The God Complex

 

Chapter The 211th, where you've not gotta have faith, you've not gotta have faith, faith, faith-uh...

Plot:

The Doctor, Amy and Rory arrive in what appears to be an empty 1980s hotel, but the walls are moving - separating them from the TARDIS - and each bedroom is filled with a different horror that seems to have been specifically tailored for a particular person. They meet with others that have been brought there against their will: Rita, Howie, and Joe are from Earth, Gibbis is from Tivoli, a planet of mole-like people who pathologically yearn to be subjugated by invading forces. Joe is already possessed by some process that makes him worship a Minotaur creature, also resident. The Doctor sees that the place is designed to evoke fear, so tells everyone to hold on to their deep rooted certainties to keep the fear at bay. Unfortunately, this is the exact opposite of the right tactic, as it is the faith in a higher power invoked by the fear that makes people susceptible. Joe trusts in luck, Howie believes in conspiracy theories, Rita has her Muslim faith; and, one by one, they are taken over and killed, the Minotaur devouring their life force. When Amy starts to come under the influence too, because of her faith in the Doctor, the Doctor has to break her faith in him, Curse of Fenric-stylee, and that interruption in its food supply let's the Minotaur finally die. The hotel disappears to reveal a holodeck-like area where the TARDIS is parked. The creature is one of a race of beings that descend on planets to be worshipped as gods, and was imprisoned by ex-worshipers that turned against him. The rest, the kidnapping and scaring of people to keep him fed, was an automatic process he could not stop. The Doctor drops Gibbis home, then, concerned about Amy and Rory's safety, leaves them on Earth in a nice new flat, and goes off to face his fate at Lake Silencio.  

Context:

As a festive thing, I am watching an episode of the BBC adaptation of John Masefield's The Box of Delights weekly with the whole family (Better Half, boys of 15 and 12, girl of 9) on Sundays, 37 years on to the day from when they were first shown in 1984. The first episode on 21st November (it was a Thursday in 1984), with the final episode planned for Christmas Eve 2021. I watch this serial in the run up to Christmas periodically as a tradition, but - given that the youngest child's age is almost into double figures - this might be the last time we can do it as a family (I didn't expect the eldest to be up for it this time, but he surprised me). With one weekly telly of yore watch ongoing, I didn't want to chance my arm suggesting another. As such, I watched The God Complex on my own later on that Sunday evening after watching the latest episode of Flux earlier, from the Blu-ray disc as part of the series 6 Box set.

First Time Round:

I always find it difficult to remember the details of my first watch of stories of this vintage. The series had been running long enough to become part of the furniture, rather than shiny and new, by Matt Smith's second year, and there was enough going on in my life to distract me. In general, I was still watching with the Better Half on the day of broadcast, time-shifted after putting our then two young children to bed. It would be another year or two before the youngsters were regularly watching new Doctor Who. The only thing of note I can recall was that long before it was shown, a dedicated trailer for the story was available online, before even a glimpse was revealed of the other episodes in this subsection of the series (Matt Smith's second run was split into two with a mid-series gap of a few weeks in the middle). At first, this looked like a big vote of confidence in the story: it must be one of which the producers were very proud if they were trailing it months ahead of broadcast and ahead of the three episodes set to air before. It turned out, though, that the trailer had just been prepared for Comic-Con as the writer Toby Whithouse had been on a panel to talk about it there. 

Reaction:

Despite it not necessarily being thought worthy of being trailed ahead of every other story in series 6 part 2, and it just being a Comic-con related coincidence, I still think this is one of the best of the bunch (not just of the second half, but of all the stories of 2011). Some of those other stories had dabbled in overblown space opera, or got too deep into the intricacies of the human condition, and most had got tangled up in the increasingly convoluted series arc plots. The God Complex just presents a high-concept horror scenario, efficiently and cleanly. It also touches on the overall arc, but just with a well-integrated and significant character moment between Amy and the Doctor at the end. Sometimes less is more, and if The God Complex is simple compared to the stories around it, it is elegantly so. First up, the concept is a strong one, an abandoned hotel with bespoke fears in every room that's really a prison with in-built feeding system for a fake god. This allows for a wide diversity of different tableaux that could appear in each room, some of which get almost Fellini-esque in their gleeful visuals. It also allows for a decent "the Doctor's got it wrong" reversal, when the Doctor realises that it is not fear that the Minotaur at the centre of this labyrinth feeds on, but faith, and that all his advice up to now has been the opposite of what was required. The transformation of each person as their faith gets hijacked is nicely chilling, with the possessed getting a catchphrase "Praise him" as is a tradition in Doctor Who stories (like "Burn with Me" in 42, or "Contact Has Been Made" in classic Who story The Invisible Enemy); as people succumb one by one, obviously and inevitably the ante is upped as one of the regular cast (Amy in this instance) says "Praise Him" towards the end of the story.

The production design to encapsulate this concept is very strong throughout. There's clearly something about the idea of abandoned hotel corridors and rooms, particularly ones with chintzy 1980s decor, that is unsettling. If I remember right, some idea of a story set in an empty hotel was one that had been discussed from around the relaunch of the series in 2005 but never made it to screen before this point. As well as the retro furnishing, there's all the different fears to visualise, and they are all done very well, with the roomful of laughing ventriloquists' dummies being a highlight for me. The design and execution of the Minotaur is impeccable too: this is an aged and weary beast, and that really come across. Its dialogue being whispered groans that only the Doctor can understand and translate is a good choice too. It's a teensy bit clumsy at the end though, when the Doctor translates the creature's dying words about an aged creature drifting through space to whom death would come as a release, and we realise that the creature is talking about the Doctor when the Time Lord slavishly repeats "I wasn't talking about myself". The line just needs to be forced out of him a bit more - he repeats the other stuff, the creature says something else, the Doctor pauses with a sad look, Amy asks what it said and maybe asks again, and finally he tells her. That would work better. It's a minor flaw, though.

Another quibble is with the character of Gibbis, and again it's a minor one. The Tivoli are an interesting race, a planet of space Uriah Heaps, outwardly humble but inwardly calculating. The make-up job is good, and David Walliams (a lifelong Doctor Who fan) is having fun playing him as the cowardly comic relief. It's just that the script then has to hammer the point home of his cowardice being a passive aggressive technique to allow his survival, in a way that Dickens never had to for Uriah. It was already shown, it didn't need to be told too. As well as Walliams, the cast - guest and regular - are on top form, and their talents marshalled well by director Nick Hurran. Matt Smith has some great moments, not least the emotional (temporary) farewell with Karen Gillan as Amy at the end, but also in smaller moments - near the beginning, there's a scene where he's doing the eccentric act (the Doctor I mean, not Matt Smith) and turns in an instant to thoughtful and worried when nobody else can see. Arthur Darvill as Rory does dry humour very well, but also gets a nice moment where he mentions that Howie had previously overcome a stammer, an everyday victory far away from "saving the universe" but nonetheless important. It's nice too that Rory, normally the weak link who's always getting killed, is the one who's immune to the effects of the Minotaur and his prison, and for a similar reason - he believes in simple kindness as a nurse, and doesn't get into anything more high falutin'. It's a bit odd when the Doctor says that this is why the Minotaur prison "kept showing [Rory] a way out", as that only happened once and Rory didn't get to tell anyone about it - I'm assuming this means some moments ended up on the cutting room floor for time.

Best of the guest cast is as Amara Karan as Rita; the character is presented immediately as unflappable and resourceful, with the Doctor joking that she's companion material, so the savvy in the audience know her life expectancy is limited. She has some great moments both serious and sparky / funny ("You're a Muslim." "Don't be frightened."). When her inevitable death comes it's a magnificent scene: she bravely draws danger away from the rest of the party, then begs the Doctor not to watch her fate on the close circuit TV and instead remember her as she was before her dignity was taken away. She faces her final moments "at peace", and then Matt Smith gets to do righteous rage once she's gone (which he does very well too). The story has some nice little nods for fans (linking the Minotaur back to the titular foes in The Horns of Nimon for example) and some links into the overall story of the eleventh Doctor - we see Caitlin Blackwood as little Amelia again, the Doctor looks into his room and sees his greatest fear but the audience is not privy to it, and won't find out what he saw until his swan song story. As well as this, there's great music and good effects work; it's a gem.

Connectivity: 

The God Complex is the third story in a row (following The Myth Makers and The Lazarus Experiment) with a three word title starting with the definitive article and themes taken from writings from antiquity (here it is the legend of the Minotaur in the labyrinth).

Deeper Thoughts:

Nick Fletcher MP's speech; a restrained reaction. Though it doesn't go as far as to say faith is bad exactly, The God Complex does posit that it is dangerous and leaves one open to exploitation. This made me muse on my own faith or lack thereof; I'm probably closest aligned to Rory in this narrative: I have no particular religion or superstition. I suppose I could be seen to be more like Amy in one regard, though, in that I do have a disproportionate amount of admiration for the positive power of the Doctor. Really, of course, I mean Doctor Who the series more than the character. It's a large set of generally well written and well intentioned drama segments, often with a moral position to be accepted or challenged, and it all comes together to form an enriching cultural artefact - no, in fact, more than that, a cultural phenomenon. I truly believe that it makes the lives of those that engage with it just a little bit better; it certainly has for me. Is this faith, though? It's not exactly going to be a faith that's tested too strenuously. Even if one doesn't like it, the worst that one could say about Doctor Who is that it is a bit silly but harmless. Nobody could seriously think that what happens in a family TV show about a benevolent time-travelling alien could possibly have a negative impact on the world. Could they? This would, of course, mean that I would struggle to stretch the topic to make up a few paragraphs of Deeper Thoughts, and would have to think of something else to talk about (Maybe a treatise on why 80s decor is inherently such a good a fit for a horror story? "The long shadow of the Overlook Hotel"? Hmm... needs work.) Praise be, then, when on Thursday 25th November 2021, Nick Fletcher, a Conservative MP in the UK, made a speech in a Westminster Hall debate and suddenly gave me all the material I would need.

A positive role model

It was a speech that - if one is charitable, which I don't see why I should be, but I'll try - was based on a dubious premise. If one isn't inclined to be charitable, one might describe it as batshit crazy. Fletcher's vague thrust was that the dramatic arts (his focus being TV and film) have reduced the number of positive male role models, and - deprived of these - young men have increasingly turned to crime. I know this is demonstrably bobbins even in summary, but I still think it is worth going through the relevant section of his words - words, don't forget that were planned and written in advance, not said off the cuff by someone's crazy uncle in the snug of some pub after a boozy Sunday afternoon - line by line. "There seems to be a call," said he, the Member of Parliament for Don Valley, "From a tiny but very vocal minority that every male character, or good role model, must have a female replacement". Maybe this minority is so tiny that they don't show up in a scan, because: where are they? There's no organisation, no pressure group, not even a discussion forum I've ever seen that has been actively calling for any male character to be recast or rewritten as a woman, let alone all of them. One of the examples he gave was of course the Doctor in Doctor Who, and that's a world I know a great deal about. In all the years since Tom Baker first joked about his replacement potentially being a she - decades in which I have been studiously aware of the minutiae of every aspect of the programme and its fandom - I have never seen any person of any sex or gender orientation ever demand that the Doctor becomes a woman. They might have thought it wouldn't be a bad idea to try, or they might have considered that they'd be pleased if it ever happened, but that's not the same thing. Once it happened, though, I did see a small but vocal minority of fans that whinged on about wanting to turn things back the way they were, but the less said about them the better.

Another positive role model 

Fletcher continues: "One only needs to look at the discussions surrounding who will pay the next James Bond". Which discussions are these? If one googles "Who will play the next James Bond?" the first hit, as anyone who had been following the discourse over recent years would probably have guessed, is about Idris Elba. The next ten hits are lists of the usual suspects. Apart from Elba, there's Henry Cavill, Tom Hardy, Regé-Jean Page, etc. etc. The odd site's article pops a woman onto the shortlist to spice things up a bit, but a concerted campaign it is not. The simple but effective rejoinder to Fletcher would be that the discussions surrounding who will play the next James Bond are silly-season puffery, of no import whatsoever, and maybe shouldn't be a source for a politician's speech even if they said what the politician intimated they said, which they don't. There's more: "And it's not just James Bond, in recent years we have seen Doctor Who, Ghostbusters, Luke Skywalker, The Equaliser, all replaced by women." The sheer desperation of not being able to list four roles without having to scrape the barrel by including The Equalizer is quite something (many people online hadn't even realised that this female-led version existed, so Fletcher might have succeeded in getting it some new viewers). It's an odd mix of titles. The Paul Feig Ghostbusters is five years old now, and famously didn't make sufficient money back to be considered a success. The franchise lurched back to the original cast in a film that was new and in cinemas at the same moment Fletcher was making his speech. So, those particular role models - if they ever were such a thing - are restored to masculinity. The Equaliser is a recast in the relatively low profile series, but in the big Hollywood film version before that (going back a bit, but only two years before the female Ghostbusters flick) it was still a man in the title role.

Fletcher giving the speech, 25th November 2021 

Luke Skywalker didn't get recast, so I'm assuming that Fletcher thinks he's been replaced by Rey. But they're different characters, and they both appear in the Star Wars films together, so how exactly has been Luke been replaced? Is Fletcher upset that Luke isn't the young swashbuckling hero anymore? Putting aside that I'd ideally like my politicians' statements to be several cuts above the level of chatter you get in an online nerd boy forum, the only way for Luke to still be the young hero is if he was played by someone who is not Mark Hamill, a recasting choice that would likely be the only thing less popular in those nerd boy forums than The Last Jedi was. Fletcher continues: "Men are left with The Krays and Tommy Shelby". Where to start? The Krays were real people not characters, why have we suddenly switched? Is there a fictionalised TV series or film about the Krays on at the moment? Legend was 2015, but I suppose that's only a year before the Ghostbusters were last played by women, so maybe he was referring to that. Peaky Blinders hasn't been on TV for over two years either, though it is coming back in 2022. The main thing, though, is that these aren't the only two examples of TV or films around that feature male characters. What about Superman, Batman, Spiderman, Doctor Strange, Sherlock Holmes, Endeavour Morse, Withnail, Marwood? Completely random selection off the top of my head, but none of them has been recast as a woman in a big film or TV series - they are still around as positive role models (it might just be me that sees Withnail that way, but even so I'd pay to see a reboot with two female leads - that could be fantastic).

Some other dummies

Maybe these examples aren't current enough for Fletcher. So, what about the top ten films in the UK at the time Fletcher made the speech? First off, there's the slight embarrassment for him of a James Bond and a Ghostbusters film in there, with the roles being incontrovertibly played by men. There are then a couple of ensemble pieces (The Eternals, The Addams Family 2) which include men in positive lead roles as part of the ensemble. Of the remaining six, only one has a female protagonist (Spencer), and the remaining five (Dune, King Richard, The Boss Baby 2, Venom: Let there Be Carnage, and Ron's Gone Wrong) all have male protagonists and none of them are crime lords. And even if they were, that would not cause a single person watching to turn to crime. Criminals are not made by TV or film. It's seductively easy for politicians to suggest that there is some causal link, because the things that are much more likely to have an impact - poverty, educational under-investment, cuts to council facilities for young people, reduction in police, reduction in health funding including mental health services, etc. etc - are all things for which the government, run by the party of which Nick Fletcher is a part, are responsible. If Fletcher wants positive male role models, he should maybe try to become one, and fight to get that investment flowing again to help the nation's male youth. If he doesn't want to do that, maybe it's time a woman took over his role? 

  

In Summary:

I like it a lot, and as it has some strong roles for women in there it would probably annoy Nick Fletcher MP, and that makes me like it even more.

The Lazarus Experiment

Chapter The 210th, has a professor called Lazarus who comes back from the dead. Nominative determinism in action? You decide.

Plot:

The Doctor returns Martha home after their first few adventures in the past and the future. He's about to depart, leaving her behind, when something on the TV news catches his eye. Professor Lazarus, scientist, 76 - but he looks older - announces an experiment to be held later that day to "Change what it means to be human". Why this information-free teasing press conference about science got on the news in the first place is a mystery; the head of Public Relations for Lazarus's company must be very good. That head of PR turns out to be Martha's sister Tish. This allows the Doctor and Martha to attend the event later that evening, as do Martha's mum and brother. Lazarus has invented a rejuvenating machine, which he demonstrates to the assembled great and good. It turns him from an exceptionally old-looking 76 year old to a youthful 30-something. It also makes him transform into a massive monster who devours everything in sight, because of course it does. The Doctor and Martha save most of the people at the event, and - alongside Tish - corner the Lazarus monster in Southwark Cathedral, where the Doctor uses amplified sound from the cathedral organ to defeat it, unfortunately making Lazarus fall to his death in the process. Afterwards, the Doctor invites Martha to join him in his travels full-time. The mysterious Harold Saxon, the sponsor of Lazarus's work, has one of his minions tell Martha's Mum that the Doctor cannot be trusted and that her daughter is in danger.

Context:

It was a grey and drizzly Saturday in November 2021; the Better Half was away at a friend's birthday party, and the children were amusing themselves. I was on top of my chores, and had nothing particular I had to do that day. For old times' sake, I thought I'd spend the whole day - as I tended to do sometimes in the days before a Better Half or children - binging Doctor Who content. I finally finished the Evil of the Daleks Blu-ray's additional content, watching lots of episodes with commentary, etc. I watched an hour of studio footage of episodes of Sylvester McCoy's first season being made (I'm still working my way slowly through the comprehensive extras on the season 24 Blu-ray box set). There's only so many times in a short period that one can watch McCoy and Bonnie Langford running through scenes over and over, though, so I needed something else. I'd have watched Galaxy 4, but the disc didn't arrive until the Monday despite a teasing email from Amazon telling me it would, followed by another later saying I had to wait. I therefore selected a random story of the remaining 80-odd stories of Who from 1963 to 2020 that I haven't yet blogged, and The Lazarus Experiment - watched from the new series 3 DVD boxset - helped 45 minutes pass happily. I didn't ask the children to accompany me, and none ventured into the living room during my viewing.

First Time Round:

May 2007 was another lifetime ago (see Deeper Thoughts section below for more details), but I can be fairly sure I watched The Lazarus Experiment with the Better Half on the day of its debut BBC1 broadcast on the 5th of that month. It would not have been live, as we had to put our son (less than 1 year old at the time) to bed during Doctor Who's usual Saturday evening slot, but it would have been soon after (and watched from a recording on the PVR). I remember thinking the story was a bit ho-hum at the time. One memorable thing was that it ended (unlike the version on the DVD I watched this time) with a trailer of clips from for all the remaining stories of the series, including tantalising glimpses of Blink, Human Nature, Utopia and The Sound of Drums. The reason for this was that the Eurovision Song Contest was occupying the Saturday schedules the week after Lazarus was shown (the UK's entry was Scooch singing Flying the Flag, with a flight attendant themed routine - if you've forgotten all about it, it's probably for the best). Doctor Who was not returning to Saturday night until the week after that. This was a bit unfair on the next story 42, which was obviously not felt enough of a draw on its own for a trailer of it to encourage people to watch again in two weeks.

Reaction:

I've now reached 210 blog posts in this ongoing journey to cover all of Doctor Who's televised stories; at this rate, I have about three years left before I catch up with what is currently being televised. One of the stories I've yet to grapple with is The Web Planet, an early adventure starring William Hartnell. It's just sitting lurking in the darkness there for me, ready to pounce (it's known to be a bit of a hard watch, but I've not seen it for a good many years). One of the reasons why it might well be a slog (I'm trying to keep an open mind) is that the concept of the story - the Doctor and friends arrive in a world where there are lots of other creatures, but none of them are humanoid, just giant butterflies and ants and grubs - is so ambitious compared to what was possible with the effects expertise of the time that it was very unlikely to be pulled off successfully. This is the sort of pickle one would think that the people in charge of the relaunched show after 2005, with many brains amongst them full of years of classic Doctor Who production knowledge, would have had the sense to avoid. They certainly had their fair share of visual moments that didn't quite work, but they didn't ever attempt something that was clearly impossible even just on the page. Except maybe The Lazarus Experiment. A story of someone who looks like he's achieved the feat of making himself many years younger but then turns into a monster is so dependent on the quality of the trickery (be it in the realm of casting, or - as it is here - make-up) to show a character old and then young. It has to be 100% convincing or the foundation of the drama is not a fit support: maybe that should have given everyone pause.

Mark Gatiss (one of the few people to have both starred in and written for Doctor Who) is great in the title role, and is a distinctive performer anyway; so, I can see why they didn't want to address the challenge by casting another actor as the older Lazarus. That means the only option is to make him up as older. It would be a good make-up job if the character was aged in his late 80s or early 90s, but not the 76 years old the script explicitly states him to be. Lazarus would have had to have had an impossibly hard life to look so much older than his years, and this damages the narrative (he looks like he'd be an insurance liability working in any laboratory). To be fair to the talented people on the production crew who achieved this look, mid-70s is a much harder age to achieve with powder and latex, there's more latitude if one skews older. The trouble is that the aged Lazarus has many scenes where he's in a two-shot with (an excellent) Thelma Barlow as Lady Thaw. Barlow was just older than 76 at the time of filming, but looks 15 years younger than the character opposite her. Maybe this wouldn't matter later on in the piece, as the aged to youthful transformation is near the beginning, but unfortunately that less than successful effect is replaced by another - the CGI Lazarus monster. Again, the artistry is not in question, it's how it fits in with the narrative. It's just about plausible that there's a scorpion-like evolutionary throwback unlocked in the professor's DNA by his machine, but the monster is a vastly different mass to the professor. It would make more sense, and be more effective, to have a gradual transformation with Lazarus getting larger and larger the more people he consumes. This would be more difficult to realise, and therefore more expensive, though.

Putting these two fairly major reservations about how it's depicted to one side, the story itself is solid enough. Since the return in 2005, the series had never done a mad scientist story, and in those days executive producer and lead writer Russell T Davies seemed always on the look out for new hooks. The inspiration for the style seems to have come wholesale from Marvel Comics and in particular the contemporaneous Sam Raimi Spiderman films (the final one of these, Spiderman 3, was in cinemas when The Lazarus Experiment was first shown); Lazarus's experiment on himself echoes scenes of William Dafoe as the Green Goblin in the first Spiderman film, for example. And you don't get characters called Professor Lazarus or Lady Thaw in realistic drama, after all. It's not a source that Who had regularly plundered, so it was a refreshing change and brought some energy. The other major source that writer Stephen Greenhorn had assimilated was one much more commonly used by Doctor Who: Quatermass, and specifically The Quatermass Experiment (which the story's title even riffs on), a story that has a character transform (gradually in that instance, but the 1950s serial had a longer running time to allow that) into a monster that at the denouement finds itself occupying a religious London landmark. It's nice to see Southwark Cathedral namechecked as it is one of my absolute favourite places, though the interiors were filmed in Wells (much nearer to Who's base of production in Cardiff).

The other interesting aspect to the story is the parts that move along the series character arcs; they don't overwhelm the narrative and are mostly effective. The brief mentions of the mysterious Harold Saxon are intriguing enough to set us up for events to come. The Doctor and Martha work well together, analysing samples and being brave and all that. As such, it seems particularly cruel that in the beginning the Doctor appears that he's just going to dump Martha back on Earth after their initial adventures. He takes her on properly at the end of the story (and she gets her TARDIS key in the next story, 42); he even says then that she was "never really just a passenger". If so, why were you being such a dick at the beginning, Doctor? Ultimately, he's not got over Rose, but I think - after five stories in a row without Billie Piper - the audience is over her enough that they shouldn't have still been hitting that note. As a counterpoint to Rose's single parent upbringing, Martha's been established with a large, busy, noisy family. Unfortunately, that means there's often not enough for all of them to do. The now mega-famous Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Tish gets the spotlight and gives a great performance (Doctor Who of this era was good at casting newcomers who would go on to bigger things; the last story featured an early turn from Andrew Garfield, who'd later go on to play Spiderman). Adjoa Andoh gets some good material being suspicious of the Doctor, and creating a nice callback gag as he gets slapped by his companion's mother again. But Reggie Yates as brother Leo doesn't get anything to do at all, and essentially disappears from the series after this point (bar a tiny cameo in the final two-parter of the series).

Connectivity: 

The Lazarus Experiment and The Myth Makers both contain references to writings from antiquity (the Bible and the Iliad respectively).

Deeper Thoughts:

"Some people live more in twenty years than others do in eighty", sayeth the Doctor. It would probably not make sense to someone younger, I doubt it would make sense to my younger self - or selves - if I'd been told, but as one gets on in years, one lives several lifetimes and some get forgotten. Long-term readers (Hi Mum!) have seen me castigate myself on occasion in these writings for my inability to sustain the keeping of a diary for any length of time during my younger years; had I been able to do this, I would have had some connection with the day-to-day working of my days long gone that might help me to remember them. The only exception is blogging, which I've done consistently since 2015 here, and in a previous blog about my screenwriting in the decade before, which I was keeping up to date at the time of The Lazarus Experiment's broadcast. I looked there for posts around the time of the 5th May and a few days before watching the Doctor Who story I'd attended a showcase screening of a short film that I'd written, for which I'd got Film Council funding, and which later would be shown at Cannes. I had a film shown (not in competition, but still) at Cannes. And I'd completely forgotten. I go into more detail about this phenomenon in the (slightly indulgent, forgive me) Deeper Thoughts section of the Blink blog post last year, but it is not isolated just to that period of my life. I was a rubbish parent at that point, for example; I'm much better (but not perfect) now.

Around 2009, after three years of very focussed efforts in screenwriting (and several more years that were less focussed but still committed before that); I essentially gave up being a screenwriter alongside the day job to take up a different second profession as an engaged parent instead. The little primary school boy who stumbled across a black and white Doctor Who story on BBC2 in 1981 was a university student less than a decade later. The baby being put to bed by myself and the Better Half before we settled down to watch The Lazarus Experiment is now taking his GCSEs. It's not just the passage of time, though, but also how one's interest and focus changes with that progression. In 1991, I was - and many people will attest to this - one of the laziest students known to higher education. A decade later, I was a professional working in the City of London in a suit and tie. University friends would come to see me for lunch just to witness this, as if I were a freak show exhibit: the amazing transforming man. I'm not saying I'm anything special, either. I contain multitudes, both in my present and my past. But think on that for a second. I am a person who has spent, or - if you want to be judgemental about it - wasted hours and hours, and days and days, watching Doctor Who and Doctor Who special features (including scrolls of footage of people trying to hit their marks making Paradise Towers or Dragonfire, as mentioned above). If even I contain multitudes, we all do.

The Doctor says in the Lazarus Experiment that "Some people live more in twenty years than others do in eighty" but I think everyone lives about the same, whether they want to or not. Life is like that, it can't be lived in a vacuum: lives collide with other lives, sometimes clashing, sometimes rebounding and flying off on new tangents. It's inevitable. Ultimately, then, I don't buy the central character premise of story (and it's not really the fault of the makers, as it's a common trope) that a single monomaniacal obsession can drive a person's life, or that a single traumatic memory - like Lazarus's memories of the London Blitz - can colour behaviour nearly 70 years later. It's a gross over-simplification of how a person's life - or lives plural - work. I think that if one were to want to extend one's life in such a way it would be because of life's plurality not its singularity. Single-mindedness is unsustainable over decades. If a machine giving eternal youth is ever created, my bet would be on it being invented by a younger person not yet grown out of that focussed obsessional phase similar to the one I was in as a screenwriter for those few years. Older men and women would be tempted to use it I'm sure; would I? Knowing how life would change and develop, I'd fear missing out, but obviously things change and develop because we age, and because life is finite, so it would probably ultimately be self-defeating. If not, and we keep going, and keep living different lives forever, it would be a lot of deaths to endure rather than just one; so maybe forgetting would be better. Maybe it was better not to keep a diary after all.

I will probably come back to this topic and dwelling on my own mortality when The Woman Who Lived comes up randomly for the blog, as it touches on a lot of these themes. To be honest, I'll probably be dwelling on my own mortality (maybe wishing for death) when The Web Planet comes up randomly (I'm trying to keep an open mind). Watch this space.

In Summary:

It's nice to see the show trying a Marvel Comics style Mad Scientist story, but this set up too high an expectation on the effects and make-up work to sell it fully.

The Myth Makers

Chapter The 209th, has two for the price of one, covering the newly animated Galaxy 4 as well as the Doctor and friends' subsequent Trojan trip.

Plot:

[The plot of Galaxy 4, as well as lots of other details about the story and my reaction to it as an audio / reconstruction is already available in the blog post on the story from last year. For the write up of the BFI event, and the animated version, scroll down to the Deeper Thoughts section below.] Immediately following their adventure on an exploding planet near but possibly not in Galaxy 4, the Doctor, Steven and Vicki arrive outside the besieged walls of the city of Troy around 1184 BC. The Doctor, followed shortly by Steven, ventures out; both end up captured by the Greeks and taken to their camp meeting Achilles, Odysseus, Menelaus and Agamemnon. Meanwhile, the TARDIS is found by the Trojans and - with Vicki inside - taken in to Troy where she meets Priam, Paris and Cassandra. The last of these believes Vicki to be a spy or a witch or both, but Vicki is able to charm Priam for a while. He doesn't like the name Vicki, so dubs her Cressida. As Vicki has taken a shine to another Trojan, the young Troilus, that renaming is pretty handy in a dramatic irony type of way (dramatic irony in an Ancient Greek Tragedy, whatever next?!).

Odysseus puts the Doctor to work on a plan to break the siege; Steven disguises himself as a Greek soldier and engineers a situation where Paris can capture him and bring him into Troy. His plan is to rescue Vicki, but unfortunately he just ends up getting both of them imprisoned. Meanwhile, the Doctor - after trying to avoid the inevitable for a while - gives the Greeks the idea for the Trojan Horse. When the Greeks appear to have fled the field, the Trojans - apart from Cassandra - put this down to Vicki / Cressida bringing them good luck and she is released (and she then secretly frees Steven). Paris brings a giant wooden horse - in which Odysseus and the Doctor, as well as many Greek soldiers, are hiding  - into the city. The Greeks sneak out, open the gates and let the rest of their army in. Troy is sacked and almost all the Trojans massacred. Steven gets injured, but escapes in the TARDIS with the Doctor and one of Cassandra's handmaidens Katarina. Vicki decides to stay behind with a similarly injured Troilus.

Context:

Sunday 7th November 2021 was a crisp, bright autumn day, and I was travelling by train to London for the BFI Southbank screening of the animated Galaxy 4 (see Deeper Thoughts section below). I had anticipated that the event and the animation itself would be worth blogging about, but had already covered Galaxy 4 last year; so, I overrode the random selection of stories and selected this neighbouring story to blog next, so that I could cover both here. Despite the one episode in between where the action cuts away, if you will, to some Dalek shenanigans, The Myth Makers follows on directly from the Drahvin / Rill dust-up for our heroes (Vicki's ankle, twisted at the end of Galaxy 4 is still injured when the TARDIS lands outside Troy). I listened to the first couple of episodes of the BBC audio version of The Myth Makers, with narration by Peter Purves, on my journey up. The trains were a bit disrupted by engineering works that day, though, so I saved my phone's battery on my way home, and didn't finish the story that day. The following Monday saw me back at the day job until the afternoon, then making the kids their tea, then watching the latest episode of Flux that I'd missed while at the event. After that, I was too knackered to listen to any more of The Myth Makers, and went to bed. I finished my listen on the Tuesday. It would be good for the BFI events to return to Saturdays, so exhausted oldsters like me can get a day to recover from the excitement!

First Time Round:

I was a somewhat sickly child, and lazy. There were four different times that I had a multiple night stay in the children's ward of a local hospital, as my asthma was very bad. But, as I could never maintain the keeping of a diary for more than a few weeks during childhood, I have scant detail of when they exactly were. I have a clear memory, though, of one stay (I think in Southlands Hospital in Shoreham-by-Sea) having the Target novelisation of this story to read, which cheered me up no end. The novel differs from the televised story quite a bit, as it features Homer - the poet, not the Simpson - getting involved in the action, and is framed as his retelling of the events sometime afterwards. It's my favourite Target book, wittier and more interesting than the TV version, with a striking cover illustration by Andrew Skilleter. This must have been after September 1985 when the book was first published. I went into hospital after an asthma attack a few months later in December of 1985 (see First Time Round section of the Night Terrors blog post earlier this year for details), and I'm almost 100% sure that wasn't the stay where I read The Myth Makers  - I was in a Chichester hospital that time, and was rushed there in an ambulance; I didn't have the book with me, nor do I remember asking anyone to bring it for the couple of days I was kept in. I don't think I went into hospital twice in quick succession in the autumn / winter of 85 either. As such, I suspect that I read it sometime in 1986 when ill again on a different occasion. This would fit with the normal lag time after a book was published before I could obtain it. I didn't have a huge amount of pocket money, and access to the books in shops immediately after their release was not a given, as distribution could be erratic. Many years later, I would have listened to the audio version (probably very soon after its release in January 2001 - distribution and my finances being much better by then), but the prose version is the default in my heart.

Reaction:

In a clip that went viral recently of UK quiz show Tipping Point, two contestants both answer a question about what Homer described in his epic poems as "the food of the gods" with the answer "Donuts". The social media reaction to the clip in some quarters felt to me to be a bit sneering and downward-punching; if one watches the longer clip, the male contestant is read the question again and realises that he jumped to the wrong conclusion in the heat of the moment, with the stress of being on a national TV show. It does demonstrate, though, that the myths and legends of the Ancient Greeks are not necessarily leaping to the forefront of people's imaginations these days. I wasn't alive to know whether that was different in 1965, but my feeling is that these things had a bit more currency then, perhaps, but not much more than now. Doctor Who in the 20th century never had another full story set as far back in history as The Myth Makers (it had dabbled with pre-history in its first story, and had very brief interludes set in ancient Egypt and Atlantis later on, but that was about it). In the 21st century too, the show has shied away, with only a trio of visits to ancient Rome or its empire outposts, and these all set in years Anno Domini, more than 1000 years after the events of The Myth Makers. The reason is probably the obvious one: how is anyone watching to identify with these characters? One approach would be to play it straight and depict the characters as per the legend; this would risk being a bit po-faced. The other option is to do what The Myth Makers does, in the same way as a later historical comedy Blackadder was to do, and depict the characters with modern manners and mores.

It's a fun idea on paper, and individual character moments amuse, like the bored Menelaus who doesn't particularly want Helen back, or the cowardly Paris always trying to evade any danger. Every performance is on the large side, though. The initial scenes are a hell of a jolt as one hears the guest characters start speaking. It is very stagey, and in the case of some characters (e.g. Ivor Salter as Odysseus) declamatory to the point of shouting out each line. This was clearly a stylistic choice, but the level of artifice is so high that it detracts from the intent to humanise / modernise these age old characters. If one reimagines Blackadder as a very loud panto, you get close to the tone of The Myth Makers. This is doubly a problem when it comes to the climax of the story when everyone starts getting killed. Am I supposed to care or not when many of the characters I've been smiling about (I don't think the script is going for laugh out loud funny) are suddenly being massacred? Am I supposed to be shocked when characters I've been watching lark about for three episodes are suddenly plunging swords into people? Or it could just be a theatrical flourish to round off the action: la commedia e finita! The almost Brechtian alienation of the staging and characterisation, and the tonal shift between lighter and darker material brings to mind some kind of experimental 1960s theatre production. This might not be a coincidence.

Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida is similarly known for tonal shifts, and there are little nods to that play (biggest amongst them that Troilus and Cressida appear nowhere in the works of Homer, but also smaller things like Troilus being jealous of Cressida's behaviour with Diomedes / Steven) in writer Donald Cotton's script. Was this then not a modern take on Homer at all, but a televisual pastiche of the Bard's Trojan play instead? This would almost make it a pastiche of a pastiche, so it is not surprising that it keeps one at a distance as one listens. Of course, I am making these judgements only based on the soundtrack. It's possible that with the visuals the piece would work differently, have more subtleties when one can see the actors' expressions and movements. Unfortunately, it's very difficult to be sure, as The Myth Makers is one of the missing Doctor Who stories with very little evidence to help us imagine what it would look like: there are no-off screen photos, not many production stills, and the fragment of cine footage taken by a fan that exists just shows Vicki in a nice frock, nothing more. There is a photo of the model of the Trojan horse, and it is a fine design - perhaps all the production design was up to this standard, and perhaps that made a big difference. Perhaps.

The regulars don't sparkle as much in this story as they did in The Time Meddler, or even Galaxy 4. Quite a lot of the running time they are kept apart from one another; there's a nice sequence when Vicki is in a cell with Steven, but that's it. The many larger-than-life characters of the story dominate at the expense of the two companion regulars, with only William Hartnell given enough to do to stand out. This is particularly tough on Maureen O' Brien as Vicki as this is her swansong: the sequences where she's using her wiles to get the better of the Trojan men are great, but it's not the sort of big ending plot that an actor could relish. There's the romance with Troilus of course, but it feels so perfunctory: they only share a half a dozen short scenes together. After Verity Lambert left as producer, and John Wiles had a brief tenure in that role (The Myth Makers is his first credited story as producer) before also handing over to someone else, the series entered an era of near constant chopping and changing of the regular cast to fit the views of the person in charge and/or capture some elusive chemistry. Some actors' exits are handled better than others. Vicki's isn't all off-screen like later companion Dodo's, but she still doesn't get to say a proper farewell to the Doctor and Steven, and that is a great shame.

Connectivity: 

Both The Myth Makers and Time Heist see the Doctor putting together a plan to break into a seemingly impregnable area; in both instances, there's someone within that place who needs rescuing; also, there are characters in both stories with psychic abilities (unless Cassandra is just making lucky guesses).

Deeper Thoughts:

Rills' Planetary Survey Results: BFI Southbank Galaxy 4 screening and Peter Purves Q&A, 7th November 2021. Justin Johnson of the BFI took to the stage at the start of the event and set the usual tone right up front saying "Those of you who have been to these events before will have noticed that I've got no Dick today". The Dick in question was Dick Fiddy, Johnson's usual co-host, who was unwell. Get well soon Dick. The opening trivia quiz with prizes still can't be reintroduced to these events because of Covid restrictions, but there were further relaxations compared to recent screenings, with audience Q&A allowed again. Instead of a roaming mic, audience members queued by a couple of static audience mics near the stage to ask the guest of honour, Steven Taylor actor Peter Purves, questions (but more on that in a bit). Johnson took the opportunity to pay a brief tribute to Doctor Who writer Bob Baker, who recently passed away, and to jokingly apologise for the BFI's and Blu-ray range exec Russel Minton's lack of precognition powers, failing to anticipate three months ago when it was booked in that the next Doctor Who event (a showing of City of Death to tie in with the Season 17 Blu-ray box set) would clash with the finale of the latest Jodie Whittaker story Flux on the TV. They've obviously had some complaints. Then, the lights went down, and a short filmed introduction by Maureen O' Brien, who couldn't be with us in person, was shown before the animated story started. The pattern was the usual one: the first two episodes were shown, then there was a panel of people interviewed related to the animation, then the final two episodes, followed by the main Q&A.

The animation is created by the same team that did Fury from the Deep last year (which was reviewed in the Deeper Thoughts section of the Galaxy 4 blog post coincidentally). The character designs and backgrounds used are in a similar style to Fury from the Deep, a little more stylised, with slightly cleaner visuals, less lines and shading, compared to the approach of the team that animated Evil of the Daleks earlier this year. The difference with Galaxy 4 compared to Fury - which Gary Russell confirmed later when speaking on the panel was a deliberate choice - is that the Patrick Troughton story was gloomier with overcast skies and cold British sea, whereas Galaxy 4's palette is colourful and bright. It really works. The surface of the planet where most of the action takes place is a vibrant red-orange (based loosely on a area of the Australian outback we were told later), the Rill's ship is a vast pop-art labyrinth, the rusted Drahvin ship a nice contrast. There are some beautiful battle scenes set in space too (some - or maybe all? - of which have been added and weren't in the original script). The characters are uniformly good: the Chumblies seem to have been made for animation, and for once economy serves the narrative, as drawing the cloned Drahvin drones to an identical template is better than the original production where they were portrayed by various actors of different heights. Touches like replacing the sneakers that they wear with long boots are subtle but add up with the other improvements to create a visual feast.

As always when watching with a big audience, the comedy comes more to the fore; this is doubly so with an animation of a missing story where previously we've been robbed of the body language and facial expressions that sell the humour. Galaxy 4 also got some laughs that may not have been intended to be there: Steven's lascivious appreciation on first spotting the Drahvins, for example, and some fluffed lines by William Hartnell (but animated Billy fluffs are the cutest Billy fluffs). The sad little movement and noise of an attacked Chumblie made the whole room go "Awwww!". The destruction of the planet at the end is a great sequence too, and it also got a reaction from the BFI crowd. It's not as epic a visualisation as the work done for The Evil of the Daleks, but that's appropriate to the story. When I reviewed it as a recon last year, I thought that Galaxy 4 was quite a small scale narrative for a season opener; Gary Russell was more frank, describing the story as "cheap". And though the new visuals do a great job opening it out, they can't solve that problem completely. The other main issue with the story is that there just isn't enough plot to fill the running time. Again, the animation improves things greatly, making some moments much more entertaining to watch, but it can't work miracles. The cut-down recon of Galaxy 4 that was an extra on a DVD excised loads of material, but the story remained coherent. Fan sacrilege, I know, but I'd love to see a cut down version of the animated story as it would zip along and look fantastic. There's no such version provided as an extra on the imminent disc release of the story, I'm sure, but from what we heard at the BFI, it still sounds like a great package, and on the strength of this screening I'd recommend everyone to buy it.

(L to R) Ayres, Morris, Russell, Johnson

The panel held in the middle of the screening of the episodes saw Mark Ayres (Audio Restoration), Ioan Morris (Concept Design) and Gary Russell (Executive Production) take to the stage. Another relaxing of the restrictions previously seen at recent screenings is that all the panellists were allowed to sit down this time. Once settled, there was a lot of information and a lot of fun from these three gentlemen. Russell stated that the intention was to give Galaxy 4 a bigger budget than it had originally, and to make an alternative version, rather than an improvement per se. Morris was asked to explain exactly what his role entailed; other than, as he jokingly put it, "doing everything Gary tells me to", he explained that he created the blueprint for the animators to follow. The biggest departure in that blueprint from the original was the Rill's spaceship, which was just a "sheet of polythene" in the original according to Russell, but was now - in Morris's opinion - like the rest of the piece - "lurid in a good way; it really pops now". One maybe surprising inspiration for the look of the animation was Star Trek Original Series episode Spectre of the Gun. Ayres reiterated that the quality of the soundtrack is one of the biggest factors in deciding which stories will be animated, and talked about the young fans in the 1960s that taped the show onto reel-to-reels allowing these stories to survive in some form after the BBC junked the videos and films.

Ayres with the home audio tape of Galaxy 4

Galaxy 4 is rare in that its best surviving audio copy is not the late Graham Strong's (Strong wired his TV's audio output direct into the tape machine so got a very clean sound compared to those that set up a microphone by the TV's speaker).  The recording used to accompany the animation was made by David Holman, and he was in the audience. Ayres encouraged him to stand up, and he got a big, warm round of applause from the assembled throng, with Morris adding "Thanks for getting me a job, David". Even better than that, Ayres had - in a plastic shopping bag he brought on to the stage to everyone's bemusement - the original tape with him. He held it up for all to see. Russell confirmed that he sees the soundtrack as sacrosanct and does not want any part of it to be excised in the animated version, which creates a challenge - and some detective work - to find appropriate visuals to accompany every second. Some of the detective work was helped by Peter Purves, who has a great memory for the details of so long ago, down to the colour of the costumes. The info was coming thick and fast in the conversation, and something was given away that happened in the final part of the animated version, which I think - and the people on the panel who didn't talk about it also seemed to think - is best left as a little surprise, so I won't mention it here, but you will see if you get yourself a copy of the Blu-ray.

(L to R) Purves, Johnson

After the final episode, Peter Purves came up onto the stage. He got a couple of laughs out of the audience before he'd even sat down, joking about needing a new knee, and commenting on the extraordinarily long extension cable that's used in the last episode to feed power from the TARDIS into the Rills' ship. Johnson had an easy job up there next to him, as Purves didn't need to be asked any questions, and went straight into a stream of thoughtful and amusing chat, with anecdotes old and new. He got the story in quick of how dissatisfied he was with the script, hastily rewritten giving him inappropriate material originally intended for Jackie Hill as the recently departed companion Barbara. He added, though, that he likes the story now: "It's given me a fair bit of work over the years". Recently, this work included a making of the story to go on the Blu-ray, which features Toby Hadoke and a real life Chumblie. He talked about getting the role for the first time in the 1960s. He had tried out for a Menoptera (man-size butterfly creature) role in the 1965 Doctor Who story The Web Planet for director Richard Martin, but it just so happened that a TV play that he'd appeared in had been repeated just before the audition. Martin saw this and realised that Purves was too good for the Menoptera role, but told him he'd be considered for something apt that came along in future. When Martin was making The Chase later in the year, a little comic turn playing confused US tourist Morton Dill fit the bill. Purves aced it, and also got on well with Hartnell. Someone - Purves thinks it was Maureen O' Brien - noticed this and seeded the idea with Hartnell, who was concerned about the imminent departure of original companion actors William Russell as Ian, and the aforementioned Hill as Barbara, that Purves would be good to play the replacement character. A few weeks later, after having grown a beard, he was back in the rehearsal rooms, and later the studio, with them again.

Purves talked about Galaxy 4 director Derek Martinus, coincidentally the same director as the last story to be animated The Evil of the Daleks. (As an aside, an amazing 14 episodes of lost Martinus-directed Doctor Who have now been animated; as well as those two full stories that includes odd episodes of The Tenth Planet and The Ice Warriors for DVD.) Galaxy 4 was Martinus's first ever directing gig, and according to Purves he hadn't quite got the hang of it. During episode one, recording had to have an unscheduled stop - almost unheard of at the time - as the cables of the cameras and sound equipment had got tangled. A helpful crew member explained to Martinus that the best way to avoid this was to make a cardboard model of the studio and use string for the cables, which he did for the second episode. When that next episode was recorded, everything ground to a halt again as the cables of the cameras and sound equipment had got tangled again. Purves, as he told it, asked his director how it had gone wrong once more when he'd planned everything on the cardboard model, and Martinus replied "Well, you see, the strings kept getting tangled up...". Purves added that he liked Martinus a lot and later employed him as a director when he had his own production company, as he did Chris Barry, who directed his final Doctor Who story The Savages.

Another person that Purves was keen to talk up was William Hartnell, who he said had taught him so much about screen acting. "Without him," he said, gesturing around NFT1, "There'd be none of this", meaning Doctor Who's longevity leading up to things like the Galaxy 4 animation and the day's event. This didn't mean that it was always easy working with Bill, who "fluffed his way through", and who often reduced the work to "Standing around waiting for Bill to get back on script". Purves told what I imagine was a well worn tale, though it was new to me, of Francis de Wolff as Agamemnon in The Myth Makers, a bit frustrated with the standing around and waiting for Bill, who when he had the line to the Doctor "Come on in and have a ham bone", actually said "Come on in, ham, and have a bone". That led to a call of "Cut!" and a retake, but Bill's later fluff "I am not a dog... I am not a God" in the same story stayed in. (It's hard to be sure on the soundtrack, but I think I disagree with Purves here and that the actual words Hartnell says are "I'm not a Doc, I am not a God" which makes perfect sense as a reply to Katarina's line in that moment.) Talking of the Trojan adventure, it was one of the stories that Purves would like to see animated; his first choice would be The Massacre (though he'd rather they actually found it). He talked about his happiness in seeing the recovered episode three of Galaxy 4 when it turned up in 2011, "Because I'm so good in it". He talked of his joy reprising the role of Steven for Big Finish. You may already have noticed that he covered a lot of material; he's such a pro. And afterwards, he signed autographs. I didn't have time or space here to squeeze in everything he covered in an entertaining session that was definitely value for money (as I think will be the Galaxy 4 release itself).

In Summary:

The Myth Makers is like an experimental 1960s theatre production of Troilus and Cressida spliced with Blackadder spliced with a Panto. Galaxy 4's animation is well worth your time and money, but the source material can only be spruced up so much when the story is two episodes too long!).