Time-Flight

Chapter The 221st, which is feeling supersonic, and you may well need a gin and tonic (or several) - but I like it!

Plot:

After mourning Adric's death for all of two whole minutes, the Doctor, Tegan and Nyssa decide to cheer themselves up with a trip into history, but encounter some time turbulence, and have to make an emergency landing. By coincidence, they materialise in the exact place the Doctor's been trying to reach all year, Heathrow Airport in Tegan's time. A Concorde on its approach to the airport has dropped off Air Traffic Control's monitoring, seemingly vanished into thin air. The Doctor's UNIT credentials mean he's brought in to help investigate. The turbulence the TARDIS encountered is evidence that the Concorde travelled through time. The Doctor is provided with another Concorde and crew to recreate the exact circumstances of the previous flight; with the TARDIS and its crew onboard, the second Concorde follows the same flight path, goes through a time contour and arrives in prehistoric times.

At first it appears that they have landed back at Heathrow, but this is a collective delusion being created by the Master, who for some reason adopts a ridiculous disguise at first. He is based in the temple of the Xeraphin who crashed landed on Earth years before, and have merged into one gestalt entity. He aims to use their race bank as a power source for his knackered TARDIS, and is using the hypnotised passengers and crew of the first Concorde flight to break into the inner sanctum to reach it. Helped by the crew of the second Concorde, the TARDIS team battles against the Master for psychic control of the Xeraphin's power. The Master wins, but is missing a vital time component to allow him to escape. The Doctor trades him one of his spares in exchange for the release of the captured passengers and crew. The Master travels back to present day Heathrow, but the Doctor has set things up so the second Concorde arrives there first, and knocks the Master's TARDIS off to destination unknown. Tegan is having a look round the airport when the Doctor dematerialises to escape some approaching policemen (he must really want rid of her!).

Context:

Every one of the family was off work and school on the Friday in February that Storm Eustice blew through where we live in the South East of the UK. The red weather warning issued advised us not to leave the house. Stuck inside watching the slightly underwhelming forces of nature outside (the advance hype had made the kids expect trees and trampolines to be flying through the air), was not a particularly exciting end to the half term holiday; it did, though, give an opportunity to watch a Doctor Who story. I bribed the three children (two boys of 15 and 12 years old, girl of 9) with sweets to sit down and watch this one with me, from the disc in the season 19 Blu-ray box set. The eldest lasted until the end of the first episode, the middle child managed one more; the youngest watched with me to the end. She spent the entire first half of the story moaning about the acting and make-up of Leon Ny Taiy's Kalid. I watched her face during the episode 2 cliffhanger - which reveals that it is just make-up and a performance, as Leon Ny Taiy is really Tony Ainley, i.e. the Master in disguise - and a big beaming smile spread across it. 

First Time Round:

Peter Davison's opening series in 1982 was the first one I watched go out live on BBC1 in the UK, after becoming a fan watching a season of repeats on BBC2 the previous winter. As whinged about in blog posts passim however, the Monday night broadcasts that year (the odd numbered episodes of each story) clashed with my regular attendance at 2nd Durrington cub scouts. I can mostly remember exactly which episodes I missed, and which ones I pulled a sickie from cubs so I could see. I can remember hoping that the second showing in the first week of the season would be a repeat of Castrovalva episode 1, and being disappointed; I remember having to have "headaches" on two Monday nights'  running to watch the whole of Kinda; I remember having to follow the plot when only viewing the second 50% of Black Orchid (it's actually pretty easy to do), and I remember the big revelation that the Cybermen were back in Earthshock being relayed to me by another child in the playground at school the following day. I am not so certain, though, about Time-Flight. Perhaps by the end of the season the novelty had worn off, so these things didn't stick in my mind. I feel sure I must have missed at least one episode on a cubs night, probably the third. I'm sure I saw the discussion in the first episode between the Doctor, Tegan and Nyssa about not being able to change history by going back in time to save Adric; I say this, because I was surprised not to see that discussion at the end of Earthshock when I watched it again years later, having misremembered it as happening in that preceding story.

I never saw a repeat or home-taped video copy of Time-Flight, so the first time I'd have seen all the episodes would have been many years later in July 2000 when they came out on VHS. I caught up with the full story not long after that first broadcast, though, in prose form. Time-Flight was the first Target paperback novelisation I ever owned. I'd read a few from the library before Time-Flight, but this was the start of my collection. I remember my Mum ordering it from a book club that was run through my primary school of the time. Did everyone of my vintage have these? The Better Half didn't have such a thing, but she's a bit younger than me. Every term or two, a pamphlet was distributed to every child with a few pages of thumbnails and descriptions of books to buy, and you could fill in and tear out a form requesting a book or books, then bring it back in and hand it over to the teacher with your pennies. After an interminable wait, which probably wasn't that long but seemed it when one had only existed for a decade, the book would be delivered to the school, and you'd be able to take it home at the end of the day. I can picture myself stumbling along the twitten outside Durrington Middle School while trying simultaneously to read the first few pages of Time-Flight, too eager to wait until I'd reached home. I can also remember later having to ask my Dad for an explanation of what "déjà vu" meant (Grimwade uses the term describing Tegan's recollection of changing her Aunt Vanessa's tyre - in her introductory story Logopolis - when she is helping do the same for Concorde).

Reaction:

The climax of any dramatic form doesn't have to be at the very end. In fact, the very best writing has multiple climaxes (yes, this is going to get a bit double entendre-esque before I'm done, sorry). A great script can achieve a climactic story reversal towards the start of the final act that will seem like the denouement, but instead it propels the narrative in a different direction that then builds to its own climax, even bigger than the last one - like a mountain climb, with peaks and drops before the final summit. Once that summit, that final climax (oo-er), is reached, it is common for there to be a bit of narrative afterwards to let things register and then subside in the audience's emotions, the best for it to have impact. It could also involve a little tying up of subplot loose ends, or just a light comic counterpoint moment (cf. Scooby Doo). It can't be too protracted, though, or else the audience's patience risks being tested. In Earthshock, for example, the climax is obviously Adric's death when the space freighter he's on hits the Earth. It's followed, though, by a short scene in the TARDIS control room as the Doctor, Tegan and Nyssa react, stunned. The story wouldn't be as effective if it ended on the explosion, without that final scene. If anything, it's still too abrupt, but the clever trick of running the end credits in silence extends the moment of reflection before the real world of "next on BBC1" intrudes. Crucially, though, Earthshock's plot tidy-ups are held off until the beginning of the next story (the one this blog post is concerned with, Time Flight); to have limped on after Adric's death with scenes explaining what happened to the Cyber fleet and the other humans would not been neither effective nor appropriate

There's then the question of how durations of post-climax material should scale up when individual pieces form a series that needs to have its own dramatic arc. Adric's death is the climax of Earthshock, but it's also the climax of the 1982 season. As such, one could argue that Time-Flight shouldn't exist at all, tacked on to the end of the year like an afterthought. End the season with the big emotional cliffhanger instead, the argument goes, and you have a break before the next season starts for people to dwell on it; if you have to do your Concorde story, save it for next year, or pull it forward and do it before you kill off one of your main characters. So, why didn't they? Doctor Who is a series famed for its cliffhangers, after all. It is also, however, famed for resolving its cliffhangers a week later (or even sooner with the twice weekly broadcast pattern in 1982), it is a programme of peril, but also of reassurance. A similar situation arose in 1984, when climactic story The Caves of Androzani saw the Doctor regenerate, but then the next guy's first story The Twin Dilemma was tacked on to the end of that season, airing the following week. This, I think was a mistake. The regeneration is not a death but a rebirth, the reassurance is baked in; but, to leave an audience reeling from Adric's death for almost a year would not be fair. So, to my mind, Time Flight has to exist exactly where it is, and has to be a pretty fun adventure, not too doomy and gloomy - to let the viewers know that the story, and life, goes on.

This means there is one big flaw that's somewhat unavoidable in Time-Flight, the crunch of a gear change as our heroes have to go from grieving over Adric's death to planning a day trip to see the opening of the Great Exhibition. Humorously, there's a line for the Doctor in there that's very nearly 'It's what he would have wanted'! It's somewhat fixable too; as soon as the Doctor sets the coordinates, the TARDIS is hit by the plot device (sorry, time contour) anyway, so why not have this happen sooner, throwing the Doctor and friends into a new adventure and distracting them from their grief. It wouldn't be perfect, but it would be better. That's it for the unavoidable flaws. The others - and Time-Flight has many, don't get me wrong - were probably avoidable, but that's not to say on balance that the story isn't overall quite good. The biggest avoidable flaw, so much so that my nine year old can see it, is Kalid. I'd think that this was a racially insensitive bit of costuming / make-up / performance if it was clear what they were trying to emulate, or if they were even trying to emulate anything. It's possible that Kalid is supposed to be an alien, for whom elements of Earth cultures were used as an inspiration. Maybe two wrongs make a right here, as the execution is so poor that it's not specific enough to be truly offensive.  All this is doubly annoying as there's no narrative need for the Master to adopt a disguise at all. If he's to be held back until the episode 2 cliffhanger, then just keep him out of shot until then. Other flaws often cited are the production design, including the prehistoric Earth sets and the globby Plasmatons, and the convoluted script, but I think both are not that bad, really, and comparable with similar efforts in other stories made around this time.

Balanced against this are the elements that work, and a lot of them work superbly. The involvement of British Airways means there is a lot of sumptuous footage of and access to Concorde, which at the time was a great coup and gives the serial a unique hook. The beginning sequence where Air Traffic Control (I can forgive them for this just being two blokes in a darkened room) lose the signal, and we see the plane fade away, is a gripping opening. There's a fringe benefit too in this external input; presumably, the BA crew depicted had to be shown in a positive light, so they couldn't be too thick or cowardly. What this leads to is three characters - played by Richard Easton, Keith Drinkel and Michael Cashman, all of whom are clearly enjoying themselves - that are open-minded about the fantastical situation in which they find themselves, and get stuck in with pluck and resourcefulness in an old school adventure story manner. Doctor Who guest character lists for the next few years after Time-Flight would increasingly be peopled by hard bitten mercenaries, and this trio - and the other couple of guest characters - are much more fun. The group hypnotic delusions are also a good (and inexpensive) threat - the scene when Cashman's character gradually comes under the influence by being pulled into the mundane litany of pre-flight checks is quite chilling. The TARDIS being on its side, but able to rectify its gravity and alignment at the touch of a button was fun for my kids watching, and I remember liking it when I was a youngster first experiencing this story too. It's also fitting to end the season with a rematch with Anthony Ainley's Master; when he's not pretending to be whatever the heck Kalid is supposed to be, Ainley gives another solid performance.

 

There are some more minor criticisms. This is the epitome of ungrateful companion syndrome, for example: the Doctor's finally got Tegan to where she wanted to be, but she moans even more. There's no way that Concorde could land or take off on the terrain as depicted. It's a shame no Concorde take-off footage could be found without a bird flapping into view - this must have been some lone pterosaur swooping over the barren landscape. The flight attendant from the first Concorde, Angela Clifford, is heavily featured until the final episode when she disappears without explanation (she isn't shown getting on the second Concorde to escape, so is presumably left back in prehistory). Of course, this is done so that Tegan can step up and finally be the stewardess she wanted to be in her introductory story. This then leads to the nice mini-cliffhanger for the season of the Doctor accidentally (or maybe not accidentally, given all the moaning) abandoning her in Heathrow to take up her old life at the end. It's a confident end to the season; at the end of his first two years in charge, producer John-Nathan Turner has transformed the show and delivered a great first run with his new leading man; Time-Flight, for all its flaws, was an integral part of that.

Connectivity: 

Both Time Flight and The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos are the last stories of debut seasons for new Doctors; in both, the TARDIS crew goes on a rescue mission, landing somewhere where creatures with great mental powers are being harnessed for an evil purpose by a villainous character, and these powers cause hallucinations for anyone around that can't protect themselves (though luckily our heroes can resist). In both instances, the villain is returning to the show after having appeared in the first story of the season.

Deeper Thoughts:

1982 and all that. I promise this isn't just going to be an exercise in Gen X nostalgia, but I thoroughly recommend anyone who enjoys watching Doctor Who of around the Time-Flight era to have a look at this post on the Curious British Telly site. It lists many children's TV shows of the 1980s that don't get as much championing by the cultists and enthusiasts (like my good self) online. I think it is interesting and useful to see Doctor Who in the context in which it was first shown; this is why my favourite extras on the Blu-ray box sets are the compilations of trailers and continuity announcements for stories; it's also why I derive pleasure from reading listings on Genome, and indeed blog posts about forgotten children's TV shows of the 1980s. It's not to show how superior Doctor Who's production values were compared to contemporary offerings like, say, Captain Zep - Space Detective (number 47 in the list), although it does display this admirably. I loved Captain Zep, by the way; I'm not criticising it, but it's worth noting that Doctor Who never looked cheap or amateur compared to other UK attempts at science fiction programmes, and this was maintained throughout the classic series. This isn't the usual narrative, which has it that Doctor Who was looking markedly tired and shabby by the end. If it had continued into the 1990s, it would have faced challenges and would have needed to change, but that's not the same thing. If you look at the later entries on the Curious British Telly post (they're in order of transmission through the decade), you won't find anything in the way of science fiction or fantasy there: it was too difficult to do by then, even for the perhaps lower expectations of a CBBC audience. The latest entry is Aliens in the Family (number 131 on the list) in 1987.

Aside from the context of UK broadcasting, though, there's personal context. Reading about (and being instantly reminded of) a programme like Puzzle Trail (number 2 on the list) - a Clive Doig produced serial quiz show where clues were given to the location of treasure etc. - brought back memories of, I think, autumn 1983. My parents had recently divorced; as a child looked after by a single parent, I was on free school meals. There was, though, a teacher's strike or working to rule at the time, which entailed a withdrawal of their support during break times. As such, I had to walk from Durrington Middle School to my grandparents' house every day to have lunch there. Before I went, I had to pick up my meal from the canteen, which was a packed lunch in a brown paper bag with my name pencilled on it. I remember that this was the most exciting thing that had happened for a good long while. I would have time to eat it and then rush back to school, but in the afternoon, when I went back to my grandparents' (Mum was out looking for / doing badly paid work at that time), I watched Puzzle Trail before I had my tea. This definitely happened, but I can't find anything online about any teachers' action in the 1980s earlier than 1985, by which time I was at secondary school. There's much more documentary evidence of kids' TV programmes on the web than there are detailed histories of industrial relations in the education sector (this somehow isn't that surprising to me).

Peter Davison's appearance on Captain Zep - Space Detective

Reading through this list, and doing the odd brief bit of googling elsewhere, tells me that I wasn't dreaming, and Peter Davison really did cameo in an episode of Captain Zep - Space Detective, in character and full costume as the Doctor. It tells me that the Channel 4 programme I liked presented by Michael Rosen was called Everybody Here (number 34 on the list), the ITV programme with Beryl Reid, Stephen Boxer and a green space-cat puppet was Get Up and Go! (number 39); plus, it lets me know that Eureka (number 20) ended in 1986 when one of its stars Sylvester McCoy got a better gig elsewhere. My detailed knowledge of Doctor Who and other telly, and the detailed knowledge of other people who've documented it and made it available, helps me to date certain events in my life. It almost doesn't matter that I was too lazy to ever keep a diary, as I can tell you that - as a random example - I was sat with a plate of boil-in-the-bag prawn curry and rice on my lap in the living room watching Doctor Who (The Two Doctors) on Saturday 16th February 1985, and a little later on watched The Laughter Show with Les Dennis and Dustin Gee. I wonder what it will be like in future years for my children, though, who can currently dial up whatever they want to watch on demand at any time on any device. They will no doubt remember that they had that weird year when they were schooled at home because of a pandemic, but when was it? They could have been watching anything at around the time, and none of it date-stamped. The poor sods will have to start keeping a diary. Won't someone think of the children?!

Post script: I never thought that a particular personal and global context from back in the early 80s would be relevant again today, but in the last few days as I wrote this post I've seen a few 'this is what would happen if Russia dropped a nuke on London' speculations. I do often touch on politics on the blog, but I'm probably going to refrain from discussing anything to do with the war in Ukraine - this is not the place. It will feel churlish to just concentrate on a silly TV programme with such things happening on the same continent, but life has to go on or the bullies win. 

In Summary:

The show must go on, even if that show is Time-Flight (which is actually pretty fun for all its flaws).

The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos

Chapter The 220th, no, it's not an anagram, believe it or not.

Plot:

After his encounter with the newly regenerated Doctor in Sheffield, nasty Stenza warrior Tzim-Sha falls through time and space to land on the planet Ranskoor Av Kolos. By a massive fluke, he immediately encounters a credulous duo, the Ux (knock-off Jedi, essentially) who accept him as their god. Thousands of years later, the Doctor, Graham, Ryan and Yaz receive multiple distress signals from the planet. With each of them wearing a special brain patch to stave off the mind-altering effects of the planet, the TARDIS team materialise and explore. They quickly find a lone survivor, Paltraki. They put a brain patch on him too, and he gradually fills in the exposition as the effects of the planet wear off. The Ux have created a huge structure that acts as a weapon powered by their mental energy; Tzim has been using this to crush planets down to extremely dense rocks. He keeps these in a trophy room and uses them to power his life support system, as presumably he has seen the story The Pirate Planet from the classic years of TV's Doctor Who. As revenge for his defeat by the Doctor, the next planet to be crushed is going to be Earth (hey, that also happened in The Pirate Planet - what a coincidence!). Before the Earth is crushed, the Doctor manages to persuade the Ux that Tzim is not the messiah, just a very naughty boy. Graham is tempted to kill Tzim because he was responsible for Graham's wife Grace's death, but in the end he chooses only to entrap the Stenza in one of his own cages. The planets are returned to their normal size and place, and hostages from the many crews who tried to attack Tzim's fortress are freed.

Context:

Watched from the disc in the series 11 Blu-ray box set one Saturday. The youngest child (girl of 9) came in briefly, but otherwise I was on my own. Coincidentally, the moment that she witnessed included the display of a dentally-decorated boat race that had caused her great consternation in 2018 (see below). This time, she didn't bat an eyelid; what a difference a few years has made.

First Time Round:

Watched live on its debut UK BBC1 broadcast on Sunday 9th December 2018 with almost all the family. I was accompanied with the Better Half and two boys, but youngest child (6 at the time) was off in another room watching another screen. This was because she had found the reveal of Tzim-Sha in the season opener, with all the teeth in his face, too frightening, and had sworn off Who for a long time thereafter. It's probably good therefore that she missed this one back then, given that Tzim was back for a rematch with the Doctor and friends, teeth and all. I had finished and published a blog post here a couple of days earlier, and I expressed there a small reservation about the current series lacking a little oomph. I also mused there on the preponderance in the stories of non-monster monsters: everyone the TARDIS 'fam' faced off against in 2018 had a more interesting motivation that just being simply evil. This resulted in a less action-packed finale than Doctor Who usually presented. 

Reaction:

I am just going to state it as fact and dare anyone reading this to disagree: this story has the worst title in the history of Doctor Who on television, including both the classic and new series stories. It's not just those last three sort-of words (though see the Deeper Thoughts section below for more on using made up gubbins in story titles), it's the second word too. There's no battle depicted here. Any major action took place before the events the audience is shown, and given the numbers of hostages freed at the end, it comprised only minor skirmishes at best. The story feels underpopulated, with active roles for just the fam, one ally, one villain, plus two of the villain's duped henchpersons (and not all of them are that active, Yaz has very little to do - again). Comparing this story to last year's epic Flux, with the latter's many crowd and action scenes (soldiers versus Sontarans in the Crimea, say, or hordes of refugees being sucked up into Passenger forms), I think the uninitiated would guess the wrong one was made within severe restrictions during a pandemic. It is puzzling why this story is so scaled down and restrained for a season finale, particularly the finale of the lead writer's first year on the job. As mentioned above, Chris Chibnall - for it was he - was making a deliberate effort to do something different in his first run. There are no recurring elements from Doctor Who's past featured, and a lot of thought has been put in to antagonists' motivations to avoid the usual genre cliches. This gave rise to a refreshing, and to my mind somewhat underrated, set of stories leading up to the finale in 2018, but it caused problems for the finale itself.

Chibnall had painted himself into a corner. He couldn't bring out the big guns of Daleks or Cybermen, and there wasn't much point creating some completely new evil alien race that was just going to act like the Daleks or the Cybermen. A completely new force of antagonism would also not up the ante sufficiently for a finale. So, the antagonist of the first story of the year is brought back, in a neat bit of circular narrative. He's just one dude, though, defeated and weak by the time of the events depicted here. The inclusion of the Ux gives him access to a superweapon, which is an understandable move in the spirit of ante-upping; but, these very powerful beings have to be super-gullible to believe he's their god. It's based on a terrible coincidence too: of all the places in the universe he could land, it's somewhere with a breathable atmosphere next to two super-beings who can provide him everything he needs. The Ux, as another flavour of non-evil antagonists with non-standard villain motivation, can't be fought or zapped. So, overcoming them is just an act of persuasion, which the Doctor does without too much effort. There's also the SniperBots. These seem to have been introduced this series (they appear in an earlier story too) as there needed to be one set of baddies one couldn't reason with, and who weren't misunderstood underneath it all, and who could be shot at with a laser guns guilt-free. Alas, as there are so few goodies, there's no redshirt cannon fodder people that can be picked off, so the SniperBots have to be rubbish shots, undermining their menace somewhat.

The scaled down nature of the production also applies to the plot. As mentioned above, the antagonists aren't any great shakes. There's a little bit of questing and infiltration of a fortress stuff, but again it's pretty easy without significant obstacles. It looks like there will be a focus on psychological conflict, with the planet (or the Ux, or both, it's not clear) able to affect the brain, slowly driving people out of their minds. The neural inhibitors that our heroes wear to protect against this are set up carefully in such a way that the savvy audience member expects someone to lose theirs pretty quickly, and then have to battle their inner demons. This does not happen; instead the Doctor and Yaz briefly decide to take them off, and get a bit of a headache temporarily. That's it. The final thread of the plot that remains, Graham's wrestling with his conscience about killing Tzim-Sha in revenge after the killing of his wife, shows some promise too. It is however a subplot promoted to main plot status, and this undermines it. An actor as good as Bradley Walsh could make the whole conflict play on his face when finally in the same room as his enemy. It would need only a few moments and no dialogue. Unfortunately, as this conflict is doing heavy lifting in the ante-upping department, it can't be done with as quickly as all that, and instead Graham has to talk about getting his revenge a lot with various characters. It being pre-meditated doesn't fit very well with Graham's character, anyway, but all the advance talk kills any drama when he and Tzim finally face off against one another.

By the end of the story, it feels like there's been almost no consequences. The Ux are forgiven for their destructive religious fervour. Shrunken planets are put back in orbit; presumably millions of people have died, but we never met them and nobody seems to dwell on their deaths particularly. One hostage is executed, a member of Paltraki's crew. Seeing Mark Addy as Paltraki give as much gravitas as he can to the risible line "Her name... was... Umsang" one mourns not the character but the waste of Addy's talents on such thin material. It's all the more frustrating knowing that Chibnall is more than capable of doing a good finale, and managed some corking plot points, revelations and spectacle in the last stories of his second and third seasons. This first try, though, is unfortunately a misfire.  

Connectivity: 

In both stories there's a few stand-offs between people with guns, and also a good man is tempted into violent action to avenge a dead family member. Aside from that though The Gunfighters and The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos don't have much in common. 

Deeper Thoughts:

'Rose' - or 'Rosa' - by any other name (Slight Return). For the first part of my deeper thoughts on using made-up words in Doctor Who story titles, you'll have to go right back to the Deeper Thoughts section of the blog post for The Rings of Akhaten published in 2016. What I wrote at that time in relation to the title of the Matt Smith story applies just as much to 'The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos', i.e. it "is just the kind of 'King Thrash-wobbler of the Biddly Bong' name that repels a certain section of the audience, and prevents a mass appreciation of a fantasy product even if deserved, consigning it to the cult ghetto." But: "You might think - and if the mood's right, I might agree with you - screw 'em" and "If those people are going to switch off just because they can't cope with an odd sounding name here and there, they're not worth keeping". However, "That would be fine for any other show, but not Doctor Who [which] shouldn't ever be a cult; it should always aim to appeal to the widest possible family audience - that's what it was made for, from the very beginning." In 2016, The Rings of Akhaten was very much an outlier. Aside from that, and a tweak to well-known name from mythology Pandora (in The Pandorica Opens), every story title since 2005 up to that point was composed of actual English words, with an occasional established Doctor Who name like Cybermen, Zygons or Ood thrown in when required. Did things change, though, in the four broadcast seasons and specials that have been shown since I wrote that blog post?

The first story to be broadcast after that Akhaten post was the 2016 Christmas special, The Return of Doctor Mysterio. I'm going to give its writer Steven Moffat another pass here: yes, Mysterio is not a real word, but it's clear what it means. Doctor Who was definitely a global brand in December 2016, and the title was inspired by the name the programme is given in Mexico, Doctor Misterio. For the following series in 2017, leading all the way to the next - and final to date - Christmas day special, every title is plain English. There's not even any Daleks or Cybermen name-checked, not that those familiar alien names are in any way, ahem, alienating. The only odd thing about the titles in 2017 is that for the first half they are all short, one or two words at most (The Pilot, Smile, Thin Ice), then for the second half, they suddenly get much longer (The Pyramid at the End of the World, World Enough and Time). I've seen bands do the same thing with track names on albums, e.g. Kill Uncle (trigger warning if you're planning on googling it - it's a Morrissey solo album). Perhaps this was a deliberate move on Moffat and his writers' part to show that the early stories are more light and fun, where the second half gets deeper and darker. Or it could just be a coincidence. There's wild difference in the tone suggested by the titles of Chris Chibnall's first year as lead writer too. Arachnids in the UK and Kerblam! are pretty pulpy, but then there is something more portentous like The Ghost Monument too.

That 2018 run is where unreal words became more popular. The finale's title alone contains as many made-up words as featured in all the previous stories from 2005 onwards put together; but there's The Tsuranga Conundrum too. It calms down a bit for the next full season. The opening two-parter is called Spyfall, which is not a portmanteau that anybody on Earth had thought to put together before, and maybe for good reason. It might seem uncharitable, but I'm less inclined to give this a pass than I am 'Pandorica' or 'Mysterio' because it's so naff. It's about spies, you see, and there was a famous spy film called Skyfall, yeah, and sky sounds a lot like spy, doesn't it? Urrgh. One positive the name had was that it set out a big budget widescreen intent for those opening episodes at least. Elsewhere, there was a similar mix of the pulpy with the more cerebral, including the last title including made-up gubbins to date, Praxeus. This is the sort of one word gnomic title that Doctor Who loved to use for its stories in the early 1980s, and it was nice to see this century get its equivalent of Meglos or Frontios. So as not to appear just to be pointing out problems without offering solutions, I suppose I should suggest some alternatives to these titles, though no doubt I risk presenting something the reader will think of as even worse. The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos could be The Planet Nervous Breakdown - that would be more of a hook, wouldn't it?  The Tsuranga Conundrum could be Holby City in Space (shades of Malcolm Hulke there). Praxeus, I think I'd just call: The Birds.

The reduced episode count imposed by Covid on Chris Chibnall's final season and specials saw the approach made more lean; anything more cerebral or worthy was jettisoned, and what remained was full-on crowd-pleasing adventure. This was reflected in the chapter and story titles. No more made-up words that nobody had heard of before; instead it was lots of straightforward English, and lots of monster names. There's been a Blank "of the Sontarans" and "of the Angels" and "of the Daleks", with a Blank "of the Sea Devils" coming in a month or two. If this is Chibnall's victory lap, then I'm loving it so far. The only title not revealed is the final Jodie Whittaker special planned for the Autumn, where everything will change. It seems very unlikely, but if it turns out to be called 'Return to Ranskoor Av Kolos', then we're in deep trouble!

In Summary:

Rank ol' bolox.

The Gunfighters

Chapter The 219th, which depicts a time when Doctor Who can truly be said to have gone west.

Plot:

A couple of days around the 26th October 1881, Tombstone, Arizona. The Doctor, Steven and Dodo arrive in the TARDIS, with the Doctor on the lookout for a dentist to fix his toothache. Luckily for him, Doc Holliday has also just set up his dental practice in the town; unluckily, the Clanton boys have come to town to kill Doc Holliday. The wily dentist / gunslinger spies a mistaken identity ploy as this other newcomer to the town is also called "Doc". Lending the Doctor his own monogrammed gun, Holliday sends the unsuspecting Time Lord off to the Last Chance Saloon where the outlaws wait. The Doctor is saved by the intervention of Wyatt Earp, who keeps up the pretence that the Doctor is the Doc to protect both men from the Clantons (and their extra hired gun Johnny Ringo who arrives in town with a score to settle with Holliday too). Earp keeps the Doctor safe in the sheriff's office, despite efforts by the Clantons to flush him out by threatening Steven. Holliday flees town, taking Dodo with him, but is persuaded to return with her. The Clantons kill Wyatt's younger brother, which prompts him - with another brother Virgil plus Holliday - to face the Clantons and Ringo in a gunfight at the OK Corral. The Earps and Holliday win, killing all the bad guys.

Context:

I watched this from the DVD one episode per night across four nights towards the end of January. A couple of surprises ensued. First, the Better Half joined me for the first part (she's been keeping clear of any Doctor Who watch, new or old, of late). She described the story cheerfully as "The one where Lynda Baron's singing a song over the top of it" and believed that I'd watched it only "very recently" (the last time was when the DVD came out for the first time in 2011, over ten years ago). She didn't walk out midway through the episode, but she didn't join me for the remaining three. The second surprise was that this marked another time that my random selections of stories have completed a season, which seems to be happening a lot lately now I'm in my eighth year of doing the blog. It was only after I finished watching and ticked off the story on my big spreadsheet (I'm a Doctor Who fan who blogs, of course I have a big spreadsheet) that I realised. Season 3 is the fifth season completed now after seasons 8, 17 and 23, and new series 13.

First Time Round:

My memory's never perfect when recalling my first watch of even recent stories, but I've got serious doubts about my recall with regard to The Gunfighters. I'm looking at the release dates for the Doctor Who VHS range, and the story came out as part of a boxset of collected Hartnell stories in November of 2002. (An aside: such is the poor reputation of the story that it has never been trusted to attract a home buyer on its own merits - it was clumped together with another story in a DVD box set too, and - assuming there is a season 3 box set sometime in the future - will not stand alone on Blu-ray either.) I purchased that first boxset on day of release, in MVC in Brighton, and so would have had The Gunfighters to watch for the first time then. I know I never saw it on a pirated copy before that (unlike The Sensorites, another of the stories in the VHS set) and I know it wasn't repeated on terrestrial TV (Unlike The Time Meddler, the final story packaged with it on VHS), so this must have been the first time I saw it. But looking back it's a story that I feel like I've always known, or at least for something like twenty years before 2002. Why would this be? Maybe it's memories of the novelisation that I read in the 1980s. I think, though, that the story was so infamous (more information on exactly how infamous in the Deeper Thoughts section below) that it just seemed like I'd already seen it multiple times before I finally caught up with it.

Reaction:

The very first moments of the first episode of this story set up The Gunfighters as something that's going to be shockingly innovative. A song (the Ballad of the Last Chance Saloon) is playing from the off to accompany the action, which has never been done before. Cowboys ride in to frame onto a rather magnificent OK Corral set, filmed at interesting angles by director Rex Tucker. It looks expensive. Though it regularly depicted historical settings, Doctor Who had never done a Western story before. Whether it'll be good or bad (and the minute the outlaws on screen start to speak it does very much feel like it will be the latter), it will certainly be new. Dig just a little below these cosmetic aspects, though, and the story is very similar to an existing template: it is essentially a re-tread of writer Donald Cotton's previous story, shown earlier in the season, The Myth Makers. Just as in that story, the setting is a historical period that is a common one to be mythologised. In both instances, there is no effort at historical accuracy, but instead the story riffs on more modern presentations of the myths. The Myth Makers seemed based more on a radical 1960s theatre production of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida than it was based on Homer, let alone a reflection of how lives were truly lived in Asia Minor over a thousand years BC. The Gunfighters, of course, is presented through a prism of the most lurid and unrealistic Cowboy movie tropes.

Almost all of the guest characters appearing in the story are real people from history (interestingly, this was the last time such a thing happened in Doctor Who for many years - the next time a Doctor met a specific historical personage, Colin Baker was the star of the show). One would be forgiven for thinking they aren't, though; Johnny Ringo, for example, sounds terribly made up, but he existed. He did have beef with Doc Holliday, but he wasn't present at the gunfight at the OK Corral, and he died the following year elsewhere. The gunfight as depicted on screen is slightly adjusted compared to the real events - in reality, more people were present, one of the Clantons survived, and Holliday and the Earps were injured. Historical detail is sacrificed to make for a more exciting narrative, and realism is sacrificed too. As wild as the West undoubtedly could be, it seems very unlikely that someone could gun down a saloon keeper in cold blood as Johnny Ringo does to the barman Charlie, then leave his dead body slumped over the bar and mosey on upstairs to stay in one of the rooms until the next morning. This sort of thing might happen in Westerns on TV, but the artifice and exaggeration does tend to distance one from the action on screen. The larger than life performances and the winking to the audience nature of the comedy both reinforce the effect that what is being shown is something confected and false; it reaches Brechtian levels of alienation. The trouble is that then the script appears to be expecting those watching to feel something at times, for example when Steven is threatened by a lynch mob, or when the Earp brothers discover that their younger brother has been killed. It can't have things both ways.

Another alienation mechanism is the song. I like the song, maybe more than most, it's well written and clever - sometimes acting as narration, sometimes as counterpoint; but, it is clearly overused. There are periods of the story where it's played every couple of minutes not giving anyone watching time to suspend their disbelief. Another similarly disruptive factor, but this time definitely not intentional, is the variability of some of the performances. Anthony Jacobs as Doc Holliday and John Alderson as Wyatt Earp are god tier, many others comport themselves with reasonable dignity, but a couple of the cast have much difficulty in maintaining an American accent, and unfortunately every time they talk the bubble of reality in the story pops. The regular cast are all great, but - in another parallel with The Myth Makers - they have very little to do. Peter Purves and Jackie Lane get to perform the song early on, but then spend the rest of the time being held captive by one faction or another. There are a couple of scenes and moments that allow William Hartnell to show off his flair for comedy, but he mostly acts as the stooge for the other characters rather than driving any aspect of the plot forward. By the climax of the story, it's all about cowboy versus cowboy shooting; two out of the three regulars don't even appear in the gunfight sequence, and Dodo appears only briefly to complicate things for Doc Holliday, who is much more the protagonist of the story than any of the three actual stars of the show.

At the micro level, there is much that is good and much that is bad. There are many witty, lines, and some great direction on film. The good guys at the end striding through a hail of bullets is implausible but very cool, and there are some great low angle shots used. On the other hand, there's moments where the Clantons chorus particular lines in a sign-song way like truly hardened killers probably don't. The resolution of the cliffhanger of episode 1 is a terrible cheat, worse than the worst excesses of the Saturday morning serials that partly inspired Doctor Who. The Doctor is walking towards the saloon where people are waiting to kill him, he's a couple of metres away at most, within grasping distance of the door; then, at the start of the next episode, he just doesn't arrive. Time passes, then somebody else arrives instead. Altogether, though, I don't think the negatives outweigh the positives, and it's still an enjoyable watch overall.

Connectivity: 

The trap street in Face the Raven has something of an old Western town about it, with desperate ex-outlaws living there now trying to make a straight living. Both there, and in Tombstone as depicted in The Gunfighters, a rough form of justice is in force, and the Doctor and his companions are brought under the protection of a figure of authority. There's even a couple of showdowns in the Capaldi story, though they are against the anthropomorphised force of death in the form of a black bird rather than any gun-slinging cowpokes.

Deeper Thoughts:

Critical Re-evaluation: A Case Study. The souvenir programme of the Doctor Who 20th anniversary celebration at Longleat (Doctor Who's version of Woodstock, and I was there!) featured an essay summarising the Doctor's adventures to date. This was written by Ian Levine, DJ, music producer and Doctor Who 'superfan'. At the time, Levine was working as an unofficial continuity adviser to Who producer John Nathan-Turner. It likely wasn't to give the fan perspective that he was chosen to write this essay over any journalist or writer, but instead for the same reason he worked in that unofficial role: he'd amassed a lot of research materials over the years, including many copies of episodes themselves. As such, he could be much more efficient in turning in something accurate than someone who'd need to do all that research from scratch. His is a fan perspective, though; the show is very important to him, and he has strong opinions about it. My guess is that - even though it was for a celebration tie-in - it would have offended his sense of integrity not to be honest about the programme's up and downs. Thus, the essay touches on periods of Doctor Who's first 20 years where, in the opinion of the essayist, there is less to celebrate. So it was that Ian Levine, in a professional publication, put it on record that The Gunfighters was the worst ever Doctor Who story. I read and re-read all his words so many times over the following months (it was difficult to get hold of affordable summaries of the whole of Doctor Who in those days, Doctor Who Magazine just gave tantalising glimpses) so I'm sure I'm right - there was no qualifying "possibly" or "probably" or "many people think" it was just there in black and white: The Gunfighters is the worst.

Levine was not alone in such an appraisal at that time of course. There was no access to vintage stories for the mass audience back then, so newer fans relied on the memories of longer term fans. It was a pervasive view in the 1980s amongst that small number of taste-makers that The Gunfighters was not just a duffer, but the ultimate duffer. This wasn't so out of line with the view of the audience in the 1960s to be fair: it got the lowest audience appreciation rating of the series to date, and the BBC Audience Research Report documented many negative viewer comments: "Third-rate story telling", "Hackneyed, ridiculous and dull", "A weak and puerile plot", "The script, even for a children's programme, was absolute rubbish". Lots of Doctor Who audience reports over the years garnered similar comments for other stories, though; and, is it really the script that's the issue? Did anyone comment back then on the accents or the song or the ambitious idiocy of trying to recreate the old west in a tiny British studio? Not that I've ever seen reported. Anyway, however fair or unfair, this was the accepted wisdom for the lifetime of classic Who. Fanzines of the 1980s back this up, as quoted in the first edition of the Television Companion, a 1998 compendium published by Virgin. The Companion's writers David Howe and Stephen James Walker summarise in line with the accepted position of the previous decade ("The story must be adjudged one of the least effective of the Hartnell era"), but this was already being challenged elsewhere.

In the 1990s, a new generation of fans became more involved in writing about Doctor Who (and many would go on to write Doctor Who too, in book or even televisual form); plus, the surviving vintage episodes were now more available, through VHS or repeat broadcasts on the UK Gold satellite and cable channel. There was less need to rely on the hand-me-down knowledge of the previous decade. A good bellwether of changing fan opinion at this point was The Discontinuity Guide by Paul Cornell, Martin Day and Keith Topping, which Virgin published in 1995. This book unashamedly took some contrary positions to those held by the earlier fans; it says about The Gunfighters that it has a "great script", and is "A comic masterpiece, winning you over with its sheer charm". It's difficult to imagine a more different response to that of Ian Levine and Co. Though the book was clearly only supposed to be a personal take by the three authors, it nonetheless created its own wisdom that endured for a while afterwards. An interesting point is that the book lists as a goof an anachronistic line of the ballad of the Last Chance Saloon that mentions "earning your gunfighter's wings", a phrase not coined until WW1. The line, though, is "earning your gunfighter's fee". Cornell, Day and Topping did not as yet have access to a pristine digital copy of the story with restored audio.

When that pristine version became available in 2011, the person I'd judge to be the final fan taste-maker gave his opinion. This was Gary Gillatt, whose DVD reviews in Doctor Who Magazine around this period were justly valued and praised. He says that The Gunfighters was "rather marvellous" in its way, and was "produced with care and conviction" but ultimately leaves its audience "feeling unmoved". It would seem that fan wisdom regarding this musical Western tale had in thirty years gone right through the three stages of Hegelian dialectic: thesis, antithesis, synthesis; it was the worst, it was fantastic, it was a bit of both. Why do I think that there have been no more taste-makers in the last ten years and there won't be any in future? Post Gillatt's time reviewing for the official magazine, social media has become more and more mainstream; in parallel, the across-the-board availability of all of Doctor Who to consume has become a reality. That any fan could subscribe to a service to watch any surviving classic Who story, even The Gunfighters, at the touch of a button without having to rise from the living room sofa would have seemed like science fiction in the early 1980s, let alone when this story was first broadcast, but it is nonetheless true. Any of those fans also has an instant global platform to share their thoughts as soon as they've finished watching (or - let's face it - probably before they've finished). The era of one collective view of a story that gradually develops over time is over; now there is a democratic explosion of a million different views at once. This means no consensus, but the consolation is that there is no orthodoxy either; I think that's a fair exchange.

In Summary:

It has flaws, but is not as bad as its reputation: a mixed saddle-bag.