The Angels Take Manhattan

Chapter The 228th, where you can tell it in his accent when he talks, he's a Gallifreyan in New York.

Plot:

The Doctor, Amy and Rory are enjoying a trip to present day Manhattan, when Rory disappears. Strangely, the events of his disappearance seem to follow the text of a book the Doctor is reading, which turned up from nowhere, a hard-boiled detective story featuring a character called Melody Malone (the character is a proxy for, and the novel has been written by, River Song). A weeping angel has zapped Rory back to 1938 where he meets with River. She has been able to travel there with her vortex manipulator, but the TARDIS won't easily be able to land because of time distortion. River and Rory are held up by gunmen, who put them in a limo and drive them to the house of a rich mobster, Grayle. He's a collector who has a captive weeping angel, and he wants information about it from River. His goons throw Rory into a dark basement which contains cherubic baby angels. The Doctor, with Amy who's trying not to fix events by reading too far ahead in the book, arranges some convoluted gubbins to allow the TARDIS to land, knocks out Grayle and rescues River. They find that the baby angels have zapped Rory in space, not in time, and follow him to a place called Winter Quay, an apartment block near Battery Park.

The building is being used as a temporal energy farm by the many angels living in New York; they tempt people to the location, then zap them back decades to live the whole of their lives trapped in an apartment room. The others catch up with Rory as he sees his older self in a bed in such a room: an angel therefore will get him imminently. Refusing to accept this fate, Rory goes to the roof of the building with Amy, intending to jump off and kill himself, preventing that future; Amy is going to jump with him. This will create a paradox, and hopefully they will come back to life. The angels close in on them, including a moving Statue of Liberty, which turns out to be a giant angel. They jump, and time is erased. Along with the Doctor and River, they find themselves in a graveyard near the TARDIS in present day New York. The TARDIS can now definitely not ever go back to the 1938 time zone as it is too screwy. Rory spots a gravestone with his name on it, and a lone angel behind him zaps him back to 1938. Amy chooses to let the angel get her too, and they live their lives together back in that time, her name appearing alongside his on the gravestone. River leaves the Doctor saying that she'll write up the book and give it to Amy in the past to get published, but will also ask Amy to write an afterword. Alone, the Doctor reads this; Amy tells him to go back and tell the waiting Amelia on the first night they met of all the adventures that she will have in the future. He does this.

Context:

Watched on my own one evening, late, from the disc in the series 7 Blu-ray box set; even though the story is presumably available on the BBC iplayer, my first instinct wasn't to go there, but was instead to go to the bother of reaching up to a high self, fetching down a reasonably well-designed box, extracting - fiddly, this - a disc, and putting this disc into the Blu-ray player. I'm old school, I suppose (more on that in the next section below). If I put on a Doctor Who story earlier in the day and invite the children to watch, they tend not to be interested; this time, when they should have been sleeping, it attracted them like moths. Both the youngest (girl of 9) and the eldest (boy of 15) snuck in and watched for a bit, before I insisted they get back to bed.

First Time Round:

It know it does very much sound like I'm talking about dusty, dated concepts such as corsets and penny-farthings, but my chief memory of seeing this story first time round in 2012 is that - for whatever reason - the recording of the BBC1 broadcast onto my PVR didn't work, and I had to wait for the traditionally scheduled BBC3 repeat of the story that week, to add it to my hard drive. I was miffed about this, as in those days BBC3 in my area wasn't available in HD on Freeview, so the picture quality was inferior to the rest of the episodes of this half-season that I'd digitally recorded the previous weeks. It was a bit fuzzy, and it had an intrusive station ident (or DOG, or Digitally Originated Graphic) spoiling one corner of the picture. Ugh. BBC iplayer was a thing even in those days, but maybe I could only watch that on my computer rather than the TV. Or maybe I was just set in my ways. I finally saw the story in HD when the aforementioned Complete Seventh Series Blu-ray box set came out in autumn 2013. I still record every Doctor Who story on first broadcast, then delete them once they've come out on Blu-ray and I've purchased them. Currently, my hard drive just contains the most recent Eve of the Daleks and Legend of the Sea Devils, even though I don't really need to keep them as they are constantly available to stream. I'm keeping alive the tradition of watching and recording Doctor Who onto video tape from the earlier days of my fandom in the 1980s.

A couple of weeks after the broadcast of the story, a web 'minisode' that provided a coda to Amy and Rory's story aired called P.S. I raved about this 5-minute long storyboard and narration creation way back in an early blog post published in August 2015. It was written by the current showrunner Chris Chibnall, and his writing for the Ponds there, as well as that in the two episodes he wrote for the first half of series 7, and other online minisodes, was great - the best I think that they'd been depicted in the show up to that point. There's definitely been as good character work in the stories of his own era, but perhaps not quite as consistently done as in 2012.

Reaction:

I was reminded while watching The Angels Take Manhattan of an interview that 1960s companion actor Frazer Hines (who played Jamie) once gave. I can't remember exactly when and how I experienced it, but I think I can recall enough to reflect the spirit. He was talking of his disappointment at the long-running role he played in the soap Emmerdale Farm, Joe Sugden, being killed off, and said that he'd have always been prepared to come back and make cameo appearances when there were family weddings and such, which he thought important to keep up the verisimilitude of such a fictional landscape. I agree with him that that's important, and I believe he would have been good to his word (he returned to his role on Doctor Who a couple of times many years after originally appearing, for example). There isn't much plot in this Angels story. Bags of atmosphere, some clever ideas, some nice-one liners and moments of emotion, all are present; but, what actually happens? Rory gets zapped back into the past and Amy choses to follow him, and they live happily ever after. That's it. Everything else surrounding that is a complicated construction built specifically to avoid having the risk that Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill (as Amy and Rory) might not want to come back in future for the Doctor Who equivalent of a wedding episode. A ridiculous amount of heavy-lifting in the script arranges things so that they are stranded in a time zone that the Doctor can't again visit. The lifting is so heavy, in fact, that you can see the writer straining at various points. Was it worth all the effort?

To be fair, it's not something of which just this story is guilty, it's endemic from 2005 onwards; the final stories of companions tend to have to be final with a capital F, allowing for no chance of return; they also, though, don't include anyone being killed off completely. (Yes, writer Steven Moffat did kill a few people off during his tenure, but only for them to be brought back to life, sometimes multiple times, so that doesn't count; The Angels Take Manhattan even makes a joke about the many previous times Rory's been resurrected.) I'm guessing it's a search for drama and novelty that produced this trend, rather than narrative plausibility - it's not like Doctor Who is set in a farming village, the whole of time and space is big enough that you might not run into the same people often. It gets progressively harder to achieve the operatic level of finality that is felt to be required, though, and the amount of screen time devoted to that rather than any actual story is quite marked with respect to this story particularly. It also seems unnecessary, as a lot of the previous few stories (the first half of series 7) had been building up to the Ponds choosing to leave anyway. Time travelling is increasingly impacting their day-to-day lives, and they're getting older (though the scene where the Doctor and Rory diplomatically avoid the subject of Amy's wrinkles doesn't work because she has no bloody wrinkles, she's a twenty-bloody-five year old actress and former model ferchrissakes). It wouldn't have been beyond writer Steven Moffat to make an exciting and moving departure without forcing a wedge of time-distorted decades between the members of his first TARDIS team, but he obviously felt it was necessary.

It's mostly just window dressing without much story, then; but, it's pretty superior window dressing for all that. Creating a detective story in the Raymond Chandler style is in itself a first for the show, and a good fit for the River Song character; Alex Kingston is giving her usual 5-star performance, having fun playing the detective and the femme fatale rolled into one. Moffat's integration of this heightened narrative, by making it a story within a story, is very clever. There's lots of energy in the sequence of intercut scenes with events playing out in the 1930s time zone, and other characters reading of the events in the book in the 2010s; Moffat then takes it an extra step by making this a timey-wimey conceit: it the characters read too far ahead they'll be powerless to change things. Sequences with weeping angels stalking people as those people blink were probably already overused even in 2012, but Moffat still innovates by adding the baby angel cherubs. There's the wonderful moment where one blows out the match that Rory is using to keep it observed in the dark cellar; this and almost every scary scene is expertly shot by director Nick Hurran and crew. The one big thing that doesn't work in the script, and no amount of direction can make work, and which I suspect was one of those things that occasionally come up where the author's enthusiasm just runs away and they can't resist, is the angel Statue of Liberty. The concept of the angels is that they can only move when not being observed. How is it even remotely possible that something as large as the statue of liberty could be unobserved long enough to travel an inch, let alone get from Liberty Island to Battery Park and back without masses of people noticing? It's very silly.

A couple of other points bothered me on this watch that I didn't notice on previous watches. The Doctor hints that New York is a great place for the angels as it's "the city that never sleeps", but that's the exact opposite of an environment they could flourish in. They'd surely be better off in some sleepy village where they can creep around undetected (ooh, now there's an idea!). The concept of the battery farm in Battery park (silly, but Moffat presumably couldn't resist again) took me a while to get my head round. When the angels zap people back in time it releases a burst of temporal energy that it's been established they feed on, but presumably they'd be able to absorb more if they kept in close proximity to their victim over a longer period? So, they zap people only in a limited area they can control - and presumably only back within a limited sweep of years -  and then keep their victim in one place, so any angels in the vicinity can get the benefit. I think that's what's being suggested. What a palaver! May as well just say they stay in the area because they're fans of Broadway shows, and ignore all of that nonsense. The other head-scratcher for me is what exactly happens at the end: in Amy / Amelia's original timeline did the future Doctor come back to her on the first night and tell her all about her adventures to come (and she's forgotten about this, or assumed it was a dream), or does he by going back there at the end of the Angels in Manhattan story change her past? Either way, it undermines some of the drama of their very first story The Eleventh Hour for me, without adding much in the way of emotion. The emotion had peaked anyway at the wonderful "Together or not at all" moment where Amy and Rory take a leap into the unknown. The rest - the excellent and the silly - doesn't matter much compared to that.

Connectivity: 

Both The Angels Take Manhattan and Legend of the Sea Devils see the Doctor accompanied by two companions, one male one female; in both stories, the adventure takes place outside the British Isles, with trips to the same places in two different time periods.

Deeper Thoughts:

Nobody Knows Anything. My day job for pretty much my entire working life to date has seen me in various roles on various teams, all of whose aim was to deliver something digital, a web application or phone app, that users might like, or at the very least might use. My favourite quote about the complexities of that day job, though, links to another career I had for a few years, as a screenwriter. It is William Goldman's "Nobody Knows Anything" first put out into the world in his 1983 book Adventures in the Screen Trade. He follows up the initial three word soundbite with a short explanation: "Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what's going to work. Every time out it's a guess—and, if you're lucky, an educated one". Without this additional explanation, people can misunderstand it as something anti-intellectual or even anarchic. But Goldman was a Hollywood man, though he might not have liked that description particularly, and he respected the craft of all the cast and crew of Tinseltown. Even with all that knowledge and graft, he thought that you could get no better than an educated guess of the reaction when you present something to an audience. I think his words can be applied to any complex endeavour, and not just films. You can do all the market research you can afford, and arguably you should, but nothing beats putting something out there and seeing what people think of it. In my day job, of course, you can still change it once people start using it, and you've seen how they're using it, and what aspects of it they think are useful or not. Unless you're someone who tinkers like George Lucas with his various versions of the Star Wars films over the years, you can't do this for a movie or a TV show.

It's an exposing business to be in; the figures will tell you if something's a hit or a miss, but by then there's not much more you can do about it. Based on ratings, the most recent Doctor Who story Legend of the Sea Devils has been a miss, not a hit. It has achieved the lowest overnight (2.2 million) and consolidated weekly (3.4 million) viewers since the series returned in 2005. Fans and commentators have had their say about why this might be. Not enough marketing, wrong time of year, inferior scripting, being up against a live ITV show (Britain's Got Talent), not enough special elements to draw in a crowd. People have also said that these figures don't have any meaning in the modern context of streaming and constant availability, though some others have said that those making Doctor Who should be aiming for a large audience that want to watch it live (though that could be because, like me and my unnecessary recordings as described in the First Time Round section above, they are living in the past). Many people have speculated on what the incoming showrunner (Russell T Davies, returning to the role) might do to make things better. Of course, according to Goldman, none of these people really know what to change to make the next story a hit, because nobody knows anything. Me neither, but I have something of a theory; to illustrate this theory, I need to bring in something I have learnt about over the years as part of the day job, but which also has some relevance to films and TV: the Cynefin framework. Cynefin (named after the Welsh word for habitat) was invented in 1999 by the very clever Dave Snowden, and is a model to help understand problems and their possible solutions.

Snowden - who is as much a tinkerer as George Lucas, and has continued to enhance and amend Cynefin over the years - would no doubt hate me over-simplifying it thus, but at heart it comprises four main domains (there is a fifth, but I won't go into it here) in which any situation might fall: Clear, Complicated, Complex and Chaotic. In clear situations, the course of action to take is obvious to any reasonable person, with little room for different approaches. In complicated situations, you need specialist knowledge or up-front analysis to a lesser or greater degree; with that, you should be able to get the same basic result each time you apply the approach that is indicated. Complex situations are different to complicated ones, because no matter how expert you are, or how much advance work you put in, you might not get the same result between one try and another; cause and effect appear to be more loosely coupled because there are so many variables at play. Finally, chaotic situations are where cause and effect seem completely uncoupled, and the course of action to take is going to have to involve more gamble and risk. To help grasp this, consider different ways of making a film or video recording. Making a short home movie using a smartphone is in the Clear domain; any reasonable person can point and click and create something watchable. This has not always been the case; making a home movie 40 years ago was most definitely a complicated affair, involving equipment not everyone could afford, and relying on a company to print the film from the captured negative. It required practice and expertise and planning; the refinement of technology platforms over the years has helped move the basic act from complicated to clear. Seeing movement between the domains is one interesting aspect of using this model.

An example of a similar situation in the Complicated domain is one that is familiar to Doctor Who fans, the making of a multi-camera video in a studio. This was how the show's early episodes were made. Expertise was definitely required, and much forward planning by the director creating the camera script, so the cameramen on the floor knew where to go to get their next shot, and the vision mixers in the studio gallery would know when to switch between cameras, and so on. It was a craft that could be taught, though; generally, if a director had done his or her preparation, any piece could be created consistently, reflecting the writer's screenplay, as many had before. In the height of the popularity of this method of making television, every day in multiple studios of BBC's television centre, multiple programmes were being made this way. The programmes were recorded before broadcast, but the approach grew out of live performances captured in the same way in previous decades; it being live meant a few more variables, but still we're in the Complicated domain unless there's a radical change in one of those variables. A good example of such a shoot falling into the Chaotic domain is the infamous story of Underground, a 1958 TV play going out live on ITV in the UK, where one of the actors died (off camera) midway through the performance. In the sprit of "the show must go on", the cast ad-libbed around the lack of an important character, the director tore up his camera script and shot the remainder of the play "like a football match", following the action, and frantically, rewrote lines on the fly supplying them to the cast when they were off screen. They got through it, by roughly following Snowden's recommended approach in that domain: act to stabilise the situation as much as you can, sense what is happening, and respond to what you sense.

So, in the world of making films and TV, what's an example of something from the Complex domain? That would be creating the screenplay in the first place. Putting pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, to create something that one hopes will engage an audience. Remember, that in the Complex domain, putting in the same basic efforts does not necessarily mean the same result, and for a show like Doctor Who it needs to be done over and over again, week on week; the writers have to come up with interesting and new scenarios each time, and no guarantee that any of them won't bomb. So, what advice does the Cynefin framework give for a problem in the Complex domain? In a word, experimentation. Ideally, you try lots of different approaches (Snowden refers to them as probes, and would suggest you do them concurrently), see what works and what doesn't, amplify the former, dampen the latter. A writer can do this within the process of creating the text, trying things out and reworking them, but as per Goldman's guidance, you can't truly know until something is made and broadcast. Interestingly, Doctor Who has more scope to do this than a lot of other shows - it can sample different settings and genres every story. So, for those that didn't like recent Chris Chibnall episodes of Doctor Who, I say: one answer might have been to have more of them. Because of Covid, and because a handover is required to a new team taking over making the show, 2021 and 2022 will only see nine episodes of Doctor Who broadcast. The scope for trying different things has been restricted. Whether - had it been possible - the creation of a wider range of stories in that time might have meant more audience engagement and enjoyment, we can never know for sure (because - all together now - nobody knows anything), but it couldn't have hurt. Here's to more episodes per year in future!

In Summary:

Window dressing, but for a superior window, like one on 5th Avenue or somewhere like that.

Legend of the Sea Devils

Chapter The 227th, is as up-to-the-minute a chapter as you could possibly have, it's some shiny new treasure.

Plot:

[There's spoilers to come; I've restricted the plot synopsis to the wording from the press release that was published long before the story aired, so you're probably safe here, but some details had to creep in below - be warned.] The Doctor, Yaz and Dan land in 19th century China, where a small coastal village is under threat – from both the fearsome pirate queen Madam Ching and a monstrous alien force which she unwittingly unleashes. Will the Doctor, Yaz and Dan emerge from this swashbuckling battle with the Sea Devils to save the planet? [I mean... Yes, yes of course they will; I don't think it's a spoiler to answer that.]

Context:

Believe it or not, this story came up randomly. As soon as the title of a new Doctor Who story is announced, I add it to the spreadsheet I keep to track my progress with this ongoing endeavour; this has happened 46 times since I started the blog as new seasons keep coming (would have been 51 times, if I counted Flux as six stories rather than one). Thereafter, it's fair game for selection whenever I run the random number generator. I don't think it's ever happened before that the latest story's number has come up, though - it's usually been a conscious decision to blog a new one, the randomiser being overridden, so to speak. I still had a week to go before Legend's broadcast when selection was made, so had to get the blog post for The Green Death done and dusted as quickly and efficiently as possible. I re-watched the Jodie Whittaker story on the BBC iplayer the following day after its debut broadcast, taking notes not on a pad of paper as usual, but direct into blogger on my laptop. The idea was to get the post up as early as possible after the Easter Sunday broadcast. You, reader, will know exactly how successful I was in doing that, from the date near the top of this web page.

First Time Round:

Watched live on its debut BBC1 broadcast on the evening of Sunday 17th April 2022 with all the children (boys of 15 and 12, girl of 9); the Better Half is still making a point of sitting Doctor Who out, though she did put her head round the door briefly to say she wan't interested in anything that transpired. By the time of the Coming Soon trailer for the final special after the story proper, everyone apart from your humble blogger had started to wander out of the living room, leaving yours truly to be the only one making the requisite excited squeaks. I don't want to spoil it, so will adjust my increasingly high-pitched monologue, but it went something like this: "Ohmygosh, it's [Redacted] and [Redacted], how did they keep that quiet?!!! Ooh [Redacted] and the [Redacted] are in it, and there's that [Redacted] [Redacted], and I wasn't expecting [Redacted] - ooooh!". I got everyone back in the room and played the trailer again, but they were more bemused than excited by this orgy of fan service, despite my best attempts to engage them ("Do you know who that is, and that? It's [Redacted]!!!!!!!!!").

Reaction:

The situation this particular story finds itself in is rare for a Doctor Who story. The lead actor has finished filming, and publicly bowed out, with still a few stories for their era yet to air spread out over a long period of time after the last full series. This is the penultimate one, i.e. not the one to look forward to with all the revelations and changes, wrapping up an era, but just another adventure, unhitched and floating free from what came before and what will happen next. It therefore has the potential to be a not-very-special special. Peter Capaldi didn't have a penultimate special, and Matt Smith's penultimate one was also the 50th anniversary special, so was fairly well insured for audience engagement. The only true precursors to Legend of the Sea Devils are the two David Tennant specials from 2009 in between his last series and Christmas special, and his final two-part regeneration story. Would I find Jodie Whittaker's Easter Special a bit disappointing like Planet of the Dead, or amazing like The Waters of Mars? Inevitably, it's somewhere in between the two. The lead-in to Whittaker's finale was restricted to the trailer that I squeed about above (see First Time Round), without the drama of the final scenes of The Water of Mars, but this fishy tale was certainly more interesting and effective than Planet of the Dead was all those years ago.

The story looks great; first time director Haolu Wang and the crew are very successful in evoking time and place, and like some of the epic parts of Flux, one would be hard pressed to tell that this was shot during a pandemic. There are many stunning vistas, from the rain and mud of the fishing village in 1807 where a sea devil goes on a murderous rampage to various pirate ships, and to the beautiful sequence where the TARDIS lands at the bottom of the ocean (not something we've seen in the series before). The sea devil design and costuming is a perfect update, keeping what worked from the old but tweaking as necessary - their blue glowing swords are a nice new addition. The creatures work well in action scenes, and they and their pet sea monster (I'm going to think of it as a Myrka) are a good fit for the genre. It's rare for Doctor Who to do a historical pirate story (space pirates are slightly more common), and this is probably the best one to date. The big sword fight between the Doctor's motley crew and the sea devils sees all the swashes duly buckled. The pirates depicted are a bit too much on the clean and honourable side, but I'll forgive them that as it's a family show. What's a bit disappointing is that Madame Ching - portrayed very well by Crystal Wu - doesn't get much focus, given that she is the historical celebrity of the story. There's a bit too much going on in the relatively short run time of 47 minutes to do justice to everything, and a bit too much of the final cut contains babble about pole-swapping tech.

The script, by new to the series writer Ella Road plus showrunner Chris Chibnall, does squeeze in some funny moments ("No ship, Sherlock"), and it's very nice to be spending some time in the company of Dan, Yaz and the Doctor again. John Bishop has some fun playing the still newbie time traveller, talked into wearing a silly fancy dress pirate outfit, and also gets an emotional phone call with Nadia Albina's Di hinting that he may be heading for a happy ending. The lion's share of the emotion of this story, though, belongs to Yaz and the Doctor acknowledging their feelings for one another. These scenes were very well performed by Whittaker and Mandip Gill, and made the story worthwhile on their own. That tips the balance and makes the story a pretty special special; without the feels, I think the story overall would perhaps just have been marking time before the big finale of this era ties up all the loose ends and plot arcs. It's apt, though, that a story in a nautical style provides so much material for shipping.

Connectivity: 

Both Legend of the Sea Devils and The Green Death feature green things that were invented during Jon Pertwee's tenure as Doctor Who.

Deeper Thoughts:

Easter's Special Too? Doctor Who had and has a long association with Christmas and New Year, but appropriately - for a series that features regular rebirths - it also has a strong connection to Easter. The series started late in 1963 (the 23rd November, as any fule kno), so missed the season of eggs and bunnies that year; to make up for it, though, a Doctor Who episode was broadcast during Easter weekend every year for the rest of the 1960s. This was by dint of the series being on almost all year round (bar a brief break during the Summer) rather than by any special effort, though. The first story shown then was historical epic Marco Polo, Who's fourth story; the sixth episode, Mighty Kublai Khan, was shown on Easter Saturday of 1964, the 28th March. Unlike at Christmas (but only Christmas Day itself back then, on which Doctor Who fell only once in the 1960s - see here for more details) there was no requirement to make the episode anything out of the ordinary, and certainly the decade didn't see any kind of Easter Special. Stories which had an episode aired during the long holiday weekend in spring during those years were a mixed bunch: The Crusade 4 "The Warlords", The Celestial Toymaker 2 "The Hall of Dolls", The Macra Terror 3, Fury from the Deep 5, and The Space Pirates 5. Any episode of Doctor Who is perfect for the family to watch when off work or school, though; so, I'm sure each of these was a treat in itself for those watching at the time.

Into the 1970s, now in colour with Jon Pertwee as the Doctor, the series was on TV for only half of the year; but, as each season started in January, this guaranteed a home on Easter Saturday for a lucky episode each year: The Ambassadors of Death 2, Colony in Space 1, The Sea Devils 6, Planet of the Daleks 3, The Monster of Peladon 4. It's good to see a significant presence for stories written (or in one case rewritten) by Malcolm Hulke, as he was an inspiration for the most recent Doctor Who Easter special; and it's interesting to note that 2022 wasn't the first time that underwater Earth Reptiles the Sea Devils made an appearance at Eastertide. [A quick aside about Hulke's impact on Chibnall; the most recent Doctor Who Magazine had many features about Legend of the Sea Devils, one of which contained his quote "A lot of the stuff that we get accused of being 'woke' about, Malcolm Hulke was doing over 50 years ago ... he was a pretty visionary writer - just look at The Green Death", as if the outgoing Who showrunner believes that Hulke penned said story. Perhaps he was confused as Hulke wrote the novelisation, but the ideas of the story came from Robert Sloman and Barry Letts. Honestly, he calls himself a Doctor Who fan!] Genesis of the Daleks episode 4, broadcast on Saturday 29th March 1975, with Easter Sunday the following day, was the final episode of the classic era to be accompanied by chocolate egg consumption. The shift of the start of each run to autumn, beginning with season 13, Tom Baker's second, meant that Easter was just missed, with each of Baker's remaining seasons ending in the spring a little before the big weekend.

Though in 1982, when Peter Davison took on the role, things shifted back and the seasons started in January again, they were shortened by episodes being shown twice a week, or by there being fewer double-length episodes as in Colin Baker's first full season; so, no run made it as far as Easter. By the final three years of the 1980s, Sylvester McCoy was appearing again when the leaves were turning brown and the nights drawing in. Paul McGann's sole TV outing came a little too late, in another spring Bank Holiday weekend (Whitsun). It was only when Doctor Who returned in 2005 that Easter weekend became not just any weekend Who was broadcast, but the big one. The new series launched on an Easter Saturday, and every season for many years thereafter launched on or very close to that day; the last regular outing was at the end of Matt Smith's tenure, with the second half of his final run kicking off on Easter Saturday 2013. At this time, the show was also putting a Christmas special out on every December 25th, so had both ends of the Catholic calendar sewn up. There was also the very first full-on Easter special in the middle on that period. On 11th April 2009, another Easter Saturday, Planet of the Dead aired; it was set at Easter, featured David Tennant eating a chocolate egg and wishing people a Happy Easter. He also states during the narrative that, as it's at a different time each year, "I don't often do Easter - I can never find it." The show succeeds in finding it more frequently, right up to this most recent story, Legend of the Sea Devils. Only RTD knows what's coming next. Will there be any future outings for our favourite Time Lord at Easter, or even at Christmas? Time will tell (it always does).

In Summary:

Incidentally, a Happy Easter to all of you at home!

The Green Death

Chapter The 226th, which features death and is very green. (Green! Green meaning environmentally conscious, yeah? You get it.)

Plot:

Global Chemicals, based in a facility in Llanfairfach, Wales, is running a government-sponsored (i.e. evil) project to make petrol more efficiently; this produces a green sludge waste product, which the company is pumping into an abandoned mine nearby. When a miner doing an annual check goes down the pit and comes into contact with the stuff, he ends up bright green and dead; UNIT are brought in to investigate. The Doctor declines the Brigadier's entreaties to come to Wales as he is instead finally going to the planet Metebelis 3 to pick up one of the blue crystals they have there. Jo accompanies the Brig, choosing not to go with the Doctor, as she wants to join up with Cliff Jones, a crusading eco-campaigner and Nobel prize-winning scientist working on cultivating an edible high-protein fungus as an alternative food source. He has set up a commune in Llanfairfach. After meeting with Stevens, a director at Global Chemicals, the Brigadier comes under pressure from senior levels of the government not to probe too deeply into the affair, and to instead help the company contain it; the Brig contrives to get Captain Yates inside Global's headquarters as a spy. The Doctor returns from his time/space jaunt, and buzzes up to Wales in a super-charged Bessie. He meets the Brigadier, and they go to the mine only to find that Jo has gone down, accompanied by a miner called Bert, in search of another miner that had gone investigating.

The lift has been sabotaged by Global Chemicals henchman Hinks. The Doctor needs cutting equipment to rig up a mechanism to allow anyone to follow Jo down into the pit. Global Chemicals are unhelpful, and the staff members behave in an odd, hypnotised way. Luckily, the Brig finds cutting equipment in a local garage. The Doctor goes down, and finds Jo, but both miners have come into contact with the sludge and end up green and dead. Escaping through a shaft leading up to the Global Chemicals facility, the Doctor and Jo find giant maggots in the mine, somehow enlarged by the chemical waste. They get away, and spend the night at Professor Jones' commune. Cliff comforts Jo as she is feeling sad about Bert's death, and they seem to be getting very close. The Doctor interrupts them, calling Cliff off to help him investigate how to destroy the maggots. The Brig blows up the mine, but that only throws up lots of maggots onto the surface of the slag heap. He then brings in the RAF to bomb them, but they survive this. Jo has gone to capture a maggot for Cliff to experiment on, and while she's away he finds out that (by a lucky coincidence) his current fungus hybrid is lethal to the maggots. Before he can tell anyone, he rushes off to rescue Jo from her suicidal mission. He gets knocked out during the bombing sweep, comes into contact with the goo and starts to glow green.

The Doctor breaks in to Global Chemicals, goes to the top floor and meets BOSS, the company computer (with hypnotic powers) that is controlling everything. The Doctor escapes but Yates is still trapped, and is hypnotised to come after the Doctor and shoot him and the Brig. The Doctor uses the powers of the blue Metebelis 3 crystal to break Yates's conditioning. Meanwhile, as Cliff fights for his life, the Doctor finds out (by another lucky coincidence) about the fungus's maggot-killing properties, as a stray maggot has died eating some. The Doctor and Sergeant Benton drive around the slag heap throwing out samples of the fungus, which the maggots tuck in to, finishing them off. They also encounter the one giant fly that has hatched from a maggot, and manage to destroy that too. BOSS is going to connect with other computers worldwide and enslave the Earth, so the Doctor confronts Stevens, but he's now under BOSS's full control. The Doctor pulls the blue crystal trick once more. Freed, Stevens sacrifices himself, overloading the circuits and blowing up the computer and the facility, after the Doctor has exited. Cliff is saved (by yet another lucky coincidence) as the fungus cures him too. He proposes to Jo, and she accepts. She's going to join him on an expedition to the Amazon to find a new even better fungus than the one that's comprehensively saved the day. The Doctor gives the crystal to Jo as an engagement present. Everyone celebrates at Jones's commune, except the Doctor who - sad at losing his friend - drives off into the sunset.

Context:

The story was watched an episode a night, from the Blu-ray in the season 10 collection box set, stripped across a week in early April 2022 starting on a Sunday. I watched each episode in the late afternoon to allow opportunity for other members of the family to join me, and to be fair they did for short periods, even the Better Half briefly. The only person who wasn't interested at all was the eldest (boy of 15). It might not be anything to do with Doctor Who, though; he and his brother (boy of 12) have been requesting recently to watch Stranger Things from the beginning (before now, I'd considered it a bit too scary); we're a couple of episodes in to the first series, and the eldest has already bailed - he might just be getting to that age where seeing his mates, etc. is more of a draw than watching TV shows. I wonder if I'll ever reach that age?! Both the other two children and the Better Half commented on the poor effects work to achieve the scenes of characters in the lift going down into the mine; there is very visible 'fringing' between the background keyed-in and the foreground characters, "It's the worst green screen ever!" was a representative comment. The Better Half creased up on hearing the badly dubbed lines added to a location film scene towards the end of episode one, which were also included in the recap of the next episode, where the Brig says "Someone's going down!" and the Doc adds "We must stop them!" in a manner that's both melodramatic and a bit flat simultaneously. She conceded that the front-axial projection glowing green make-up effect was good, though.

First Time Round:

In November and December 1993, as part of the celebrations of Doctor Who's 30th anniversary (of which more in the Deeper Thoughts section below), Planet of the Daleks was repeated weekly on BBC1. To make the presentation fill a 30-minute slot, each 25-minute episode was padded out with a preceding documentary short. The last one was a jokey UNIT recruitment film, which ended with a phone number on screen to call if one was interested in joining up and being blown to bits by aliens. I wasn't curious enough to phone the number; if I had, a recorded message by Brigadier actor Nicholas Courtney would have informed me that another Jon Pertwee story - The Green Death, the story that followed Planet when they were originally shown - would be repeated in the new year. As there was no other advance publicity, I had no idea it was happening and so missed episode one of a story I'd never before seen and would have been very eager to catch. The story was shown weekly on BBC2 on Sunday lunchtimes, starting on 2nd January 1994. Between the first and second episode, I found out about it - can't remember how - and weekly started recording the story onto a VHS tape; by this time I had travelled back to university in Durham after the Christmas vacation. I'd finished my studies, got a job and moved out of home into a flat with the Better Half by the time I got to see that missing first episode. This was when the sell-through VHS of the story came out in October 1996. The release had been delayed twice; it was originally slated for early 1994 before the story was chosen for repeat; this pushed it back to early 1996, whereupon all classic Who videos were paused, so as not to pull focus from the new Paul McGann TV movie and its home video release. This was overridden later in the year so that The Green Death tape could act as a celebration and commemoration of Jon Pertwee as the Doctor, after the actor had sadly died earlier in the year.

Reaction:

The Green Death is so iconic a Doctor Who story that it even has it's own Friends-style nickname title - it is and forever will be "The One with the Maggots". The micro beasties gone macro are depicted with varying degrees of success in the story, but they are never not memorable, and in most cases very striking. The large models made by visual effects designer Colin Mapson are particularly good, and they're shot well by the VFX film unit, and by director Michael E Briant in their studio appearances. The production team in the early 1970s had hit on a formula for the season finale (an innovation, as it wasn't something they bothered much with in the 1960s when the break between Doctor Who seasons was short). It would be written by the producer Barry Letts with a writing partner Robert Sloman (though the former wasn't credited), and it would have a nice bit of business in it for each of the 'UNIT family' of regular characters, often seeing them in civvies or doing more relaxed and more comic scenes. For the first two of the finales, that meant including Roger Delgado as the Master - he was playing the wicked uncle of the family, if you will - but he was featuring in fewer stories by season 10 (Pertwee's fourth year), and would tragically die young around the time that The Green Death was broadcast. The absence of the normally contracted villain for the production left space for what had been missing the previous couple of times, a memorable monster. The maggots were an imaginatively nasty choice, and had such a great impact that they reused a tweaked version of the basic idea for the following year's finale (it was giant spiders that time).

There's so much more to this story than just maggots, however. Six-parters of this vintage tend to drag at some point, but the presence of so many elements to fashion the narrative around means that The Green Death is always moving at a pace, and always engaging. This is, for example, a rare case of a story being filmed and set outside the home counties. Yes, the depiction of Wales is mostly as caricatured as the later depiction of Scotland in Terror of the Zygons but it is still refreshing. Anyway, as well as many "boyos", a few miners straight from central casting, and a miserable, grumbling milkman ("Old Jones the Milk says they're going to blow up the mine!"), there is a proud Welshman depicted who's a young Nobel prize-winning professor living an alternative lifestyle, and you don't see Welsh hippies that often in any TV or film of the period. Also refreshing is the presence of working class characters in a 20th century Doctor Who; yes, it's not done very well, but for half a story (the interests of the mining community into what's going on in the mine are not followed up after episode 3, and only middle-class people propel the narrative forward after that) it was good to see. While they're on screen, the characterisations might be a bit dodgy, but the characters' actions are pretty noble, all told. Miners, environmentalists, soldiers, Time lords, companions, all are allowed agency and some respect by the narrative. Businessmen and politicians maybe not so much.

Two of the Global Chemicals employees, Elgin and Stevens, do show a tiny bit of individuality in resisting control, including at the climax where Stevens sacrifices himself to destroy BOSS, but the capitalist elements of the script are there to provide the panto villain rather than nuance. Even then, there are moments where more than one viewpoint is allowed, like the beginning where Professor Jones and the unemployed miners clash regarding economic necessity versus ecological safety. John Dearth's fruity voice performance as BOSS is a boon for the production (he would return in the following finale to again play an interesting antagonist), and it lifts the somewhat hackneyed idea of the controlling computer by letting him gloriously attack great dialogue about Nietzschean Supermen and hum classical music during climactic moments. It is a somewhat hackneyed idea, though, almost exactly the same plot as a previous Doctor Who story from seven years earlier, The War Machines: a computer starts controlling people and builds up to a climax where it will link into a network of other computers across the globe and take over. Why is it that everybody thought computers were going to develop a way to hypnotise people? Why is it anyone thought they would need to? As good as Dearth makes BOSS, it's a shame to have a computer in control as it dilutes the main theme that people are quite capable of doing such awful things in the name of capitalism without mind control. It does though allow BOSS to act as the anthropomorphised company itself, with Stevens pleadingly asking it whether the death and destruction is worth it.

One other character in Global Chemicals that stands out is Hinks, the Londoner henchman that appears to have wandered in from a Euston films production, but it works; it's a shame that he becomes victim of a maggot halfway through. Despite being packed with plot, there are still a few 'loop' scenes in the story, which fill up time with incident that ultimately doesn't lead anywhere. One such is the Doctor's breaking in to Global Chemicals early on to look for cutting equipment, but I will forgive it anything for the Doctor/Hinks confrontation that's in there, where the captured Doctor says he's quite spry for his age, and Hinks gets the wonderful line "Oh, going to have a go? Tu-wiffic!" before they have a fight with many a "Hai!". All the regulars get fun things to do, though some of the more comedic moments work better than others; Jon Pertwee in drag as a cleaning lady, and Richard Franklin's reaction to this, is so broad that it feels like they're breaking character and doing a sketch. Much better are the lovely intercut scenes in the first episode where the Doctor on Metebelis 3 battles against outrageous obstacles, almost as an aside, while his friends engage with the real plot of the week. Nicholas Courtney's line "I never thought I'd fire in anger at a dratted caterpillar" isn't quite in the same league as "Chap with wings there, five rounds rapid", but otherwise I think the story bests The Daemons, the only other serious contender for best Pertwee finale; despite its adventure plot resolution relying on a series of massive coincidences, The Green Death is much more coherent and meaningful.

This comes from a strong subplot that brings in more emotional character change than usual. The story's ultimately not about defeating the maggots, or stopping Global Chemicals - it's about Jo's romance with Professor Clifford Jones, and her eventual departure. Jo leaving to continue adventuring and saving the world with a younger, human version of the Doctor is exactly right, but it would only work if the casting was perfect. Reportedly, this did cause them some trouble, but luckily Katy Manning was finally able to bring in her actor boyfriend of the time, Stewart Bevan. He nails it. As well as great chemistry with Manning (not necessarily guaranteed, even if there's chemistry in real life), he personifies the principled, resolute and heroic aspects of the Doctor too. Jon Pertwee performs his side of this triangle with an interesting ambiguity; it could be taken as just the actions of an overprotective parent feeling neglected when their fledgling is flying the coop, but the scene where he deliberately splits up Jo and Cliff as they're getting romantic smacks of a (sexual?) jealousy of the younger man. The subtext is there if you want to see it, and not if you don't; it all feels very new series, in the best possible way. Jo's character arc reaches a point of resolution: she's still getting herself into trouble, as she does when getting caught up in the bombing raid while on her maggot-finding mission; but, crucially, she now doesn't need anyone's help to get back out of trouble. Her rewiring the radio once Cliff has been knocked out mirrors gadgetry jiggery-pokery she's seen the Doctor do previously (e.g. in The Sea Devils). Finally, there's the call-back to her very first appearance, calling in a favour from her influential uncle, and the beautifully shot sequence of the Doctor leaving the party and driving off alone. It's the perfect end to one of the most enjoyably watchable stories of classic Who.

Connectivity: 

Both The Green Death and The Invisible Enemy feature an infection that spreads between members of the cast, and both include invertebrates (maggots, a prawn) expanded to massive size.

Deeper Thoughts:

3D Glasses as Proust's Madeleine: 1993/94 and all that. This is going to be a bit indulgent, apologies - blame the TV schedulers (they are usually to blame for my excesses!). At the time of writing, the BBC pop documentary series "Top of the Pops: The story of..." has reached 1994, and I just watched the 1993 and 1994 editions, plus the separate shows that are compilations of hits from those years, back to back. A wave of nostalgia washed me up on the shores of a particular time, autumn / winter 1993 and early 1994, and in particular the events and televisual offerings that surrounded the 30th anniversary of Doctor Who. It was a strange kind of celebration. Other big anniversaries each decade on from the show's start in 1963 looked to the past, of course, but also looked to the future. Regular production of the programme was ongoing when the 10th, 20th and 50th anniversaries were celebrated, as will be the case for the 60th next year. Just before the 40th anniversary, the new series went into the early stages of pre-production following the most exciting announcement conceivable for Doctor Who fans, that it was back, back, back for the 21st century. For the 30th anniversary, there were rumours of a possible co-production with Steven Spielberg's Amblin Television; but the years since the last run of the show in 1989 and cancellation were rife with rumours, not just of other potential TV co-production deals, but also script and casting speculation for a Doctor Who motion picture that Coast to Coast Productions had been trying to get off the ground for a few years by then. Nobody set much store by such title-tattle; Doctor Who was seen as a show that was done, finished, ended, dead.

Paradoxically, by 1993, dead Doctor Who seemed to have a much higher profile than when last alive in 1989, but as a heritage concept. The show's long and rich history was being regularly exploited in the early 1990s through repeats and sell-through VHS. Old stories were being released on tape at a rate of 10 -15 per year in the first half of the 1990s; plus, on each of an amazing 54 weeks between January 1992 and March 1994, a different old episode of Doctor Who was shown on either BBC2 or BBC1, almost doubling the TV presence it had when Sylvester McCoy had taken over as the Doctor in the latter years of the 1980s. The 30th anniversary was very much the culmination of the trend, but I couldn't help feel then that it was unsustainable. It was like Northern Soul, a new phenomenon creating something vital for a brief moment out of something old, and finite - once all the old records were rediscovered, with nothing new being made, the musical movement would be no more. Similarly, Doctor Who couldn't keep repeating old shows without making new ones. For a few weeks late in 1993, though, one might have thought different. There was new factual material on BBC1, including a showpiece documentary. The Doctor had a big presence in the prestigious and worthy Children in Need telethon, it appeared in a crossover with a popular soap in 3D, and the show got a front cover of the Radio Times once more (something it hadn't achieved for ten years prior to that).

I had started my third and final year at St. Aidan's College in the University of Durham that autumn. Myself and a dozen others got to move in to one of many newly built self-contained houses on college grounds, comprising individual rooms with communal kitchen and living room areas. We early on obtained a TV for the year by all chipping in and getting one from Radio Rentals; someone had brought a toploader video recorder from home, which was wired up to said telly and we were all set, or at least I was. (Look, I spent all my meagre student money on Doctor Who videos, and had not much left for going out and enjoying the springtime of my life, so a TV and a video was all I needed to be happy, pathetic I know.) Not to get too À la recherche du temps perdu about it, but some items from back then can produce what Proust afficionados would call 'involuntary memory'. One such would be a pair of a particular kind of 3D glasses. These one could buy in 1993 in Woollies and Smiths, with some of the proceeds going to the Children In Need charity. Just seeing a picture of these takes me back to those days when I and many others were part of an experiment to give as many TV watchers as possible motion sickness. I josh, of course. It was really something of a trial for a new system of 3D with dark and light tinted lenses, rather than the old red/green lens approach, meaning that the programme would still be watchable for someone who didn't have the special glasses. The problem was that to make the 3D effect work, there needed to be objects kept in the foreground in front of the action, and the camera had to constantly move. It could certainly make one feel giddy. The 3D trial lasted a week around the broadcast of the BBC Children in Need telethon.

Another item that can transport me back to 1993 is the double CD single. Thinking and writing about this phenomenon now I can't believe it ever existed, but just like a bunch of 78 records collected in a booklet to form a song sequence or the movements of a symphony (this is where the word 'album' originally came from, pop pickers), they were a historic quirk of physical media. To sustain a song's sales, the first disc of the set would come out one week, often in an attractive case with a tauntingly empty space for the second disc of the set. This second disc would come out the following week, and you'd pay separately for both. I only fell for this con a few times; one was a Pet Shop Boys single that came out around this time, I Wouldn't Normally Do This Kind of Thing. I really didn't need that second disc of remixes, but the packaging - a soft, bumpy tactile clear-plastic wallet - was nice. Anyway, Tennant and Lowe performed the song on the telethon, wearing Beatle wigs and funny glasses, with the camera circling them over and over, and with odd CG shapes superimposed floating around in the foreground. It wasn't the oddest presentation of the night, though: that would have to be part 1 of Dimensions in Time, the aforementioned Doctor Who / Eastenders crossover skit. It is bewildering now to speculate as to how this came about. Yes, it was Who's anniversary year, but it was a recently - and infamously - cancelled show; having a skit putting together the highest-rated current BBC show with a show that had been seen as old and tried only four years previously was bizarre to say the least.

For thoughts on the story (loosely speaking) of Dimensions in Time, see the Deeper Thoughts section of The Five Doctors blog post. Interesting too was the material broadcast around it. The two parts of the piece were presented within Noel's House Party, Noel Edmonds's somehow popular Saturday night entertainment format of the time (it gave the country Mr. Blobby, who was imminently going to secure the Christmas number one in the UK at the end of 1993). The first part on the Friday night was in a House Party styled section of Children in Need, which saw an in-costume, in-character Jon Pertwee being comedy rude to Noel. The second followed the next evening within that week's House Party edition, though Noel in his somewhat passive-aggressive introduction did not appear to want it there too much. For me, it was exciting to see Doctor Who on such a big, popular Saturday night programme (even one that was a bit naff, and definitely embarrassing to watch as a third year student at the time). I was also disproportionately pleased to see 30 Years in the TARDIS, a primetime broadcast documentary shown within the same week. It will seem like I'm being sarcastic, but I was genuinely thrilled to see people like Toyah Wilcox, Mike Gatting and Lowri Turner enthusing about Doctor Who, that's how much we fans needed validation in those so-called wilderness years. Paused for a week for Dimensions in Time midway through it's run, the BBC1 repeat of Planet of the Daleks resumed the week after, and finished on 17th December. The ratings for the New Year BBC2 showings of The Green Death (see above) were disappointing, so they tried a Tom Baker classic, and the ratings got even worse, so they gave up. That new 3D system was never mentioned again. The bubble had burst, but for a brief period Doctor Who had taken over television again. It wouldn't be the last time it was to do so, and the next time it would be with new material...

In Summary:

This sounds like the slogan of the worst possible product ever, but: there's more to it than just the maggots.