Warriors of the Deep

Chapter The 207th, the start of a new series of Doctor Who, but probably not the one you were expecting.

Plot:

The Doctor, Tegan and Turlough are looking to visit the near future of Earth, but the TARDIS overshoots and they end up in 2084. It's a time of cold war tensions between two international power blocs, when it is common to have underwater military bases with missile strike capability. The TARDIS trio find themselves in such a base.There are two enemy sleeper agents in the crew committing sabotage; that is just a side show, though, as the real danger is an attack by Silurians and Sea Devils (not their real names, but they seem to have adopted these handles now), reptiles who were the dominant species on Earth millions of years before man evolved. They want to launch the base's missiles to provoke a nuclear war that will destroy all the humans, allowing them to take back the planet without directly being responsible. Luckily, the Doctor found a kind of Chekhov's Gas on the base in episode 1 that's lethal to reptile life. After a fruitless search for alternatives, the Doctor regretfully disperses the gas into the base's air supply. All the reptiles are killed, but not before they - and their pet sea monster the Myrka - have killed everyone else except the TARDIS team. The Doctor is regretful that a more peaceful solution couldn't be found.

Context:

I put this on during the kids' half term break, when I also had time off from the day job. It was watched at the rate of two episodes a day over two days, from the DVD. All three children (boys of 15 and 12, girl of 9) joined me for the first half; none of them returned for episodes three and four. Whether this had anything to do with the Myrka moments in the cliffhanger to episode two (which I'll get on to in the Reaction section below), or whether they had just got bored anyway, I couldn't say. In the first half, they all seemed fairly well engaged, asking how far into the future the story was set, wondering if Mark Strickson's Turlough was "still evil", and discussing and agreeing between themselves that the Doctor couldn't have drowned at the end of episode one, as he otherwise "would have turned into another Doctor". The youngest particularly liked the gag early on where both the male regular characters strain to push open a door, before the female character steps forward and slides it open with ease.

First Time Round:

January 1984. I had first watched Doctor Who just over two years earlier and had rapidly become a fan. Warriors of the Deep episode one was the start of the third new season of Doctor Who that I had sat down to watch from the outset on its BBC1 debut broadcast; maybe this only counted as the second time really, as every other episode of  Davison's first season clashed with my weekly session of cubs (including the very episode that year, Castrovalva episode one). The big celebrations of November 1983, Doctor Who's 20th anniversary, including the broadcast of The Five Doctors special, were still relatively fresh in my mind, so I was filled with fan enthusiasm and expectation. I'd read the snippets of preview of Warriors of the Deep in Doctor Who Magazine issue 85, the cover of which I can still recall in detail from memory (it was now titled The Official Doctor Who Magazine, presumably to differentiate it from the many many unofficial Doctor Who magazines that weren't lining the racks of newsagents at the time). There was a fighting chance I'd have read the listing in the Radio Times too (in the early 80s, my family only took that publication at Christmas and New Year). My anticipation levels were high. This all sounds like I'm setting up to say the story was a crushing disappointment, but this was not the case. I enjoyed it unreservedly as an eleven year old in 1984; I enjoyed it watching in 2021 too, even though I had a few more reservations this time out.  

Reaction:

Let's get it out of the way up front: the elephant in the room (or sea monster in the studio) of Warriors of the Deep is the Myrka. It's one of only a handful of occasions in the classic Doctor Who era (26 years long, remember) where the visualisation of some part of the script is so egregious that it tends to leap to one's memory way ahead of anything else in the story that was more successful. Every aspect of the Myrka is wrong: it's unwieldy; its head looks misshapen; its design and build are not clever enough to disguise the way it is powered (by two performer / puppeteers, pantomime horse-style); the way those performers move the creature is clumpy and risible. Even after it's dead, and a couple of characters collide with its corpse with a rubbery bounce, it's letting the side down. The build up to the cliffhanger of episode two sees various non-speaking Sea Base 'red shirts' manoeuvre themselves into its path so they can get killed, as it would have no chance of getting anywhere near them otherwise. Tegan is then trapped under a similarly rubbery fake door, struggling to make it look like she couldn't escape by just loudly sighing, while the Doctor pushes and prods at the flimsy door so tentatively or else he'd ruin the illusion, such as it is. The Myrka advances clumsily, and the front-end performer does a gesture with the front limbs that looks something like Henry Winkler as the Fonz whenever he appeared on set in Happy Days. This all then gets reprised at the start of the following week's episode, so we can endure it again. It would definitely be 'jump the shark' territory, if it weren't that the Myrka only appears in a limited number of sequences, and even with the reprise only takes up a scant few minutes of the run time; the rest of the story is perfectly good and well realised.

The brief, consciously or subconsciously, seems to have been to do Earthshock with Silurians. Earthshock was the big hit of Peter Davison's first year as the Doctor, but for some reason wasn't used as a template for a while. Davison's second year stories were much more lyrical and thoughtful, but from this point on the action mini-movie style becomes more prevalent (this season's later stories Resurrection of the Daleks and The Caves of Androzani definitely fit the mould, and many others after that). Like Earthshock, the story brings back old monsters that hadn't been seen for a number of years, with a snazzy makeover. Both Silurian and Sea Devil costumes look great; not quite as effective as the Cybermen's new look, but very good nonetheless. The Samurai style uniform for the Sea Devils is particularly apt, and the script is clever to define them as the warrior caste of the Earth reptiles. They score one point less than the 1970s versions, though, as the mouth of the mask doesn't move, meaning that the creature performers have to make their head movements and gesticulations a little larger than life so you know which one of them is speaking. As such, I'm fine with the decision to make the Silurians third eye flash in time with their conversation, as the originals had to similarly do lots of head wobbling without this visual cue. The voices too are updated but nicely in keeping with what went before. It may just be me, but the voice treatment makes Silurian Icthar addressing Sauvix, sound like he's actually saying 'Cervix'. That was a little distracting.

The plotting of Warriors of the Deep is much more solid and more coherent than Earthshock's was. This is not just a stringing together of action set pieces. This is handy, as the action sequences are a bit flat, with director Pennant Roberts not able to get much dynamism into the scenes made in a Television Centre studio. The climactic sequence of the Doctor cancelling the missile launch includes the base commander getting fatally shot, but I had to rewind it to see where that happened as it is staged so poorly. The fight and stunt fall into the water from episode one, filmed at Shepperton, is much better. The sets for the sea base come in for a bit of flak for being dull and over-lit. I don't think this is fair; each part of the sea base, including some split-level sets, looks fantastic to me, and there's a feeling that this a connected real space. The bright lighting also counterpoints the gloomy undersea sequences of the Silurians and Sea Devils before they come to the base: these are moodily lit, and shot well, but nobody ever gives any credit for this. The shell suits that the base crew wear are very 80s, but are also perfectly serviceable, and the model work is uniformly good. With only that one very big exception, Warriors of the Deep looks amazing, as well as having interesting story material at its heart: there's almost moral complexity in the reptiles working around their moral code, and the Doctor desperately trying to find an alternative to the inevitable destructive conclusion. There's even a couple of jokes. And it's all underlined by a fine score by Jonathan Gibbs.

The cold war nuclear tension theme and the spy subplot are very much of the time. Writer Johnny Byrne puts a futuristic spin on things, establishing that the technology and security protocols of 2084 require an individual who has been cyber-augmented, a Sync Ops, to control the missile firing computers. (Well, one has to assume there's some cyber augmentation, and it's not just that the Sync Ops has had a socket drilled into his head.) This is an interesting part of the story (despite the subplot not having anything much to the main Silurian plot at all), as it gives us some honest to goodness empathetic moments of emotion, which is rarer than you'd think in Doctor Who stories of this vintage: the Sync Ops Maddox's anxiety about the responsibility of having to fire the first shot in a nuclear war, and then being controlled by the enemy agents and made to betray his base, and kill his friend. It's good stuff. One of the sabre-rattling cold war politicians in the wider world of the time was UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and - as it turns out - she was the one most responsible for the disastrous nature of the Myrka as it finally turned out. By calling a snap election in 1983, which then had an impact of BBC studio allocation prioritising election-related programming, she drastically reduced the prep time before Warriors of the Deep went before the cameras. This meant that there was insufficient time for special effects to build the costume, and no time at all for the performers to rehearse while wearing it. If you were looking for someone to blame, I don't think you could find anyone better.

 

Connectivity: 

No cheating involved, I promise: the random number generator plumped for Warriors of the Deep, the sequel to the last story blogged, The Sea Devils. (Both it and The Sea Devils are also sequels of Doctor Who and the Silurians - over a decade had passed since those earlier stories, though, so it would be a stretch to say Warriors is the third part of a trilogy). There are therefore lots of connections such as bases underwater, ships being destroyed, the build up to a missile launch, the Doctor trying to keep the peace between trigger-happy humans and Earth reptiles, etc. etc. No string vests in Warriors, though; or, none that can be seen at any rate - Turlough could be wearing one under his school uniform for all I know! 

Deeper Thoughts:

The Continuity of Philosophy. What exactly is the Silurian credo? The Doctor says that "Everything you Silurians hold sacred forbids" genocide. They themselves state that their law forbids all but "defensive war". There's been some continuity retrofitting, or perhaps just plain continuity error, from what was established in the earlier two stories about these Earth reptiles (more on that in a moment), but if we take what's presented in Warriors of the Deep at face value, they have changed tack from trying to find a peaceful solution to the dilemma of both themselves and the humans having a claim upon the same planet. They have stormed a sea base belonging to one of the two international power blocs, and they are going to hack the base's systems and then set off a missile attack at a target or targets in the other bloc. This is expected to be interpreted as a human act of aggression, which will mean retaliation, and eventually mutually assured destruction of both blocs meaning the death of all the humans. The reptiles will then be able to take back the planet, having not directly caused the genocide. As the Silurian leader Icthar puts it: "We will harm no one - these ape primitives will destroy themselves. We, Doctor, will merely provide the pretext." They are convinced that this new plan fits within their overall value system. Now, I've learnt a bit about moral philosophy (and yes, this was mainly from watching episodes of The Good Place on Netflix), and I'm finding it difficult to pin down exactly what school of thought underpins the reptiles' plan in this story.

Whatever philosophy they believe in, it can't be basic consequentialism, which would measure the morality of an act on the consequences that arise from that act. If the consequence is genocide, the act is clearly immoral. Maybe they believe the opposite of consequentialism. I googled it, and the internet came up with Kantian deontology, but that opposes consequentialism not in allowing any consequences altogether, but instead in changing the area of consideration for how to judge the act. Instead of measuring the consequences, one has to judge whether the act itself is right or wrong based on a set of rules. Given that the creatures have expressed that they have laws defining 'just wars'  as being defensive wars only, they do seem to lean more towards the philosophy of Kant's rules and obligations. They are, though, directly responsible for firing the first shot in the proposed human war. This is not a defensive act, so would break their explicitly stated law. Let's say they have the benefit of the doubt, and that the first missiles were aimed at unpopulated areas (this is a bit of a stretch given the need to set one bloc against another, and the destructiveness of the weaponry mentioned in the narrative, even if they are never specifically identified as nuclear weapons). Even then, though, how can they be excused from the raiding of the base and killing of almost everyone within it? It's a military target, and those actions constitute an act of (offensive) war. The only way would be to not count the humans as sentient beings at all (they do talk about humans as if they are animals); but if they are happy to make that moral descent, then they don't need any pretext at all.

Utilitarianism? The reptiles' actions can only be seen to be for the greatest overall good if one again doesn't count humans or their feelings. Virtue ethics? You can't kill multiple people and claim that you are acting with inherent virtue. The only teachings that might justify their plan, trying to find a just and moral seeming cover for unethical actions, are the teachings of Machiavelli. So, though it seems momentarily that the reptiles in Warriors of the Deep have a more interesting ethical outlook, it doesn't take much examination to reveal that they are pretty much the same as all the other Doctor Who baddies. This isn't a problem, though, as they always were like this. Icthar - who, if he's supposed to be the same Silurian leader seen in the story with Jon Pertwee, has changed his name - has dialogue thus: "Twice we offered the hand of friendship to these ape-descended primitives". This isn't true, though. In neither of the earlier stories did a peaceful solution go any further than a hypothetical discussion with the Doctor, but the stories did see the Silurians try to wipe out humanity with a plague, and see the Sea Devils blowing up boats and attacking a naval base. Warriors of the Deep was made in a period where the producer had an unofficial continuity adviser, but I don't think we can blame that person for this. The writer clearly saw an interesting story about a third party manipulating a nuclear stand-off similar to the one between the US and the Soviet Union in the 1980s; the continuity and the ethics were just window dressing, and considerations about them were not allowed to get in the way of the story, which is as it should be.

  

In Summary:

It's mostly good, like an underwater Earthshock; the bad moments - like most bad moments in the 1980s - are all the fault of Margaret Thatcher.

The Sea Devils

 

Chapter The 206th, where there's a fishy situation going on with some underwater creatures, plus a Masterful prison break.

Plot:

The Doctor and Jo visit the Master, who is incarcerated in an island prison. The Doctor's also there to investigate ships that have sunk without a trace in the vicinity (or it may have been just a coincidence). The Master has secretly persuaded the governor of the prison Colonel Trenchard that enemy agents are responsible for the sinkings, and that together the two of them can foil this plot. The enemy agents turn out to be another group of reptiles woken from long hibernation, who were the dominant species on Earth before man evolved, the same that were previously incorrectly called Silurians, and here are politically incorrectly called Sea Devils. They are in underwater chambers, and have been woken by work being done on an old sea fort for the nearby secret naval base. (Just a tip for any fictional government in an adventure story that might be reading this: don't imprison your super-criminals near secret naval bases - it's just asking for trouble). The Master has learned all about the reptiles from Time Lord files he stole, and so somehow engineered to be imprisoned nearby where some might be awake (or it may have been just a coincidence).

The Master steals parts from the naval base and builds a communications device, bringing Sea Devils to attack the prison and kill Trenchard. The commander of the naval base, Captain Hart, having sent out and lost contact with a submarine to investigate underwater, allows the Doctor to descend in a diving bell. The Sea Devils take the Doctor into their underwater stronghold, and he offers to negotiate a peace between them and the humans, but the Master is also there - having offered his services to mend their faulty mass-revivification system - and agitates for war. Unfortunately, the UK government in the form of Permanent Private Secretary Walker has ordered an attack, which explodes around them just as the Doctor was starting to persuade the Sea Devil leader. The Doctor escapes, frees the submarine crew and goes back to the Naval base, but the Sea Devils attack and take over. The Master gets the Doctor to help him build a device to wake up the Sea Devils, and both Time Lords are taken back to the Sea Devils' underwater base. The Doctor has sabotaged the device, though, and after giving the creatures one more opportunity to seek a peaceful solution, which they refuse, he allows it to be set off. The Doctor and Master escape just before the Sea Devil base explodes, and are picked up by a Navy hovercraft. When everyone else is back on shore, the Master hijacks the hovercraft and escapes.

Context:

Watched an episode a day with a break or two over the course of around one week in October 2021. This followed a longer than usual gap after watching the last story for the blog, which may have had something to do with my catching up finally with Squid Game on Netflix in the interim (it's a good show, but it's no The Sea Devils!). Watching from the DVD, though the restoration work is very good, there's still an appreciable lift in picture quality for the latter three episodes, for which the original videotape masters exist (the first three are converted from the NTSC format). Members of the household joined me for different episodes, but no one managed to go the whole distance - six-parters can be a bit of an endurance test for the younger generation even when spread out across a week. The youngest (girl of of 9) was around most watching the first two episodes before getting a bit bored, but rejoining me for the end. She was very pleased with herself when she predicted how the action would play out a few times. When the two workers alone on the sea fort heard a noise, she said "You're going to get killed. Probably". As the cliffhanger for episode one was approaching (the Doctor and Jo hearing someone or something approaching them), she said "It'll be the man who escaped - he survived" and looked very smug next episode when it did indeed prove to be the case. Her eldest brother (boy of 15) only commented to wonder why the prison staff's vehicles didn't have doors, and I had to admit that I hadn't the foggiest.

First Time Round:

For six weeks starting in March 1992, BBC2 showed a repeat of The Sea Devils. It was the third of a series of repeats, one per Doctor, that had kicked off at the beginning of the year with The Time Meddler. The Sea Devils hadn't yet come out on VHS, so it was an exciting opportunity to see some new (to me) Doctor Who during the so called "Wilderness Years" period when the show was not being made as a regular ongoing concern by the BBC. I was at university in Durham at this point, armed with blank tapes, and would go to my friend Mike's room at 6.50pm-ish on each Friday evening to watch with him, and use his recorder (Mike was blessed to have a single room and his own TV and VCR) to make a copy of each episode to rewatch (until the official VHS came out and replaced my home-made copy later in the 1990s). This was a time before most people had access to other fans and series news on the internet, so I was somewhat surprised and miffed when the repeats season abruptly stopped after the Sea Devils had concluded. The story for the fourth Doctor Tom Baker would not be broadcast until January the following year. I must have watched that copy of The Sea Devils four or five more times in the next couple of years. A repeat of any Who was such a rare event at that point, and made such a proportional impact compared to the volume of my Who collection, which consisted then only of the few titles released   on official VHS, and the few more I'd taped from the TV in the late 1980s. As such, The Sea Devils has always held special place in my fan affections - a little extra gift from the scheduling gods.

Reaction:

Malcolm Hulke, writer of The Sea Devils, was the dependable workhorse of the Pertwee era, commissioned for six episodes per year like clockwork. Generally, his were the stories with deeper political themes than other Doctor Whos, dealing with colonialism, the impacts of multinational corporations, media manipulation of wars, etc. In his first story for Pertwee, Doctor Who and the Silurians (the only time he got to write a story longer than six episodes) he'd turned the tables on the invaders from outer space format, creating a race of reptiles that invaded from within the Earth, and - having ruled the planet long before humans - had a claim to the planet that gave rise to interesting discussions within the plot. The Silurians story looked at colonialism from a different angle, highlighted scientific and bureaucratic blindness, touched on the struggle between war and peace, the paranoia of a particularly cold war version of the dislike of the unlike, and lots more besides. The Sea Devils, a sequel to that story, dispenses with all that, dials down the nuance and just goes for action and adventure. It is the Hulke script that comes closest to - for example - Robert Holmes's way of working: no nonsense, no deeper theme, just thrills and spills. And it works a treat.

Particularly helpful to this are the monsters themselves. The only issue is the difficulty in naming them (Silurians is wrong, Eocenes is wrong, Sea Devils is just the rambling of one person in shock after being attacked), and it's a confusion that continues to this day (Homo Reptilia is super wrong). Otherwise, they are great: great masks, great vocal performances delivering their lines in a whisper, and - even though it was a relatively last minute decision as they looked too 'nude' to director Michael E Briant - the string vest costumes they wear are iconic. The early episodes do the traditional Doctor Who trick of holding off from the full monster reveal for as long as possible, just showing glimpses of a hand here and there. The big build up leads to the sequence where one Sea Devil emerges from the sea at the cliffhanger ending of episode 3. In my memory before this watch, and I'll gamble I'm not the only one, this was a whole group of Devils emerging all at once, but that happens (a couple of times) in the next episode, and isn't a cliffhanger; it is nonetheless an enduring image of early 1970s Who up there with shop window dummies coming to life, or giant maggots wriggling about on a coal heap. In general, Briant and crew shoot the Monsters well throughout, and get some good shots elsewhere too. I love the overhead shot of the ladder in the fort that various characters descend, for example. The sound design, with echo and metallic footfalls added, shouldn't be overlooked either, in selling the reality of these scenes.

Another key factor in the story's favour is the input of the Royal Navy. The production gets the most bang for their buck from what the RN provide, with hardware, stock footage and personnel all used to great effect. The final episode, which is mostly just a set of action set pieces utilising these resources, even features a hovercraft - I think the first of the Pertwee era, but it would not be the last. There's stunts and explosions and someone doing a fall from a height. There's a charmless civil servant character (the odious, food-obsessed Walker), there's lots of tinkering to build electronic devices, which then blow things up. The phrase "reverse the polarity of the neutron flow" is said by the Doctor for the first time. It would be archetypal if it weren't for the absence of UNIT. It's essentially the same structure as a UNIT story, though, just with blue uniforms instead of green ones; Captain Hart takes the Brigadier role, and Blythe "lays on" sandwiches and tea. No disrespect to Nicholas Courtney and the boys, but it's refreshing to do something different, and the Naval characters are all good - the submarine crew, for example, featuring early performances by recognisable actors Donald Sumpter and David Griffin. Colonel Trenchard is another in Hulke's line of misguided patriots, but - in keeping with the reduction of nuance throughout - he's a less complex character than his others, such as Major Baker in The Silurians. It's difficult to see how he could have been fooled quite so thoroughly by the Master except to assume that he's very stupid (and Clive Morton pretty much plays him as such, but it's still very watchable).

The three regulars are all on fine form too. Pertwee doesn't have any moments of charmlessness that sometimes creep in (though he does steal all Jo's sandwiches, the cad); the script and the performances of him and Katy Manning are gently sending things up just a little, the series now exuding confidence in its winning set-up. Roger Delgado is magnificent throughout, and The Sea Devils is a definite contender for the best Master story of this period. He even gets to have a swordfight with the Doctor, in a fun scene. His best moment is joshing with Trenchard that he believes the characters in the kid's TV show The Clangers on his cell's TV are real - just look at Delgado's impression as the Master turns away from Trenchard after realising the duffer doesn't realise he's joking. There's also great location work filmed in the Isle of Wight, and there's great model work (so realistic was this that the production got into trouble with the Ministry of Defence who thought they must have seen top secret plans for a new propeller). And there's fantastic music by Malcolm Clarke. This is a contentious view, as many dislike the experimental all-synthesised score but they're all wrong: it's perfect, in keeping with the action, and rarely obtrusive. So there!

 

Connectivity: 

Both this story and The Rebel Flesh / The Almost People feature action set on an island with a repurposed old building (a castle as prison in the Jon Pertwee story, a monastery - though actually filmed at a castle - as acid processing facility in the Matt Smith one). 

Deeper Thoughts:

The Paradise of Death. In the early 1990s, Jon Pertwee became the current Doctor again. After The Sea Devils repeat on BBC2 (see First Time Round section above), some clever methods were devised of restoring the colour to his stories only held in broadcast standard as black and white film copies, and he was on telly again in another repeat that had had this treatment (The Daemons in the autumn on BBC2). The following year, one of his stories was chosen as the repeat shown to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Doctor Who, on BBC1 no less. Even the tie-in Children in Need sketch around the same time, in which he featured heavily, was introduced by him in costume and in character. From all the available evidence, any Earth reptile awakening after hibernation would have thought that Pertwee was the incumbent. He looked like he was loving it too, which was great to see. At around this time, the third Doctor also featured in Doctor Who episodes that weren't second-hand. In August and September of 1993, BBC Radio 5 broadcast five weekly audio episodes of a story called The Paradise of Death, written by Pertwee's 1970s television producer, Barry Letts, and directed by Phil Clarke (later a successful television comedy producer). Returning with Pertwee were Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith, and Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier, and it had a good guest cast including Harold Innocent and Peter Miles. I remember the excitement of sitting waiting for the first episode, poised to record it onto a cassette; I'd forgotten this, but Wikipedia tells me the story started on my birthday. By the time the fourth and fifth episodes went out, I had much less enthusiasm, and it wasn't because it was no longer my birthday.

I never bought the story on CD when it was reissued this century, such was my indifference towards it. I did recently however - prepare for the contradictions of the collector's mindset - shell out a reasonable amount of money for the story in paperback form. It didn't count (at least in my mind) as a CD to collect, as I only collect missing televised story audios; the book, though, plugged the final gap in my Target collection. This was the run of paperback novelisations published on the Target imprint throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and now I own at least one copy of them all! I'd collected all the titles over the years except three from the early 90s that were harder to come by. In 1991, there were almost no titles left to writet hat didn't have complications blocking their inclusion in the Target range, and a new range of original novels (the Virgin New Adventures, or VNAs) featuring the Sylvester McCoy Doctor (who the publishers insisted was the current one, despite everyone else knowing it was Jon Pertwee) had started. As something of an afterthought, though, three novelisations came out a few years later, well into the run of VNAs. The first two were adaptations of the two Patrick Troughton Dalek stories, which I recently bought, read and reviewed in the Deeper Thoughts section of this blog post. The final one of the three, the last one of the range until it was resurrected this century, Target Library number 156, and the final book I had left to complete my collection, was Barry Letts's prose version of The Paradise of Death. It was published in early 1994, when I had finals looming and not enough cash to collect Doctor Who books (mainly because I spent it all on Doctor Who videos). 

The story sees the Doctor and Brigadier investigating a new space themed amusement park on Hampstead Heath where a body has been found killed by something not of this Earth. Sarah, seeking a scoop, tags along accompanied by a colleague from Metropolitan magazine, Jeremy Fitzoliver, an upper class twit added to the regular cast to make mistakes, get into trouble and twist his ankle. The amusement park is run by the Parakon Corporation, whose sadistic Vice Chairman Tragen had an intruder killed by one of his pet monsters, hence the body. The corporation are trying to negotiate a business deal with world leaders using the soft power of their Experienced Reality (ER) technology - immersive first-person movies where you feel the feelings of the protagonists - showcased in the amusement park. They are running a kind of intergalactic pyramid scheme. The Earth would plant a wonder crop called rapine that can be used for everything from buildings to food, providing a percentage of that crop back to Parakon, and for a while everyone would be in paradise enjoying their ER. But rapine rapidly makes the land in which it is planted barren, leaching the nutrients from the soil, and more and more fertiliser is needed to get it to grow. The planet would have dwindling growing space eventually, and fall into wars (for which the Parakon corporation would sell them arms), and finally the wounded and the refugees would be rounded up by the corporation and turned into fertiliser for another planet not as far through the grim cycle. Sarah is investigating in the amusement park and finds herself trapped aboard a spaceship that heads back to Parakon. The Doc, Brig and Jeremy chase after her in the TARDIS, and piece all of this backstory together.

On Parakon, the kindly President is oblivious to what his planet's corporation is up to, and won't easily be persuaded as the Chairman of the corporation is his son Freeth. Luckily, our heroes, reunited with Sarah, find a resistance group and manage to defeat the baddies and show the president evidence, and he halts the work of the corporation (well, we have to assume he does, as the story ends before all that tedious clearing up); he's even okay when his son gets killed. Tragen is killed also. Sarah had become smitten with one of the president's guards, Waldo, but he's killed too and she's sad. The End. It's quite a lot of plot, firing off in a lot of directions. In a way, it serves as a greatest hits of Pertwee's era, apt for the anniversary year in which it was broadcast. The aliens bearing gifts that are too good to be true echoes The Claws of Axos, and the image of a spaceship landing on Hampstead Heath is lifted from an early draft of the Axos story. The material going into the politics of corporations and colonialism is very like the work of Malcolm Hulke, and the spirituality versus capitalism message is very like Letts's own stories for Pertwee writing with Robert Sloman. The creature in the latter part that will follow the scent of its (human) prey forever until it catches up is like the Drashigs in Carnival of Monsters. There's also the Doctor crooning his Venusian lullaby one more time, and the polarity of the neutron flow gets reversed at one point.

In some ways, though, it departs from the Pertwee era, particularly tonally. Sarah's crush on Waldo, for example, does not fit well nor feel right to me; it would have worked for Jo Grant's character but Sarah Jane never displayed any romantic inclinations towards any characters in the whole of her time on the show. It goes beyond romantic, too, there's a passage of her thoughts as she admires the shape of Waldo's bum! This and a few other moments more earthy in outlook would be more at home in the VNAs than in a Target novelisation. It was written, as mentioned above, in a time of transition between the two ranges and has the page count of a VNA, substantially thicker than the Targets of old. A few months after its publication, another Virgin range started, the Missing Adventures, original novels for the six Doctors before McCoy. It might have been better to save The Paradise of Death a while so it could have been part of that range (the radio play sequel to Paradise, The Ghosts of N-Space, was novelised and published a few years later as a Missing Adventure). One tonal problem with the radio series is solved when rendered into prose, though. There's a tendency because one's doing fantasy on the wireless to make all the vistas and creatures bigger and stranger than they possibly could be if created in a Television Centre studio. I think this is the wrong call, and that radio plays work much better when they are localised and intimate. Otherwise you suffer from dialogue like "Oh my goodness look at that giant creature swooping down toward me, it looks like a bat but it's six-foot tall and orange" and the radio version of Paradise suffers a bit from that. In a book, though, it works fine.

There are a few more quibbles: the story might have done better to just concentrate on taking the dangers of ER to a logical conclusion (as it seems to be about to do in the earlier part of the story) or have the rapine gift in from the beginning instead of ER: as it is, the story switches in the middle and the dangers of ER aren't dwelt on in the second half of the story. There's also a bit of a judgemental pious tone about people enjoying violent entertainment that suggests that it leads to violence, which I don't believe is the case. The hippy resistance characters are quite dull, and learning their backstory slows down the latter part of the action. Plus, the ending is quite abrupt: the villains are killed and everything put right in the last two pages. All told, though, I enjoyed it much more than expected, and greatly more than the radio play. It wasn't a bad way to finish off my Target collecting, something I've been doing even longer than I have been collecting Doctor Who on video or shiny disc. The end of all that has felt a bit abrupt too. I'm not going to be tempted to start collecting the New Adventures, though; life's too short.

In Summary:

Atypical (given the replacement of UNIT with the Navy) but nonetheless traditional Pertwee action fare.

The Rebel Flesh / The Almost People

Chapter The 205th, where it's double trouble for the Doctor and friends as they are ganged up on by Gangers.

Plot:

The Doctor is going to drop Amy and Rory off to get fish and chips, as he's clearly up to something, probably related to the inconclusive pregnancy scan he is covertly doing on Amy (which was well dodgy, looking back, wasn't it?). Before he can, a solar tsunami hits the TARDIS bringing it down in a 22nd century military facility situated in a 13th century island monastery. The five person crew there are pumping acid off the island. The hazards of the work are mitigated by their operating avatars of themselves, while they sit safe in remote harnesses. The avatars are made of a programmable matter known as "flesh". When another shockwave hits the island, it knocks everyone out, and makes the flesh avatars, or Gangers (short for doppelgänger; avatar is just as short, of course, but maybe that name was already taken somehow) self aware and self-controlling. With all the same memories and feelings as their respective human, including for their loved ones back home, there's a real moral quandary to face about how each pair can co-exist, but the Gangers are not yet stable. Jennifer's Ganger is particularly unstable; her human version is already dead, and this version seems intent on starting a war with the humans. The tsunami has made the facility too dangerous to stay in, and they need to evacuate it, but people don't know exactly who is who, and that goes for Who too. The Doctor, after a close encounter with the flesh vat earlier, has also been duplicated.

Amy doesn't trust the copied Doc (who she can tell apart from the original as they are wearing different shoes, the Doctor she arrived with having had an accident with some acid that melted his usual ones). The Doctors work together to try to calm the situation down and get everyone to safety. A lot of people, in both forms, get killed, including Ganger Jennifer, who transforms into a monster towards the end somehow. The Doctors switched shoes early on as a test for Amy; she unwittingly lets the original know hes going to die in Lake Silencio. The TARDIS team, two Gangers and one original escape in the TARDIS, each of their respective doubles having been destroyed (conveniently side-stepping the moral quandary). Ganger Jimmy has to take on parenting of his son; Cleaves and Ganger Dicken go to their HQ to blow the whistle on the dubious use of the Flesh. Ganger Cleaves and Ganger Doctor get dissolved, as they've bravely stayed on to ensure the facility blows up and Jennifer is finished off. Back on the TARDIS, the Doctor reveals that Amy is really a Ganger and has been since being kidnapped before they visited America. He turns the Ganger Amy to goo, which is a bit harsh really given everything they've learned. The real Amy wakes up on Demons Run, and she's just about to give birth. To Be Continued.

Context:

This time, after several stories watched on my own, I was joined by the younger two of my three children (boy of 12, girl of 9) as we watched the episodes from the series 6 Blu-ray box set on a Sunday afternoon in October 2021. Surprisingly, they weren't sated by watching the first episode as I'd expected, so we watched the second straight away at their insistence, rounding off the Ganger plot. Of course, the second episode of this story also ends on an intriguing cliffhanger, but the middle child remembered how A Good Man Goes to War played out sufficiently to explain it to his sister, and they were happy not to watch further.

First Time Round:

I usually can't remember anything about watching Matt Smith stories for the first time, except the general descending rollercoaster feeling of high hopes being disappointed, either greatly or slightly. This one, though, I can remember a few things. This is a shame in a way, as usually when I can't remember in these situations I've been able to share an unconnected anecdote. I could have told you about starting at university, which - coincidentally - is 30 years ago pretty much to the day as I write this. I travelled up from the south coast of the UK to Durham, taking the InterCity from (I assume, I wish I had a clear memory of it) London King's Cross, with my school friend and fellow Doctor Who fan Zahir (mentioned previously a few times on the blog). We both had plans to write sketches for the Durham Revue, and - at least for me, can't speak for how serious Zahir was taking it - to become professional writers. We had lots of fun that day and thereafter (I remember alighting from the train in Durham station singing "We're getting educated in the morning, ding dong the bells are gonna chime" - it was fun for me at least, I can't speak for those around me). On the way up, I had mentioned that there was a Doctor Who convention TARDIS in Durham happening within a few days of term starting, which I was tempted to scrape together the money to attend. Zahir thought we'd be too busy studying, and too strapped for cash. I sometimes wonder how I'd have found it if I hadn't listened to him, but I accepted his wisdom at that moment.

Anyway, 20 years on from that, I was something of a professional writer having been paid a couple of times for screenplays that didn't get produced. I had made the acquaintance of Matthew Graham, author of this Doctor Who story, who was something of a mentor. I remember emailing him that this double-parter was very good, but that I preferred his previous story, the generally unloved Fear Her. He replied, telling me jokingly that I was "perverse", but I stand by it. Fear Her is great and underrated. I don't think many of my issues with the Ganger story are with the script, though: my other main memory of that first watch was the trailer at the end of part 1. I remember it (and I felt the same on this recent watch) as a succession of under-lit moments of people shouting. Honestly, watch the trailer: it is various shots of pale people in gloomy spaces going Arggghh Oooh Urggggh Wahhhhh Arggh and such. It's enough to give one a headache. I'm sure they could turn the lights up a bit and not lose atmosphere too. I preferred the sunny, colourful palette of Doctor Who stories from a few years earlier, including Fear Her, so all of series 6 is a bit grey and moody for my taste.

Reaction:

I remember reading an interview with Matthew Graham about his first stint on Doctor Who, when he was in discussions with Russell T Davies before Fear Her was written. I can't find this interview online, so I'm paraphrasing, but Graham said he had lots of ideas with deep themes about the nature of existence. Davies stopped him, and asked him how old his son was (at the time, he was seven); Davies then told him to write something his seven-year-old son would like. On his return to the show, working this time with Steven Moffat as showrunner, Graham got a chance to do something more akin to that initial pitch. In between the two, he had of course got to dwell on some similar themes within a genre framework in his co-creations Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes; but, he's still having a good time digging in to some material that's a little less kid-friendly here. The existential angst created by being presented by an exact copy of oneself, complete with memories and feelings, is explored in the quieter moments within the more generous running time afforded by a two-part story. More than his own long-running shows, though, Doctor Who demands immediate thrills and action and cliffhangers, so eventually the philosophising has to go on hold. The difficulties for the characters are side-stepped by the convenience of there being no duplicates of any single person left alive by the end. This isn't a criticism, though, as it couldn't happen any other way. There could be an interesting tale to tell about Mark Bonnar's Jimmy and his life after the action of the story, taking his place in a family while knowing he's not the quote unquote real Jimmy, but this is not the place to tell it.

Bonnar's performance sells some of the subtleties without them needing to be more spelled out, and it's one of the big plusses of this story. The scene where the Ganger Jimmy has to talk to his / his original's child is one of the best of the Matt Smith era, despite a not quite 100% perfect child performance being involved (something that unfortunately tended to impact the productions of Graham's Doctor Who scripts). Pitch perfect, though, this time providing the light relief, is Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes regular Marshall Lancaster as Buzzer. His lines, such as "No need to get poncey - it's just gunge" are well written and delivered. Regulars Matt Smith and Karen Gillan fully commit to the material, exploring the difficulty Amy has dealing with the idea that both original and Ganger Doctors could be the quote unquote real Doctor. Sarah Smart as Jennifer has a more difficult time. Her and Arthur Darvill's Rory character are supposed to form some kind of bond, but the direction doesn't highlight it sufficiently, and so it seems to come from nowhere. There's also the challenge of making her character's descent into villainy and monstrousness believable. The script is clever giving her a traumatic childhood memory, an inbuilt wish to be some other, stronger version of herself. Collectively, writing, direction and performance just about pull it off when she's in humanoid or semi-humanoid form, but believability is stretched to breaking point when Jennifer turns into a CGI monster. Doctor Who being Doctor Who means that there's a pressure for there to be a big monster at the end, but there seems to be no easily discernible reason either why or how Jennifer should mutate in such a way.

In that original conversation with Graham, Davies was not trying to state that Doctor Who couldn't ever do deeper themes of course. It was just that the brief for Fear Her was that it should act as a small stand-alone adventure before that year's explosive and emotional finale; limits were dictated by the position in the season and by the budget available. As such, one can't blame Graham for enjoying being able to go full on Doctor Who in his next script, with monster action and scares and running around creepy tunnels; previously in Fear Her he'd only had "two blokes with a red lamp rattling a wardrobe" as he put it in an interview with Den of Geek around the time of the launch of the Ganger two-parter. The pale slightly unformed versions of the Ganger characters are a great make-up job and very effective in horror moments like the jump cut revealing them as a storm rages. The action is mostly very effective (it can get a bit muddled and hard to follow at times - the geography of the facility is never adequately established as the pace of movement is so frenetic and the lighting so low; this is a minor quibble, though). Another element that Graham gets to deploy that he didn't first time out is the cliffhanger. He gets to do two, and they're both cliff-Gangers if you will as they both revolve around the reveal that someone familiar has been made out of the gunge. The first episode's cliffhanger is interesting because of its inevitability rather than surprise. There have been so many hints building up that the Doctor's Ganger is forming, that it couldn't have caught anyone unawares, but the intrigue of what it's going to be like with two identical Doctors propels the narrative forward into the second part.

The cliffhanger ending of episode two, leading in to the next story written by Steven Moffat, is the one major problem with the Ganger story. The other quibbles above would be completely acceptable on their own, but the imposition of the season's arc narrative on this two-parter fundamentally undermines it. The story, after all, demonstrates that a Ganger copy has just as much right to exist as its original form. The ongoing series, though, can't have two Amy Ponds wandering around (think of the visual effects cost), so when it is revealed that she has been kidnapped and replaced by a Ganger since before the current season started (which, to be fair, is a great twist), the Ganger has to be removed in some way. Graham and Moffat are painted into a corner, and have no choice but to have the Doctor kill the Amy Ganger, something he's spent the two previous episodes saying wouldn't be a nice thing to do. There's an attempt to paper over the cracks with a line for the Doctor "Given what we've learned, I'll be as humane as I can", but it's not enough. To end that way, the entire story leading up to it has got to be changed. A simple way to fix it would be to have the Doctor's researches lead him to be able to start a trace of the signal back to Madame Kovarian (the eye patch lady controlling the Amy Ganger) and for it then to be Kovarian who breaks the link, killing the Amy Ganger (she doesn't need to keep the deception up anymore now Amy's going to give birth, after all).

 

Connectivity: 

Both this story and Arachnids in the UK end with an attempted corporate cover-up; in both, the situation involves new creations that have come about by accident causing difficulty because of human interference. Both stories also mention popular singers (Ed Sheeran, Dusty Springfield).

Deeper Thoughts:

Doctor Who's Bad Company.  I'm not going to moan on about social media again in the Deeper Thoughts section as I did enough of that last time. Just briefly to say that since I posted a blog post last, Doctor Who twitter (and other places, but that's where I saw the fall out) was nonplussed at the decision to do a fake takedown of all the Doctor Who socials as a publicity gimmick, and a few people were disproportionately annoyed about it. Hey-ho. Ignoring that, the issue with social media is that it's so polarising, almost as if one has to hammer one's personality about a bit to make it fit into some pre-conceived slot. I am a bit of a leftie but I don't conform to the stereotype, for example, in despising all big business. I've indeed spent almost all of my working life at the day job employed at big capitalist organisations. Like anything involving lots of people, a large company is a complex system capable of doing awful, but also wonderful things. For some reason, though, in Doctor Who, the complexity is dialled down, and every company depicted in the series that employs more than, say, two people is bad. The contractor company depicted in The Rebel Flesh / The Almost People, which abuses the Gangers and tries to cover up the events at the facility, is just one example but is fairly representative.

I 'm struggling to think of any company in Doctor Who's long history that is featured significantly in a story and portrayed in a positive way. The obvious ones that leap into my mind are the IMC in Colony in Space (willing to commit mass murder for profit), or International Electromatics in The Invasion (subjugating humanity for the Cybermen), or Cybus Industries (doing the same as International Electromatics, but in a parallel universe). Looking at the most recent run of Jodie Whittaker stories last year, the first handful all included at least one company: Lenny Henry's tech company in Spyfall (evil), the tourism company in Orphan 55 (amoral at best), Tesla's company (good, but we only actually see two employees, and the enterprise is doomed to failure), and Edison's Company (many more employees, not nearly so nice). Many stories I've blogged this year (Oxygen, The Sun Makers, Planet of Giants, Dragonfire) have also centred around nefarious corporate shenanigans. Obviously, its not just private companies that are up to no good in the series; very often, military or governmental organisations are infiltrated by villains, or run by people who've gone insane, or both. But the Doctor has happily worked for or with UNIT and Torchwood, at least. What about a commercial company? It wouldn't be a very good look, I guess, for him / her to have an enduring working relationship with an entity that wants to make a profit. The only times I can remember were briefly held stints in a call centre in The Lodger, and a department store in Closing Time. Neither (fictional) company was portrayed in a particularly poor light either, but just two tiny examples in nearly 60 years is not very much.

It's also not just Doctor Who. Science fiction and fantasy does have a tendency only to include companies so that they can be the bad guys. The name of the firm in the Ganger 2-parter, Morpeth Jetsan, has something of the flavour of Weyland Yutani, the big corporation responsible for nasty goings-on in the Alien films and elsewhere. Heroic teams, such as the crew of Star Trek: The Next Generation, have evolved beyond the use of money. Maybe this tells us that genre writers as a breed, indeed maybe all writers, with the pressure of deadlines looming as they type furiously to earn their crust, subconsciously hanker for a time when all money worries are behind them. Maybe all those evil corporations in Doctor Who were just reflections of one particular corporation, the British Broadcasting Corporation, the evil overlords who hold the writers' livelihoods in their power. At the time of writing this, a Friday in the first half of October, that particular corporation has made itself look good at last, for Doctor Who fans at least, as it has finally - after all that mucking about on social media and teasing mentioned above - released a full trailer for the next series of Doctor Who. We only have to wait until Halloween night, the 31st October, to see a brand new episode. Even evil overlords can get it right once in a while.

In Summary:

A great idea and good script, mostly well executed, but let down by an occasional lack of clarity in the direction, and an imposed ending that just doesn't fit.