Deep Breath

Chapter The 242nd, is not that deep, really. 

Plot:

The newly regenerated Doctor and Clara arrive in Victorian London, accidentally bringing a giant dinosaur with them as the police box got stuck in its throat. Madame Vastra, Jenny and Strax take them in to their place in Paternoster Row, so the Doctor can recover. At night, the dinosaur mysteriously catches fire, one of many recent cases of supposedly spontaneous combustion. The Doctor goes missing, investigating. A mysterious personal ad appears in the next day's paper, which the Doctor and Clara both see and believe was placed by the other, bringing both of them to a restaurant that turns out to be a trap. Clockwork droids surround them, and they are transported underground to the droids' original spaceship. It had time-travelled back and crashed in the past; since then, the droids have been patching up their ship, and their control-node leader Half-Face Man patching up himself, using parts harvested from humans (with the combustion of the corpses covering this up). The Half-Face Man is doing this as a malfunction in his programming (presumably) has made him believe it will lead him and the droids to a 'promised land'. The Doctor joins him in an escape pod attached to a hot air balloon made from human skin, floating over London. The Doctor either talks him into suicide or pushes him from the pod, and Half-Faced Man is impaled on top of a spire. The Doctor disappears again, but after some time passes, returns to pick up Clara. He's by this time redecorated the TARDIS interior, and donned a new outfit. Clara is still unsure about the Doctor's new self, but receives a call on the TARDIS phone from his previous self, made on Trenzalore just before he regenerated, telling her to give his new self a chance. Half-Face Man meanwhile appears in what appears to be heaven, greeted by Missy.

Context:

On the second weekend of September 2022, I was away meeting up with some university friends in London in around the same area as I was the previous weekend for the Abominable Snowmen screening at the BFI (and which a few days after my second visit would be the site of a long queue of mourners working their way towards Westminster Hall to view the queen's coffin as she was lying in state). In advance of travelling, I realised we wouldn't be too far away from the Embankment and Westminster Bridge, both featured settings for Deep Breath, which the random number generator had already chosen as the next story to blog. Nothing of Deep Breath was filmed in London, though, those Victorian locales having been recreated on location in Wales or in the studio. I didn't know it at the time, but I did walk directly through many parts of the bankside near The Clink Museum that weekend that had been used to recreate Victorian London, but for a classic series story, The Talons of Weng-Chiang; this excellent youtube video by Gav Rymill, which I only watched later, explains all about it. I recommend giving it a watch if you're interested in detailed Doctor Who investigations (and if you're reading this, there's a good chance that you are). Anyway, I considered downloading the story and watching it at some point when I got back to my hotel room, then remembered that the last time I met up with this same group of people in London I brought along a different story (this was back in 2019 and it was the Pting one, if you're interested) and failed to find any time to watch it. I didn't bother this time, and ended up drinking cocktails and dancing until the early hours like last time, having no scope to watch even the shortest video. In the end, I got round to watching Deep Breath at home from the Blu-ray in the Complete Eighth Series box set almost two weeks later, on my own late one evening.

First Time Round:

Sometimes certain events create a collective phenomenon where masses of people get a bit too carried away and there is behaviour displayed that in normal times would seem extreme; writing this in the UK just after the period of mourning for Queen Elizabeth II, I can say that I saw no hint of this during that period, of course - the entire populace of my country behaved entirely appropriately, with no going over the top whatsoever. I did see this phenomenon in the world of Doctor Who in 2014, though. An actor took on a role that previously was played by another actor. This perhaps should have been run of the mill by then, as it was something that had happened for this specific role nearly a dozen times before, but for a brief period it was treated like the biggest event in the world. Stars of the show Peter Capaldi and Jenna Coleman went on a world tour, and big crowds came out to meet them. Their first full story was a feature length one, directed by a big name UK movie director, Ben Wheatley, and it was shown in cinemas worldwide. This was the last echo of the noise made about the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who the previous year, during which Capaldi was announced in a primetime shiny-floored live entertainment show (which even at the time seemed a bit much, and to my eyes Capaldi looked a bit uncomfortable with the excess of it). After Deep Breath, everything calmed down a lot and even the announcement and debut story of the first female Doctor a few years later wasn't quite as huge an event. All this rigmarole surrounding it could have risked the story being an anti-climax, but at the time I thought it held its own. The family was on holidays from work and school at the end of August 2014, and after the weekend would travel to a cottage in Kent for a short stay. On the night of the 23rd, though, we were still at home and had friends Alex, Rachel and Phil (all mentioned many times before on the blog) visiting. They watched with myself and the Better Half, and the elder two of our three children (youngest was only a toddler at that time and would have already been in bed). I think it would be one of the last, if not the last, time we got a reasonable crowd together to watch a new Who story broadcast; interest started to wane with some parties from then on.

Reaction:

Unless you are someone that thinks that The Meg is a more important film than Jaws, you'll know that size doesn't necessarily equate to impact. Like that Jason Statham vehicle, Deep Breath features an oversized CGI creature - in the case of the Doctor Who story, a dinosaur - that's just a bit ridiculous. If you're going to depict something an order of magnitude larger than any known dino fossil, then why not just make it a new original space creature rather than pretend it's a time-displaced great lizard from prehistory? Narrative plausibility has already been left far behind, after all, if we're expected to believe that the history books just looked the other way and never recorded God-flippin'-zilla wandering around Westminster in the 1890s. The first fifteen to twenty minutes or so of the story focussing on this OTT-Rex could lift right out, and the plot would be undisturbed - the dinosaur's narrative function is merely as the latest victim in a series of suspicious deaths, the Doctor's cue that there's a mystery to solve. There are numerous ways such an inciting incident could have been done that would have been more in keeping with the rest of the narrative, so why graft on a beginning that's of a different scale to the rest of the proceedings? The short answer is no doubt that it's to create spectacle. The story needs to instantly grip its audience (some of whom have paid for a cinema ticket). Could audience engagement not be generated by a gradual investigative beginning, more in keeping with the Sherlock Holmes / Jack The Ripper trappings thereafter, though? The Half-Face Man is a good adversary, well written, well performed and well realised. Hints of him from the off, followed by a slow burn reveal, might have cohered better than a comic monster movie opening. If the idea is to create something filmic, well, not all films have to begin with action sequences, do they?! It speaks to me of a lack of confidence. Paradoxically, at a time of grandiosity (with the cast going on world tours and such - see First Time Round above), there is something tentative about Deep Breath.

The giant dinosaur up front, if a bit silly, whizzes by so fast on first watch that it's not so big a problem. Where I feel the story is also too tentative, in a way that's much harder to forgive, is in relation to its new leading man. Deep Breath is doing something somewhat rare for the new 21st century Doctor Who, a post-regeneration story with a regular cast member carried over from the previous lead actor's tenure. The only other time this had been done was with Rose's reaction to Doctor Nine Christopher Eccleston turning into Doctor Ten David Tennant. That was the first time such a change of actor had been done since the return, and was very early on, still in the first year that the show had come back. As such, the script of that story rightly pushes hard on Rose's doubts about and eventual coming to terms with the change, to mirror what the audience might be feeling. Writer of Deep Breath Steven Moffat wants to emulate this, but time has moved on since 2005, and multiple different actors playing the Doctor (sometimes simultaneously) has been normalised. Clara is also the worst possible character to express any doubts about the Doctor changing, because she has been set up in the previous year as someone who has met the Doctor in all his different bodies. So, the script, seemingly desperately casting around for a motivation, has her deeply concerned about the Doctor being suddenly too old. But two stories previously, Clara met the Doctor played by septuagenarian John Hurt, and one story before that she was shown meeting him as William Hartnell, who was in that footage exactly the same age as Capaldi in Deep Breath. The conflict seems confected; it doesn't convince that this behaviour would emerge from the character, so it seems more like a behind-the-scenes preoccupation that's bled through into the world of the story.

Did Moffat have lingering doubts about casting Capaldi because his age was so different from the other 21st century Doctors? Probably not, but he seems to have inadvertently suggested this in the script. It all comes to a head with a scene that I think is a serious misstep, where Capaldi's predecessor Matt Smith cameos as the pre-change Doctor calling up Clara through time on the TARDIS phone to reassure her that this new version is the same person. The series had never done this before, and it's not hard to see why. Imagine if Capaldi's later companion Bill had stayed on, and Capaldi had a scene in Jodie Whittaker's debut calling Bill to reassure her that Jodie was still a man underneath. It would be rightly decried, and I'm struggling to see why the Deep Breath scene is that much different. The first story of a new Doctor should be a clean break, and Capaldi should have been left to make his mark alone. Ironically, the awkward phone call scene functions only because of the performance of... Peter Capaldi - he really sells it with minimal acting, just stillness, and the barest flicker of facial expression. He is as good as anyone could expect in the role, burning up the screen in every moment despite some of the dialogue ("Planet of the pudding brains") being questionable. All the cast comport themselves well, including the previous era's recurring guest actors, playing the Paternoster Gang in their final baton-passing TV appearance. They mainly provide the light relief. Special mentions also should go to Peter Ferdinando as the Half-Face Man, and Brian Miller as the unnamed homeless man (in the credits, he's called Barney). Both get one-on-one sequences with Capaldi, and in both Capaldi raises his game above the - still more than adequate - performance he gives elsewhere, seemingly enjoying the sparring with these characters / actors. The dark ambiguous ending - did Half-Face Man jump or was he pushed by the Doctor? - is great for the story and the character too.

Jenna Coleman does what she can with the material she's given, and is much better once the clockwork droids plot starts up properly and gives the story a single focus. The central idea of characters having to hold their breath to fool the droids into thinking they are also robotic is a strong one, and gives rise to some good sequences in the latter part of the story, such as the POV shot of Clara walking through a group of droids while rapidly running out of air. Clara applying her hard-won teaching skills to the scenario is a nice character moment too. There is a lot to enjoy here: the production value in all departments adds up to a handsome look and feel. The new trappings that come with a new Doctor - new costume, new theme arrangement, new title sequence, new incidental music motifs - are all nice. Wheatley and the crew capture some magnificent imagery, including at the end the shot of the Half-Face Man impaled on a spire, and the Doctor full-frame, inscrutable, looking out from the hot air balloon where they had tussled. There are a few good gags, and the set-ups for the overarching plot of the series are intriguing. Looking back on these now its all been resolved, however, and this aspect too seems not to have the courage of its convictions. It's ages since I've watched  Dark Water / Death in Heaven, the two-part finale of the season that started with Deep Breath, but I'm sure the plot was something about Missy - using a corporate institute as a front - fooling humans into being uploaded into her fake afterlife, and then turning their bodies into Cybermen. If so, what's the point of her uploading Half-Face Man, and how did she do it? And when did this happen, given he died so suddenly? Why did the Half-Face Man develop a fixation on going to some undefined 'promised land'? Why is Missy so keen to put and keep Clara and the Doctor together? Something was later said about how they are somehow a bad combination that will bring the Doctor down or something, but it wasn't convincing, and didn't really pay off anything set up in Deep Breath.

Connectivity: 

Another story like Castrovalva where the Doctor is erratic after a recent regeneration and spends a lot of time recuperating.

Deeper Thoughts:

Voluntary Memory. I am currently reading the mammoth multi-volume Proust novel Remembrance of Times Past, or In Search of Lost Time (the two English versions of the original title 'À la recherche du temps perdu', as I am most assuredly reading an English translation, being not clever enough to read it in French). I have a few times in blog posts previously mentioned the concept of involuntary memory that forms part of Proust's philosophy within the novel, and have often done this in relation to Doctor Who (e.g. when talking about 1993 and a particular kind of 3D specs in the Deeper Thoughts section of The Green Death post earlier this year). I'm now though thinking I was incorrect to do so. To summarise: involuntary memory is when one's brain, presented with a surprising external trigger, is flooded with unexpected memories. The famous example from Proust is his unnamed narrator and author proxy in the first of the seven volumes of the novel tasting a madeleine cake that's been dipped in tea, and this bringing about a rush of memories about his childhood spent at his family's country home. I have experienced something a bit like this with Doctor Who, but nowhere near as extremely or surprisingly as true involuntary memory would be, for the simple reason that I've never stopped watching, reading, and studying Doctor Who. My avidity over the years has taken away any possible element of surprise, as I'm too well versed in the detail. And yes, the external trigger of watching a story will bring back some memories, but they are memories that I've experienced over and again, having watched all these stories many times each. Even something relatively recent and relatively less re-watched like Deep Breath has still settled in my mind somewhere not far from the surface. The memories are stubbornly voluntary, and their retrieval a more controlled process.

My enthusiasm for the show long ago spilled over into a knowledge of other archive TV fare, further limiting the scope of finding a truly surprising trigger. If ever I see a post on social media saying something like "Who remembers Blakes' 7 / Words and Pictures / The Book Tower / etc.?" my answer will always be: "Oh course I bloody well do!". Is there anything from TV that could cause such a reaction after 50 years of obsession? Madonna performing Like a Virgin in a pink wig on Top of the Pops in 1984, for example, brings back some strong memories - I don't even need an external trigger to recall them. This is, I think, a different phenomenon, driven by youthful lust, and something Proust definitely knew about as it seemingly forms the bulk of his immense novel. One short passage about a cake dipped in tea, and the remainder of the seven volumes is all about girls and women he fancied. So, probably it can be described as Proustian, but it is not involuntary memory. No, I would need to go further back into childhood to find my own madeleine, and - given the nature of these things, this could not be forced. I would have to wait until something came up that acted as a trigger to memories that I'd actually given myself opportunity to forget. A few weeks back, it finally happened, and then very rapidly happened again. Both times were prompted somewhat inevitably by nerdy blog posts on a linked theme that I'd happened to find. Thankfully, everybody out there in nerdy web land is looking for more obscure topics than Blakes' 7 or Words and Pictures or The Book Tower. Not that the first madeleine-like trigger was obscure when it was first around, being a best-selling book, Masquerade by Kit Williams. This was the perfect candidate, something that I had been obsessed with for about eighteen months around 1980 and 1981, before my interest in either Doctor Who or Madonna in a pink wig came along to distract me; after that, though, I hadn't really thought about it again.

The blog coverage I referred to earlier is by Jimmy Maher and is in two parts, Part 1 - The Contest and Part 2 - The Aftermath; it gives the background of the book (and is a very interesting read). In short, Masquerade was a picture book that held clues to a real buried treasure that had been hidden somewhere in Britain by artist / author Williams, a nifty publicity wheeze of the time that captured the imaginations of many an adult or child worldwide, myself included. This meant that I spent many hours poring over the pictures across an extended period of time, looking for the clues. The pictures are in a style that I found, still find, quite disturbing, so a shiver of memory hit me as soon as I stumbled across the blog posts. Once the treasure had been found back in 1982, the book was not of much value to me (it is not a great story, nor really even a great puzzle, and I'd had enough of the art). So, it was much more potent when the memories flowed back, suddenly jumping a 40 year gap and flooding the present. It was nice to remember being part of a brief international craze (I never came anywhere near to solving the damn thing, by the way). Interestingly, I reached that blog using a link in another and this had given me it's own Proustian rush. This was In Search of the Golden Brain by John Hoare, and talked about the first Spitting Image tie-in book, which I had owned when it first was published. This again acted as a trigger for similar reasons: slightly disturbing artwork - tick, mightily obsessed with it for a brief period - tick, not thought about it since I last read it 30+ years ago - tick; I was transported back to Christmas 1985 when I received it as a present. Amazingly, the book had it's own similar treasure hunt, which Hoare expounds upon in the post, which is also a very interesting read. Because the puzzle was presented as a parody of Masquerade, most people probably - as I did - assumed that it wasn't real, but it was, and eventually two parties worked out the puzzle and shared the treasure.

These examples of being parachuted directly down into memory lane have made me a little regretful that I could never feel exactly the same way about Doctor Who. The only way to achieve it would be to go cold turkey and not watch any of it, new or old, for an extended period. How likely is that ever to happen, though, even if I didn't have a blog to write?! 

In Summary:

Tentative about things it should be sure of, but also overconfident about some less good elements; in other words, a bit half-arsed as well as half-faced.

Castrovalva

Chapter The 241st, which has a lot of Escher but no Gödel or Bach. 

Plot:

The Master plans ahead: not only does he have a backup scheme to kill the Doctor after his schemes in Logopolis fail, but he also has another scheme to do next if that one fails. Everything fails, so we get to see them all put into action. Having fallen from the Pharos Project radio telescope gantry, the Doctor regenerates - as witnessed by Tegan, Nyssa, and Adric. Security guards close in on them, so they perform the shortest ever chase sequence to reach the TARDIS and get the dazed new Doctor to safety. Adric at first seems to have been left behind, trapped by the Master's TARDIS, then he enters the Doctor's TARDIS, sets the coordinates and it dematerialises. It's not really Adric, though - it's a projection of him using the Block Transfer Computational mathematics of Logopolis (which is definitely not just creating things by magic). The Master has Adric in some kind of S&M harness in his TARDIS, and is using the boy's maths prowess to power this Block Trasf - magic, I'm just going to say magic. The Doctor's TARDIS is flying back into the big bang that started the universe, but this is averted by jettisoning rooms from the ship to create escape thrust. Unfortunately, one of the rooms jettisoned is the very 'zero room' the Doctor needs to recuperate in, but Tegan and Nyssa find a reference in the TARDIS databank to a place where they pilot the TARDIS that has the same properties: Castrovalva. This is all a projection too, and Castrovalva and its inhabitants don't exist, just more magic powered by S&M teen maths. The space starts to collapse in on itself, snaring the weakened Doctor. The Castrovalvans don't know they aren't real, though, and eventually turn on the Master who has been hiding out there disguised as a local. They destroy the S&M harness, freeing Adric, and hastening the collapse. As Adric created the world, he's able to get the Doctor, Nyssa and Tegan out, while the Master remains trapped (he'll get out before the end of the season, don't worry).

Context:

Watched from disc one of the 'Collection' season 19 Blu-ray box set. I did not watch with the enhanced visual effects of the Blu-ray, as to be brutally honest I'd forgotten they were an option. The cliffhanger to episode 3 looks much more like an Escher print in the new version, but apart from that, they don't add much. For various reasons, I'm away from the family home for many weekends in September 2022, when I might normally have watched Doctor Who and tried to interest the family. I therefore had to grab any window I could to watch the episodes, one a day, over the course of a working week. Usually, I was on my own, but episode 3 I watched at the start of a day, and the Better Half and youngest (girl of 10) came in the room briefly. The BH was quick to point out that the Portreeve was clearly played by Anthony Ainley "It's so obvious" and then chuckled that the Castrovalvan characters were wearing waste paper bins on their heads. "No they aren't," said I, but then the 10-year old confirmed "They're definitely wearing bins on their heads, Dad".

First Time Round:

The series of Doctor Who shown in 1982, Peter Davison's first, season 19, holds a special place in my fan affections. I became interested in Doctor Who for the first time in the autumn of the previous year (as related in blog posts passim but most extensively covered in the Carnival of Monsters post) when a series of repeats were shown on BBC2. I was a fully fledged fan by Christmas 1981, but didn't yet have an active connection to wider fandom and its information (which might be how I managed to miss K9 and Company go out that Yuletide); still, though, I was aware that the first newly made set of episodes since I'd fallen in love with the show were starting early in January. This was I think because of a lot of advance publicity, perhaps to remind longer-term viewers that it was no longer showing on Saturday afternoons. Instead, the series went out in the evening on Mondays and Tuesdays. The Mondays were a bit of a problem for me, though, as on that evening weekly I was committed to attending 2nd Durrington cub scouts in a hall in Pond Lane, next to the park. While I was stuck in that hall, missing the first episode, I held out a small amount of hope that the Tuesday showing would be a repeat of what was shown on Monday, but no such luck. My Mum had put me on a reasonably long waiting list to get me in to cubs, and was immune to my protestations that started up as soon as I realised the full extent of my predicament after watching that Tuesday.

I've always remembered I had quite quickly feigned all sorts of ailments to get to see the odd numbered Doctor Who episodes, but I don't know if I ever before have worked out exactly how quickly. I pulled a sickie to get out of cubs at the very next opportunity, on Monday the 11th January 1982, so I could watch episode three. I know this because I remember continuing to watch BBC1 after the cliffhanger of part 3 for the next programme, So You Think You Know What's Good For You? This was a one-off light factual programme which featured married couples measuring their health and fitness, and one of those couples was Peter Davison and his then wife Sandra Dickinson. I can remember the continuity announcer bridging with something like "He was in a bit of trouble in Doctor Who, but now Peter Davison's fit and well in So You Think You Know What's Good For You?" or some such (the trailers and continuity on the Blu-ray are pretty comprehensive, but don't extend to covering that moment, so I can't be sure of the wording). I finally saw the first episode in March 1992 when the story came out on VHS. I remember watching it with a group of people in Durham University, as it came out during term time. In between, I read the novelisation in my final year of middle school (year 7 in new money), wrote is up as a book report, then had a lot of trouble explaining the concept of jettisoning rooms to my teacher Mrs. Rawlings, who just could not get her head around it.

Reaction:

Castrovalva shouldn't work, but it somehow does. It is a lyrical fairy tale written by the most rigidly scientific writer the show had; almost half the running time sees our heroes confined to the TARDIS, but it doesn't drag; there's no monsters, a lot of talking, and the threat when it comes is somewhat nebulous and hard for the production team to realise, but it still seems dramatic and exciting. It meshes neatly with the final Tom Baker story that preceded it as if they were planned as one arcing narrative, all neatly of a piece; but, in fact, Castrovalva was a relatively last minute rush job to replace a script that fell through. There's many a time where a Doctor Who story with everything going for it collapses because of a couple of dodgy elements, so I should celebrate when the opposite happens, I guess. It's odd, though. Why does it work? A lot is to down to the direction of Fiona Cumming that complements the material, and has a certain lightness. Lightness in all senses of the word, lightness of touch for such material, but also that almost every scene of Castrovalva is brightly lit in the house style of studio work at that time. This works for the story, though, as it isn't a fairy tale of dark corners and cobwebs; in Castrovalva there is more mystery in the visible than the invisible. It is after all the tale of a place that's supposed to look like a paradise, but turns out to be a trap - there is a good reason it wouldn't have too many shadows. When the trap is sprung, the chaos is economically invoked with sound effects, sparingly used video effects (which I thought worked very well at the time, and I think they are indeed still good taken in the context of the time), and - above all - good quality acting. The final Castrovalva sequence, where the Castrovalvans are tearing at the Master as he tries to escape, is lit rather moodily, and interestingly shot from a low angle, showing that such things could be done when apt for the story.

Cumming also gets great performances from every one of the cast. The first part of the narrative focusses only on the new regular cast and returning baddie character. It's particularly good to see Nyssa and Tegan (as played by Sarah Sutton and Janet Fielding respectively) as two female characters becoming plural protagonists in the main plot (The Doctor is mostly off in his own subplot adjusting to his regeneration, and Adric is captured and caged by the Master, giving the antagonist someone to whom to monologue) - this was rare for the show, which didn't usually give the female companions so much to do, and allows for great scenes of the two of them working out their situation, getting to know each other, and allows the audience to get to know them too. Again, the visuals are kept simple with a steam overlay to represent the increasing heat of the TARDIS as it approaches an explosive connection with the first ever event of the universe. Having this beginning section means that the trip to Castrovalva is somewhat truncated, but good casting means that the characters introduced halfway through nonetheless make their mark. Doctor Who stalwart Michael Sheard gives another great performance as Mergrave (never mind reaching 241 stories blogged, I've reached a real milestone with this post in that I've finally covered all the six stories that Sheard guest starred in throughout Doctor Who's classic era). Frank Wylie is a solid presence as Ruther, and Derek Waring is particularly good as the sinister-seeming Shardovan. And then there's Neil Toynay, the actor credited as the Portreeve. Call me naive but I did not see through the disguise or the anagram (Neil Toynay = Tony Ainley) when I first saw the story, and was convinced that Shardovan was the bad guy working for the Master (which of course is entirely what the script and direction intend).

Even with limited screen time, it's easy for the characters to shine if they're given great things to do or say, and writer Christopher H. Bidmead delivers what I think is the best of his three scripts for the programme here. As mentioned above, the action is continuous between this and the last story, also written by him, and he builds on the themes of that story seamlessly. Block Transfer Computation (creating real space/time events from pure mathematics) introduced for Tom Baker's swansong, is developed further, with the creation of beings as well as objects, and the story musing on whether they would be sentient and autonomous or not. The concept provides the imaginative leap required to make the magical aspects of the narrative just about acceptable for a Doctor Who context. There's another school room topic to engage the brainy teens and pre-teens watching; just as Logopolis used entropy as a theme, Castrovalva features recursion, using Escher's impossible pictures as a way of (sort-of) illustrating the concept. There's some great dialogue too. When told that the Doctor's recovery requires him to go someplace cut off from the rest of the universe, Tegan says "He should've told me that's what he wanted - I could've shown him Brisbane"! The child teaches the Doctor that 3 follows 1 and 2, and he says "We'll have to give you a badge for mathematical excellence" prompting his memories of Adric to return. The Doctor asks, within the screwy geography of Castrovalva, for the way out, only for the Castrovalvans to all point in different directions: "Well, that's democracy for you". Shardovan is able to see the spatial disturbance "With my eyes, no, but in my philosophy". Best of all for me, though I know some people think it's melodramatic and risible, is Shardovan's exit line to the Master before his self-sacrifice: "You made us, man of evil, but we are free". Each of these is not just a good line but a great moment in the story too, and there are loads of them. I still get mild chills at the reveal of the tiny detail that betrays the unreality of this environment: the books containing the history of Castrovalva are old, but they chronicle the history up to the present day.

I'm trying to second guess whether I'm too in love with this story to be objective, because of its small significance in my history of watching the show (see above), but I really think most of the choices made are right. Even something small like the TARDIS being landed at an awkward angle seems like it would be engaging to the youngsters in the audience. Yes, there's some very 1980s eye-make up on display (Michael Sheard's is more OTT than Janet Fielding's mind), and the costumes are starting to become more like brightly coloured uniforms than clothes. Poor Tegan has to climb rocks in an incredibly short, tight skirt, as she wasn't allowed to change into trousers like Nyssa. Before that, though, Nyssa could barely even run in her flower fairy skirt, poor thing. The Doctor's regeneration not going smoothly is fine enough as a one-off, but it did set the precedent that the character should always be somewhat unstable in each debut story, and that led to diminishing returns eventually. The cliffhanger where Tegan and Nyssa find blood next to where the Doctor has been is a bit of a cheat: it turns out to be a trail from the animal that Ruther and Mergrave hunted, and the Doctor's following it. But why would he suddenly decide to get out of the cabinet that's healing him and keeping him safe just to play at being a bloodhound? After a strong start, there's not very much for Tegan and Nyssa to do towards the end except narrate the action, but this is going to happen when you have too many regular cast employed on the show. I could probably pick more holes, but I could probably find more good points too, like Paddy Kingsland's music and the location footage at Buckhurst Park and Harrison's Rocks. Overall, against all odds, it's just a little bit magic. 

Connectivity: 

In both Castrovalva and The Abominable Snowmen the Doctor ventures into a closed and isolated community situated on a mountain; he's then followed there by two companions. The community isn't religious in Castrovalva, but there's something of a flavour or echo of an ascetic order in the 1980s tale. Bit of a spoiler, but in both stories the leader - or master? - of the community, who has some seemingly supernatural powers, turns out to be the evil force behind the proceedings.

Deeper Thoughts:

Well, that's lack of democracy for you! Like all those other humans seeing patterns that may not be there, particularly in this blog where a fun game is played finding connections between randomly sampled Doctor Who stories, I sometimes can't help but draw parallels. Often, as I'm interested in progressive politics (or lefty woke snowflake stuff, depending on which side you're on), this means linking Doctor Who to what's happening in my country's government. If that's not your bag, probably best to skip to the final sentence now. Because of the subsequent death of our long-standing monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, it's almost forgotten already, but - just as happens in Castrovalva where a new person took over in a leading role - the people of the UK have in the week I'm writing this got a new Prime Minister. Just as with the casting of any new Doctor, the people did not get a vote in this matter. That's the system here; we vote within our local constituency for a representative in parliament; these candidates most often tend to be from an established political party, and - after going to the polls in a general election - the political party that can command authority with a majority of the elected representatives (members of parliament - MPs), appoints the Prime Minister (which in modern times is always the leader of that particular party). The Prime Minister then runs the country on behalf of the Queen (and now the King). In the case where the leader of the party steps down between general elections, it is up to the party and their rules and procedures as to how a new leader, and therefore new Prime Minister, is appointed. As we've been reminded over the last couple of months here, the way the current ruling party, the Conservatives, do this is long-winded. MPs whittle down the many candidates in iterative votes until there are two left, then it goes to the ordinary members of the party for the final vote after many weeks of hustings. The membership of the Conservative party is approximately 160,000 people; needless to say, this is an infinitesimally small proportion of the population of the UK. For that couple of months, the rest of us have been watching this unfold without being able to influence it one jot.

The undemocratic nature of this was probably overshadowed for those of a republican mindset by the almost immediate handing over of power from one monarch to another, just by dint of birth and without anything as grubby and proletarian as a vote; at least that doesn't happen that often, though - it's not taken place in the UK for 70 years; Conservative Prime Ministers on the other hand seem to have adopted the pattern of Doctors recently of doing three years, then out. Unlike Peter Davison, who did his three straight, Doctors these days have gap years, or years with a few specials, to pad out their time. As such, Jodie Whittaker has now been the Who incumbent during the period where three different Prime Ministers have been in charge of the UK. This hadn't happened previously since Tom Baker's record-breaking seven year stint on the show. Another issue is that the politicians and the political media assume and expect a very presidential style of leadership, even though the mechanisms for appointing a leader (as outlined above) are not how any president would ever be chosen. There is often criticism that any new leader might prove to be the 'continuity candidate', but in the representative, parliamentary system of politics, that's exactly what they should be. They represent the same party, and until there is a general election, the same manifesto, but there is a strong expectation that - like any new Doctor - they will bring the freshness of change. Both issues might be the fault of rolling 24 hour news, accelerating the timeframe of current affairs and making the grammar of politics in line with the grammar of other television. New lead actor = new leader = change. The new Prime Minister Liz Truss barely has a mandate to carry on as things were, let alone make radical changes. She was never the majority selection of Conservative MPs - the representatives of the people - at any stage during the voting, and in the final round received the endorsement of only 47% of the members. It's going to be a challenging time, as the country has many pressing problems that can't wait any longer for internal party business to take precedence.

It's entirely in Truss's power as to whether I get a chance to vote for how my country is run sooner rather than later. I guess changing the party in power is a more fundamental change than just switching up the leader; it's probably analogous to the showrunner on Doctor Who changing rather than the lead actor. When Russell T Davies ran the show last, my preferred party Labour were in charge of the country; it would be nice if around the same time Davies returns, Labour does too. That would need - as I previously thought might happen, but maybe it's less likely now that every aspect of the UK is on hold for a period of mourning - a UK general election in mid-December this year, called by Truss. If it happened, it would mean that another build up to Christmas is ruined for me by worry of how it's going to turn out, but I'd happily accept that if it meant the baleful rule of the Conservative party was ended. Even without the sombre mood of national mourning, there is very little to celebrate right now, even when witnessing things I've dearly wanted to happen for a long time like Prime Minister A. Johnson leaving. That at least is an unalloyed good. He is a terrible person, and terrible leader, and his no longer being in the most powerful position means however bad Truss is she must be a marginal improvement (she's rubbish, but there's no evidence - yet - that she's a sociopath). Johnson's leaving speech was typically self-serving and divorced from reality. Using a metaphor, like an outgoing Doctor Who lead actor might, of passing the baton, Johnson petulantly mumbled his grievances at being ousted: "The baton will be handed over in what has unexpectedly turned out to be a relay race – they changed the rules halfway through, but never mind". No, nobody changed any rules. Johnson could not command a majority of MPs, so could not stay on as Prime Minister. His own party's MPs indicated this to him by resigning en masse from government roles. They were working within the established system in doing this.

The reason why that happened to Johnson is because of a culmination of uncountable broken rules, for all of which he was responsible, and none of which were changed halfway through anything. He no doubt wants to set up a betrayal narrative about his unfair removal, it's straight out of the populist playbook after all, but don't believe a word of it. It's telling anyway that Johnson didn't think of politics as a relay race before he was forced to quit, because what else has it ever been? Did he expect to go on forever clutching that baton to his chest, never letting anyone else take part? Yes, I think perhaps he did. Johnson also snuck in to the speech one of his tedious Classics references, mentioning Roman general Cincinnatus returning to his plough once his job was done. As many people pointed out as the speech went out, though, Cincinnatus came back to power later. As a dictator. I don't think Johnson is serious about this; clawing his way back would be a little too much like hard graft. The new monarch has also created something of a new epoch narrative that I think would make his return feel a lot more odd to the public than if the Queen had lived a little longer; lined up at Charles III's proclamation with the other ex-Prime Ministers, he looked to me a little bit like the relic of the end of the Elizabethan era. Just in case, though, to anyone reading this: this poisonous man must never under any circumstances be ever let anywhere near power again; never forget all the lies, all the deaths, all the parties, all the protected wrong-doers, and all the corruption. Exhale... OK, it's safe to read again: I'm taking a deep breath now, and not thinking about this anymore until I'm allowed a vote again.

In Summary:

Like one of Escher's drawings, it shouldn't work, but it somehow does. 

The Abominable Snowmen

Chapter The 240th, the abominable finally became animatable. 

Plot:

The Doctor, Jamie and Victoria arrive in 1930s Tibet, the TARDIS landing on a Himalayan mountainside near the Detsen monastery. The Doctor has been here before many years previously. Four monks have recently been killed, as has the expedition-mate of a Professor Travers, who is trying to discover the elusive yeti creatures believed to live in the area. The yeti are suspected of the killings. The Doctor and his friends, helped by the monks, manage to capture a Yeti and find it is a robot, with a gap in its chest for a control sphere. The spheres can move on their own to fill the gap in the robot Yeti and activate it. The Doctor rigs up a device to track the transmissions controlling the spheres, while Yetis menace people inside and outside the monastery. The master Padmasambhava is behind the Yeti plot; a floating bodiless entity called the Great Intelligence has been communicating mentally with the master for years, keeping him alive; Padmasambhava has built a glass pyramid, which is taken to a cave and starts to change the Intelligence into a physical form there. Travers witnesses all this but goes into shock and can't remember it until it's dramatic to do so later in the story. The master orders that the monks abandon the monastery as the Yeti are too powerful. The Doctor tracks the control signal transmissions to inside the monastery itself. Padmasambhava struggles against the Intelligence's control. The Doctor confronts the Intelligence in a secret room behind the throne in the sanctum, and they battle mentally. During this, Jamie and the others destroy the control equipment including another pyramid. The Yeti are deactivated and the old monk is released from the Intelligence's power and dies. The TARDIS team leave the monastery accompanied by Travers; he spots a real yeti and rushes off to track it.

Context:

Before the BFI screening of the new animation (see Deeper Thoughts section below for full details), I thought about first listening to the audio version, but I decided against. Instead, I watched the surviving episode two on DVD from the Lost In Time box set (on my own one evening, with a glass of wine). The Better Half came in briefly, and watched for a while without making any sarcastic comments (so that's got to be a plus). To me, the episode was as fun and engaging as I found it on first watch (see immediately below). On the day of the 3rd September, I arrived at London Bridge station and then walked along the waterfront to the BFI; the sun was shining, the Southwark Cathedral bells were ringing, people were happy and smiling, buskers were playing nice tunes. I was in a very good mood, and meeting up with friends; what could be better? I met up with David, Trevor and Alan at the BFI. Scott and Chris were intending to attend also, but had to drop out at the last minute. When I enquired at the box office about whether anyone might want these tickets, I was surprised to find that they still had some left themselves. These events are usually sell-outs. That may not have been a reflection on the story. There were two other fan events going on during the weekend (Whooverville and Collectormania) and the panel that accompanied the BFI screening didn't include any stars of the show. Still, the auditorium was pretty full as we all sat down to watch what documentary maker Chris Chapman described in an on-stage interview later as "Doctor Who does Black Narcissus with teddy bears chasing people".

First Time Round:

Only the second of the six episodes of The Abominable Snowmen is present in the archives. The rest are not known to exist, though audio recordings of all the episodes are held because young fans in the 1960s taped them off their tellies. These audio recordings of course allowed for the animation to eventually be made as shown at the BFI, with images matched to those home-made soundtracks. Before animations were feasible, though, releasing these 'orphaned' episodes and mostly pictureless soundtracks presented a challenge. John Nathan-Turner, former producer of the show in the 1980s, worked as a consultant on the BBC Doctor Who ranges in the 1990s, and attempted to tackle these challenges. He was responsible for the first official audio tapes of various story soundtracks with linking narration; from that start a full range on CD (with better source audio and restoration) became a reality later, after his time as a consultant had ended; The Abominable Snowmen came out on CD in 2001. A decade earlier, in June 1991, a time when the Doctor Who VHS range was just getting going, there was a release called The Troughton Years. This was one of an initial brace of 'Years' tapes that provided a way to get the orphaned material released. The presentation style did not catch on as well as narrated audios eventually did. As was probably inevitable based on his style, Nathan-Turner presented the episodes within an inexpensive framing documentary about the lead actor of the show; it was showbiz biography and a little dash of trivia, but little attempt was made to present the wider story either side of the episode shown. With less availability of plot synopses in those days, it was tantalising and somewhat frustrating to get these 25-minute glimpses into stories, but then no more. I defy any Doctor Who fan to watch the surviving episode of The Abominable Snowmen, with its intriguing set-up and fun interactions between the regular cast, and not want to see what happens next. Curiously, when I finally experienced the full story 10 years later as an audio experience, it was not nearly as engaging as a whole.

Reaction:

The Abominable Snowmen doesn't have any music, just special sounds and background atmosphere tracks, which in the exterior scenes is mostly whistling winds and in the interiors, the chanting of monks. This might be why I struggled to engage with the story on audio - deprived as I was of the energy boost of music or much differentiation between the voices - apart from Victoria and the half-ethereal half-raspy performance of Wolfe Morris as Padmasambhava, it's just the sound of a lot of earnest blokes. If you're able to know which of the lamas dies midway through when just listening to voices - is it Rinchen? is it Sapan? - then you've got better ears than me. As such, it's negatively impacted more than other stories by the absence of visuals, and so was a good candidate for what was confirmed at the BFI to be the last animation, at least for a while. A few people who were lucky enough to watch the episodes first go out in the 1960s will know how the story worked with visuals, and how closely the cartoon version captures the feel. It must have gone down well at the time, though, as the writers Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln were rapidly commissioned for a sequel that was broadcast after only two stories had gone by in the interim. The Yeti were probably the main reason; they clearly struck a chord with the audience, even though they are cuddly and unthreatening. In that sequel, The Web of Fear, the Yeti design is tweaked to make them more monstrous and less teddy bear, and the animation succeeds with a very slightly tweaked design in that direction too.

Another thing that probably appeals to audiences is all the paraphernalia that comes with the creatures - the mini-Yeti that can be moved around a map to remote control the full-size versions, the control spheres with their distinctive beeping, the mysterious pyramids of power. I suspect that there have been some tweaks to how some of these are depicted in the animation, but I haven't seen any offscreen pictures of the original for a while. Despite any changes, and there a more emphatic changes that I'll cover in a moment, these new visuals still feel pretty faithful. The paraphernalia, effective though it all is, does create some implausibility in the story, though. One poor ageing monk working away over centuries has apparently built all this, and several fur-coated robots, and potentially excavated a cave (it's not 100% clear): no wonder he's secretly wishing for death. It would have been a lot more efficient for the Great Intelligence to commune mentally with someone who owned a factory, Nestene-style. Nevertheless, the Tibetan (well, ish) style is original and engaging. With the new visuals those watching are taken more nimbly through a plot that - if one stops to think about for even a few seconds, or if one is just listening to the sparse audio where it's more obvious  - is slight. There's lot of walking back and forth between places to pad out the running time, and suspicion falls on different people pointlessly as the audience have already been clued in to who's behind the plot. On stage later, animation exec and director Gary Russell was a cheerleader for the original story, saying that nothing repetitious happens in The Abominable Snowmen, and that every moment propels the plot along. His comments were definitely heartfelt, but I can't alas agree with him completely.

The plot works - albeit slowly - but the structure of the plot is just to delay the inevitable confrontation between Doctor and master (with a small 'm'), and it is easy to get frustrated when experiencing the story that the obvious final act is put off so long. Russell and all the talented people involved have succeeded in putting off the point where I got restless and annoyed as late as humanly possible, but it did still occur. Maybe somewhere around the time that the Doctor said he needed another bearing when using his gizmo; if the Doctor thought about it for a second, he'd realise that the only reason that Padmasambhava would want to evacuate the monastery is if the control centre was in there somewhere. Anyway, the audience have known since episode two who the bad guy is, and scenes of him hypnotising people left, right and centre are continually being intercut with the actions of the good guys.The writers tweaked the structure for next Yeti story The Web of Fear and held back from revealing who was under the Great Intellignece's influence until the end, and that worked a lot better. When the confrontation happens, it is greatly enhanced by the new visuals. The Scooby Doo look (in a good way) for Padmasambhava is nice for a start. (This is just one of some great character redesigns including the guest cast's ethnicities being updated to be more in keeping with the Tibetan setting; this story - probably because of the visuals mostly being missing - doesn't come in for as much criticism as The Talons of Weng-Chiang for 'yellowing up' white actors, but it really should do.) In the final scenes, the master of the monastery can levitate and his eyes glow, and it's very impressive. All the sanctum scenes, when Padmasambhava is at first hidden behind a gauze curtain, then gradually revealed, are effective too, but they held back some animated spectacle for this final confrontation.

The sequences of Jamie wrecking the machinery in the background also work, and this is itself a minor triumph; this style (and time and budget) of animation finds scenes with rapid movement a challenge. This has been most often obvious when characters have to run in previous animations, but most of the running scenes in The Abominable Snowmen animation work perfectly well. There was one moment of audience mirth when Jamie shouts "Come on!" at Victoria as they escape a Yeti followed by the animated characters moving very slowly out of frame; but, these moments of pacing (as explained by Gary Russell later) are inherited from the soundtrack source material, and the purists in the target market don't like anything to be cut. Action sequences that go beyond running were mostly successful too, well at least for me. The scene where the Yeti is caught in a rope trap and prodded by various warrior monks' spears worked really well, but got a huge laugh from the assembled fans in the BFI, ungrateful so-and-sos. The intended moments of comedy also went down well for the audience, like Troughton's line "I think this is one of those instances where discretion is the better part of valour - Jamie has an idea" and many other moments. The background pictures of all the locales are grand and give the story more scale than could be achieved in a television studio. There's also a nice background Easter egg tying this first ever Yeti story to the new series appearances of the Great Intelligence. Most of my quibbles are with the original material rather than the animation. The script seems to contradict itself as to how long it's been since the Doctor and Padmasambhava last saw each other. It should be three hundred years, but it's sometimes stated to be two hundred. There's a few too many instances where the Yeti just stand in place not doing anything; for instance, the Doctor is allowed to go up to one and remove its control sphere. As they already look cuddly, having them be static does remove any last vestiges of threat. Overall, though, the plusses of the original outweigh the minusses, and this new version makes it even better. 

Connectivity: 

The Doctor finds himself in a place surrounded by mostly men in silly robes in both The Abominable Snowmen and Hell Bent. In both stories, someone gets their memory selectively wiped too.

Deeper Thoughts:

Professor Travers's 1935 Expedition Journal: BFI screening of The Abominable Snowmen, 3rd September 2022. The structure of the day was similar to previous BFI screenings. Our hosts were as ever Justin Johnson and Dick Fiddy, Johnson joked early on that Dick had come as the aged Professor Travers from The Web of Fear and that he himself had come as a Yeti. The session kicked off with a quiz and a cheeky round-up of the social media comments of people attending, there followed the first three episodes, then an onstage interview, the final three episodes, another onstage interview and a sneak peak at some of the Value Added Material from the disc release of the animation, then the final panel. Before all that, as has become a tradition, Fiddy paid tribute to one of the Doctor Who family who had sadly left us all recently - Bernard Cribbins. Johnson knew Cribbins from a Bafta committee, and told an anecdote about Elaine Page unexpectedly calling him (she was wanting to sort out BFI membership for a relative), and Cribbins being in the room with her. They were at the time both working on Russell T Davies's BBC version of A Midsummer Night's Dream. "Tell Justin I'm in my pants!" Cribbins shouted in the background. Another scoop (which someone tweeted during the showing of the first episode, which Johnson comically upbraided them for at the intermission) was the reveal that the next BFI screening would be The Time Meddler on the 29th October 2022 as a tie-in for the next Blu-ray boxset release of season two (William Hartnell's second year). The prizes for the quiz were all general - rather than Doctor Who specific - Abominable Snowman tat, so I didn't 'shout for Dick' (Johnson: "Some of you are more used to shouting that than others") despite knowing most of the answers. One social media comment Johnson read out was someone asking if any gay people would be attending - huge laugh from the crowd - Johnson: "Statistically speaking, maybe one or two"; another tweeter didn't know what the BFI was and speculated that it stood for "Best Friends' Institute".

Fiddy (L), Johnson (R)

Throughout the opening, Johnson kept referring to the story as The Abominable Snowman, effectively reducing the threat level by three quarters, and I just thought he was having an off day; but, Alan, who was sitting next to me pointed out to me that it was a typo on the screen-saver behind him, so maybe Johnson was persuaded by this mistake that it was the correct name for the story. In the break between the two halves of the story, the interviewee was Jess Jurkovic. He is a New York based fan and pianist who has an interesting youtube account where he works out, transcribes and then performs Dudley Simpson incidental music from Doctor Who. Simpson was the most prolific composer for the classic years of Doctor Who, but very little of his music survives as isolated tracks or sheet music. Jurkovic looked ecstatic just to be in London, let alone on stage; he talked about how he became a fan in 1982 watching stories on PBS, jokingly teased the Brits in the audience saying that he got The Five Doctors a few days before them across the pond (it's true!), and talked warmly about how the videos he's made have reconnected him to the fan community; he'd attended the Gallifrey One convention in the US recently, thirty years after attending his first convention as a youngster. A grand piano was set up in one corner of NFT1, and we were treated to a brief tinkle of the ivories. This started with a rather funny tribute to the music of The Abominable Snowmen (a story famous for having no music). The "first movement" of this was a snatch of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star (which the Doctor plays on his recorder when imprisoned in the monastery in episode two). The second movement was just two notes played over and over, to replicate the sound effect of the control sphere. This was followed by Jurkovic playing a memorable cue from later Troughton story The Seeds of Death. Support his Patreon, people.

Jurkovic at the piano

After the second half of the story had finished, Chris Chapman was welcomed onto the stage. He has been responsible for many documentaries on Doctor Who DVDs and Blu-rays over the years, and has made one called Troughton in Tibet (the title inspired by a Hergé Tintin book) for the disc release of The Abominable Snowmen. This involved taking presenter Toby Hadoke and Jamie actor Frazer Hines to the area of Snowdonia used for the original filming. He did a recce with Doctor Who locations expert and researcher Richard Bignell, and his first impression was that this should be a site of pilgrimage for Doctor Who fans. A shot of the same place is also coincidentally a backdrop used behind the logo on every episode of Countryfile (a series that Chapman works on). This was obvious when the opening shots of the documentary were shown after Chapman left the stage. Fiddy mused that it will probably surprise the Countryfile producers when next week's episode gets a spike in viewers. Chapman detailed that despite there being not many people still alive from the original cast or production, they managed to get eight new interviews and also used five archive interviews from people no longer with us. One of the new interviews was with last surviving Yeti actor from the story John Hogan, who has sadly died since the filming was done last year. Chapman paid him a brief tribute from the stage. The first six minutes of the documentary were then shown, and it looks amazing: some stunning drone shots of the vistas of the mountain and valleys. As in another of Chapman's Who documentaries, they took a TARDIS prop to the location to recreate an image from the original story, and Hines's reaction when first seeing it is lovely to witness.

Fiddy (L), Chapman (R)

The final panel featured three people involved in the animation: Gary Russell (executive producer and director), Rob Ritchie (3D animator) and Ioan Morris (Concept Designer). It's fair to say that it was the first of these three that did most of the talking. The animation has been in production for sixteen months, and Morris's work is all up front doing the first drafts of character designs. He said that when watching the screening his was a surprised reaction of "Oh yeah, I worked on this". Ritchie modestly said that his contribution was merely to send over to Russell "Four renders of a TARDIS". Russell explained that Ritchie works for "the other team". Gary Russell's animated productions are Fury from the Deep, the Web of Fear episode 3, Galaxy 4 and The Abominable Snowmen; the other team led by AnneMarie Walsh created The Macra Terror, The Faceless Ones and The Evil of the Daleks. The two teams do occasionally collaborate; Russell thought it was important for the range as a whole to have consistent elements and not reinvent the wheel, so Ritchie's season five TARDIS and his beginning credits sequence was shared. The decision to change the ethnicities of the monastery inhabitants was a deliberate one, which Russell and Morris worked on early on in the process. Russell talked passionately about this, disagreeing with the usual line that there weren't sufficient actors of the correct ethnicities to play the roles back then, and saying it was his one big bugbear with original director Gerald Blake's work; "We were going to rectify that decision from 1967 because frankly it's bloody insulting".

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

For the warrior monk costumes, even though no monk in history has ever worn such a design or colour combination, the designs used in the animation stayed faithful. For the lamas' robes, which were a bit dull in the original, they took inspiration from another Doctor Who story featuring Buddhism, Jon Pertwee's swansong Planet of the Spiders: the colour scheme is based on the costume worn by the character Cho-Je in that later story. Script and designs are sent to Digitoonz Media & Entertainment, the animators based in India, and they create the finished product in small chunks (you might get 15 seconds a day if you're lucky according to Russell, although the longest sequence was the 1.5 minute section where Victoria feigns being poisoned to escape from a locked room, and that took ages to download, the file size was phenomenal). There was a brief to everyone working on the animation not to view the surviving episode two for reference. The six episodes of the animation had to all be of a piece and work as a coherent whole; anyway, the approach and techniques of animation are very different to live action. Part of the reason why it took so long to get The Abominable Snowmen finished was that the same team were asked to do Galaxy 4 simultaneously, to which they couldn't really say no. Russell said that it was accomplished at the cost of only one nervous breakdown, which he counted as a win. He was generally quite dismissive of  Galaxy 4 as a choice for an animation because of the quality of the story ("Who would want to make that? Who would want to watch it?!"), but Russell and his team created something more than adequate (see the Deeper Thoughts section of this post for more details).

Note the typo

There was time for only a couple of audience questions. Doctor Who historian Jeremy Bentham asked a question about the new look for Padmasambhava. Russell said his inspiration was EC Comics character the Crypt Keeper, rather than from Scooby Doo as I'd thought. He believed that the actor Wolfe Morris's build wasn't right for the script's description of the desiccated guru, so they diverged from faithfulness at this point. They may also have embellished with the scene towards the end when the artificially long-lived Padmasambhava, freed from the Great Intelligence, disintegrates. The surviving off screen photos don't confirm either way, and memories differ as to whether the scene was excised from the final version in 1967 or not. Russell's memory from originally watching the story is that the disintegration moment was in there, and Bentham, also of an age to have seen it first time round, agreed with his recall. The final audience question was niche, but to be fair the questioner prefaced his question with a disclaimer about its potential to invoke a rolling of the eyes. Why do Gary Russell's team's animations show Patrick Troughton with green eyes when he had blue eyes in real life? Russell explained that he'd asked all of Troughton's co-stars what their Doctor's eye colour was, and was told by all of them that they were blue-green. This was research long before the animations for his novel Invasion of the Cat People ("It's terrible" its author added as an aside, sotto voce), where the eye colour was a plot point. He chose the green rather than the blue end of the range in the animations because it would make the Doctor seem more alien and would stand out from the rest of the cast that would be mainly blue and brown-eyed. Earlier in the panel discussion, Russell confirmed that this is their last animation for now, and they're not working on any more. This was expected, but still a shame. He did add, though, that the animated releases to date have come in waves with gaps in between: "These things are cyclical". On the evidence of The Abominable Snowmen, and all the wonderful animations of recent years, I hope the next wave isn't too long.

In Summary:

It's not abominable. It's mostly pretty bominable, actually, particularly now one can see it move.