The Fires of Pompeii

Chapter The 236th, wherein we see the events of volcano day. 

Plot:

The Doctor and Donna arrive in Pompeii in 79 AD on the day before Vesuvius erupts. The TARDIS is bought as a piece of modern art by local marble vendor Caecilius; tracking it down to make their escape, the time travellers meet Caecilius and his family at their villa, and realise something is very wrong. Many people in Pompeii have precise precognitive powers acquired from breathing in the volcano vapours coming out of Pompeii's hypocausts, and this is turning them to stone. Nobody, though, can foresee the events of the next day, almost as if it is blocked from their view. Aliens called Pyroviles, giants made of magma and rock, live in the volcano after having crash landed many years before. An earthquake 17 years earlier woke them up, and since then they have been influencing anyone with latent psychic ability. The family and the Doctor defeat a Pyrovile that attacks the villa by throwing buckets of water over it, but a local Sibylline sisterhood kidnap Donna in the confusion. The Doctor rescues her, and they both use an entrance in the sisterhood's temple to descend into the volcano. They find a local bigwig Lucius delivering a stone circuit board that he commissioned Caecilius to complete. It is an energy converter that will use the power from Vesuvius to convert all the humans on the planet into Pyroviles, meaning the volcano will never erupt. The Doctor has to make the eruption happen and kill all the residents in order to save the rest of the world and correct history. He and Donna escape in the TARDIS, but Donna persuades him to go back and save just Caecilius and his family, who in gratitude adopt the TARDIS crew as their household gods.

Context:

This story came up randomly a little while ago, but I held it back until now to tie in with the publishing of the Target novelisation (see Deeper Thoughts section for more details). I first thought I'd watch it late in the evening on the hottest day of the year in the UK so far, July 19th 2022; unable to sleep for the third night running, I was looking for something to distract me. It is after all an apposite if unnerving watch when the ambient temperature is high. I remembered, though, that the children - who were all in bed by then - had expressed an interest a few days earlier in watching a Doctor Who story, so I held off. The following Sunday afternoon, I watched the story from the disc in the Complete Fourth Series DVD box set accompanied by all three children (boys of 16 and 12, girl of 10). All of them were surprised to see Peter Capaldi appear as Caecilius - "It's two Doctors in one!" said the middle child, who I later had to show the clip from Capaldi era story The Girl Who Died as he was intrigued to see the explanation of why the Doctor models a regeneration on this Pompeiian he once met. This child, who's the most like his Dad in terms of enthusiasm for genre TV and propensity for binge watching, mentioned in passing that Loki had done Pompeii too (and encouraged me for the nth time to watch said series on Disney+). When the Doctor was facing his cruel decision, I asked all the children of what this was an example, and they all chorused "The Trolley problem!" like the good moral philosophers that they are.

First Time Round:

I watched this go out live on its BBC1 debut broadcast in the UK on 12th April 2008, accompanied by the Better Half and my - at the time - only child (a boy of nearly two years old then). The show was on a little earlier on Saturday nights that year, so the boy was still up, and we'd tried a tentative experiment the previous week with the Adipose story. He'd responded well to that one, but when giant magma monsters growled through the TV screen at him, he burst into tears. We knocked such family watches on the head at that point, and didn't try again until he (and each of his two siblings who came along later) was much older. At the time, I was a lowly UK screenwriter and screenwriting blogger and vaguely 'knew' the writer James Moran as a fellow blogger. I don't know if he ever saw it but in a post a few months later talking about this first watch of The Fires of Pompeii, I wrote "Who do you think you are scaring my innocent child, Mr. Moran?". This was not actually a criticism, but a very obscure Doctor Who reference, to an article by a journo called Jean Rook in the Daily Express in the 1970s that took pot shots at Robert Holmes, script editor and writer and genius. Essentially, I was saying that Moran was in exalted company. So febrile was the online debate at that time that I felt I had to add a disclaimer in the post explaining this, else someone might think I was having a pop at him. As I've mentioned on the blog before, there was a lot of negativity in his comments section after his Doctor Who story went out, and I didn't want to add to that. It was nothing, though, to the ire that was unleashed by the unthinking the following year, when Moran's co-written episode of Torchwood killed off a well-loved character. I've only seen positivity online about his latest foray into the worlds of Doctor Who, this time in prose form (see Deeper Thoughts section below), so maybe things have improved in the last 13 years. Maybe.

Reaction:

In the 1970s Tom Baker story Pyramids of Mars, which is set in 1911, companion Sarah Jane Smith asks one of those key questions on behalf of the audience that companions are put there to ask: why can't she and the Doctor just leave rather than defeating the baddie of the week (Sutekh), as they know that the world doesn't end in 1911? A sequence then follows where the Doctor takes her to the future as it will look if they don't defeat Sutekh, and it's a barren wasteland. This little bit of ironing, pressing out the wrinkle of why it's okay for the Doctor to interfere sometimes but not others (usually because naughty aliens have been playing fast and loose with established history), what's "meant to be" and what's in flux, is one that Russell T Davies, the showrunner of the first few years of twenty-first century Who including The Fires of Pompeii, wanted to emulate. There was a desire to include a Pyramids of Mars style scene as early as the third story (the first one set in the past), but they couldn't quite make it fit. I'm glad they didn't, as in the end they - whether they realised they'd done it or not - commissioned James Moran to make a whole story out of that question, and it's a cracker. Consider the climactic sequences: the painful decision the Doctor has to make, with Donna with him so he doesn't have to face the decision alone, the dark spectacle of the recreation of Pompeii's final moments, and the emotional moment that Donna, in floods of tears, persuades the Doctor to go back and save someone, anyone; seeing these, you might be fooled into thinking this was a season finale but it's just episode two of thirteen. It was a very strong run, Donna and the Doctor's adventures from 2008, and this story is one of the best of them.

In the style of a comedy like Blackadder, the story makes the past more immediate by including characters (the family) that behave in a modern way within a historical setting. It's quite broad and sit-com with its "Don't tell my Dad" and "You're not going out wearing that" and so on, but it works. This relies a lot on the individual performances, and the casting here is exemplary. There's a lot of plot crammed in to the approximately 45 minutes of action, and this leaves little time for everyone to shine, so getting the right actors to have an immediate screen impact - and make you care at the end when their characters face death - was crucial. It means one's left wanting more, though. Capaldi is great as Caecilius, as are all the members of the family; they could power an entire series of knockabout Roman adventures (I love the Mary Poppins homage where they have a standard family procedure to catch any valuable ornaments when the volcano rumbles, "Positions!"), but they only get a short amount of screen time when one adds it all up. Capladi and another member of the cast (Karen Gillan as a soothsayer) got to come back in major starring roles, of course; but it would be nice to find another role in Doctor Who in future for each of the Phils, Cornwall and Davis, as they essentially have cameos here. For Phil Davis this is a particular shame; Lucius Petrus Dextrus (a bit of a spoiler if, unlike me, you were taught Latin, as it means Lucius Stone Arm) is the nominal baddie of the piece, and Davis talks a good baddie game, but there isn't room for him to do very much - he serves the plot only by delivering a MacGuffin to the real villains. The scene where Davis, and the daughter of the family, ominously reveal that they know all about the Doctor and Donna's real identities is very good, mind.

The visuals of the story are excellent throughout. Monsters made of stone and fire hadn't been done before (at least in the new series era - if they had turned out to be the Krargs from Shada, finally appearing in the series properly, that would have been nice), and the CGI works well enough (it was certainly realistic enough to scare my infant son - see above). Utilising the sets from another Ancient Rome based series in the Cinecitta studios in Italy gives the story an expensive sense of scale, and the location work matches this high standard. Murray Gold's music is nice, if not particularly memorable, and the dialogue is good. The comedy quotient in the script is larger than usual, even for this era. This can vary in groansomeness (maybe it's just me, but Donna's idea about where Pompeiian teens go shopping "T K Maxximus" is a very fine gag; the Doctor asking the Pyroviles not to get themselves "in a lava", not so much, and Caecilius thinking that San Francisco is a restaurant in Naples is somewhere in the middle) but most jokes land. There's also the running gag that the TARDIS translation of talking in Latin to Latin speakers comes out sounding Welsh, and the Doctor wielding a water pistol like James Bond. It is just balanced enough not to impact on the more serious musing on the central moral quandary when that needs to come to the fore. Ultimately, that's what the story is all about. A minor gripe about the more serious stuff would be that - after a big build up to the crucial explosive moment where the Doctor and Donna push the lever that makes the volcano erupt - they escape somewhat conveniently, with the object that they are in turning out to be an escape pod that throws them exactly the right distance clear such that they can outrun the lava and get back to the TARDIS. I'll forgive this, though, as there are greater horrors to come for them because they survive, and then ultimately some small moment of redemption.

Connectivity: 

Aside from them both being recently published as books (see Deeper Thoughts section), The Fires of Pompeii and The Stones of Blood each have mention of ancient gods or goddesses, a group of robed worshippers and creatures made of stone. The plot in each instance hinges on a backstory where a spaceship arrived on Earth thousands of years previously.

Deeper Thoughts:

Target Acquisition - part 2 of 2. The latest batch of new Doctor Who novelisations on the resurrected Target imprint were published recently. These four books group neatly into two pairs, and not just because the first two (covered in the Deeper Thoughts section of the previous blog post) are classic Who stories, and the two I will cover here are post-2005. The first two were both by the same author, David Fisher, and both featured in the Key to Time Tom Baker series in the late 70s. This second two are both (presumably coincidentally rather than by design) set within the imperial era of ancient Rome. Whereas Fisher was encouraged to create alternative versions that meant removing things as much as adding, for these latter two - each based on a single episode story of around 45 minutes running time (so about half the length of the 1970s tales) - it's the addition of material that is more the challenge. As we'll see, mind you, even though they are more expanded than alternate versions, there is still some material as broadcast missing from these latest two. With these additions and deletions, and with tweaks to tone and emphasis, you can get a very different adventure (in the case of The Eaters of Light) but I'd still say overall that this brace are more faithful. I think I prefer a faithful approach. Obviously with any new series Doctor Who episode available at the touch of a button, a novelisation isn't required as historical record or aide memoire, but there's a risk in straying too far that you lose what's good from the TV version. Fisher, for example, dispenses with the renowned kiss-off line from The Androids of Tara's villain Count Grendel "Next time I shall not be so lenient!" I love that line, and I'm not the only one; the story feels incomplete without it. No such liberties are taken by James Moran in his new prose version of The Fires of Pompeii.

Of the four, Moran's book is the most like an old school Target novelisation of the 1970s and 80s. He expands out the narrative with moments of backstory and internal monologue of Donna - whose voice he captures particularly well - and the guest characters, adding the odd moment or new piece of dialogue to smooth things out for the new medium, but with no major new or altered scenes. The dialogue from the original TV version is almost 100% intact (Moran only removes some references to the arc plots of 2008 like Rose returning to our universe, and Donna having something on her back). The original story goes at such a break-neck pace that this extra material here and there on the fly doesn't create too much drag, and the story is still brisk and engaging. Moran keeps the humour mostly in the dialogue; in a recent interview in Doctor Who Magazine, he cited Douglas Adams as a hero and The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy novel as an early fave, but there's no attempt to emulate Adams's descriptive style (unlike at least one author novelising classic Doctor Who stories for Target in the 1980s) and it's all the better for that. The minor issues I mentioned above about the story are still present; Lucius is more rounded on the page, but he still contributes very little, and the Doctor and Donna still get very lucky in escaping the volcano when it goes boom, even though there's a tiny bit of prose sticking plaster over it. They are really minor, though, and far outweighed by the great material all around. What I suspect might have been the most challenging section, expressing the explosive visuals where ash and terror are raining down on Pompeii, is even better on the page. This reader must have had a little volcanic ash in his eyes or something, as those eyes were a bit wet whilst reading the sequence where the family huddle together and talk to one another while they wait for the inevitable.

Moran clearly is comfortable with the somewhat flippant style of humour that was the house style of Doctor Who in 2008; based on the book of The Eaters of Light, it's likely that Rona Munro is not so wedded to the equally flippant humour of the show under a different showrunner in 2017. Though the basic story is the same as on TV (see the blog post here for more details), the dialogue of Munro's novel is a page one rewrite; gone are quips about the Doctor being a vestal virgin and the like, and the subject matter is taken much more seriously, though not over-seriously. Unlike Moran's packed story, the plot of The Eaters of Light is much more slight. It is propelled by details of characterisation and backstory, references to the immediate events of a battle that happened just before the aftermath we are shown, but what then takes place is very simple - two groups of enemies have to come together, helped by the Doctor and his friends, to defeat the alien threat. The structure of the novel is to split these actions in the 'present' in twain to form sub-books one and three, then insert between them a book two section that flashes back and introduces the key characters from each of the two warring factions, Kar (on the Pict side) and Lucius (on the Roman side), explain how they came to be in this battle, and show the battle itself. There is skillful work to round out these characters and show that the two groups are not so different as they appear, both having lost people they love in the battle.

Apart from this major addition, Munro also expands out the simple televisual moment when Kar chases Bill and she falls down a hole into the Roman's hide-out to include a ceremonial bull chase and an underwater sequence that would have busted the series budget. A couple of things that are removed are a bit more of a wrench. As in the other book, scenes from the TV series arc plot would have got in the way and not been adequately resolved, so they have to be removed. Thus the beautiful moment where the villainous Missy sheds a tear on hearing the music echoing through the ages near the site of the cairn is sadly gone. Also missed by this reader is a scene that stood out on the telly where Bill is shocked to find in her conversations with the Roman survivors that the sexual mores of her time are not necessarily more enlightened than theirs. As a key part of Lucius's story is the love he has for his fallen comrade Sextus, it would have seemed out of place to still include a more light-hearted reference to his homosexuality. Bill doesn't have quite as prominent a role in the book, as her interactions with the Romans are generally simplified to focus only on listening to Lucius telling his story. Overall, despite the changes, this is a superb book, and builds on a story that on television was solid but a little slight. I'd recommend both of these titles, if you haven't picked them up yet. The Eaters of Light is probably the better book, but The Fires of Pompeii is the better novelisation, and both are interesting retellings of new Who stories.

In Summary:

The Fires of Pompeii is so hot right now.

The Stones of Blood

Chapter The 235th, which demonstrates that it is relatively easy to get blood into a stone. 

Plot:

Sometime around 2000BC, the villainous Cessair of Diplos stole the great seal of Diplos, really the third segment of the Key to Time, giving her the power to transform the appearance of people and objects. She then abducts some silicon-based lifeforms called the Ogri from their home planet of Ogros to use as muscle; these creatures look like massive stones and drink blood. Somehow she still gets caught, and is taken off in a hyperspace ship for trial, with the arresting officers, plus justice machines called Megara sealed in one of the ship's chambers. They also transport the powerful seal and the Ogri in the same ship, which is asking for trouble. Cessair escapes and takes her weapon and hench-monoliths with her, leaving the ship stalled, and transfers from hyperspace to the corresponding area of real space: somewhere in rural England. The Ogri pose as part of a megalithic stone circle, and Cessair takes on a variety of aliases over the years so she has control of the land on which the stone circle stands. She could go anywhere and do anything, but she chooses to spend 4000 years pretending to be a Celtic goddess, the Cailleach. In the late 1970s, the Doctor, Romana and K9, arrive at the stones searching for the third segment. Cessair is now posing as Vivien Fay, a research assistant to Professor Emelia Rumford, presumably to sabotage the study Rumford is doing, the latter's curiosity having been piqued by discrepancies in the numbers of the stones recorded over the years. 

The Doctor visits De Vries, the leader of a local (fake) druid society based in a nearby manor house, and ends up the centre-piece of a pagan sacrifice, his blood to be food for the Ogri. Meanwhile, Vivien / Cessair cosplays as the Doctor using the segment's power and tricks Romana into falling off a cliff. Luckily, the 'druids' have second thoughts; plus, Romana manages to hang on. After having failed to sacrifice the Doctor, De Vries is killed by an Ogri; examining the manor house after this, the Doctor and Rumford find clues that help them piece together that 'Vivien' is behind everything. Cessair sends Romana to the hyperspace ship, so the Doctor builds a gizmo to follow her, which Rumford and K9 operate. While on the ship, the Doctor opens the seals on the Megara (who appear as floating sparkling balls), which they inform him is a capital crime. With Cessair in attendance, the Doctor defends himself appealing the death penalty, trying to get the Megara to realise that their escaped defendant is in the room. He fails, but moves near to Cessair at the point when the Megara are going to execute him; the Megara inadvertently knock her out, then scan her brain to check she's okay, revealing her identity. The Megara punish Cessair by turning her into another stone in the stone circle back on Earth. Before the Megara can carry out sentence on the Doctor, he uses the seal (somehow) to banish them back to their ship and the ship back to Diplos. The Time Travellers leave Professor Rumford and carry on with their quest...

Context:

After enjoying watching the last Doctor Who story for the blog on a Saturday morning, I did the same for episode one of The Stones of Blood. Last time, this led to many members of the family coming in and watching for long periods, but absolutely nobody so much as glanced in from the doorway this time. Separately, though, the two youngest (boy of 12, girl of 10) unexpectedly asked to join me for the next Who watch - this was after I'd caught up on parts two to four over the weekend. We'll see if they are still interested next weekend. I watched the story from the disc within the Australian region DVD box-set. (Why the Australian version? See the First Time Round section of The Armageddon Factor blog post for more details, but be prepared for man-baby whinging!)

First Time Round:

This is the fifth blogged of a total of six stories from the Key to Time series, season 16 of the classic run. I first experienced every one of this linked set of stories in the same way: on VHS. The tapes were released in the first half of 1995, two a month between April and June. The Stones of Blood was one of the middle pair released on Monday 22nd May 1995 with The Androids of Tara. Following the usual pattern of my purchases of this era, I would have ventured into central Worthing after work on the day the VHS came out (I was employed at the time in a factoring company based a little way out of the centre near the hospital, and it was just a little too far to go there and back in my lunch hour and still find time for lunch) to Volume One, my supplier of the time. Volume One was a book and video shop with a large cult and sci-fi section. I'd have bought both the two videos and then most likely have stopped to get a burger in Old Nick's Diner, then get the bus home, all the while soaking in every bit of information available on the cover about the new and special delights that awaited me when I was finally reunited with a VCR. This would have included opening up the boxes and reading the inner covers too, as BBC Video at this point had started to print slightly more in-depth sleeve notes on the inside (as pictured below). Once I was back in my old family home where I was still living at that time, I was on my own; my sister was at university and my Mum was living almost full-time at my soon-to-be Stepdad's place. As such, there would have been nothing and no-one stopping me from gorging on all eight episodes in one sitting, and nothing and no-one did. Volume One and Old Nick's Diner are no more, the family home sold, and the video tapes long ago consigned to landfill, but I feel they are in some small way commemorated by my still retaining that VHS sleeve in a plastic wallet in a folder alongside all of its stable-mates.

Reaction:

The most memorable part of The Stones of Blood is a scene late in episode three that is totally divorced from the main action: two campers find Ogri, or as they appear to them massive standing stones, mysteriously and suddenly situated outside their tent. They touch the stones, their hands become fixed causing them immediate terror, and we watch as one of their hands become a skeletal version, flesh and blood absorbed; the screen then fades to red. It's a chilling and effective contemporary horror moment, but it is telling that it stands out, unencumbered as it is with the weight of the ongoing narrative. The ongoing narrative, you see, is absolute pants. The Stones of Blood is nonetheless overall a good example of this period of Doctor Who, but it works as a series of moments, some witty and some horrific, that are connected by a loose plot that essentially involves the characters travelling randomly - and often quite slowly - from one location to another, with a backstory that struggles to make much sense. To see this, you just have to study the text to try to locate any motivation for Vivien Fay / Cessair's actions, and you'll come up blank. She is an escaped convict, and has the Ogri and the power of the seal. She could pretty much do anything she wants, and could certainly leave the immediate vicinity of the prison spaceship in which she was previously incarcerated, Instead, she hangs around for millennia pretending to be a goddess, presumably popping back to the ship occasionally to check it's still in the same state, acquiring a stately home and various minor positions of power over the years, and having herself immortalised in oils for a portrait every so often.

The three missing portraits clue is another case in point; it's a lovely moment when the Doctor investigates this Scooby Doo style clue, but the slightest scrutiny shows it to be absurd. If Cessair is trying to protect a secret identity and not draw attention to her superhuman longevity, why would she have commissioned three separate portraits of her unchanged mug over the decades, why would she exhibit them side by side in her house, and why would she only recently have thought to hide them, leaving very obvious gaps? It's similar to the investigation later when Romana finds out from cookbooks in the cottage that Vivien / Cessair is allergic to lemon juice; this fictional information only helps Romana and K9 to find a fictional planet of origin, through a fictional process of elimination, so could have been literally anything; she could be allergic to Bath Olivers or jelly or Sondheim musicals: go nuts, it's all made-up! The characters don't even use that piece of information in any way, so it was pretty pointless. Still fun, though. If one accepts that there must be some good reason why Cessair needs to continue - or at least enjoys - playing the fearsome beaked deity, her methods still don't add up. If she has the ability to transform into other things, why does she need to dress up (having said that, the feathered all-over number with plague mask is wonderfully scary and memorable). Can she also commune with the birds that seem to frighten De Vries so much? It's not mentioned as a power of the Key to Time nor the Guardians (though they do start wearing dead birds stuck to their heads in later stories, so who knows). Perhaps she has used the power of the seal to turn into the raven, but if so she appears to be in two places at the same time during the early parts of the narrative. How else though would De Vries know that his visitor is called the Doctor if  'the Cailleach' hadn't somehow told him? It's not clear and never explained.

None of this matters much, though: The Stones of Blood moves on to its next nice moment, fleet of foot, and gets to the end with the whole house of cards just about intact, held together by charm rather than logic. This story is perhaps the best use of the Key to Time arc plot in the stories before the season finale - giving the segment some powers that the villain can harness is an interesting twist on the established format, and also serves as a reminder to the audience half way through the quest of what it's all about. Behind the scenes there's a minor innovation too, with Outside Broadcast video rather than film used for the location footage, which happened very rarely in the 1970s. In general, the story is shot well - there's a beautiful low angle scene of K9 at dawn in the third episode. Well, I assume it's dawn. The story's notable for the use of a 'day for night' filter on some of the exterior scenes that doesn't quite work; unfortunately, the night-time lighting of outdoor set scenes that were staged in the studio is much darker, so there's still a visual bump between studio and location even though both are shot on video. The images on location seem a bit soft focus occasionally too, which may have been deliberate, but it's hard to be sure. The humour in the show, which is always to the fore in this period, is just the right side of taking the mickey. The scene where the Doctor takes on an Ogri like a matador, swirling his coat around Paso Doble-style, and tempting the poor stone creature towards the cliff edge, does go over the top (as indeed does the Ogri), but the rest is just slightly more restrained. There's much wit and wisdom, and some wonderful lines, like the Rumford / Doctor exchange: "Are you from outer space? / No. / Oh. / I'm more from what you'd call inner time".

Halfway in, the genre of the story abruptly changes. It's two for the price of one: the horror of the Ogri with their omnipresent heartbeat gives way to some harder science fiction of the hyperspace ship, and then a battle of wits in a (sort-of) courtroom drama.  Again, The Stones of Blood somehow gets away with side-stepping the genre promise of its earlier episodes. Lip service is paid with the occasional cutaway to the stone circle and the Ogri during the second half. One of these cutaways is a very well directed moment: most Ogri scenes see a septuagenarian leaving them behind at a slow walking pace, but the scene of K9 narrating them getting closer and closer to the circle as Rumford operates the hyperspace machine is tense and exciting. The main part of Dudley Simpson's score is good but not distinguished, but the cues accompanying the hyperspace scenes are much more distinctive and give it a lift in the second half. The Megara, flashing blobs vision-mixed into the main action, aren't that bad an effect. The story seems curiously underpopulated; apart from the cameoing campers and the Megara voice-only parts, there's only four speaking roles in the guest cast, and half of them are characters that are barely in any scenes and are dispatched early. The reason this doesn't matter is the other half of that quartet: this story stands or falls on the quality of two performances, Susan Engel as Vivien / Cessair and Beatrix Lehmann as Professor Rumford. Thankfully, they are both superb. Lehmann gives one of the best dotty scientists in the whole of Doctor Who's long history (and that's a crowded field). Engel's restrained and smooth criminality is a joy to watch. The queer coding of the couple gives an interesting subtext too (but its subtle enough to ignore it if you're not convinced and think I'm seeing something that isn't there). This is a female-led guest cast, with a token bloke and a couple of male voice artists; this was rare for Doctor Who in the 1970s. I haven't the time to be exhaustive searching back, but four guest speaking parts for women is probably a record for this era, if not for the whole of classic Who. They should have tried it more often. 

Connectivity: 

Both The Stones of Blood and The Curse of the Black Spot feature a space ship, its original crew dead for many years to the point that their bodies are desiccated, occupying the same place as an area on the planet Earth that is blissfully unaware that the ship is also there, but on another plane or dimension or some such nonsense; in both stories, the initial impact of an alien force on a character is shown by something happening to that character's hand (though it's a lot more grisly in the 1970s story).

Deeper Thoughts:

Target Acquisition - part 1 of 2. In 2021, I completed my collection of at least one copy of every Doctor Who novel and novelisation on the Target imprint, which I blogged about on occasion throughout the year. My collection stayed complete for - ooh - all of seven months. Now, for the third time in recent years, a batch of new novelisations has been published with the usual lovely retro covers; again, there's a mixture of classic and new series stories novelised. The latter category still provides ample scope for new releases, with only a handful of the many stories shown from 2005 onwards having been adapted into books; the former category meanwhile is close to done. With all the classic series stories completed in Target versions last year, the only couple left are two new versions of The Stones of Blood and The Androids of Tara, the prose written by original author David Fisher. These versions were made for alternate talking book versions, the original novelisations having been penned by Terrance Dicks soon after the television broadcasts; Fisher's versions are now printed on paper for the very first time. The Stones of Blood starts with a foreword by the author's son, Nick Fisher, also a writer, that's a heartfelt tribute to David, who's passed away since writing the adaptations. Another tribute, this time from a colleague, comes in the afterword, where Michael Stevens, the commissioning editor for the audio range, explains how this version originally came about: Dicks's novelisation was during the years where he was working on many titles, and therefore the books were very lean; Stevens wanted something more substantial for audio, and wanted to do something a bit different.

Fisher's prose is a solid and unpretentious as Dicks's work, and he does not deviate much from the story as broadcast except to smooth out some of the lumpier bits of plotting. For example, Cessair is shown to have mental powers from the seal that allow her some control over her acolytes, which she uses to get the original stone circle built. The book explicitly confirms that this also allows her to control the raven, rather than her transforming herself into one. This doesn't explain how De Vries knows the curly haired fellow in his manor is called the Doctor, though; a little bird couldn't have literally told him, could it? Because logistics and budget are no issue in a novelisation, there are many more birds in the narrative, including some gulls that try to push Romana off the cliff during the material that represents the episode one cliffhanger. The discrepancies in the number of stones can be more definite too, without having to adjust to a real world location: in the book, it's been surveyed as having either six or nine stones, depending on whether the three Ogri are on walkabout or not. Fisher returns the Megara to being the floating balls they were in his original script, rather than the sparkling lights of the TV production. There are a few extra lines and gags here and there, and sometimes dialogue is turned into character thoughts. There's not much of the inner life of the characters, though there's a nice couple of pages of Rumford using her archaeological skills to find where the crystals to power the Doctor's hyperspace gizmo might be hidden in Vivien's cottage. Something of a motivation is given for Cessair's actions, but I don't really buy it. She stays near the hyperspace ship in case she can work out a way to pilot it and escape Earth, and has to keep sacrificing people to the Ogri or she'll lose control of them. It's better than nothing, I suppose.

In a note on the text at the end of The Androids of Tara novelisation, Steve Cole, project editor of the Target range, explains that both Fisher and Stevens were keen to do another audio book after the first proved successful, so Fisher was commissioned in June 2011 to create a new version of the story that was broadcast directly after The Stones of Blood. My blog post on the TV version of the Tara adventure can be read here, and it gives away instantly to the reader that this is one of my favourites from the classic years of Doctor Who. Would the prose version meet such a high level of expectation? Not quite, alas. The prose style is the same, and again dialogue exchanges are simplified by being turned into character thoughts or reported speech where possible. More than in The Stones of Blood book, Fisher provides chunks of backstory. The problem is that the Tara story doesn't need it. In a way these two stories are polar opposites; Stones is a very simple plot based on some complicated and sometimes nonsensical backstory; tidying up that backstory in the book is therefore useful. Androids, on the other hand, though the plot is slightly more involved with its doubles and double-crossing, results from very straightforward motivations for all concerned that don't need fleshing out. It's all just about who becomes king of the planet. So, the additional material tends to go into detail about people's family trees and history, and is not so essential.

Like the previous book, The Androids of Tara is robbed of the wonderful performances from the TV, but this seems to hurt it more than its predecessor. It's a souffle of a show, the rise coming from some wonderful actors creating little moments that can't be captured on the page. For example, Simon Lack and Paul Lavers make a lot from facial expressions and tones of voice to create fun and laughter watching them, but the characters on the page are just a couple of dull soldiers. Peter Jeffrey's sly and witty performance as Count Grendel lifts what in prose form is a very stereotypical tyrant. I'm glad this version exists, but it'll never become my go-to version over the TV story; to be honest, though, that was never a likely outcome. Two new series stories came out alongside the two Fisher books in this batch (and I'll review them next time); there was to be a third, Peter Harness's book of his scripts with Steven Moffat, titled The Zygon Invasion, which was announced but then delayed until next year. The rumour, though, is that it will be part of a larger batch planned to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Doctor Who. I look forward to it.

In Summary:

Not quite a stone-cold classic, but very enjoyable (almost despite itself). 

The Curse of the Black Spot

Chapter The 234th, is just what we never knew we needed, a prequel to The Smugglers. 

Plot:

The Doctor, Amy and Rory follow a distress call to the Fancy, a becalmed 17th century pirate ship captained by Henry Avery. The crew are picked off by a siren who emerges from the sea whenever anyone gets injured or sick: the affected crew member has a black spot appear on one palm, the siren appears and uses her song to turn them drunk / horny, they go to her, and she touches them apparently zapping them to destruction. Rory suffers a slight injury, and Avery's son - found stowing away on the vessel - has typhoid. The Doctor surmises that the siren travels within water, so they bar themselves in to the driest room on the ship, the armoury; but, the Doctor's wrong - it instead can travel through any reflections, so they have to throw all of the looted (and shiny) treasure overboard, much to Avery's annoyance. The TARDIS team, Avery and his son attempt to man the sails when the wind picks up in a rain storm. A stray piece of treasure that Avery had kept is released from its hiding place, which allows the siren back, and it claims his son. Rory falls overboard, and the Doctor decides that the people taken are still alive somewhere, so they allow the siren to take the drowning Rory from the water, then each prick their fingers to be captured by the siren too. They find themselves on a spaceship occupying the same space as the Fancy, but on a different astral plane or something; this was the source of the distress call. The siren turns out to be a medical program, the spot is a tissue sample, and the song a form of anaesthetic. Avery and his crew, who are all still alive, pilot the spaceship off into the stars, implausibly, and Amy saves Rory with some CPR, implausibly.

Context:

On a Saturday morning early in July 2002, I put on the disc containing this story, from the Complete Sixth Series Blu-ray box set. I'd planned to watch alone, but - maybe because of the unusual timing, my watching stories for the blog normally done in the evening - a number of family members came in and watched long sections with me. At the most populated, the living room contained me, the Better Half and the two younger of the kids, boy of 12, girl of 10, though none of them stayed to the very end. The Better Half and boy child had a long discussion about the Doctor's smashing of all the ship's mirrors and windows being a bad idea, as it will just create more, smaller reflective surfaces not less. The Better Half was also bemused, presumably like everyone else that's every watched this story, at what happened to Lee Thingy from Press Gang. He's the second most famous of the guest cast after Hugh Bonnerville, he's foregrounded in the action leading up to a dramatic scene where he's stuck as an unwilling ally of the regulars, unable to escape; then, in the next scene, he's vanished and nobody mentions him again. Presumably there was a scene deleted as he turns up with the rest of the crew in the space infirmary at the end, but it is a bit jarring.

First Time Round:

I have a blank spot when it comes to remembering The Curse of the Black Spot; I don't have strong memories of many of my first watches of the Matt Smith stories. I would have watched this on or near to its UK BBC1 debut, at or near to the time of broadcast. As is usual on the blog in these instances, I will share another unconnected Doctor Who memory, and this one is itself about sharing. I've mentioned many times before that when I got to university in 1991 I rapidly found a cohort together with whom I could watch stories from VHS tape. Before that, though, watching Doctor Who was a solitary activity. No one in my house was a fan, so I never experienced the family viewing ritual during the classic series years. My schoolfriends in the mid-to-late 1980s who were Who fans, Dominic, Zahir, and Alan G, talked about the latest stories with me after they'd aired, and we occasionally swapped the new VHS tapes that had just started coming out, but we never got together to watch them. When the four of us did meet, we would play RPGs instead. I remember once bringing along a pirated version of a great recent film I had seen at the cinema called Back to the Future, but I couldn't drum up much interest in that, let alone us all watching Revenge of the Cybermen for what was likely the 20th time for some of us. My other close friends were not as into Doctor Who. I once - this must have been in 1990 when it came out on VHS - tried to interest my friends Andrew D, Alex and Paul in watching The Five Doctors, but they just wanted to fast-forward (fast forward!) to the action sequences, instead of watching the whole thing. We tended to watch Paul's Blakes' 7 videos instead (I was outvoted); these were the long edited compilation videos that were out at that time. Blakes' 7 got roundly mocked on these viewings. In particular, a line reading of Paul Darrow as Avon "This one is dead also" from Space Fall tickled the assembled throng (except Paul); who knows what they would have made of Darrow's much riper performance in the Doctor Who story Timelash!

Reaction:

This is not really a prequel to William Hartnell's 1966 story The Smugglers of course. As a plot point in The Curse of the Black Spot involves the tossing of Avery's accumulated treasure overboard, it's difficult to see how a large hoard of it came to be hidden in a crypt in England; maybe the villainous Pike from the Hartnell story was a crew member of Avery's before the events of the Black Spot, and Avery gathered two hoards over the years, one of which he hid in Cornwall, and one he kept onboard his ship. Apart, though, from creating minor issues for continuity-enamoured enthusiasts like myself, the story is fairly inoffensive to my mind. It is deliberately positioned as a self-contained genre-sampling romp, a palate-cleanser after the big two-parter series launch of The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon. It does everything you'd expect, swordfights, treasure, stowaway cabin boys, mutinous swarthy knaves, the plank. Costume, staging and music combine to perfectly evoke the genre. The use of a real ship in dock for the above deck sequences adds an extra few Duobloons worth of production value, but the sets that represent below decks (and the siren's spaceship) are pretty good too. The pirate guest cast is the epitome of the solid, UK character actor and supporting artist ensembles that one would put together for such a production (just like the similar crews of all the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, put together from similar quality stock). The regulars all get something fun to do - Karen Gillan as Amy gets to cosplay and wave a sword around, Arthur Darvill gets to do the comedy dope act that he excels at when taken over by the siren's song, and Matt Smith gets lots of scenes with the biggest guest star Hugh Bonnerville, bouncing off one another with 'Captain envy' as a theme.

Underpinning this is an interesting science fiction idea, which efficiently explains lots of the trappings of pirate curse legends. It's not a particularly original science fiction idea, of course, being one of the go-to inspirations of this era: abandoned / out of place technology seeming to be an evil monster. Writer Stephen Thompson even brings in a role for a child actor too, only unable to squeeze in any timey-wimey paradoxes to make it the hat trick of Showrunner Steven Moffat's favourites. The depiction of the siren is great, which helps enormously, with Lily Cole as a beautiful floating wraith who before you can say "that early scene in Ghostbusters" turns into a fearsome projection in attack mode. There's also a bit of humour mined from the initially ludicrous situation of the big, butch pirates frightened of getting so much as a scratch. Taken on its own by the random sampling of the blog's approach, it is much more effective than when seen in situ of an ongoing series. At the time, the obvious thing that was glaring was why the Doctor isn't following up on the many loose ends of the ongoing Silence / mysterious girl in Spacesuit plot set up in the first story of that year. There's obviously long-form serial drama sequencing reasons why this story has to be a palate-cleanser, but they're not story or character reasons. Interestingly, though, in isolation without those worries, another issue becomes more obvious: the script has a couple of sizeable holes.

I'm not talking so much about Lee Thingy from Press Gang disappearing, as - I'm assuming but pretty confidently - that that was an editing snafu, not a script problem. It doesn't exactly help matters, though. No, there are other holes. For example, all the way through the first section of the narrative, the siren is assumed by audience and characters alike to be a killer; the Doctor advises everyone on his changing theories for how best to protect themselves from being attacked by the siren, including by getting rid of all the reflective surfaces in the ship, and they look to escape. The TARDIS gone, their only escape is to wait for the winds to pick up, and when that happens - and Rory goes overboard - apropos of nothing, with no build up, the Doctor decides the siren isn't dangerous after all and they should all get zapped by her. I mean maybe the scene of his growing awareness that things are not what they seem was cut out along with Lee Thingy from Press Gang's comeuppance scene, but I doubt it - it just seems like a switch is flipped and the Doctor then knows the plot needs to move on to its next phase. Perhaps the deleted scenes also included a convincing explanation for how the 17th century crew can pilot the futuristic spaceship at the end, or how an untrained Amy can save Rory with CPR. That last script decision seems a bit irresponsible, and also unnecessary. They can (and do) get Rory into the TARDIS which presumably has lots of devices to give a plausible scientific reason for saving Rory. Instead, the script goes for an unearned emotional crescendo where Amy is the only one to save Rory because of her love for him. I don't think it quite works. The Curse of the Black Spot is a story that doesn't expect to be taken seriously, but some of these issues (there's also a flippant tone from the Doctor throughout the early sessions that grates) means that as an audience member I could barely clear that low bar.

Connectivity: 

The Mechanoids in The Chase are the prototype for the regular Steven Moffat trope mentioned above (in stories he either writes or exec produces) of technology that appears to be evil but is just following the logic of its programming, just as the medical hologram / siren is in this story. Plus, both The Curse of the Black Spot and that 1960s Dalek story feature a sailing ship's entire crew forced to abandon the ship by an alien force.

Deeper Thoughts:

Beginnings and endings, but not necessarily in that order. Blogging The Curse of the Black Spot has completed another season of Doctor Who. Jumping around randomly to select stories as I do, the completion of any season is not a predictable event; but, having been covering stories for the blog for more than seven years now it becomes inevitable that - if I keep up the same rate of posting - it will happen more and more. Counting the classic and new series years together, there are a total of 39 seasons, or series if you prefer, as well as a number of specials in the gaps between. I have now completed six of them: season 3 (first Doctor William Hartnell's third year in the role), season 8 (third Doctor Jon Pertwee's second), season 17 (fourth Doctor Tom Baker's sixth and penultimate run), season 23 (sixth Colin Baker's second and final full season, which happened to act as one long linked story), and new series 13 (thirteenth Doctor Jodie Whittaker's third and final full season, ditto). The latest completed one is new series 6 (eleventh Doctor Matt Smith's second year). There are 33 to go (and soon there will be more, as new stories are being made as I write this). There's a philosophical conception from antiquity about time that suggest humans are walking backwards into the future - able to see the past and our beginnings receding before us, but turned against what's coming next, unable to peek at it. I wonder what will be the final story I ever cover for the blog. I have no way of knowing, though it's fun to speculate. In that past I see in front of me, though, I can see times when I've done something similar to this experiment before.

Any completist Doctor Who fan who wasn't lucky enough to watch the series from its first episode in November 1963 has had to catch up with stories as they were repeated, or as they came out on VHS, or DVD, until bit by bit - in random order inevitably - they reach the end. So, what were the first and last stories I watched for every Doctor? Let's start with the starts. From Colin Baker's first appearance in the title role (in late 1984), it's a fairly easy and prosaic journey, as that was when I was fully on the Who bus and making every regular stop. I'd finally been born (nine whole seasons of Who went out before I even existed, wasted), had grown up to an age when I could watch the programme, discovered it, and then become a regular viewer. There were always difficulties catching any particular episode, though - even in the video age, I ended up failing to record something and missing it on occasion. I was blessed (cursed?) though that I managed to see every minute of every episode of Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy's debuts, The Twin Dilemma and Time and the Rani, respectively. I'm only going to count whole stories for the purposes of this exercise: I caught many glimpses of stories before I properly started watching the series, and have watched many orphaned episodes and audio-only versions of missing episodes since; that doesn't reflect the original experience, though. Paul McGann's first (and last) story was fairly easy to catch, as it was available on sell-through VHS before it was even shown on TV. And from Christopher Eccleston on, it became impossible to miss (with regular repeats and then iplayer to fall back on). So, the first stories for every Doctor since Colin were the first ones originally broadcast. That goes for the last ones too (it's one and the same for Paul McGann, of course).

As I've mentioned many times, my indoctrination into Doctor Who was a series of repeats in late 1981 called The Five Faces of Doctor Who. As such, I know that my first stories watched for the second, third and fourth Doctors were - in order - The Krotons, Carnival of Monsters and Logopolis. This is where random sampling can get interesting: the first ever Tom Baker story I watched in full was his swansong in the role. I missed the first couple of episodes of the William Hartnell repeat in the Five Faces season, so the first ever full story I saw of his was the first Hartnell VHS release, The Daleks. Every other episode of Peter Davison's first series clashed with Cub Scouts, and we didn't have a video in my house in 1982; but, thanks to the power of malingering, I managed to catch all the episodes of Davison's third story Kinda, so that was my first of his (still random, but I couldn't have chosen better - it's one of the very best and a firm favourite to this day). Endings for Doctors Three to Five took a bit of detective work, but the situation is nonetheless relatively straightforward. If not being in full colour makes no difference, then my last Pertwee was Invasion of the Dinosaurs on VHS in 2003 (with the first episode in black and white); but, if all the colour has to be there, then it was the restored The Mind of Evil on DVD ten years later. If full colour is properly restored to the first part of Dinosaurs for Blu-ray though (the DVD had a semi-successful restoration that was not seen as broadcast standard), then that will re-take the final place instead. My final Tom Baker was The Sun Makers (see the First Time Round section of its blog post for more details), and my final Peter Davison was Time-Flight (of which I missed one episode when it was first broadcast, so I caught up when the VHS release came out in summer 2000).

The first two Doctors Hartnell and Troughton are a little bit more problematical. Do animations count? If so, I may never be done as all those missing episodes and stories might get animated eventually, but nobody can know when. Besides, as mentioned above, stories experienced wholly or partially in audio form are not the stories as originally made or broadcast, even if they are accompanied by wonderful moving art; also, any of the stories might get rediscovered in their original format after having been animated. Adhering to the 'as broadcast' rule, the final Hartnell story I ever watched was The Gunfighters, when it came out on VHS in 2002. It was in a box set with two other stories, but I'd already seen both of them by that point. The final Patrick Troughton story I caught up with was The Enemy of the World, which was rediscovered and released on DVD in 2013. Before that one was known to exist, it was The Tomb of the Cybermen, when that was rediscovered and released on VHS in 1992. Before Tomb was known to exist, the final story of Troughton's I caught up on (at least that I knew existed at the time) was The Dominators in 1990. Given that the VHS range only started in the mid-1980s, to have provided every Troughton story I hadn't seen as early as 1990 just shows how few of the stories of his tenure survived in the archives back then. I am therefore grateful for the animations, and hope they continue (rumour is that their budgets have been cut and so there might be a gap before new animations are worked on, but I live in hope). It also brings back the mystery, which is what Who's all about: after the announced The Abominable Snowmen, nobody knows which of those missing stories of the first two Doctors will be animated - or possibly even rediscovered - next, let alone last. Predictions are a mug's game; I could go out on a limb and guess that the last story I ever cover for the blog would be, ooh, I dunno, The Stones of Blood, and then find that's the very next story to come up randomly. Oh.

In Summary:

Yo-ho-plot-(ho)les!