Evil of the Daleks, so it would have fit quite well. I obtained this, and the novelisation of the other David Whittaker scripted Patrick Troughton Dalek story The Power of the Daleks, after swearing I never would. But as a dog returns to his vomit, a fool repeats his folly, so the Bible says. I couldn't bear any longer to have an almost complete collection - every classic series story novelised except these two. I'm not fussy about specific editions or anything, I just want to have and be able to read every story that was on TV. These two came out in 1993, quite late on when a range of original Doctor novels had already started in parallel; they had relatively limited runs, and have never been reprinted. As such, it cost a reasonable sum of money to get them. If you're prepared to do that, though, they aren't that hard to obtain.

The prose by John Peel (not that one) is unfussy and gets on with telling the stories, with just enough character insight added regarding motivations. This is as expected; Peel was the trusted fellow in the late 1980s and early 1990s when it came to novelising Dalek stories, but he wasn't the type to take too many liberties with the text. I think that he occasionally pushes a little too hard on some emotions (for example, Ben's suspicion of the Doctor, and Polly's sometime irritation with Ben) that should have been more subtle, but that's just personal taste. In Power, he clearly feels there needs to be an explanation of why there is discontent in the Vulcan colony, creating the factions amongst the humans that the Daleks exploit. To add more explanation, he does a bit of retroactive continuity, and says that the colony is run by IMC (an immoral mining concern featured in the later TV story Colony in Space). It's neat but, I think unnecessary. It's better, in a way, to leave the reasons behind the humans' disunity unexplained as it almost suggests that the Daleks are so powerful and evil that they could overcome any group of flawed, backbiting humans. These are quibbles, though, and it was a great treat overall to finally read these books. I was very careful flicking through these paperbacks as they were so expensive, but the point was to read and enjoy them rather than just put them on a shelf to look at forever. The only book published as part of the original novelisation range that I don't have now is The Paradise of Death (a prose version of a Jon Pertwee starring radio serial made for Doctor Who's 30th anniversary) that came out around the same time as those two Dalek stories. I wonder how long I'll hold out before I crack and buy that too.

The other item I want to tell you about is a new release on Blu-ray, so it was considerably less expensive. This was the special edition of The Web of Fear. It's a two disc set with lots of extras (the DVD release was a bare bones release without such additional material). I covered the story for the blog before here, so won't go into detail of the story apart from to state that it's still great and looks better than ever on Blu-ray. The story's third episode is still missing from the archives (except for the off-air soundtrack) and that previous version had a photo reconstruction to bridge the gap. This new version has an animated third episode instead, one that uses a new approach. This involves creating the characters as "skins" rather than multiple drawings and applying these skins to moving 3D stick people models that can emulate motion-captured movements by actors, and presumably be directed by computer, or react independently based on AI too (that's what it looks like to my uneducated eye anyway). The result is odd, to say the least, but you do get used to it. My first impression was somewhat unfavourable, it was like I was watching a pastiche of a Thunderbirds-like marionette show. It would be a disservice to the talented people involved in Thunderbirds to compare it directly, this was more like an exaggeration for laughs. I think this is because quite a lot of the movements by the animated Doctor Who characters are too big; where they are smaller, it works much better. I'm putting this down to teething problems with the new technology and am excited to see how they can refine it, and what they do next, though some people (based on online comments I've seen) hated it.

The new approach was deployed, according to the printed notes in the packaging, because a more 3D presentation would better fit in with the episodes either side. What hooey! Lots of stories have previously come out with gaps bridged by 2D animation (or even flatter, still image slide shows) and it didn't cause too many problems. The colour version of the episode can be viewed standalone elsewhere in the set, and it is much less jarring when seen on its own. The truth is more likely to be that this new approach (known as Shapeshifter) is less resource intensive and may open up possibilities to be able to do complicated stories with lots of characters, which may be prohibitively difficult to create with more traditional approaches. This is pretty much confirmed by a representative of Shapeshifter Studios on a featurette talking about the animation on the second disc of the set. If the movement can be made more controlled, the remaining issue will be with likenesses - the 'skin' approach is less likely to always look perfectly like the original actors compared to the more controlled 2D animation illustrations. Some of the animated episodes over the years have had some questionable likeness anyway, though, and if it means that more stories can be animated, I'd be happy with the trade-off.

The animation is the main draw of this release. Other than that, there are making of documentaries and episode commentaries that are at the high level of quality we've come to expect. There's no info text subtitle track, which is a shame; maybe that will be added in future when this story is included in a Patrick Troughton Blu-ray season box-set. I am more and more thinking that a 26 box-set series, covering every season of classic Who on Blu-ray, with missing episodes all animated, is an inevitability, let alone a possibility. I hope that the complaints about the animation of Web of Fear episode 3 don't impact that. What would help, I think, is to have an alternative branched option of a photographic reconstruction for those that don't like the animation style. This emphatically is not the case on the Web of Fear set. The old reconstruction is included, but on the extras disc, separate from the other episodes. One would have to switch between discs partway through to see the recon in situ with the other episodes. Rectify that, and I think any naysayers will be placated, and - you never know - we may get a lovely Shapeshifter-ised version of The Highlanders or Marco Polo, before too long, and thereafter season box sets for the first six black-and-white years of Doctor Who too.

In Summary:

Doesn't achieve greatness despite a fun script, but nonetheless is not too taxing to watch. Taxing, see? Tax? (I couldn't resist it again, sorry.)

The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang

 

Chapter The 198th, which proves that any long-running series must eventually have a wedding episode.

Plot:

The Doctor and Amy follow a message from River Song (Rory at this point has been erased from existence by the mysterious crack in time) and materialise in England near Stonehenge in 102 AD. River has been guided to this place by a painting by Van Gogh that's been passed down through the many guest stars of the 2010 series until it comes into River's possession. The two TARDIS travellers find her ensconced in a nearby Roman legion's camp pretending to be Cleopatra. Together, the three of them discover the Underhenge, an area under Stonehenge containing the Pandorica, an impregnable mini-prison rumoured to contain a trickster or warrior. Stonehenge is transmitting a signal which appears to have attracted Spaceships of every alien race the Doctor has ever encountered, including Daleks, Cybermen and Sontarans, to take whatever is inside. It's a trap, however. The villains are in an alliance, and are not after what's in the Pandorica, but instead lock the Doctor in it - he's the fabled trickster / warrior (surprise surprise). One of the Romans is Rory, but he - and all of the legion - are really Autons, brought to life from the Nestene Consciousness mining Amy's imagination. Rory, desperately trying to resist his programming shoots Amy, whose memory has come back as to who he is.

River, trying to escape the TARDIS which has been taken over by forces unknown (and never really adequately explained - presumably it's the Silence, but how they are able to remote control the TARDIS; who knows?), finds herself  trapped as it explodes. The explosion causes the cracks in the fabric of reality, which devour all energy in the universe, causing all the stars to disappear, never to have existed. Rory is cradling the dying Amy, when the Doctor appears from the future, travelling using River's vortex manipulator. With Rory's and others help, this future Doctor contrives the means of his own escape from the Pandorica, and puts Amy in (as the box looks after its occupant very well, it will heal her). Nearly two thousand years later, during which time Rory has guarded the Pandorica, never ageing as he's plastic, the young Amelia is able to open the box, and reunite the older Amy with the Doctor and Rory. The Doctor rescues River from the exploding TARDIS where she's been kept alive in a time loop by the ship's emergency systems. Despite reality still collapsing around them, and despite an attack by a stone Dalek, a vestige of the universe that never existed, the Doctor is able to formulate a plan where he uses the Pandorica plus the energy of the exploding TARDIS to recreate the old universe again with a second big bang; the cracks in the universe will heal, but the Doctor will be on the wrong side when they do, and will no longer have existed.

As his timeline slowly unravels, the Doctor finds he is able to speak to Amy on a couple of key past occasions. He tries to imprint himself in her memory, along with the tale of the TARDIS that he took from Gallifrey. As with Rory, Amy's memories can come back to corporeal reality (something to do with living for years with a time crack in her bedroom, although in the new rebooted reality she hasn't lived with a time crack in her bedroom, but best not to think too hard about that as it's quite confusing). On her wedding day, the phrase "Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue" reminds her of the TARDIS, and the blue box and its pilot arrive. The Doctor dances at the wedding reception, and then he, Amy and Rory fly off in the TARDIS for more adventures in time and space... 

Context:

Watched each episode from the disc in the series 5 Blu-ray boxset, on two Sunday afternoons separated by a week; this was so my viewing companions - all the kids: boys aged 15 and 11, girl aged 9 - could feel what it was like to wait the regulation amount of time before the cliffhanger of The Pandorica Opens was resolved. I expected a chorus of disapproval and entreaties to put on the next episode immediately after the first, but came there not a peep. Maybe it's not as compelling as I thought. Comments from the children ranged from the youngest congratulating herself on seeing the Van Gogh painting "I knew it was going to be the TARDIS!"; but, she was wrong-footed by the Pandorica opening in the second episode to reveal Amy rather than the Doctor. All three children were confused at how a stone Dalek could survive when none of the other aliens did. I didn't have a satisfactory answer to this (I hesitated to give what I thought was the true reason: that a Stone Dalek looks cool in a way that a stone Silurian, say, probably wouldn't). 

First Time Round:

The date of the The Big Bang's first BBC1 broadcast is quite close to my eldest son's birthday. He was quite young at the time, but we were nonetheless planning a birthday party on the Sunday. The main memory I have is of tidying up the back garden all day Saturday, to allow it to be used as a play area for half a dozen pre-schoolers the following day. As a long and beautiful sunny evening was finally ending, the Better Half and I decided we'd done enough, and came in to watch that night's Doctor Who, and - if I remember correctly - both enjoyed it. Thinking of this, made me wonder whether at least one episode of Doctor Who had been broadcast of each of the family's birth dates, and a bit of research (see Deeper Thoughts section for more details) showed me that this was indeed the case. The three children have never had a Doctor Who episode shown on their birthdays during their lifetimes thus far, but the date for each had seen a few past episodes shown before they were born. Myself and the Better Half have both had Doctor Who seasons start on our birthdays in recent years.

Reaction:

Steven Moffat does not believe that less is more. This double-parter is his definitive statement that actually more is more. It features every monster he could cram in, and includes every possible ally, or references to plot points and loose ends, from all the previous stories of the 2010 series. The scene at the end of the first part The Pandorica Opens, with every alien race teamed up to put the Doctor into his bespoke prison, is like a frame of a particularly over-excited Doctor Who comic strip come to life, or how an army of 11-year olds in 1983 imagined The Five Doctors would be before they saw it (when they discovered it was just eight blokes in cyber-suits on a damp, Welsh hillside, and one Dalek in the studio). In terms of scale, one could not be disappointed. The whole episode is structured to build to a triple cliffhanger: the Doctor locked in the Pandorica, Rory shooting Amy, and River stuck in the TARDIS as it explodes. The universe ends, leaving only the Earth alone in a blank and infinite space. And that's just part one of two. If Doctor Who had any monsters made out of kitchen sinks, Moffat would undoubtedly have thrown them into the mix too; he does after all include a kitchen mop. It's well structured, though; by no means is everything just being thrown at the viewer to see what sticks. Although there's no real reason apart from spectacle why the plan to trap the Doctor couldn't be managed by only one alien race, a couple of moments for featured creatures are very well handled. For example, the dismembered parts of a cyberman having life of their own come together as a full suit keen to capture a new occupant, with the head snapping at Amy like a crocodile's jaws. The Autons too: their reveal, and making Rory a plastic facsimile that does not know he's not real, is the best use of the Nestene duplicate concept since its introduction.

The big reversal of The Pandorica Opens - that the Pandorica does not contain an evil "trickster", but that person as referred to in the legends is instead the Doctor and he's going to end up in the box - is telegraphed from fairly early on, but I don't think it matters. What it does do is unfortunately render meaningless the much celebrated speech that the Doctor does from Stonehenge to the assembled aliens, where they appear to back off because of his bravado. Instead, they are fooling him, turning the moment into one of defeat rather than victory - it's a nice speech, though, and it's only undermined on the second viewing; when it plays out (assuming you're not a clever dick like me who saw things coming) it feels like a punch the air moment, so they get away with it. The other minor thing that doesn't sit right in the first part is the use of Amy's childhood memories to create the scenario aimed to ensnare the Doctor. It doesn't make any sense: the Doctor's no more likely to fall into a trap just because it involves some things Amy read about as a nipper, and if it were spotted it is more likely to give things away (as it indeed does in The Pandorica Opens, albeit too late); this is, though, setting up the possibility of things coming back if Amy can remember them, which will pay off in the second part.

For all the many showy elements of The Pandorica Opens, the story structure is simple and traditional. The same cannot be said, though, for The Big Bang, which is much more timey-wimey, for want a better phrase. The episode plays out in multiple sections too. First, there's the section of the Doctor zipping back and forth through time between 102 AD and the young Amelia Pond in an alternative universe 1996, where there are no stars. The first thing that's notable about this section is that it is a gargantuan cheat. If the Doctor can use time travel to escape from the most secure prison ever made, and then go back in time to explain to people how to free him in the past, there is nothing stopping him doing that every week to escape whatever scenario he ends up in. It's carried along, whizzing past any audience scepticism, by the speed of the telling, and the charm of the performances, particularly Matt Smith and also Caitlin Blackwood as Amelia. Just at the point where it starts to get a bit smug and irritating (something like watching Back to the Future 2 on fast forward) the Doctor makes one more jump, arriving back to appear before himself, Amy and Rory apparently dead. Suddenly, things are serious again. This is the climax of the first section. The second section is the more traditional build up to the ending where the Doctor has to sacrifice himself to put everything back to normal. Some lovely distractions from what is essentially a linear segment are a gun-totin' River Song, and a Stone Dalek (lovely visual, doesn't really make sense - see above for my kids' reaction).

The third of four sections sees the Doctor's existence unravelling as he watches. He's able to drop in on events of the 2010 series as they run backwards. It contains perhaps the most bravura moment of plotting in the whole of Steven Moffat's tenure as showrunner: the scene where the Doctor talks to Amy in the Byzantium. We've already seen this play out in the Weeping Angels 2-parter earlier in the year, but now we see it again, and fully understand what's happening. Finally, there is Amy's wedding. The actors playing her parents are odd choices (and never appeared again), and it's weird that it's the day of her wedding where Amy is suddenly aware that something has changed in her life now she's got them back. A big deal is made, both in this story and earlier in the season, that the TARDIS explodes on Amy's wedding day, the 26th June 2010. But the actions depicted in this story make it feel more like it explodes in 102 AD. If not, how is Amelia affected in 1996, where there are no stars despite it taking place before the explosion, if that happened in 2010.  Maybe the impact rippled backwards in time; whenever anything in post-2005 Doctor Who doesn't quite make temporal sense, the answer is always that it rippled backwards in time somehow. It also occurs to me now that all three of Matt Smith's finales take place in a parallel universe (where there are no stars, where all time's happening at once, where the Doctor's victories have all been undone). It did get a bit wearisome all this messing with time and realities, but first time out it is interesting.

The climax of this last section is a tour de force of lyrical skill: Moffat uses the traditional wedding saying of "something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue" to describe the TARDIS and bring it back into being. The whole structure of the second episode is built around this clever bit of wordplay. It would ultimately be more satisfying if it was a visual rather than verbal flourish, but it's still nonetheless exciting. All the visual elements surrounding it, marshalled by director Toby Haynes, are wonderful, window dressing or otherwise; and there's far too many great things to call them all out here (I haven't had time to go into Arthur Darvill and Karen Gillan's emotional scenes as the latter realises who the former is, for example). There's a tiny niggle at the back of my mind that Moffat is including everything he can in a sort of desperation that he doesn't believe his storyline is strong enough in and of itself. He's obviously decided that every finale should be as big as anniversary special used to be (just as next season he'd decide that a series opener could be as big as a finale), but if this is just ultimately a bag of tricks, it's a bag of the best tricks one could imagine.  

Connectivity: 

Like The War Machines, this 2-parter is a big story to finish a season, and looks to have had a fair amount of the budget spent on it. Both stories significantly set some action on a date roughly contemporaneous with the broadcast of the story (the 1960s story is set around the 16th July 1966, with its final scene confirmed later as happening on the 20th; Amy's wedding in the The Big Bang is on the 26th June 2010, the same date that episode debuted).  

Deeper Thoughts:

Everything's an anniversary of something, old boy. The focus on tying the action of The Big Bang to the date of its broadcast, and of the proximity of that date to my son's birthday (see above), reminded me of something I have often meant to research in more detail about my favourite TV programme. I follow a lot of fans and feeds on social media related to the venerable Time Lord, and often someone will post something along the lines of "It's 25 years to the day since The Keeper of Traken episode 1" or "On this day in 1979, City of Death was getting record breaking audiences for its second episode" or such. Doctor Who's been going a long, long time, and before that there was a gap, but before that gap it was going an even longer long time. In the early days, Doctor Who was on every week almost all the year round, only stopping for a short break in the Summertime. I wondered whether there was any day on the calendar which wasn't the anniversary of something; so, I did an hour or two's research on the internet. I set a reasonably high standard for what the something could be; it would be too easy to fill a year if I counted the birthday of every actor ever to appear, down to those heroes who play the third Ood on the left and similar. No, it had to be the debut to air of a Doctor Who episode or something reasonably significant related to the show. There were, as it'll probably be no surprise for you to hear, lots of detailed websites I could utilise curated by committed individuals where such information was held.

The first sweep was to go through and find the list of dates where the show has not been broadcast. Like Doctor Who, I originate from the UK, so I'm only counting premieres on British television, but just that - and only looking at first runs of episodes of the main show, no spin offs - covered approximately 80% of the year. Every day from the start of January to the end of April, for example, a Doctor Who episode has been launched on BBC1 in at least one year. The autumn's very popular too for both new and classic series alike. A period from late June to the end of August is a bit fallow, though. It's traditionally been seen in TV as a no-go zone, a time when the best shows were held back to launch in Autumn, rather than lose viewers to various outdoor sun-kissed activities in the school holidays. That's less true these days, though, and a couple of times (the second half of the 2011 series after a mid-series break, and Peter Capaldi's first series in 2014) a run has started in late August. Beyond that, it was standard in the classic series era to have terrestrial repeats in the Summer months when Doctor Who was off the air. Given that in those days it was pretty much impossible to catch up with an episode once it had been shown, these repeats were as important as the original airings, so I don't think it was too much of a cheat to include them. With that, the number of anniversary-free days shrinks markedly down to only a dozen dates out of 366 (February 29th, which I did wonder about, was the date for the 1964 broadcast of an episode of Marco Polo in Doctor Who's first ever season).

I thought I'd need to lean heavily on episodes of spin-offs to get to that level (97% coverage), but no. For the most part, spin offs like Torchwood or The Sarah-Jane Adventures first aired on days of the year that Doctor Who had already been shown. The exception was Torchwood: Miracle Day. Three episodes of the mostly US-based fourth series of that spin-off (on the 14th, 21st and 28th July 2011) were shown on days that nothing else from the worlds of Doctor Who had ever aired. That took the total unaccounted for dates down to nine. On the 29th June 2007, an episode of Totally Doctor Who - a non-fiction magazine show for children - was shown. This wouldn't normally be so special, but the episode included the TV debut of an episode of the animated David Tennant story The Infinite Quest, so that counts. On the 20th December in 2012, the only day of the twelfth month where a full episode or special hadn't already been shown, a teaser for the year's Christmas special called Vastra Investigates premiered on the Red Button. On 21st August 2014, there was a Blue Peter special introducing Peter Capaldi to the young viewers a couple of days before his first story aired. So, with all that considered, there are only six days in the year that aren't an anniversary of something new being shown: the 4th, 15th, 22nd, 29th and 31st July, and the 28th August. Now, it would be ridiculously completist to hope that a series of Doctor Who from 2023 onwards (it's too late for this year, and we're only getting specials next year) could go out of their way to show some new episodes on all those six dates, so every day of the year can showcase something. Ridiculous. But I can't help hoping for it anyway. Until then, a happy anniversary for the 6th August, the date I'm writing this: 41 years since the BBC1 Summer repeat of Destiny of the Daleks episode 2, and on this day a year later in 1981 discerning viewers were enjoying a repeat of Full Circle part 4.

In Summary:

An everything including the kitchen sink drama.