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.